Morality and Politics in the Promethean-Inspired Narratives of the Romantics - by Courtney Smotherman

     In the late eighteenth century, Enlightenment ideas were spreading across Europe.  These ideas, most especially those pertaining to education of the lower classes, and particularly women, social equality, and the critique of the social hierarchies and the class system, were more than a little disturbing to those who were the beneficiaries of the class system currently in place.  The members of the aristocracy degraded those ‘radical’ thinkers who wished to change the status quo in order to prepare for a society in which power and knowledge was more evenly distributed.  One of their primary targets was Mary Wollstonecraft, all the more so after her husband published his Memoirs (1798) of her life shortly after her death.  Her ideas nevertheless lived on, notably in the works of her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, and her circle, namely the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon, Lord Byron. 

     These ‘disciples’ of Mary Wollstonecraft came together at Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816.  It was, to paraphrase a famous floppy-eared author, a dark and stormy summer.  The previous spring, Mount Tambora in modern Indonesia had violently erupted during a period of ten days in which massive amounts of dust and ash were flung into the atmosphere.  As a result, the next summer saw extremely cold temperature across most of North America and northern Europe.  This produced wet and dismal weather which, in turn, resulted in the Shelleys and Byron staying inside and telling one another ghost stories.  Since they were all recognized or aspiring authors, it didn’t take too long for a challenge to be made: that they each compose their own ghost story.  Out of this challenge came Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, the 1818 work that defined Mary Shelley for many future generations.  It was also during this time, mid-1816, that Byron was finishing his poem Prometheus and shortly after the publication of his wife’s novel, Percy Shelley would compose Prometheus Unbound, a semi-sequel to Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, one of his favorite Greek plays.

      These writers all found something that spoke to them in the Promethean myth -- whether it was in the way Mary Shelley may have seen the title character’s sacrifice to better humanity as mirroring the way Mary Wollstonecraft gave up her life to bring her daughter into the world (Hoobler, 161), the way Percy Shelley possibly viewed Prometheus’ act of defiance as vindication for his elopement(s) against the wishes of his family (Hoobler, 161), or the way Byron might have viewed Prometheus’ fetters as symbols of the restrictions placed on his desired lifestyle by the society and class into which he was born (Hoobler, 162) -- and used this synergy between their lives and the myth as a starting point from which they explored political and moral issues of the day.  Mary Shelley turned the connection between fire and knowledge on its head as Frankenstein, while attempting to better humanity, brings only destruction and death to those he loves.  Percy Shelley attempted to paint a picture of how much better the world would be if Prometheus were released from his punishment and overthrew Zeus, suggested that society would be vastly improved if everyone followed his example of disregarding social norms.  Byron used his work as a forum to voice his displeasure with the strict rules that made it impossible to live as he wished by framing them as Prometheus’ thoughts and feelings. Throughout their Promethean narratives, each writer vividly allegorizes the social problems they see, almost as though they were doctors diagnosing a patient.  Yet all three appear to come to the same conclusion: the disease affecting the moral and political codes of the early 1800s was chronic and fatal.  Consequently the writers abandon their patient before prescribing any course of action.  These narratives, though heavily personalized in some ways, remain as warning signs for the modern political theorist concerned with the effects of highly centralized, illegitimate, or otherwise misdirected forms of power.  It is the intent of this paper to present a fully Promethean-based political reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, and Byron’s Prometheus, a path that has not been well-traveled by Romantic scholars.  The Promethean themes in these works has been commented on by, among others, Betty Bennett and Daniel M. Shea, but they focused more on the psychological effects the Promethean myths had on the Shelleys and Byron than on any political or moral message they may have been attempting to convey through Prometheus

I.    The Promethean Myth in Antiquity

     In traditional Greek mythology, Prometheus was one of only two Titans to side with Zeus in the power struggle between Zeus and his siblings and their father Cronus and the remaining Titans.  As a result, Prometheus and his brother were not sentenced along with the other Titans to Tartarus when Zeus won.  This is the assumed starting point for the multiple myths that surround Prometheus.  Obviously the best known myth is that of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods.  This tale, which seems to spring most clearly from Hesiod, begins when Prometheus notices how humans shiver in the cold of winter and eat their meat raw.  Determined to do something about this, he takes a fennel stalk with him on his next trip to Mount Olympus and hid a flame within it until he returned to earth and gave the flame to humanity.  Unfortunately, this act of generosity was discovered by Zeus in some way, some sources state the top of the fennel stalk revealed the flame to Zeus as Prometheus traveled down Mount Olympus while other sources have Zeus deducing that Prometheus was the culprit after seeing the fires lit by humans down below.  However, Zeus discovered Prometheus was the one who went against the will of the gods, no one disputes that Zeus did identify Prometheus as the culprit and proceeded to punish him quite severely.  Prometheus was chained naked to a mountain where everyday a vulture came and ate his liver which regenerated itself during the night.  Here he would remain until many years later when Zeus’ own son, Heracles, would set him free (Graves, 144-5).

