ABSTRACT
Mary Shelley's waking nightmare on June 16, 1816, inspired one of the most powerful horror stories of Western civilization. It can claim the status of a myth, so profoundly resonant in its implications for our comprehension of our selves and our place in the world that it has become, at least in its barest outline, a trope of everyday life. Of course, both the media and the average person in the street have mistakenly assigned the name of Frankenstein not to the maker of the monster but to his creature. But as we shall see, this “mistake” actually derives from an intuitively correct reading of the novel. Frankenstein is our culture's most penetrating literary analysis of the psychology of modern “scientific” man, of the dangers inherent in scientific research, and of the exploitation of nature and of the female implicit in a technological society. So deeply does it probe the collective cultural psyche of the modern era that it deserves to be called a myth, on a par with the most telling stories of Greek and Norse gods and goddesses.
