Summary of Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - Research Paper Example

Like a fair amount of science fiction, particularly from the 19th and 20th centuries, the novel Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is a thematically complex work that takes other-worldly or speculative situations and derives from them a premise readily applicable to our own reality. Frankenstein is particularly interesting because its place in the literary canon; written during the Romantic Period of English literature, by the wife of legendary Romantic Percy Bysshe Shelley and the daughter of revolutionary intellectual parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the novel shows a unique confluence of ideas and principles not seen in other works at the time. Beyond those pressures, Frankenstein is a powerfully symbolic work, with strong ties to Greek mythology and other allusions of history. For instance, themes relating to light and fire, the story of Prometheus, and the fruit of knowledge are common throughout the text. Most, if not all, of these themes are present in another work by a man of greater literary fame and recognition, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his four-act play Prometheus Unbound. Seeing the parallels between this play and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, there is an interesting correspondence between the two writers, in addition to a literary parallelism between the two works. One theme used throughout the novel Frankenstein is that of dangerous knowledge; of course, dangerous knowledge is a theme throughout the history of English literature because of its origins in the story of Adam and Eve from Biblical stories. In the Bible, Adam and Eve eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which God had expressly forbade them from doing. Upon giving into the temptation of eating the apple, Adam and Eve are fallen creatures: filled with imperfections and a natural evil. This story is repeated in John Milton’s seminal Paradise Lost, which is an influence not only of Shelley and the Romantics, but of any English writer from the 17th century onward. Given the power of the Adam and Eve creation story and Milton’s Paradise Lost, with its graphic description of God, Satan, and Christian cosmology, it is not a surprise that the theme of dangerous knowledge has such consistency throughout English literature. In Shelley’s Frankenstein, a pursuit of knowledge is a value. In his attempts to break conventional standards of truth and knowledge, Victor Frankenstein seeks the secrets of life. Robert Walton seeks to break conventional limits in the dangerous exploration of the North Pole. A dogged pursuit of knowledge turns out to be extremely dangerous for each of the primary characters, especially Victor and Walton. Victor’s act of creation inevitably produces the destruction of those close to him. Eventually, Walton and his crew become confined between sheets of ice during their journey. While Victor’s fanatical hatred for his creation will eventually kill him in the story, Walton wisely chooses to retreat after his defeat on the ice and from this hazardous exploration after taking a lesson from Victor. Victor’s lesson in death deals with how much destruction can result from knowledge (and the pursuit of it). The novel begins and ends within this framework of Victor’s story told to the explorer Robert Walton; the story is of the pursuit of knowledge, or the secret of human life. Victor’s story begins with his childhood in Geneva and his education at the University of Ingolstadt, where he applies his extensive research and knowledge in a variety of fields toward creating an artificial person from the remains of the dead. While successful in his creation, Victor spurns the monster he constructs. After being rejected by his creator, Frankenstein’s monster begins a rampage for revenge against the man who brought him to life only to reject him as a fiend. This is the inevitable result and logical upshot of Victor’s quest for knowledge: destruction. Victor is pulled deeper into the destruction when the monster demands an equally grotesque companion. As he gives life to hi newest creation, Victor is overcome by remorse and ends the process. The rest of Victor’s life is spent in pursuit of a monster that lives only to destroy his values: his work, his wife, and his family. Seeking and attaining the secrets of life, Victor Frankenstein succeeded only in unleashing a curse upon himself and those who follow him, which parallels the story of Adam and Eve. But the difference for Victor is how he reacts to this destructive force in his life; Victor vows to spend every waking moment of his life to destroying his creation. Interestingly, the two figures in the novel (Victor and his monster) live to destroy each other, which establishes the existence of opposites, or contraries, in the text; but these opposites have the same values and purposes for existence: the destruction of the other. Even though they exist to destroy each other, they need each other to survive; for example, when Victor finally perishes on Robert Walton’s boat, the monster weeps over Victor’s body and leaves to die on the ice. This recurrence of opposites reminds the reader that with knowledge, the corresponding cost of that knowledge must exist; for Victor, having knowledge costs him his life. Mary Shelley titled her book Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, which is often abridged to simply Frankenstein. But shortening this title is a disservice to those who seek a deeper understanding of Shelley’s purpose in writing this novel. The myth of Prometheus comes from Ancient Greek mythology. As the story goes, Prometheus is a Titan who championed the interests of mankind to the gods. But the gods, who generally regarded man as a base and useless creature, often dismissed Prometheus and his attentiveness to the needs of man. To benefit man, Prometheus cunningly stole fire from the chief god Zeus in order to give it to mankind. In anger for his treachery, Zeus punished Prometheus for the crime by binding him to a rock face. Day after day, a giant eagle would eat at his liver, only for his liver to regenerate to be pecked at the next day. Prometheus is regarded popularly, both today and in history, as a hero with a fundamental place in the history of mankind. With that myth in mind, Mary Shelley’s husband Percy Bysshe Shelley constructed a well-recognized four-act play entitled Prometheus Unbound, in which he retells the story of Prometheus’ punishment and his eventual