Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University and Henry W and Albert A. Berg Professor of English at the New York University Graduate School. He is the author of twenty books and the editor of more than thirty anthologies of literature and literary criticism.
Professor Bloom earned his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1955 and has served on the Yale faculty since then. He is a 1985 MacArthur Foundation Award recipient and served as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University in 1987-88. He is currently the editor of the Chelsea House series Major Literary Characters and Modem Critical Views, and other Chelsea House series in literary criticism.
HAROLD BLOOM: INTRODUCTION
Frankenstein; or, The Modem Prometheus is the full title of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley's inaugural science fiction novel, which she began before she was nineteen and finished less than a year later. Mary Shelley's full name is as important in understanding Frankenstein as is the book's full title. The novel intends us to see its protagonist, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, as the modern Prometheus, stealing creative fire from heaven in order to make a creature, a New Adam, whom most of us now call "the monster," because we have seen so many motion picture versions of Frankenstein. Despite his crimes, the creature is as much angel as monster, and we do best by following the book in calling him "the daemon." This ill-starred daemon is, in certain respects, a critique of all three illustrious figures who meet in Mary Shelley's full name: her mother, the radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft; her father, the radical philosopher William Godwin; and her husband, the revolutionary lyrical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. These three great idealists all had envisioned a new humanity in a newly structured society, and all had hoped that human nature could be redesigned, so as to eliminate exploitation, timidity, remorse, and conventional morality. Though Mary Shelley, to some extent, shared in these aspirations, her book nevertheless is a powerful, implicit critique of the Romantic Prometheanism of her husband and the radical rationalism of her parents.
The center of Frankenstein is the bitter relationship between Victor Frankenstein and his daemon, best expressed by the daemon when he cries out to the scientist: "Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed." This alludes to the novel's epigraph, Adam's lament to God in John Milton's epic, Paradise Lost.
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?
One way to measure the vast distance between Mary Shelley's daemon and the movies' monster is to try to imagine anyone of the film monsters educating himself by reading Milton's Paradise Lost. Mary Shelley's formidable daemon does exactly that, and receives a superb education in consequence. Unlike Victor Frankenstein, who is a literalist lacking in imagination, the daemon has the sensibility of an authentic poet. Critics tend to agree that Frankenstein and the daemon are the two halves of the same being, divided against itself. This gives an ironic sanction to the universal popular "error," by which the name of Frankenstein has come to mean the poor monster rather than its irresponsible creator. When we realize that, in the book, the creature is far more sympathetic than its maker, then we approach the heart of Mary Shelley's critique of the two men she loved best, her father and her husband, and of the mother whom she never knew, since Mary Wollstonecraft died in giving birth to the author of Frankenstein.
Though Paradise Lost is so crucial an influence upon Frankenstein, the novel's genre more closely resembles Jacobean revenge tragedy. What Frankenstein and his daemon ultimately desire is revenge upon one another. Each might say, with one of the revengers in John Webster's The White Devil: "I limned this night-piece, and it was my best." The book's final night-piece is its best, as Frankenstein and his daemon seek their final confrontation in an Arctic frozen sea. And yet the entire book is a night-piece, since it represents the torments of a civil war in the Promethean psyche, fought out between Frankenstein and his daemon. The daemon is superior to his maker both in spirit and in feeling, and so we come both to love him and to fear him. We do not have any particular affect towards the scientist who has both botched his work (the daemon is hideous in appearance) and failed to take responsibility for his creature. It is one of Mary Shelley's many fine ironies that the daemon mourns his dead maker, hardly an emotion that Victor Frankenstein would have experienced had he succeeded in slaying his creation.
The relevance, aesthetic and moral, of Mary Shelley's novel only augments as we enter more deeply into an era that already has brought us "virtual reality" and seems likely to confront us with cyborgs. Victor Frankenstein, though he possesses generous impulses, is nothing less than a moral idiot in regard to the "monster" he has created. Even at the end, he cannot understand his own failure of moral imagination, and he dies still misapprehending the nature of his guilt. He is thus at once a great Hermetic scientist, an astonishing genius at breaking through human limitations, and a pragmatic monster, the true monster of the novel. His trespass is beyond forgiveness, because he is incapable of seeing that he is both a father, and a god, who has failed to love his marred creation. The novel's greatest strength seems to me its ironic contrast between the deepening of self-consciousness in the poor daemon and the narrowing of self-awareness in Victor Frankenstein. There are no victors in Mary Shelley's plangent novel: Frankenstein and the daemon both end in defeat. Yet the daemon has a tragic splendor, while Frankenstein is at most a figure of pathos. Our current purveyors of "third wave" future shock, and their political allies, ought to ponder the deeper meanings of Mary Shelley's Promethean parable.