614
HAROLD
BLOOM
best work of fiction,
Caleb Williams.
Godwin summarized the
climactic
(and harrowing) final third of his novel as a pattern of flight
and
pursuit, "the fugitive in perpetual apprehension of being overwhelmed
with the worst calamities, and the pursuer, by his ingenuity and resources,
keeping his victim in a state of the most fearful alarm." Mary Shelley
brilliantly reverses this pattern
in
the final sequence of her novel,
and
she also takes from
Calep Williams
her destructive theme of the monster's
war against what Caleb Williams from his prison cell calls "the whole
machinery of human society." Muriel Spark, pointing to Shelley's
equi–
vocal Preface to his wife's novel, argues that
Frankenstein
can be read
as
a reaction "against the rational-humanism of Godwin and Shelley."
Certainly Shelley was worried lest the novel be taken as a warning
against the inevitable moral consequences of an unchecked experimental
Prometheanism and scientific materialism. The Preface insists that:
The opinions which naturally spring from the character and
situation of the hero are by no means to be conceived as existing
always in my own conviction; nor is any inference justly to be
drawn from the following pages as prejudicing any philosoph–
ical doctrine of whatever kind.
There are two paradoxes at the center of Mrs. Shelley's novel, and
each iIIuminates a dilemma of the Promethean imagination. The first
is that Frankenstein
was
successful: he
did
create Natural Man, not as
he was, but as the meliorists saw him. Indeed, Frankenstein did better
than this, since his creature was more imaginative even than
himself.
Frankenstein's tragedy stems, not from his Promethean excess, but from
his own moral error, his failure to love. He
abhorred his creature,
became terrified of it, and fled his responsibilities.
The second paradox
is
the more ironic. This disaster either would
not have happened, or would not have mattered anyway, if Frankenstein
had been an esthetically successful maker; a beautiful "monster," or
even a passable one, would not have been a monster. The creature
himself bitterly observes:
'
Shall I respect man when he contemns me? Let him live with
me in the interchange of kindness; and, instead of injury, I
would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude
at his acceptance. But that cannot be; the human senses are
insurmountable barriers to our union.
As the sensuous horror of his creature was no part of Victor Frank–
enstein's intention, it is worth noticing how this came about. It would
not be unjust to characterize Victor Frankenstein, in his act of creation,
as being momentarily a moral idiot. There is an indeliberate humor,
to
