Gregory Maertz - Children of Prometheus - Romanticism and Its Legacy

I was now about to form another being of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness. He had sworn to quit the neighborhood of man and hide himself in deserts; but she had not; and she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation . . . . Even if they were to leave Europe and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the demon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had I a right for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations? (122–123)

The use of his illicit powers increases Reginald’s sense of isolation, and his lament resonates with his counterpart’s in Frankenstein : “Man was not born to live alone. He is linked to his brethren by a thousand ties; and, when those ties are broken, he ceases from all genuine existence.” (III, 97) But rather than put an end to his wretched wanderings, Reginald, after employing the elixir vita e in order to make good his escape from the Spanish Inquisition, “panted for something to contend with and something to conquer. My senses unfolded themselves to all the curiosity of remark; my thoughts seemed capable of industry unwearied, and investigation the most constant and invincible. Ambition revived in my bosom . . . desired to perform something . . . that I might see the world start at and applaud.” (III, 284)

Illustrating Godwin’s prowess in the historical travel mode made popular by Ann Radcliffe and M. G. Lewis, Reginald crosses Europe and finds his desired new field of action in Hungary. Ravaged by war, famine, and grinding servitude under the Turks, the inhabitants of this nation seem ready for a savior, and Reginald seizes the chance to atone for the death of his wife and the breakup of his family with some supreme act of charity and benevolence. However, rather than endearing himself to his Hungarian hosts, the gold he creates in order to buy wheat undermines the nation’s markets, stokes runaway inflation, and increases the suffering of the population. Once again, the use of alchemy has been shown to disrupt the laws of nature and society and to alienate the protagonist still further from the human circle. Reginald’s ostracism marks him as another member of the band of Romantic outcasts: the Ancient Mariner, Childe Harold, Prometheus, and his literary double, Victor Frankenstein. Transgression is the natural consequence of hubris, and it is punished by exile from one’s home culture. Mary suffers ostracism from her family as a result of transgressing her father’s will and the hubris of elopement is equated with the exercise of her procreative powers and her emergence as the author of her own literary texts. This is the same pattern of creation / transgression/isolation replicated in St . Leon and Frankenstein. Release from this condition is achieved only in confession or by acts of unselfish caring that lead to absolution. But such deliverance is denied to Reginald and Victor. Even though the Monster reads Victor’s lab notes, his scientific method is never disclosed to others. Similarly, Reginald keeps his promise to Zampieri and the secret of the philosopher’s stone is never revealed to the reader. Indeed, the entire first-person narrative in S t. Leon forms a series of complex circumlocutions corresponding to the evasive actions and disguises that Reginald requires to preserve his secret at all costs. Instead of genuine communication, Godwin’s protagonist offers what he admits is only the semblance of communication and “the unburdening of the mind” simply because he recognizes it is of the essence of being human “insatiably [to thirst] for a confident [sic] and a friend.” (II, 103) Reginald’s faux confession functions merely as auto-therapy, and his sufferings, while offering an admonition to the reader, are not redeemed. He is doomed to continue his wanderings without respite.

Written by Mary when she was only nineteen, Frankenstein is among the most enduring icons of Romanticism, and in recent years it has attracted as much attention from critics as any text in the canon. As the only daughter of Godwin and Wollstonecraft’s ill-fated union, Mary was “nursed and fed with a love of glory. To be something great and good was the precept given me by my father.” 12Emily Sunstein dismisses as inaccurate the assumption still accepted by some that Mary received no systematic education prior to falling under the influence of Shelley. “Living with Godwin was an education; she loved leaning; he encouraged her, and gave her the background Wollstonecraft had not had and regretted having missed.” 13Years later, Jane (later Claire) Clairmont corroborated her stepsister’s account of the tenor and routine of their Godwinian education:

All the family worked hard, learning and studying: we all took the liveliest interest in the great questions of the day: common topics, gossiping, scandal, found no entrance in our circle, for we had been brought up by Mr. Godwin to think it was the greatest misfortune to be fond of the world, or worldly pleasures or of luxury or money; and that there was no greater happiness than to think well of those around us, and to delight in being useful or pleasing to them. 14

Godwin described the spirit that governed Mary’s education in this way: “I am anxious that she should be brought up like a philosopher even like a Cynic. It will add greatly to the strength and worth of her character.” 15Her father’s choice of a second wife was only the first of devastating paternal rebuffs she suffered; the other was his reaction to her elopement with the older married poet, which may be seen as an effort to establish independence from Godwin’s control over her discourse. 16As the precocious child grew into a young woman and emerged as an author, her father’s texts provided the authoritative discourse with which she contended in an effort to establish her own distinctive voice. Her earliest literary efforts were, of course, published by the Juvenile Library, her stepmother’s publishing venture, and Mellor suggests that there is “a peculiar symbolic resonance” in the loss of Mary’s early writings which were “accidentally” left behind at a Parisian hotel: “Mary’s first impulse in her new life with the poet Shelley was to establish her own literary credentials, to assert her own voice, and to assume a role as his intellectual companion and equal.” 17But at least initially she merely exchanged one male tutor for another; it was only with her emergence as an author that she attained liberation from both father and husband.

While a number of candidates for Mary’s precursor text are named or cited in the novel, including those by Milton, Plutarch, and Goethe, S t. Leon is the “adult” text for which Frankenstein serves as a reduction, translation, and revision. Its author combined the functions of Mary’s father and mother as well as her chief teacher and her chief literary “precursor,” and yet the most striking structural and thematic correspondences between Frankenstein and St. Leon arise from the urgency of Mary’s efforts to mediate her Godwinian education by re-writing one of its canonical texts. In a modification of the Russian linguist I. M. Lotman’s model of the “reception” and “appropriation” of adult texts by children, Michael Holquist suggests that “not only do children thus limit the scripts of the playlets their parents enact with them; they also limit the size of the cast. That is, for children all possible players in the world’s drama are reduced to the characters experienced in the family culture.” 18Barbara Johnson has written that “ Frankenstein can be read as the story of the experience of writing Frankenstein ,” but actually the writing of Frankenstein is about the re-writing of St. Leon . 19This accounts for the parallels between St. Leon and Frankenstein with respect to their dramatic personae. The model for St. Leon’s family is, of course, Godwin’s own deceased first wife, daughters, and stepson; and in Frankenstein Mary sustains this pattern, less as a way of exorcising an Electra complex by gender substitution (in this sense Victor and Alphonse Frankenstein can be seen as surrogates for Shelley and Godwin; Elizabeth is Fanny Imlay’s double) than as a means of completing her literary education. As such, education assumes the form, initially, of appropriating parental speech patterns and narratives. Once this step is successfully completed, the child moves on to the second stage in the process of Bildung : the articulation and creation of her own original discourse.