Responsible Creativity and the "Modernity" of Mary Shelley's Prometheus

Author(s): Harriet Hustis

Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 , Autumn, 2003, Vol. 43, No. 4, The
Nineteenth Century (Autumn, 2003), pp. 845-858
Published by: Rice University

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4625101

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SEL 43, 4 (Autumn 2003): 845-858 845
ISSN 0039-3657

Responsible Crea
and the "Moderni
Mary Shelley's Pr
HARRIET HUSTIS

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is responsible for a creative

formation worthy of her prototypical mad scientist, Vic
kenstein: she reconfigures, recontextualizes, and thus m
the myth of Prometheus by means of a "tiresome, unlu
story."' By focusing on the issues of paternal negligenc
need for responsible creativity implicit in what is perh
paradigmatic myth of the romantic movement, Franken
The Modern Prometheus deconstructs the story of Prometh
masculinist narrative of patriarchal authority and (in)j
Shelley's novel focuses on an aspect of the Prometheus m
cally overlooked in the more traditional version of the Tita
ant martyrdom, namely, an offspring's need for sustained
influence, pity, and support from its creator. Ultimatel
amination of the "modernity" of Shelley's Prometheus m
emphasis on the issue of responsible creativity, has an i
only on interpretations of Frankenstein itself, but also on
tion of the novel's 1831 preface, traditionally a site of muc
controversy regarding Shelley's own authorial status and in
Shelley's decision to entitle her novel Frankenstein;
Modern Prometheus suggests a far more complex literar
tion than simple appropriation or modified replication
cient Greek myth; it simultaneously invokes a literary
and establishes a point of comparison or, more accuratel
of departure, for her own creative endeavor. As Christop
has observed, Mary Shelley's Prometheus figure is strik
ferent from the creations of her romantic contemporar
kenstein, her Prometheus, while sharing the impious an

Harriet Hustis is associate professor of English at The College of Ne

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846 Mary Shelley's Prometheus

qualities that exerted such fascin

Promethean first and foremost as
the legend that has tended to be
primary Promethean act of stealing
troduction to Mary Shelley's "Fran
gests that this difference is indicat
Shelley's creative conception; he th
kind of primer to the more sophis
plex texts of Lord Byron, William
Revision and Romantic Authorship,
gues that "Frankenstein is anti-Rom
might be called the 'Promethean' v
autonomous, transgressive), and of
Leader claims that Shelley advance
Romanticism" by means of her "mo
kenstein.5
And yet, in assessing the purpose and evaluating the success
of Mary Shelley's divergence from the original Prometheus leg-
end, neither Leader nor Bloom looks closely enough at precisely
what her "modernization" does with (and to) this myth. A juxta-
position of the Greek variants that appear in Hesiod's The Works
and Days and Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound with the text of
Frankenstein itself suggests that Shelley reconfigures the signifi-
cance of the Prometheus myth in order to foreground the issue of
responsible creativity. Thus, her novel explores the ethics of a
male creator's relationship to his progeny by questioning the ex-
tent to which he incurs an obligation for the well-being and hap-
piness of that creation by virtue of the creative act itself.
Shelley's configuration of the Prometheus legend appears
particularly "modern" when its concern with the issue of respon-
sible creativity is read in the context of Carol Gilligan's analysis
of the moral and psychological development of women. The in-
sights of Gilligan's In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and
Women's Development are strikingly applicable to Frankenstein:
like the subjects of Gilligan's abortion study, Victor Frankenstein
also struggles with the ethical consequences of an "unwanted
pregnancy" of sorts, particularly when he undertakes and then
abandons the creation of a female mate for his monster.6 In the
figure of Victor Frankenstein, Shelley innovatively problematizes
the moral conflict between Zeus and Prometheus established in
the ancient Greek texts; by focusing on the way in which their
power struggle involves the issue of paternal negligence and th
abuse of creative power, she effectively reconfigures the signifi
cance of an ancient myth in decidedly feminist terms. As Ellen

