ABSTRACT
When Mary Shelley subtitled her novel “The Modern Prometheus,” she forcefully directed our attention to the book's critique both of the promethean poets she knew best, Byron and Percy Shelley, and of the entire Romantic ideology as she understood it. Victor Frankenstein's failure to mother his child has both political and aesthetic ramifications. The father who neglects his children can be seen as the archetype of the irresponsible political leader who puts his own interests ahead of those of his fellow citizens. Victor Frankenstein's quest is nothing less than the conquest of death itself. By acquiring the ability to “bestow animation upon lifeless matter” and thus “renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption” (49), Frankenstein in effect hopes to become God, the creator of life and the gratefully worshipped father of a new race of immortal beings. In his attempt to transform human beings into deities by eliminating mortality, Victor Frankenstein is himself participating in the mythopoeic vision that inspired the first generation of Romantic poets and thinkers. William Blake had insisted that the human form could become divine through the exercise of mercy, pity, love, and imagination; Coleridge had stated that human perception or the primary imagination is an “echo of the Infinite I AM;” Wordsworth had argued that the “higher minds” of poets are “truly from the Deity;” while both Godwin and his disciple Percy Shelley had proclaimed that man was perfectible. In their view, the right use of reason and imagination could annihilate not only social injustice and human evil but even, through participation in symbolic thinking or what Blake called the “divine analogy,” the consciousness of human finitude and death itself. 1 Victor Frankenstein's goal can be identified with the radical desire that energized some of the best known English Romantic poems, the desire to elevate human beings into living gods.
