Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus is a depictionof a haunting nightmare of Western civilization since the dawn of themodern industrial society. This paper will be reading the novel, focusedon its subtitle, “The Modern Prometheus.”Invoking the myth of Prometheus who was taken for the symbol for theunvanquished human willpower and the overreaching pursuit beyond thehuman limitations by Romantic poets, Shelley asks us what the ModernPrometheus should be. By assigning to a man the job of creating life withthe supreme knowledge while to herself that of giving birth to a book insteadof a child, Shelley subverts the established gender roles. As a resultVictor Frankenstein ended up creating a monstrous creature who eventuallydestroyed its creator and itself, while Shelley succeeded in writingthe novel, Frankenstein, which Paul Youngquist calls “a Vindication to theImagination of Women,” a sequel to her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft’s“The Vindication to the Right of Women.”The novel is about giving birth, which is a power unique to the womanand the core of nature’s secret and the goal of Frankenstein’s aspiration.
In this nightmarish story, Shelley tries to demolish and deconstruct the binaryoppositions between masculine and feminine, life and death, and civilizationand nature. The birth of the monster is the first step to our recognitionof the problems involving the exploitation of the nature in the nameof science and civilization.