    Other myths concerning Prometheus include Ovid’s version in which Prometheus creates man from heavenly-infused dirt and fresh rainwater, but then separates them from the other animals by shaping them so that their faces point toward the sky where he orders them to always orient their gaze (Ovid, lns 80-6).  Sometimes he plays a small role in the tale of Pandora’s Box, cautioning his brother Epimetheus not to accept Zeus’ present of Pandora (Buxton, 57).  In one version, Prometheus is shown not antagonizing the gods, but instead coming to Zeus’ aid.  When Athena is pounding at the inside of Zeus’ skull with her spear in an attempt to be born, it is Prometheus who takes a hammer to the head of the king of the gods, allowing Athena to escape (Graves, 46). 

      Prometheus is also prominently featured in another of Hesiod’s stories, one that purports to explain why Zeus was so eager to blame Prometheus for bringing fire to humanity without solid proof, assuming of course, that the top of the fennel stalk did not blow off.  In this version, at some point prior to Prometheus’ act of larceny, Zeus decided that there needed to be a regulated system of animal sacrifice to the gods.  To order to set up this system, Zeus called a meeting between the gods and humanity to determine what parts of the sacrificial animal would be burnt as offering to the gods and what parts would be left for human consumption.  Suspecting Zeus would try to take the choicest bits for himself and the other gods, Prometheus devised a clever scheme to ensure humans had decent food to eat.  He took the best bits of meat and covered them with the rather off-putting offal while the bones he covered with a thin slice of succulent fat.  Zeus fell for Prometheus’ trick and decided that the succulent looking pile would be that which was sacrificed to the gods.  Some sources have this trickery occurring before Prometheus steals the fire, but others place it afterwards, citing this as the primary reason Zeus formulated such an ingenious and agonizing punishment for Prometheus (Buxton 55).  It is interesting to note that Prometheus’ name literally means ‘forethought’ yet he displayed no such forethought when helping mankind, always to his own detriment (Pinsent, 38).

II.    The Promethean Myth in the Romantic Era

   In the 1800s, Romantic poets returned to the Promethean myth and infused it with their personal feelings toward the current political and moral structures.  Percy Shelley became fascinated by Aeschylus the first time he read one of the ancient playwright’s plays.  P. Shelley was so enamored of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound that he even included a quote from it in a letter to his future wife, Mary Shelley (Holmes, 267).  Three years after Mary began her explicitly Promethean-themed novel, P. Shelley resolved to compose a poem that would serve as the sequel to Prometheus Bound.  His Prometheus Unbound only took him about a month to complete and he thought it “better than any of [his] former attempts (Holmes, 490).”  He meant to make his political views as blatantly obvious as possible, feeling that it was his duty to pay homage to the great writers of times past for their efforts to advance political freedom.  Politically, P. Shelley drew inspiration from the ideas of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.  At one point when Prometheus is being hounded by the Fiends, as P. Shelley calls the Furies, some of the horrific visions they show him come straight from the French Revolution.  The desolation of nature at the beginning of Act II is meant to represent the political desolation that exists when the poor are downtrodden to the point of misery.  Toward the end of Act II, Prometheus is finally freed from his shackles by Demogorgon, the embodiment of education, who also overthrows Jupiter.  It is a violent overthrow, reminiscent of the chaos of the French Revolution that birthed the Terror.  It is in Act III that the consequences of such a revolution are made evident. 

      Prometheus, who thus far has been the emblem of the revolutionaries, the symbol of hope for a better future, cannot become the symbol of victory over tyrants.  Whether or not P. Shelley consciously realized this is debatable, but the last two acts of Prometheus Unbound, i.e. the acts that take place after the overthrow of Jupiter, become increasingly incoherent and bewildering.  Prometheus’ actions after his successful revolution are not what would be expected of a victorious leader.  Prometheus retires to “a cave, [a]ll overgrown with trailing odorous plants (P. Shelley).”  In doing so, he seems to acknowledge that his revolution has failed; that his triumph over Jupiter has produced nothing more than a change of tyrants.  P. Shelley was dissatisfied with Act III and several months later wrote Act IV in an attempt to fix the problems he saw, but Act IV is even more of a disaster than Act III.  This failure is representative of the impossibility of life after such a revolution and P. Shelley’s inability to adequately describe the means of improving society’s problems.  Interestingly enough, years later William Butler Yeats would analyze Prometheus Unbound in an essay of the same name and conclude that the fatal flaw P. Shelley allowed into his work was Demogorgon, who, Yeats said, “made [P. Shelley’s] plot incoherent, its interpretation impossible (Wiebe, 55).”  Since Demogorgon represents education in Prometheus Unbound, it is curious that Yeats identified him as the character that destroyed the political happiness P. Shelley was attempting to describe.

