VARIETY
FRANKENSTEIN,
OR THE NEW PROMETHEUS
The motion picture viewer who carries his obscure but still
authentic taste for the sublime to the neighborhood theater, there to see
the latest in an unending series of
Frankensteins,
participates in a Ro–
mantic terror now nearly one hundred and fifty years old. The terror is
a familiar and a pleasing one, and few figures in contemporary mythology
are as universally loved as Frankenstein's once pathetic monster, now a
star beaconing from the
a~de
of television, comic strips and the sweat–
shirts of the young.
"Frankenstein,"
to
most of us, is the name of a monster rather than
of a monster's creator, for the common reader and the common viewer
have worked together,' their apparent confusion, to create a myth
soundly based on a central duality in Mary Shelley's noveP As Richard
Church and Muriel Spark were the first to record, the monster and his
creator are the antithetical halves of a single being. Miss Spark states
the antithesis too cleanly; for her, Victor Frankenstein represents the
feelings, and his nameless creature the intellect. In her view, the monster
has no emotion, and "what passes for emotion . . . are really intellectual
passions arrived at through rational channels." Miss Spark carries this
argument far enough to insist that the monster is asexual, and that he
demands a bride from Frankenstein only for companionship, a conclusion
evidently at variance with the novel's text.
The antithesis between the scientist and his creature in Frankenstein
is a very complex one, and to be described more fully it must be placed
in the larger context of Romantic literature and its characteristic myth-
1 Mary Shelley, second wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and daughter of William
Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, was 19 when she wrote the original
Franken–
sf';n.
