Children of Prometheus: Romanticism and Its Legacy

II.

Following Wollstonecraft’s death in 1797, Godwin was left to care for their infant daughter and the three-year old Fanny Imlay. At this time he began to work on St. Leon, and the new novel, which anticipates the interest in history and the historical accuracy of his Life of Chaucer (1803) and History of the Commonwealth of England (1824–28), examines what Godwin described a few years before as “the evils which arise out of the present system of civilized society,” and he considered the novel’s publication an effort to “disengage the minds of men from prepossession, and launch them upon the sea of moral and political inquiry.”4 Thus St. Leon resumes the critique of “things as they are” that commenced with An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and was continued in Caleb Williams (1794) and, like the previous novel, St. Leon was intended to make Godwin’s political teachings more widely accessible. In particular, the new novel reveals the extent to which Godwin’s views on marriage had been modified under the tutelage of Wollstonecraft; in fact, even friendly critics charged that he had recanted his revolutionary views on relationships between the sexes. (He concedes this point in the novel’s Preface: “I apprehend domestic and private affections inseparable from the nature of man, and from what may be styled the culture of the heart, and am fully persuaded that they are not incompatible with a profound and active sense of justice in the mind that cherishes them.”)5 Scattered throughout the text, variations of this view contradict Godwin’s memorable description of marriage given in Book VIII of Political Justice (1793) as “the worst of all monopolies.”6 And yet, the revised argument presented in St. Leon, which accommodates bourgeois family life, is but another example of the intertextual dialogue conducted between Political Justice and Godwin’s prose fiction: the later texts suggest modifications to the ideology set down in the philosophical treatise.

The overall design and thematic patterns of St. Leon are replicated typologically in Frankenstein. At the center is a presentation of the “education” of the protagonist Reginald de St. Leon alternately via chivalry and alchemy. (Alchemy, it is implied, is analogous to chivalry; both are anachronistic social and scientific paradigms.) The latter is perceived initially by the protagonist as a possible vehicle by which he might simultaneously serve mankind and seek atonement for his betrayal of the chivalric code. Reginald’s travels embody an ironic inversion of the classical Bildungsreise; his education is based on disillusioning rather than edifying experiences. And, anticipating the trajectory of the Monster’s experience, rather than the popular gratitude he expects in response to his benevolent actions, suffering and destruction seem ineluctably to follow in his wake and he is rejected precisely by those whom he had intended to help. As a result, he is hunted down by such adversaries as his son Charles and his erstwhile friend, Bethlem Gabor. Reginald’s fate is shared by Victor and the Monster (who alternately serve as each other’s prey), and parallels to all three characters are found in the tragic situation of Oedipus. Sophocles’s tragedy, St. Leon, and Frankenstein are all myths of misguided benevolence in which hubristic transgression of social, religious, and epistemological boundaries is punished by exile from human society. Mary Godwin also suffers ostracism from her family following her elopement with Shelley—an intolerable act of rebellion against her father’s authority—which coincides with a new phase of authorship independent of her father’s influence. And yet her new status as an author connects her more closely than ever to her precursors Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Shelley.

Following his disillusioning experience of the brutalities of war in the Italian campaigns of French King Francis I (1494–1547), Reginald finds himself ill-equipped to function in civilian society. Precisely because he is publicly celebrated as a paragon of chivalry who no longer believes in its values, Godwin presents his fall from grace as symptomatic of a culture in decline. Thus chivalry, Edmund Burke’s shibboleth in The Reflections on the Revolution in France and Godwin’s target in Caleb Williams, is exposed as already otiose even during its supposed heyday. A living anachronism driven to gambling, Reginald forfeits his family’s honor and fortune. Flying from France in disgrace, he settles his family near Lake Geneva. The idyllic scene is reminiscent of the De Laceys’ cottage in the forest where Victor’s Monster finds refuge.

