The Artistic Failure of Victor Frankenstein: Galatea Rejected, Prometheus as a Misfit, and Mary Shelley’s Critique of Romantic Hellenism

The Artistic Failure of Victor Frankenstein: Galatea Rejected, Prometheus as a Misfit, and Mary Shelley’s Critique of Romantic Hellenism

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been read and re-read as many things. Many of these readings and re-readings project, teleologically, a modern distrust of nineteenth century natural science or an incredulity towards Enlightenment values. In this paper, I wish to suggest that the original focus of the work was actually a proto-Romantic distrust of artifice in art. I present three types of evidence to support this aesthetic rather than scientific reading of the novel. The first, and weakest, is the most direct: it is the many direct links between the aesthetic theories of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and the Shelley circle. In this view, Victor Frankenstein appears as an ironic treatment of Winckelmann and of the Pygmalion myth: the artist creates a male Galatea and then rejects him as flawed. The second, stronger, type of evidence is a description of how Shelley’s novel presents an ironic reinterpretation of Mary Shelley’s own husband, and of the Promethean promise of artistic as well as scientific progress. In this view, both Victor and the creature-monster alternate in the role of Prometheus. But the final, and in my view the strongest, evidence to support a reading of the novel as an aesthetic rather than a scientific tragedy is the clear link to the arguments of holism then being popularized by Goethe and other Romantic philosophes. The monstrosity of the monster lies in being a misfit, both in the sense that his parts do not cohere and in the sense that because of his appearance he cannot form part of a social Gestalt.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been read and re-read as many things. Many of these readings and re-readings project, teleologically, a modern distrust of nineteenth century natural science or an incredulity towards Enlightenment values. In this paper, I wish to suggest that the original focus of the work was actually a proto-Romantic distrust of artifice in art. I present three types of evidence to support this aesthetic rather than scientific reading of the novel. The first, and weakest, is the most direct: it is the many direct links between the aesthetic theories of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and the Shelley circle. In this view, Victor Frankenstein appears as an ironic treatment of Winckelmann and of the Pygmalion myth: the artist creates a male Galatea and then rejects him as flawed. The second, stronger, type of evidence is a description of how Shelley’s novel presents an ironic reinterpretation of Mary Shelley’s own husband, and of the Promethean promise of artistic as well as scientific progress. In this view, both Victor and the creature-monster alternate in the role of Prometheus. But the final, and in my view the strongest, evidence to support a reading of the novel as an aesthetic rather than a scientific tragedy is the clear link to the arguments of holism then being popularized by Goethe and other Romantic philosophes. The monstrosity of the monster lies in being a misfit, both in the sense that his parts do not cohere and in the sense that because of his appearance he cannot form part of a social Gestalt.