release. Shelley’s play takes its title from the Ancient Greek Aeschylus’ work of the same name, and although the two works are very similar in theme, Shelley’s version differs in one important way with respect to its ending. According to Aeschylus’ version, and popular myth, there is reconciliation between Zeus and Prometheus. In Shelley’s version, Prometheus does not reconcile with Zeus; rather, Zeus is overthrown and Prometheus is released. One important fact about this ending corresponds to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; this ending mirrors the eventual destruction of Victor (the creator), and the release of the prisoner (his monster). The creator and his creation do not reconcile; instead, reconciliation comes only in death. Another important consideration with regard this difference in the plays is the Romantic spirit of rebellion, which ultimately corrupts Adam and Eve and the Frankenstein monster. Prometheus’ dangerous knowledge is the knowledge of fire. In the original myth, once the fire is given to mankind, the docile man becomes a creature of aggression, war, and chaos (his modern state). In other words, once knowledge is given to man, he becomes the corrupted Adam and Eve: subject to the whims and fancies of evil. Mary Shelley giving her novel the subtitle The Modern Prometheus makes sense with how fire is symbolically used throughout the text. In Frankenstein, fire symbolizes knowledge, but with a dangerous twist. The monster has recurrent exposures to fire, the first of which shows the dual nature of flames: with excitement, he realizes that it can produce light in darkness, but it hurts when he grasps it. Victor, attempting to become a modern Prometheus, is indeed disciplined, but unlike the case of fire, the nature of his “gift” to humanity stays a mystery even past the end of the novel. This theme of fire and its influence on Frankenstein from other works is analyzed by critic Burton R. Pollin traces a number of intellectual influences from the 19th century and before within Frankenstein, among these influences were those of fellow Romantic writers like Lord Byron and her father William Godwin. But Pollin traces lines of thought back to the classical writings of Ovid, whom he describes as having “supplied a major element of the inspiration in his presentation of the Prometheus legend, acknowledged in the subtitle of Frankenstein” (Pollin 102). It is claimed that Lord Byron drew both Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley to this theme for their respective artistic works; this fact about Byron’s correspondence with these writers led to an emphasis on the monster’s rebellion against its master. A frequently quoted line from Frankenstein, for instance, is one from the opening of Chapter V: “I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet” (M. Shelley 51). Common allusions to a spark draw upon the Prometheus myth expressly, and with Percy Shelley’s play about the myth itself, we see a mutual influence between the Mary, Percy, and Byron (Pollin 103). In Percy Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound”, the Titan Prometheus succeeds in creating man out of clay, which is followed in a symbolic sense by Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s novel. But such an act is considered a crime in both works. In the words of M.A. Goldberg, “The apple of knowledge bears within it the acrid seeds of punishment. As with Satan and Beelzebub, this passion to usurp divine prerogatives casts the new creator into a burning cauldron of his own making” (Goldberg 30-31). Victor simultaneously recognizes his monster as a devil and an innocent victim of his “curiosity and lawless devices’ (M. Shelley 89). Likewise, for the Prometheus in Shelley’s play, and in the story of Adam and Eve, mankind is both a curse and a victim after they are given the knowledge of good and evil. Alan Rauch, in “The Monstrous Body of Knowledge in Mary Shelleys ‘Frankenstein’”, attempts to analyze Shelley’s Frankenstein in terms of the nature of knowledge. For Percy Shelley, another Romantic Period critic named Carl Grabo writes that, “Science, Knowledge, in which all share and contribute, is, like love, a way to the loss of the individual in the attainment of the larger self" (Grabo 196). This comment on Percy Shelleys view of science helps the reader to comprehend his wife Mary Shelleys views as well. A notion of a pursuit of knowledge, as cooperative endeavor, which runs in the name of the “larger self”, is a perspective that Rauch finds lacking in Frankenstein (Rauch 244). Whereas Percy is absorbed in the abstract consequences of what is called in Prometheus Unbound the “chain of linked thought”, Mary Shelley is attentive to its practical consequences. Regardless, this notion of “linked thought”, underlies a faith “in the unity of knowledge” and the idea that an “individual adds his bit to the whole” (Grabo 196). An overriding body of thought corresponds to the Prometheus myth insofar as the fire Prometheus gives to the world is one that enlightens the whole world; the question of whether this enlightenment is more good than evil is one to be resolved with the respective texts of Frankenstein and Prometheus Unbound. The theme of dangerous knowledge is ever-present throughout Mary Shelley’s most famous work Frankenstein, partly because she intended the novel to be a modern application of the myth of Prometheus. Her husband’s, Percy Bysshe Shelley, four-act play Prometheus Unbound provides a separate though intricately related Romantic commentary on the Prometheus myth. Analyzing these two works together, along with the works and ideas that influenced them, gives an additional perspective not only on those specific authors but on the Romantic Period to which they belong. An interesting direction for further critical studies might be how other, less well-known works by Mary Shelley were influenced by her husband and his writings. Works Cited Goldberg, M. A. "Moral and Myth in Mrs. Shelleys "Frankenstein"." Keats-Shelley Journal 8:1 (1959): 27-38. Grabo, Carl. Newton Among the Poets: Shelleys Use of Science in "Prometheus Unbound". New York: Gordian Publishers, 1968. Pollin, Burton R. "Philosophical and Literary Sources of Frankenstein." Comparative Literature 17:2 (1965): 97-108. Rauch, Alan. "The Monstrous Body of Knowledge in Mary Shelleys "Frankenstein"." Studies in Romanticism 34:2 (1995): 227-253. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Prometheus Unbound; A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts. New York: General Books LLC, 2010. Read More