Entry #5: Shelley
“Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom you drive from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous” (Shelley 114).
I first read Shelley’s Frankenstein in high school, prior to any sort of familiarity with Paradise Lost and its interrogation of divine power. However, upon reading Milton’s epic, the symbolic intricacies of Shelley’s novel pack an entirely different sort of punch! Rather than just constructing her characters to parallel power dynamics and issues detailed in Milton’s epic, Shelley directly references Paradise Lost from the “Creature”’s POV; in my opinion, this choice is provocative for its unabashed engagement with the text. Most compelling is Shelley’s subversion of dichotomous analogies; the Creature, of course, compares himself to both Satan and Adam, albeit delivering an idealized view of the latter’s life. Ironically enough, the Creature says he cannot be Adam because has been deprived of “joy for no misdeed”; a critical reading of Milton’s God, however, would suggest that Adam and Eve experienced this fate as well. If the Creature considers himself comparable to Satan, though, he still sees Dr. Frankenstein as his God; Dr. Frankenstein himself bears similarities to Eve and Adam (especially Eve in his desire for knowledge/labor) AND Satan. Shelley does not map merely one Milton character onto her own creations! Moving forward, I am especially interested in the relationship between knowledge and power that manifests in Dr. Frankenstein AND the Creature’s intellectual labor. Neither one of these attainments ends particularly well, but for the Doctor, knowledge still constitutes power (however disastrous it may be). For the Creature, learning does not ameliorate his alienation. Who is allowed to benefit from the supposed empowerment of knowledge, we might ask?