ABSTRACT
In 1818, Mary Shelley published Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, a thoroughly Gothic novel set in desolate garrets, windswept islands, and icebound ships, and featuring a tortured Faustian seeker of power, a direct but alienated descendant of William Shakespeare's Prospero (The Tempest, 16Il), who consciously strives to fulfill the ancient myth of undoing death and unconsciously seeks to reproduce himself without the help of a woman. Structurally, Frankenstein made one crucial advance over Gothic explique: it moved the explanation from the end of the novel to the beginning. The 1818 preface begins by asserting that "[t]he event on which this fiction is founded, has been supposed, by Dr. [Erasmus] Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence." The never-named monster is clearly Frankenstein's double, just as Mephistopheles is Faust's, and takes his lineage from Adam shaped of clay and the Jewish legend of the Golem, the clay man given supernatural life to protect the community. But in Shelley's case, seeking knowledge alienates the seeker from the moral compass of his community, and the product of that seeking, the monster (probably from the Latin monere, "to warn"), destroys the community. One of the very first science-fiction novels, then, demonstrates the fearful consequences both of love of knowledge and of knowledge itself.