The appearance of a mysterious interloper, Zampieri, violates the intimacy of the family circle and awakens Reginald’s dormant ambition. The stranger offers to share the mystery of the philosopher’s stone and the elixir vitae but only on condition that Reginald agrees in advance not to share this secret with anyone, not even Marguerite, his high-minded wife. Her character is an idealized portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft and serves as the model for all the noble female characters in Frankenstein: Caroline, Agatha, Safie, Justine, and Victor’s cousin, childhood companion, and fiancée Elizabeth Lavenza. Reginald’s first impulse is to refuse Zampieri’s offer, insisting that his “heart was formed by nature for social ties . . . and I will not now consent to anything that shall infringe on the happiness of my soul.” (II, 7) Zampieri responds by striking at Reginald’s Achilles’ heel; as a true knight and the flower of French chivalry he desires to serve once again as an agent of justice and public welfare: “Feeble and effeminate mortal! Was ever a great discovery prosecuted, or an important benefit conferred upon the human race, by him who was incapable of standing, and thinking, and feeling, alone?” (II, 7, 8) The esoteric skills are imparted and immediately Reginald experiences a complete resurrection of his former pride and ambition. His transformation parallels Victor’s metamorphosis following the creation of his hideous offspring, but as the bearer of a monstrous secret he embarks on an odyssey “hated by mankind, hunted from the face of the earth, pursued by atrocious calumny, without country, without a roof, without a friend.” (II, 9)

While Reginald’s and Victor’s horrible inner transformation is comparable, the knowledge engendering such change in the psyche of the protagonists is different and must be distinguished. In contrast to the “new science” of natural philosophy that engenders Victor’s creative act of hubris, Godwin’s protagonist, Reginald de St. Leon, pursues the arcane arts of alchemy, but both Reginald and Victor are both afflicted by a mania for illicit knowledge that Chris Baldick has called “epistemophilia.”7 Knowledge per se is, however, not the crucial issue; it is rather the specific character of the knowledge that they seek. Awakened by the writings of Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus, alchemy is also Victor’s first intellectual passion, and he confesses to Walton that “if only he had been content to study the more rational theory of chemistry which had resulted from modern discoveries” it is possible “that the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin.” The following passage, with its self-analysis and confessional tone, might just as easily have been spoken by Godwin’s protagonist:

My dreams were therefore undisturbed by reality, and I entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life. But the latter obtained my most undivided attention: wealth was an inferior object, but what glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render men in vulnerable to any but a violent death.8

Masao Miyoshi observes that “in Frankenstein the main vehicle of Gothic fantasy is no longer the conventional supernatural” such as alchemy; instead, it is the “new science,” which, as a result of the protagonist’s misapplication, vitiated its claims to being “a humane pursuit by demonstrating its possible monstrous results.” Shelley reveals in her appropriation and revision of her father’s novel that “science,” the definitive Enlightenment pursuit, “can generate a totally new species of terror. If scientific man is a kind of God, his scientific method becomes a new supernaturalism, a contemporary witchdoctoring of frightening potential.”9 But clearly, what Reginald and Victor have most in common is the abuse of their respective sciences. Both novels present the distortion and perversion of procreation as a misapplication of science, old and new, and the process leading to Mary Godwin’s emergence as a novelist corresponds to Reginald’s application of alchemy and Victor’s exploitation of the “new science,” since all three processes presuppose the transgression of nature, established authority, and, ultimately, the social order.

The enormous destructive potential of Reginald and Frankenstein’s secret powers condemns them to the remorseless isolation experienced by all those who possess the Midas touch, starting with Godwin himself, whose influence as a philosopher appears under the guise of alchemy and science in both novels.10 If Reginald’s powers are shared with others the laws of nature will be violated, thus posing a threat to the whole basis of human civilization: “Exhaustless wealth, if communicated to all men, would be but an exhaustless heap of pebbles and dust; and nature will not admit her everlasting laws to be so abrogated, as they would be by rendering the whole race of sublunary man immortal.” (II, 103) In this way, Reginald’s concerns over the potential misuse of his powers anticipate Victor’s principled refusal to create a female companion for the Monster. It is important to note that altruism dominates the following passage and not, as Anne K. Mellor insists,11 fear of female sexuality or the conscious drive to “usurp” the female principle in procreation:

I was now about to form another being of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness. He had sworn to quit the neighborhood of man and hide himself in deserts; but she had not; and she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation . . . . Even if they were to leave Europe and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the demon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had I a right for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations? (122–123)

The use of his illicit powers increases Reginald’s sense of isolation, and his lament resonates with his counterpart’s in Frankenstein: “Man was not born to live alone. He is linked to his brethren by a thousand ties; and, when those ties are broken, he ceases from all genuine existence.” (III, 97) But rather than put an end to his wretched wanderings, Reginald, after employing the elixir vitae in order to make good his escape from the Spanish Inquisition, “panted for something to contend with and something to conquer. My senses unfolded themselves to all the curiosity of remark; my thoughts seemed capable of industry unwearied, and investigation the most constant and invincible. Ambition revived in my bosom . . . desired to perform something . . . that I might see the world start at and applaud.” (III, 284)

Illustrating Godwin’s prowess in the historical travel mode made popular by Ann Radcliffe and M. G. Lewis, Reginald crosses Europe and finds his desired new field of action in Hungary. Ravaged by war, famine, and grinding servitude under the Turks, the inhabitants of this nation seem ready for a savior, and Reginald seizes the chance to atone for the death of his wife and the breakup of his family with some supreme act of charity and benevolence. However, rather than endearing himself to his Hungarian hosts, the gold he creates in order to buy wheat undermines the nation’s markets, stokes runaway inflation, and increases the suffering of the population. Once again, the use of alchemy has been shown to disrupt the laws of nature and society and to alienate the protagonist still further from the human circle. Reginald’s ostracism marks him as another member of the band of Romantic outcasts: the Ancient Mariner, Childe Harold, Prometheus, and his literary double, Victor Frankenstein. Transgression is the natural consequence of hubris, and it is punished by exile from one’s home culture. Mary suffers ostracism from her family as a result of transgressing her father’s will and the hubris of elopement is equated with the exercise of her procreative powers and her emergence as the author of her own literary texts. This is the same pattern of creation/transgression/isolation replicated in St. Leon and Frankenstein. Release from this condition is achieved only in confession or by acts of unselfish caring that lead to absolution. But such deliverance is denied to Reginald and Victor. Even though the Monster reads Victor’s lab notes, his scientific method is never disclosed to others. Similarly, Reginald keeps his promise to Zampieri and the secret of the philosopher’s stone is never revealed to the reader. Indeed, the entire first-person narrative in St. Leon forms a series of complex circumlocutions corresponding to the evasive actions and disguises that Reginald requires to preserve his secret at all costs. Instead of genuine communication, Godwin’s protagonist offers what he admits is only the semblance of communication and “the unburdening of the mind” simply because he recognizes it is of the essence of being human “insatiably [to thirst] for a confident [sic] and a friend.” (II, 103) Reginald’s faux confession functions merely as auto-therapy, and his sufferings, while offering an admonition to the reader, are not redeemed. He is doomed to continue his wanderings without respite.

III.

Written by Mary when she was only nineteen, Frankenstein is among the most enduring icons of Romanticism, and in recent years it has attracted as much attention from critics as any text in the canon. As the only daughter of Godwin and Wollstonecraft’s ill-fated union, Mary was “nursed and fed with a love of glory. To be something great and good was the precept given me by my father.”12 Emily Sunstein dismisses as inaccurate the assumption still accepted by some that Mary received no systematic education prior to falling under the influence of Shelley. “Living with Godwin was an education; she loved leaning; he encouraged her, and gave her the background Wollstonecraft had not had and regretted having missed.”13 Years later, Jane (later Claire) Clairmont corroborated her stepsister’s account of the tenor and routine of their Godwinian education:

