Frankenstein's Promethean dimension facts for kids
As the story of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus recounts the making of a kind of human being, a Promethean theme of defiance of the gods is evoked, in reference to the mythological hero.
What's more, the adjective "modern" testifies to a desire for a double adaptation of the ancient myth, in the light of new knowledge and the dominant Christian narrative. The challenge posed to the mythological gods thus ironically becomes a challenge to the Creator God, even if creation in the Christian sense is not fabrication but takes place ex nihilo.
The title of this novel echoes the call of the French materialist philosopher, La Mettrie (1709-1751), in 1747, in his Homme machine, for the advent of a "new Prometheus" who would set in motion a reconstituted human machine.
Mary Shelley did not invent the expression, which had already been used in the early 18th century and, closer to its end, by Immanuel Kant, and Frankenstein goes far beyond the technical substratum, presenting, in addition to its borrowings from myth, metaphysical, aesthetic and ethical aspects.
Mythological influences
Frankenstein is not only reminiscent of the myth of Prometheus. Because it tells the story of a man seeking to surpass his condition, it is first and foremost akin to that of Icarus, the bird-man destroyed by the physical order of the universe. It also evokes the more recent eighteenth-century Faust, thirsting for knowledge beyond the limits assigned to Man, even if only by time: Faust must give an account on the appointed date, abandoning his soul to the forces of evil. Mary Shelley refers to the Faustian idea that knowledge intoxicates the soul and proves dangerous when it becomes excessive, becoming in itself "a serpent's bite". The novel also contains hints of Don Juanism: the hero's quest is never satisfied and, like the statue of the commander, the monster appears and precipitates Frankenstein into the bowels of a psychological hell, whose fire is the "bite" of glaciation. Finally, Frankenstein evokes Pygmalion, king of Cyprus and above all sculptor, in love with the statue of a woman he has just completed, a new Galatea of flesh and blood after Aphrodite breathes life into her. The latter myth was known to Mary Shelley, who had read it first and foremost in the Nouveaux contes moraux et nouvelles historiques, published by Madame de Genlis in 1802, then in John Dryden's translation, again published in 1810, and which she also knew from Rameau's Pigmalion (1748), reductions of which for fortepiano were circulating throughout Europe.
