61&
HAROLD BLOOM
brings her Romantic novel to a demonic conclusion in a world of ice.
The frozen sea is the inevitable emblem for both ,the wretched daemon
and his obsessed creator, but the daemon is allowed a fmal image of
reversed Prometheanism. There is a heroism fully earned in the being
who cries farewell in a claim of sad triumph: "I shall ascend my funeral
pyre triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames."
Mary Shelley could not h"ave known how dark a prophecy this consum–
mation of consciousness would prove to be for the two great Promethean
poets who were at her side during the summer of 1816, when her novel
was conceived. Byron, writing his own epitaph at Missolonghi in 1824,
and perhaps thinking back to having stood at Shelley's, funeral pyre two
years before, found an image similar
to
the daemon's, to sum up an
exhausted existence:
The fire that on my bosom preys
Is lone as some volcanic isle;
Mo
torch is kindled at its blaze–
.A
funeral pile.
The fire of increased consciousness stolen from heaven ends as an
isolated volcano, cut off from other selves by an estranging sea. "The
light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into
the sea by the winds,"
is
the exultant cry of Frankenstein's creature. A
blaze at which no torch is kindled is Byron's self-image, but he ends his
death poem on another note, the hope for a soldier's grave, which he
found. There is no Promethean release, but release
is
perhaps not the
burden of the literature of Romantic aspiration. There
is
something both
Godwinian and Shelleyan about the final utterance of Victor Franken–
stein, which is properly made to Walton, the failed Promethean, whose
ship has just turned back, Though chastened, the Modem Prometheus
ends with a last word true, not to his accomplishment,
bu~
to his desire:
"Farewell, Walton! Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid
ambition, even if it
be
only the apparently innocent one of
distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I
say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another
may succeed."
Shelley's Prometheus, crucified on his icy , precipice, found his
ultimate torment in a Fury's taunt: "And all best things are thus
confused to
ill."
It seems a fitting summation for all the work"done
by Modem Prometheanism, and might have serveti as an alternate
epigraph for Mary Shelley's disturbing novel.
Harold Bloom
