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a fallen existence more terrible than the expelled Adam's. Echoing
Milton, he asks the ironic question, "And now, with the world before
me, whither should I bend my steps," to which the only possible answer
is: toward his wretched Promethean creator.
If
we stand back from Mary Shelley's novel, in order better to view
its archetypal slrape, we see it as the quest of a solitary and ravaged
consciousness first for consolation, then for revenge, and finally for a
self-destruction that will be apocalyptic, that will bring down the creator
with his creature. Though Mary Shelley may not have intended it, her
novel's prime theme is a necessary counterpoise to Prometheanism, for
Prometheanism exalts the increase in consciousness despite all cost.
Frankenstein breaks through the barrier that separates man from God,
and apparently becomes the giver of life, but all he actually can give
is death-in-life. The profound dejection endemic in Mary Shelley's novel
is fundamental to the Romantic mythology of the self, for all Romantic
horrors are diseases of excessive consciousness, of the self unable to bear
the self. Kierkegaard remarks that Satan's despair is absolute, because
Satan as pure spirit is pure consciousness, and for Satan (and all men in
his predicament) every increase in consciousness is an increase in despair.
Frankenstein's desperate creature attains the state of pure spirit through
his extraordinary situation, and is racked by a consciousness in which
every thought is a fresh disease.
A Romantic poet fought against self-consciousness through the
strength of what he called imagination, a more than rational energy,
by which thought could seek to heal itself. But Frankenstein's daemon,
though he is in the archetypal situation of the Romantic Wanderer
or Solitary, who sometimes was a poet, can win no release from his
own story' by telling it. His desperate desire for a mate is clearly an
attempt to find a Shelleyan Epipsyche or Blakean Emanation for him–
self, a self within the self. But as he is the nightmare actualization of
Frankenstein's
de~ire,
he is himself an emanation of Promethean yearn–
ings,
and his only double is his creator and denier.
When Coleridge's Ancient Mariner progressed from the purgatory
of consciousness to his very minimal control of imagination, he failed
to
save himself. He remained in a cycle of remorse. But he at least
became a salutary warning to others, and made of the Wedding Guest
a wiser and a better man. Frankenstein's creature can help neither himself
nor others, for he has no natural ground to which he can return.
Romantic poets liked to return to the imagery of the ocean of life and
immortality; in the eddying to and fro of the healing waters they could
picture a hoped-for process of restoration, of a survival of consciousness
despite all its agonies. Mary Shelley, with marvelous appropriateness,
