ABSTRACT

This chapter argues that the most perceptive and original contributions to the Prometheus myth in the Victorian period, by Augusta Webster and John Addington Symonds in particular, resonate not with Percy Shelley’s triumphant unbinding of Prometheus but with the more ambivalent representations of the bound titan by Goethe, Byron and Mary Shelley. The assimilation of Prometheus to Christianity reverses Mary Shelley’s move of introducing Christ’s suffering as one of the titan’s torments. Assessing Aeschylus’s Prometheus by the standard of Christ, Elizabeth Barrett Browning finds him wanting–inevitably, as Aeschylus was ‘born of Adam and unrenewed in Christ’. As the Victorians co-opted Prometheus into the Christian tradition, so they assimilated him to their own constitutional political ideals. The post-Romantic politics of the Prometheus myth, like its theology, emerges as strikingly consistent in its commitment to paternalism and the monarchy in place of democracy and to gradual progress in place of radical revolution.