All the family worked hard, learning and studying: we all took the liveliest interest in the great questions of the day: common topics, gossiping, scandal, found no entrance in our circle, for we had been brought up by Mr. Godwin to think it was the greatest misfortune to be fond of the world, or worldly pleasures or of luxury or money; and that there was no greater happiness than to think well of those around us, and to delight in being useful or pleasing to them.14

Godwin described the spirit that governed Mary’s education in this way: “I am anxious that she should be brought up like a philosopher even like a Cynic. It will add greatly to the strength and worth of her character.”15 Her father’s choice of a second wife was only the first of devastating paternal rebuffs she suffered; the other was his reaction to her elopement with the older married poet, which may be seen as an effort to establish independence from Godwin’s control over her discourse.16 As the precocious child grew into a young woman and emerged as an author, her father’s texts provided the authoritative discourse with which she contended in an effort to establish her own distinctive voice. Her earliest literary efforts were, of course, published by the Juvenile Library, her stepmother’s publishing venture, and Mellor suggests that there is “a peculiar symbolic resonance” in the loss of Mary’s early writings which were “accidentally” left behind at a Parisian hotel: “Mary’s first impulse in her new life with the poet Shelley was to establish her own literary credentials, to assert her own voice, and to assume a role as his intellectual companion and equal.”17 But at least initially she merely exchanged one male tutor for another; it was only with her emergence as an author that she attained liberation from both father and husband.

While a number of candidates for Mary’s precursor text are named or cited in the novel, including those by Milton, Plutarch, and Goethe, St. Leon is the “adult” text for which Frankenstein serves as a reduction, translation, and revision. Its author combined the functions of Mary’s father and mother as well as her chief teacher and her chief literary “precursor,” and yet the most striking structural and thematic correspondences between Frankenstein and St. Leon arise from the urgency of Mary’s efforts to mediate her Godwinian education by re-writing one of its canonical texts. In a modification of the Russian linguist I. M. Lotman’s model of the “reception” and “appropriation” of adult texts by children, Michael Holquist suggests that “not only do children thus limit the scripts of the playlets their parents enact with them; they also limit the size of the cast. That is, for children all possible players in the world’s drama are reduced to the characters experienced in the family culture.”18 Barbara Johnson has written that “Frankenstein can be read as the story of the experience of writing Frankenstein,” but actually the writing of Frankenstein is about the re-writing of St. Leon.19 This accounts for the parallels between St. Leon and Frankenstein with respect to their dramatic personae. The model for St. Leon’s family is, of course, Godwin’s own deceased first wife, daughters, and stepson; and in Frankenstein Mary sustains this pattern, less as a way of exorcising an Electra complex by gender substitution (in this sense Victor and Alphonse Frankenstein can be seen as surrogates for Shelley and Godwin; Elizabeth is Fanny Imlay’s double) than as a means of completing her literary education. As such, education assumes the form, initially, of appropriating parental speech patterns and narratives. Once this step is successfully completed, the child moves on to the second stage in the process of Bildung: the articulation and creation of her own original discourse.

Bakhtin used the term “novel” to denote “whatever force is at work within a given literary system to reveal the limits and the artificial constraints of that system.” According to this view, “literary systems are comprised of canons and novelization is fundamentally anticanonical.”20 This characterization applies to both St. Leon and Frankenstein, since each work is a militantly anti-canonical, composite literary form that explores the outer boundaries of the novel’s possibilities as a genre and combines, appropriates, and fuses other narrative sub-genres, including the Gothic, travel, and sentimental fiction. Bakhtin argues that the content and images of the novel are therefore “profoundly double-voiced and double-languaged” because they “seek to objectivize the struggle with all types of internally persuasive discourse that had at one time held sway over the author.”21 One such sub-genre exhibited in Frankenstein that illustrates this process is the Bildungsroman, in which the process of intertextual dialogue has been fused with the dialectic of education.