     Due to his status as a dissenting Romantic, it should come as no surprise that P. Shelley identified Jupiter, the villain, with God and the protagonist Prometheus with Satan.  Jupiter/God was to be depicted as wholly evil in everyway while Prometheus/Satan was to be held up as a model of human perfection.  Jesus is here depicted as a human youth who fell victim to the machinations of Jupiter and not divine at all.  Jupiter’s eagle dips his beak into Jupiter’s poisonous saliva, an overt metaphor for the Gospels as the Word of God, before descending to earth to tear at Prometheus’ liver, an action that represents the divisive power the Gospels have had on humanity.  After Jupiter’s downfall, Prometheus does not take his place but instead retires as described above.  The resultant crumbling of the poem is perhaps meant to suggest that even though organized religion can create many problems, the lack of organized religion can result in just as many, if different, problems (Wiebe, 106).

      George Gordon, Lord Byron, also wrote a poem concerning Prometheus, although it was neither as long nor as allegorical as his friend, Percy Shelley’s Promethean poem.  Bryon’s Prometheus played more on themes that directly related to Byron’s life, assuming as he did that the entire world revolved around him.  The main theme running throughout Byron’s Prometheus is that of disaster brought about by defying divine commands.  Written as it was around the same time as the original version of Frankenstein, in which Victor and Elizabeth’s blood ties bring the incest subtext to the foreground, it is not difficult to imagine that Byron was contemplating his probable incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta.  Casting Prometheus as the hero, Byron praises him for daring to oppose the gods, holding him up as an reminder that humans can overcome the restraints imposed upon them by the ‘Gods’ who by Byron’s time were the moral standards placed upon society.  In a later poem dedicated to Augusta, he once again references Prometheus, here connecting his anguish at being separated from her as equal to the pain Prometheus felt when chained to the rock. 

III.    The Promethean Myth as Moral and Political Allegory in Frankenstein

     In Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, the title character can be seen to reflect many of these Prometheus themes.  Initially M. Shelley’s knowledge of all these variations on the Promethean myth may seem strange, but it is important to remember that, during her childhood, it is known that Goodwin required her to read several of his own books for children, most notably, Fables, Ancient and Modern and Pantheon: or Ancient History of the Gods of Greece and Rome in which these tales of Prometheus appeared and emerged as M. Shelley’s favorite of all of the myths (Hoobler, 161).  Additionally, M. Shelley was taught how to read Latin, which opened up to her additional avenues of Promethean learning, and she was permitted to peruse her father’s vast library whenever the fancy struck her (Ibid., 16).  Exposed to all these resources, it becomes almost impossible to imagine that M. Shelley did not discover all these variations of the Titan Prometheus.  Coming from such a literary and political family, it also seems vastly unlikely that M. Shelley would not have realized the possible political interpretations and implications of these tales.  So when she began writing her first novel, estranged as she was from her father at the time, she must have seen the political Promethean theme as a way to communicate to her father, to whom she dedicated the tale, that, despite her recent actions, she remained a faithful follower of her great politically-minded parents.

    Her protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, although he never specifically compares himself to Prometheus, nevertheless initially sees his actions as bringing wisdom and enlightenment to humanity (Shelley, 30-32), much as Prometheus brought light and warmth to mankind, jumpstarting civilization.  As time goes on, Frankenstein begins to see himself as a twisted version of Prometheus who has brought not enlightenment, but destruction and terror to the world (Shelley, 114-5).  In this, he can be viewed as a mirror for the aristocracy of the time, who themselves created one of their biggest problems: the middle class.  Members of the aristocracy and upper class, such as Rousseau and Burke, advocated for the education of all citizens, but it was this education that allowed the underprivileged to gain wealth and influence to the point where they threatened the supremacy of the aristocracy.  This allows the reader to view Frankenstein almost as an amalgam of Zeus and Prometheus, as he wishes to come to humanity’s aid like Prometheus, but instead finds himself creating problems for them such as Zeus often did.

