Children of Prometheus: Romanticism and Its Legacy. Gregory Maertz

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СКАЧАТЬ ideological life precisely in a world of alien discourses surrounding it, and from which it cannot initially separate itself . . . . One’s own discourse is gradually and slowly wrought out of other’s words that have been acknowledged and assimilated, and the boundaries are at first scarcely perceptible . . . . When such influences are laid bare, the half-concealed life lived by another’s discourse is revealed within the new context of the given author. When an influence is deep and productive, there is no external imitation, no simple act of reproduction but rather a further creative development of another’s discourse in a new context and under new conditions.23

      In its mythical treatment of the necessity to struggle against even the most beloved presence in one’s life, Mary Shelley’s novel also reflects the centrality to Romanticism of Germaine de Staël’s maxim: “Force of mind is developed only by attacking power.”

The Monster’s acquisition of speech, reading skills, and, most importantly, the capacity to generate texts symbolically, replicates Mary’s education as a struggle with another’s, more powerful discourse. Within her narrative this process approximates the Lotman/Bakhtin paradigm according to which the Monster learns, first, by appropriating the discourse of the De Lacey family and of the books he finds in the “leathern portmanteau”: Milton, Plutarch, and Goethe, and, secondly, in articulating its own individuated discourse.24 In the Godwin household the categories of parents and authors were conflated, and the circle of family friends included prominent literary and cultural figures who were familiar to the children.25 Mary’s, and by extension, the Monster’s obsession with language reflects their shared struggle to gain command of a medium in which to express their own thoughts in the midst of many authoritative models of discourse: “By degrees I made a discovery of still greater moment: I found that these people possessed a method of communicating their experience and feelings to one another by articulate sounds . . . . This was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to become acquainted with it.” (83) There is a remarkable parallel between the Monster’s language acquisition through a process of eavesdropping on the De Laceys and the famous anecdote of Mary and the other Godwin children hiding behind the sofa in order to hear Coleridge’s reading of the “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” How many countless times was this scene replicated over the years during visits by Wordsworth, Lamb, and Holcroft? An interesting irony disclosed in the dialogic process is how the Monster acquires and demonstrates a command over language that far surpasses the eloquence of any other figure in the novel. Indeed, the source of his eventual domination of Victor is not his superhuman strength, but his greater rhetorical power. It is also an irony of literary history that in securing her authorial identity with the endurance of Frankenstein Mary surpassed the success enjoyed by St. Leon, her primary precursor text, which Byron considered superior to Caleb Williams. And while Frankenstein continues to generate countless literary and cinematic spinoffs at a dizzying rate, Godwin’s novel, until recently, was only available in an antiquarian reprint.

A further instance of Mary’s identification with the Monster is found in their similar responses to maternal deprivation. Victor and Reginald are also motherless, and for both this loss is exacerbated by the deaths of other loved ones. Anne Mellor has described Frankenstein as “an analysis of the failure of the family, the damage wrought when the mother—or a nurturant parental love—is absent.”26 This is also the central theme of St. Leon, which is, as already suggested, a transparent redaction of the Godwin family experience, and Mary’s treatment of the orphan’s agony of the Monster illustrates Sigmund Freud’s view that “missing someone who is loved and longed for is the key to an understanding of anxiety.”27 John Bowlby, the English psychologist and biographer of Charles Darwin, modifies Freud’s observations on grief and separation anxiety to suggest a possible cause of Mary’s frequent bouts of anxiety during her many pregnancies:

States of anxiety and depression that occur during adult years, and also psychopathic conditions, can, it is held, be linked in a systematic way to the states of anxiety, despair, and detachment . . . that are so readily engendered whenever a young child is separated for long from his mother figure, whenever he expects a separation, and when, as sometimes happens, he loses her altogether.28

By virtue of a kind of sorcery akin to alchemy, Mary and the Monster seem to have been formed by a hermaphroditic father, who combines both the male and female principles of generation and whose powers of multiplication correspond to the recondite powers of the philosopher’s stone. As a descriptive term “hermaphroditic” is preferable to William Veeder’s “androgyne,” since androgyny refers only to proclivity or “sexual character,” while hermaphroditism actually has reference to actual sexual nature or capacity.29 Victor’s ability to create life from inanimate matter and Reginald’s multiple rebirths by means of the elixir vitae are methods of creating life that circumvent the female body but not the maternal principle. In a thinly veiled disguise for Godwin’s relationship to Mary and her half-sister Fanny, Reginald outlives his wife and appropriates the maternal role in his relationship to his daughters. The life-giving powers exhibited by Victor and Reginald correspond to Mary’s own birth in which the maternal principle was eliminated in Wollstonecraft’s death. Through their traumatic births and status as orphans the Monster stands revealed as her fictive other.

The main narrative and thematic vehicle in both novels—the perversion or misuse of science, old and new—is, in fact, a distortion of procreation, and the bridge between alchemy and natural philosophy is the discovery of the means of creating or perpetuating life by a subtraction of the female principle from procreation. Ironically, the stain of mortality is removed from persons not of woman born. The elimination of the female principle in procreation invites Mary’s critique of the monstrosity of neglectful parenting. Testifying to the power of environmental conditioning in childhood, which is a fundamental teaching in Godwin’s Political Justice, both motherless protagonists reveal themselves to be neglectful parents in their own right. And Victor’s feckless record as the “parent” of the offspring of his scientific labors is symbolic of the neglectful male parents in Mary’s personal life—Godwin and Shelley, Victor rationalizes the abandonment of his child on grounds not usually associated with maternalism, that is, aesthetic criteria, insisting “that no mortal could support the horror of that countenance”; even a “mummy endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch.” (43) There are strong parallels here to Godwin’s “monstrous” behavior as a parent, for we know that he not only opposed Mary’s decision to elope with Shelley, but he also refused to claim or identify the body of Fanny Godwin following her suicide on October 9, 1816. (Like her half-sister, this doubly orphaned young woman had, in her father’s view, indelibly stained the family’s honor.) The novel also provides subversive commentary on the egregious behavior of other parents in the Shelley circle: Percy, Claire Clairmont, Byron, and even Mary herself. Byron gained custody of his daughter Allegra only to have her placed in a convent where she died of neglect. The frenetic wanderlust (and the woeful traveling conditions they endured) of the Shelleys may be directly implicated in the deaths of their children Clara I (March 6, 1815), Clara II (September 24, 1818), and William on June 7, 1819. Perhaps of all acts the most reprehensible was Shelley’s abandonment of Harriet and their children when he eloped with Mary. In what can only be reckoned a display of astonishing insensitivity, Percy and Mary were then married less than three weeks after Harriet, who was pregnant at the time, drowned herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park. Considering this monstrous record of neglect, which clearly contravened the teachings of Godwin by which the Shelleys claimed to be fashioning their lives, the Chancery judgment delivered on March 17, 1817 denying Percy custody of his children with Harriet could have come as no surprise and, respecting the moral universe of both St. Leon and Frankenstein, was СКАЧАТЬ