616
HAROLD BLOOM
from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent
and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I
shall again be virtuous."
The passage I have italicized is the imaginative kernel of the novel,
a reminder of the novel's epigraph:
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?
-Paradise Lost,
Book X, 743-5
That desperate plangency of the fallen Adam becomes the char–
acteristic accent of the daemon's lamentations, with the influence of
Milton cunningly built into the novel's narrative by the happy device of
Frankenstein's creature receiving his education through reading
Paradise
Lost
"as a true history." Already doomed because his standards are
human, which makes him an outcast even to himself, his Miltonic
education completes his fatal growth in self-consciousness. His story, as
told to his maker, follows a familiar Romantic pattern "of the progress
of my intellect," as he puts it. His first pleasure after the dawn of
consciousness comes through his wonder at seeing the moon rise. Caliban–
like, he responds wonderfully to music, both natural and human, and
his sensitivity to the natural world has the responsiveness of an incipient
poet. His awakening to a first love for other beings, the inmates of the
cottage he haunts, awakens him also to the great desolation of love
rejected, when he attempts to reveal himself. His own duality of situation
and character, caught between the states of Adam and Satan, Natural
Man and his thwarted desire, is related by him directly to his reading
of Milton's epic:
It moved
every
feeling of wonder and awe that the picture
of an omnipotent God warring with his creatures was capable
of exciting. I often referred the several situations, as their
similarity struck me, to my own. Like Adam, I was apparently
united by no link to any other being in existence; but his
state was far different from mine in every other respect. He
had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature,
happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his
Creator; he was allowed
to
converse with, and acquire know–
ledge from, beings of a superior nature: but I was wretched,
helpless, and alone. Many times I considered Satan as the fitter
emblem of my condition; for often, like him, when I viewed the
bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me.
From a despair this profound, no release is possible. Driven forth
into an existence upon which "the cold stars shone in mockery," the
daemon declares "everlasting war against the species," and enters upon