    It was during this time in Europe that science was growing by leaps and bounds, indeed that was part of M. Shelley’s inspiration for Frankenstein, living in the last stages of the Scientific Revolution.  Concepts such as electricity made their way into M. Shelley’s consciousness and she used them, as did her husband, in her work.  Though Frankenstein never fully reveals how he reanimated the creature, he does insinuate that electricity played an important role.  This electricity is the link to the most obvious comparison between Frankenstein and the classical Greek myth of Prometheus.  The fire Prometheus steals from the gods is transformed into the life-giving electricity Frankenstein ‘steals’ from God to reanimate his progeny.  As the Olympian fire was the spark that led to civilization, Frankenstein’s ‘spark of life’ can be seen as leading to the destruction of civilization through the damage inflicted by and the various murders carried out by his creature. 

      Additionally, there is evidence that M. Shelley was aware of Erasmus Darwin’s (incorrect) theory of evolution at the time she was composing Frankenstein (Bennett, 38), something that might have influenced the composite nature of Frankenstein’s creature and the benefits such a composition imparts to him.  This is politically representative of the composite nature of society at the time, something that was especially noticeable to M. Shelley as she and her party traveled through Europe.  Frankenstein’s action of combining the many forms of knowledge he gained from his self-guided reading and his formal schooling may reflect Prometheus’ act of bringing wisdom into the world by releasing Athena.  Given the results of Frankenstein’s wisdom, this reinforces the image of Frankenstein as the twisted Prometheus.

    The twisted Prometheus is the most prominent theme when one looks at Frankenstein from a moral perspective.  Running throughout the narrative is the theme of responsibility.  Frankenstein’s refusal to take responsibility for his creature is the beginning of all of the problems caused by his creature.  When he views his completed creation for the first time and is repulsed by what he sees, he runs from it in horror, refusing to believe that he has created such a hideous being.  He does not stay to help his creature adjust to life or teach it right from wrong.  At the very least, he should have notified the authorities that a strange being was on the loose.  Had he taken responsibility for what he had done, the many deaths caused by his creature may not have happened.  Even after his brother, William, Clerval and Elizabeth are killed, Frankenstein is unable to bear responsibility for what he has done.  It is not until his father dies that Frankenstein realizes he must attempt to destroy the evil he has brought into the world. 

     The Promethean theme reappears when it becomes clear that Frankenstein will perish as a result of his actions.  Frankenstein admits to Walton that he believes he is being punished for his part in the murders of his family and friends.  Prometheus was also punished for his actions, but he did not attempt to deny that he was the one responsible at any point.  This acknowledgement of responsibility enables Zeus to eventually allow his son Heracles to rescue Prometheus from his torments.  As Frankenstein never fully took responsibility for his creature and the deeds of his creature, he is not allowed the eventual freedom Prometheus was granted

    Part of the reason Prometheus was so willing to accept responsibility for his actions lay in the fact that he was aware that his actions benefited all of mankind.  In all of his exploits, Prometheus is shown helping the human race, bringing them light and food.  Frankenstein’s scientific endeavors, though he claimed they would benefit society, were primarily intended to bring glory to his name.  A man truly concerned with the betterment of mankind would ensure that such a creation would not endanger anyone before creating it.  Frankenstein’s lack of such precaution reveals that he is only seeking “personal, godlike power (Bennett, 35),” and as such, incapable of self-sacrifice on a Promethean scale.   

    Mary Shelley’s fascination with the political and moral issues that could be invoked by means of the Promethean myth did not end with the publication of Frankenstein.  Betty Bennett has argued that almost all of Mary Shelley’s works, from Frankenstein to Valperga to Faulkner, incorporate some part of the Prometheus myth into their plotlines.  Over time, however, the Promethean connection weakens, and it is never again as strong as in Frankenstein.  It seems that M. Shelley viewed the Promethean theme as difficult to reconcile with solutions to societal problems.  In Frankenstein, there are no solutions revealed, only the consequences of such actions.  In her later novels, as the Promethean connection wanes, the solutions begin to appear to the point where M. Shelley’s later works bear only the slightest imprint of Prometheus, but they are the ones in which solutions are presented for the societal and political problems her characters encounter.  The Promethean themes M. Shelly engages are still relevant today.  The importance of accepting responsibility for one’s actions has been stressed by many modern political theorists, especially when dealing with different cultures, as Frankenstein and his creature were of different cultures.  With the vast influx of new technologies that exists today, the consequences of engaging these new forms of science must be carefully considered before any action is undertaken.  With so many connections between the Promethean myth and the modern moral and political lives, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein will continue to have far-reaching implications as long as humanity continues to deal with moral and political issues.     

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