ABSTRACT
The association between revolution and electrical experiment in the popular mind was confirmed when Joseph Priestley's laboratory was trashed by the Church and King mob in 1791, on the second anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. As Priestley explained, the poles of electricity corresponded with principles of 'redundancy' and 'deficiency', and Benjamin Franklin's experiments demonstrated that rush to equilibrium occurred whenever the electricities came into contact. To characterize Mary Shelley's authorial position in Frankenstein as simply anti-Promethean, as has been done in a wide range of critical literature and popular culture, is a crucial misunderstanding. Mary Shelley offers a complex and troubled view of human psychology, in which the sturdy innovator is himself the one who falls into the trap of being unable to distinguish the possible from the monstrous. This is the 'modern' trap that awaits the Prometheus of late Romanticism. The symbolism of dynamic natural polarities was readily attuned to the cultural mood swings of Romanticism.
