VARIETY
615
which readers since 1945 are doubtless more sensitive than earlier ones,
in the contrast between the enonnity of the scientist's discovery, and the
mundane emotions of the discoverer. Finding that "the minuteness of
the parts" slows him down, he
resol~es
to make his creature "about eight
feet in height, and proportionably large." As he works on, he allows
himself to dream that "a new species would bless me as its creator and
source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to
me." Yet he knows his is a "workshop of filthy creation," and he fails
the fundamental test of
hi~
own creativity. When the "dull yellow eye"
of his creature opens, this creator falls from the autonomy of a supreme
artificer to the terror of a child of earth: "breathless horror and disgust
filled my heart." Ile flees his responsibility, and sets in motion the events
that will lead to his own Arctic immolation, a fit end for a being (rather
like Lawrence's Gerald in
Women in Love)
who has never achieved a
full sense of another's existence.
It is part of ,Mary Shelley's insight into her mythological theme
that all the monster's victims are innocents. The monster not only refuses
actively to slay his guilty creator; he
mourns
for him, though with the
equivocal tribute of terming the scientist a "generous and self-devoted
being." Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus who has violated nature,
receives his epitaph from the ruined second nature he has made, the
God-abandoned, who consciously echoes the ruined Satan of
Paradise
Lost,
and proclaims "Evil thenceforth became my good." It is imagina–
tively fitting that the greater and more interesting consciousness of the
creature should survive his creator, for he alone in Mrs. Shelley's novel
possesses character. Frankenstein, like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, has
no character in his own right; both figures win a claim to our attention
only by their primordial crimes against original nature.
The monster is of course Mary Shelley's finest invention, and his
narrative (Chapters XI through XVI) fonns the highest achievement
of the novel,. more absorbing even than the magnificent and almost
surrealistic pursuit of the climax. In an age so given to remarkable
depictions of the dignity of natural man, an age including the shepherds
and beggars of Wordsworth, Frankenstein's hapless creature stands out
as a sublime embodiment of heroic pathos. Though Frankenstein lacks
the moral imagination to understand him, the daemon's appeal is to
what is most compassionate in us:
"Oh, Frankenstein, 'b'e not equitable to every other, and trample
upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and
affection, is most due. Remember, that I am thy creature;
I
ought to be thy Adam; but I am mther the fallen angel, whom
thou drivest from
joy
for no misdeed.
Everywhere I see bliss,
