Children of Prometheus: Romanticism and Its Legacy. Gregory Maertz

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СКАЧАТЬ nineteenth centuries yields several prominent examples of intertextual dialogue: James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), the collaboration of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) with Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) in the journals Die Horen (1795–1797) and Musenalmanach (1796–1800) and then again with C.M. Wieland (1733–1813) in Taschenbuch auf das Jahr 1804, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s controversial appropriations of German sources in Biographia Literaria (1817). Dialogue in these works reflects a process fraught with more complexity than the term usually implies, since the emergence of each new text presupposes a struggle with more authoritative discourse. There are enough additional examples, such as the Schlegel-Tieck translation of Shakespeare (1797–1801, 1810), William Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798), and J.P. Eckermann’s Gespräche mit Goethe (1836–48), to suggest that intertextual dialogue is one of the paradigmatic modes of Romanticism. These examples also illustrate Mikhail Bakhtin’s characterization of literary history as “an arena of struggle constantly being waged . . . against various kinds and degrees of authority”: the young Schiller and the amanuensis Johann Peter Eckermann (1792–1854) with Goethe, Boswell with Johnson, the “Great Cham,” Coleridge (1772–1834) with Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and F.W.J. Schelling (1775–1854), and the translators Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) and Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) with the works of William Shakespeare.1

For Bakhtin the generic locus of this struggle is the novel and an intertextual dialogue that exemplifies the effort to achieve individuated discourse during the Romantic Period is exemplified by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) and William Godwin’s St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (1799). The intertextual ligatures connecting these texts have previously been acknowledged, but never fully revealed.2 The present discussion is built on this previously unvisited site and is intended to satisfy two objectives: first, to suggest that St. Leon is the primary precursor text with which Shelley engaged in intertextual dialogue during the composition of Frankenstein; and secondly, as a re-writing of Godwin’s novel, Frankenstein illustrates the dialogic progression from Shelley’s appropriation of her father’s discourse to the emergence of her own authorial originality. Seen from this perspective, the novel functions as an allegory of its author’s education and literary apprenticeship. Moreover, intertextual dialogue between Frankenstein and St. Leon imposes a slight modification on Harold Bloom’s paradigm of influence. Here, and in some of the examples named above, the “strong precursor” with whom the “ephebe” grapples is not a poet of the past but a near contemporary. As the product of intertextual dialogue, Shelley’s novel embodies the female child’s quest for independence from patriarchal authority, but the act of asserting her independence is made problematic in this case by the fact that her “strong precursor” is not merely a near contemporary but her own father. Partially orphaned and then alienated by a stepmother whom she saw as a rival for her father’s attention, Shelley’s attachment to her father was perhaps also afflicted by a trace of culpability for her mother’s death in childbirth.3

      II.

Following Wollstonecraft’s death in 1797, Godwin was left to care for their infant daughter and the three-year old Fanny Imlay. At this time he began to work on St. Leon, and the new novel, which anticipates the interest in history and the historical accuracy of his Life of Chaucer (1803) and History of the Commonwealth of England (1824–28), examines what Godwin described a few years before as “the evils which arise out of the present system of civilized society,” and he considered the novel’s publication an effort to “disengage the minds of men from prepossession, and launch them upon the sea of moral and political inquiry.”4 Thus St. Leon resumes the critique of “things as they are” that commenced with An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and was continued in Caleb Williams (1794) and, like the previous novel, St. Leon was intended to make Godwin’s political teachings more widely accessible. In particular, the new novel reveals the extent to which Godwin’s views on marriage had been modified under the tutelage of Wollstonecraft; in fact, even friendly critics charged that he had recanted his revolutionary views on relationships between the sexes. (He concedes this point in the novel’s Preface: “I apprehend domestic and private affections inseparable from the nature of man, and from what may be styled the culture of the heart, and am fully persuaded that they are not incompatible with a profound and active sense of justice in the mind that cherishes them.”)5 Scattered throughout the text, variations of this view contradict Godwin’s memorable description of marriage given in Book VIII of Political Justice (1793) as “the worst of all monopolies.”6 And yet, the revised argument presented in St. Leon, which accommodates bourgeois family life, is but another example of the intertextual dialogue conducted between Political Justice and Godwin’s prose fiction: the later texts suggest modifications to the ideology set down in the philosophical treatise.

      The overall design and thematic patterns of St. Leon are replicated typologically in Frankenstein. At the center is a presentation of the “education” of the protagonist Reginald de St. Leon alternately via chivalry and alchemy. (Alchemy, it is implied, is analogous to chivalry; both are anachronistic social and scientific paradigms.) The latter is perceived initially by the protagonist as a possible vehicle by which he might simultaneously serve mankind and seek atonement for his betrayal of the chivalric code. Reginald’s travels embody an ironic inversion of the classical Bildungsreise; his education is based on disillusioning rather than edifying experiences. And, anticipating the trajectory of the Monster’s experience, rather than the popular gratitude he expects in response to his benevolent actions, suffering and destruction seem ineluctably to follow in his wake and he is rejected precisely by those whom he had intended to help. As a result, he is hunted down by such adversaries as his son Charles and his erstwhile friend, Bethlem Gabor. Reginald’s fate is shared by Victor and the Monster (who alternately serve as each other’s prey), and parallels to all three characters are found in the tragic situation of Oedipus. Sophocles’s tragedy, St. Leon, and Frankenstein are all myths of misguided benevolence in which hubristic transgression of social, religious, and epistemological boundaries is punished by exile from human society. Mary Godwin also suffers ostracism from her family following her elopement with Shelley—an intolerable act of rebellion against her father’s authority—which coincides with a new phase of authorship independent of her father’s influence. And yet her new status as an author connects her more closely than ever to her precursors Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Shelley.

      Following his disillusioning experience of the brutalities of war in the Italian campaigns of French King Francis I (1494–1547), Reginald finds himself ill-equipped to function in civilian society. Precisely because he is publicly celebrated as a paragon of chivalry who no longer believes in its values, Godwin presents his fall from grace as symptomatic of a culture in decline. Thus chivalry, Edmund Burke’s shibboleth in The Reflections on the Revolution in France and Godwin’s target in Caleb Williams, is exposed as already otiose even during its supposed heyday. A living anachronism driven to gambling, Reginald forfeits his family’s honor and fortune. Flying from France in disgrace, he settles his family near Lake Geneva. The idyllic scene is reminiscent of the De Laceys’ cottage in the forest where Victor’s Monster finds refuge.

      The appearance of a mysterious interloper, Zampieri, violates the intimacy of the family circle and awakens Reginald’s dormant ambition. The stranger offers to share the mystery of the philosopher’s stone and the elixir vitae but only on condition that Reginald agrees in advance not to share this secret with anyone, not even Marguerite, his high-minded wife. Her character is an idealized portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft and serves as the model for all the noble female characters in Frankenstein: Caroline, Agatha, Safie, Justine, and Victor’s cousin, childhood companion, and fiancée Elizabeth Lavenza. Reginald’s first impulse is to refuse Zampieri’s СКАЧАТЬ