The composition of Frankenstein may, in fact, be compared to the manner in which children learn to appropriate adult speech for themselves and the means by which a writer distinguishes their voice from those of precursors and literary authority figures. The first process is analogous to translation in that it involves assimilation, rearrangement, a certain amount of necessary distortion, and simplification of the parental discourse adopted by the child as models in developing their own voice and speech patterns. Lotman describes language acquisition as a mediating process combining translation, appropriation, and reconfiguration:

The child’s contact with the world of adults is constantly imposed on him by the subordinated position of his world in the general hierarchy of the culture of adults. However, this contact itself is possible only as an act of translation. How can such translation be accomplished? . . . [T]he child establishes a correspondence between some texts familiar and comprehensible to him in “his” language and the texts of “adults” . . . . In such a translation—of one whole text by another whole text—the child discovers an extraordinary abundance of “superfluous” words in “adult” texts. The act of translation is accompanied by a semantic reduction of the text . . . . The child reduces the semantic model obtained from [the language of adults] in such a way that translation into his own language of the texts flowing from without is possible.22

The child’s mediation of adult discourse thus may be likened to the reception of literary texts belonging to a foreign culture. In Les voix du silence (1951) André Malraux describes the process of cultural interaction in terms of a “conquest,” an “annexation,” a “possession” of the “foreign,” of that which is culturally “other,” and Bakhtin characterizes the impact of another’s discourse upon the writer as a dialectical opposition between the self and the other involving, first, the recognition of difference that is then followed by the struggle for individuation or originality:

When someone else’s ideological discourse is internally persuasive for us and acknowledged by us, entirely different possibilities open up. Such discourse is of decisive significance in the evolution of an individual’s consciousness: consciousness awakens to independent ideological life precisely in a world of alien discourses surrounding it, and from which it cannot initially separate itself . . . . One’s own discourse is gradually and slowly wrought out of other’s words that have been acknowledged and assimilated, and the boundaries are at first scarcely perceptible . . . . When such influences are laid bare, the half-concealed life lived by another’s discourse is revealed within the new context of the given author. When an influence is deep and productive, there is no external imitation, no simple act of reproduction but rather a further creative development of another’s discourse in a new context and under new conditions.23

In its mythical treatment of the necessity to struggle against even the most beloved presence in one’s life, Mary Shelley’s novel also reflects the centrality to Romanticism of Germaine de Staël’s maxim: “Force of mind is developed only by attacking power.”

The Monster’s acquisition of speech, reading skills, and, most importantly, the capacity to generate texts symbolically, replicates Mary’s education as a struggle with another’s, more powerful discourse. Within her narrative this process approximates the Lotman/Bakhtin paradigm according to which the Monster learns, first, by appropriating the discourse of the De Lacey family and of the books he finds in the “leathern portmanteau”: Milton, Plutarch, and Goethe, and, secondly, in articulating its own individuated discourse.24 In the Godwin household the categories of parents and authors were conflated, and the circle of family friends included prominent literary and cultural figures who were familiar to the children.25 Mary’s, and by extension, the Monster’s obsession with language reflects their shared struggle to gain command of a medium in which to express their own thoughts in the midst of many authoritative models of discourse: “By degrees I made a discovery of still greater moment: I found that these people possessed a method of communicating their experience and feelings to one another by articulate sounds . . . . This was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to become acquainted with it.” (83) There is a remarkable parallel between the Monster’s language acquisition through a process of eavesdropping on the De Laceys and the famous anecdote of Mary and the other Godwin children hiding behind the sofa in order to hear Coleridge’s reading of the “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” How many countless times was this scene replicated over the years during visits by Wordsworth, Lamb, and Holcroft? An interesting irony disclosed in the dialogic process is how the Monster acquires and demonstrates a command over language that far surpasses the eloquence of any other figure in the novel. Indeed, the source of his eventual domination of Victor is not his superhuman strength, but his greater rhetorical power. It is also an irony of literary history that in securing her authorial identity with the endurance of Frankenstein Mary surpassed the success enjoyed by St. Leon, her primary precursor text, which Byron considered superior to Caleb Williams. And while Frankenstein continues to generate countless literary and cinematic spinoffs at a dizzying rate, Godwin’s novel, until recently, was only available in an antiquarian reprint.