His lineage was portrayed as being one of the most distinguished from the republic of Geneva. Prometheus was the son of the Titan, Iapetus, and goddess, Clymene.
Raised with the gods, he—like Victor—was brought up in a world of power, knowledge, and wealth. With this knowledge of the relation Victor has with Prometheus, the reader is able to relate Victor to someone who could have godlike abilities, arrogance, and pride. These early intertextual moments help to foreshadow the. Prometheus is well known in Greek mythology to have been extremely passionate for knowledge. He was taught mathematics, architecture, metalworking, writing, astronomy, navigation, and much more by the goddess Athena after helping to free her from Zeus.
This clearly shows his passion for learning, which he took to the University of Ingolstadt, where he was a slave to his schoolwork.
This unquenchable thirst for knowledge also led to the ability for both Prometheus and Victor Frankenstein to create life. Victor had the notion and desire to be godlike by discovering the secrets to life and death. During his years at Ingolstadt, he devoted himself to this cause. After failing many times he finally succeeds by sending a bolt of lightning into his creature, as if he were a god.
Likewise, Prometheus was the creator of mankind: he brought forth man from molded clay. This theme is also expressed by Prometheus in his attempts to win over his creations by coddling and gifting them. The analogous elements in Frankenstein signal to the reader clues as to what will happen with Victor later on in the story after the creation of his monster.
Prometheus defies Zeus by tricking him for the betterment of mankind by stealing fire from Zeus after he was prohibited from doing so. As punishment, Zeus chains Prometheus to a rock and has his liver eaten daily by an eagle and it grows back to be devoured again every next day.
After creating mankind Prometheus fought for his creations. He attempted to better their lives and give them hope by nurturing them, teaching them mathematics, architecture, metalworking, and many other useful skills. The young author was only 20 years old when her novel changed the literary world.
When she started writing the story at age 18, Mary Godwin, as she was called in her youth, had already lived a full and tragic life. Her mother died when she was very young and Mary herself had suffered the loss of a child, the first of many such losses she would experience. In , Mary had wed poet Percy Blysshe Shelley after the death of his first wife.
The two had already been living together for nearly two years, the first of many scandals that would hound their lives. It was during a stay in Switzerland that Mary conceived the idea for her most famous work. During a wet summer the Shelleys, along with friend Lord Byron, entertained themselves by telling German ghost stories. The three writers challenged one another to write their own tales, inspired by their surroundings and the rising popularity of the Gothic horror genre.
Mary Shelley claimed that she spent days agonizing over what story she could come up with to possibly outdo the older poets she lived with. Inspired by the trends of the world around her, as well as her own experiences of loss and loneliness, she dreamt of a tale of a scientist who took his work to impossible extremes.
Mary won the contest with her tale of a hubristic doctor who defied God to bring the dead back to life. With the encouragement of her husband, she expanded the story into a full-length novel. The Shelleys lived in an age of scientific advancement in which academics like themselves kept informed of the latest discoveries. What if a scientist could bring an entire human back to life? The Dr. In taking science too far, he created a monster. Frankenstein blurred this line.
He claimed the power to create life and defy death. In bringing his monster back from the grave, Dr. Frankenstein defied divine will. In his case, it was the Christian God who was offended by the hubris of science.
In the case of Prometheus, it was Zeus who grew angry when humans received a gift they should not have. The gift Prometheus gave was not the power over life and death, but it enabled humans to survive nonetheless. When Zeus was tricked into accepting scraps as an offering instead of the best cuts of meat from the sacrificial ox, he retaliated by punishing humans.
He took away fire, leaving them unable to cook their food, forge weapons, or keep themselves warm. In addition to the biblical account of the Creation , Adam and Eve and the Fall , the Greek myth of Prometheus also lies behind the text.
The myth says that:. Prometheus' daring in stealing fire from the gods made him an admired figure among writers of the Romantic and later generations. The German writer Goethe see Literary context: The monster's reading wrote about Prometheus in the s, seeing him as a figure representing humanity's creative powers and the revolt against social and political restraint.
The romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a critical essay about the play Prometheus , written by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus. Prometheus Unbound follows the view taken by Goethe in seeing Prometheus as a heroic figure who defies the tyranny of the gods on behalf of humanity. It is a kind of political allegory , aimed at the political oppressions of the day, and also concerns science and psychology.
Like the story of the biblical Creation and Fall , this myth can be applied to Frankenstein in a number of ways:. The Creation; Fall of humankind and universal or original sin; Noah and the Flood; the call of Abraham start of salvation history , followed by the stories of the other patriarchs, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. Resources and further reading Booklist Website resources Frankenstein on film Worksheet downloads. The Prometheus myth In addition to the biblical account of the Creation , Adam and Eve and the Fall , the Greek myth of Prometheus also lies behind the text.
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