VARIETY
My Spectre around me night and day
Like a Wild beast guards my
way.
My Emanation far within
Weeps incessantly for my Sin.
A Fathomless and boundless deep,
There we wander, there we weep;
On the hungry craving wind
My Spectre follows thee behind.
He scents thy footsteps in the snow,
Where.l'Oever t'hou dost go
Thro' the wintry hail and rain
...
613
Frankenstein's monster, tempting his revengeful creator on through a
world of ice, is another Emanation pursued by a Spectre, with the
enormous difference that he is an Emanation flawed, a nightmare of
actuality, rather than a dream of desire. '
Though abhorred rather than loved, the monster is the total fonn
of Frankenstein's creative power, and is
more imaginative
than his
creator. The monster is at once more intellectual
and
more emotional
than his maker, indeed he -excels Frankenstein as much (and in the
same ways) as Milton's Adam excels Milton's God in
Paradise Lost.
The greatest paradox, and most astonishing achievement, of Mary
Shelley's novel is that the mo ster is
more human
than his creator. This
nameless being, as much a Modem Adam as his creator is a Modem
Prometheus, is more lovable than his creator and more hateful, more to
be
pitied and more to be feared, and above all more able to give the
attentive reader that shock of added consciousness which compels a
heightened realization of the self. For, like Blake's Spectre and Emana–
tion, or Shelley's Alastor and Epipsyche, Frankenstein and his monster
are the solipsistic and generous halves of the one self. Frankenstein is
the mind and emotions turned in upon themselves, and his creature is
the mind and emotions turned imaginatively outward, seeking a greater
humanization through a confrontation of other selves.
I am suggesting that what makes
Frankenstein
an important book,
though it is only a strong, flawed, frequently clumsy novel is that it
vividly projects a version of the Romantic mythology of the self, found,
among other places, in Blake's
Book of Urizen,
Shelley's
Prometheus
Unbound
and Byron's
Manfred.
It lacks the sophistication and imagina–
tive complexity of such works but precisely because of that
Frankenstein
affords a unique introduction to the archetypal world of the Romantics.
William Godwin, though a tendentious novelist, was a powerful
one, and the prehistory of his daughter's novel begins in 1794 with his