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 Harriet Hustis 847

Moers persuasively argues in her landmark essay, "Female

Gothic," Shelley "brought birth to fiction not as realism but as
gothic fantasy, and thus contributed to Romanticism a myth of
genuine originality."7 The result, Moers argues, is "a phantasma-
goria of the nursery."8 Thus, it is not the case that Mary Shelley
failed to comprehend the complexities of the Prometheus myth
and miraculously created a fictional masterpiece that is simulta-
neously a naive reading of it. Rather, Shelley's rewriting of the
Prometheus legend reconceives its social and cultural significance
in terms no less revolutionary than those of her romantic con-
temporaries.
Significantly, although numerous studies of romantic litera-
ture have discussed the hubristic defiance of the martyred
Prometheus, it is only in Hesiod's account that Prometheus's
actions are motivated by self-interest; in The Works and Days,
Prometheus steals fire, which Zeus has hidden, gives it to mor-
tals, and then hides it from Zeus himself.9 His apparent motiva-
tion is an innate mischievousness coupled with a desire to outwit
Zeus; Hesiod's Prometheus is essentially a trickster figure.
Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, however, develops a more
nuanced characterization of Prometheus. Aeschylus's Prometheus
defies Zeus; he does not simply trick him. Furthermore,
Prometheus's rebellion is overtly inspired by pity, an especially
human emotion. Pity causes Prometheus to undertake an act of
daring responsibility: he steals fire for mortals in a gesture of
compassion for their neglected and benighted state:

As soon as [Zeus] ascended to the throne

that was his father's, straightway he assigned
to the several Gods their several privileges
and portioned out the power, but to the unhappy
breed of mankind he gave no heed, intending
to blot the race out and create a new.
Against these plans none stood save I: I dared.
I rescued men from shattering destruction
that would have carried them to Hades' house;
and therefore I am tortured on this rock,
a bitterness to suffer, and a pain
to pitiful eyes. I gave to mortal man
a precedence over myself in pity: I
can win no pity: pitiless is he
that thus chastises me, a spectacle
bringing dishonor on the name of Zeus.'o

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848 Mary Shelley's Prometheus

Prometheus's audacity manifests itse

ture of defiant compassion, but also
a creator's responsibility for his help
nurtures human community by in
creatures in the arts necessary for th
piness, and cultural evolution as a sp
kenstein, who flees his creation in "bre
apparently because it does not overt
his creative intentions, Prometheus understands that revulsion
in the face of hideousness can only be overcome by an indul-
gence in benevolent pity, and he accepts the fact that such "dar-
ing" may come at a considerable price (p. 318).
It is precisely such pity that Frankenstein's monster cannot
obtain; Frankenstein openly acknowledges that the most he can
feel toward his creation is a fleeting sense of "compassion" and a
temporary urge to "console" him, impulses which are quickly over-
whelmed by disgust, "horror," and "hatred": "'I compassionated
him and sometimes felt a wish to console him, but when I looked
upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my
heart sickened and my feelings were altered to those of horror
and hatred. I tried to stifle these sensations; I thought that as I
could not sympathize with him, I had no right to withhold from
him the small portion of happiness which was yet in my power to
bestow'" (p. 414). As David Marshall persuasively argues in The
Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein dramatizes the failure of the eigh-
teenth-century conception of "sympathy," which "suggests put-
ting oneself in the place of someone else, taking someone else's
part-a general condition or act, related to the modern word 'em-
pathy,' of which pity, compassion, and commiseration are only
specific examples."'12 Frankenstein's pity and compassion are
purely intellectual responses to his creature's helplessness and
misery and thus cannot withstand the physical reality of the
monster as a "filthy mass that move[s] and talk[s]."
In effect, this failure of true sympathy mirrors the fundamen-
tal error of the monster's creation: Frankenstein's decision to work
on a large scale in order to avoid becoming bogged down by (in
his opinion) an unnecessary attention to detail. He thus acknowl-
edges his unwillingness to allow seemingly insignificant minu-
tiae to impede the progress of his creative impulse; he is interested
in the principle of "life" only as an abstraction: "'Nor could I con-
sider the magnitude and complexity of my plan as any argument
of its impracticability. It was with these feelings that I began the

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Harriet Hustis 849

creation of a huma
a great hindrance t
a gigantic stature"
nitude and comple
sible creativity, Fr
parts" in an attem
the grandeur of h
ative precision for
purely theoretical
life with blatant d
Ultimately, this at
the moral complex
concrete manifesta
sistently extols th
as it narrates the s
his family and fri
actions are ironica
cantly, Frankenste
the disasters he he
as "Chance" or an "
Interestingly, Car
cal Theory and Wo
of this tendency t
thetical terms wit
Frankenstein, nam
creativity. Such ph
"useful for the dis
of justice and for m
procity."'5 Howeve
appeals to an ethic
application of a "for
dilemma may ultim
consequence which
It is precisely thi
sequence" which el
insistent claims th
his misfortunes. E
ernization of the P
when responsible cr
and a purportedly
the most crucial el
Pity and the willin
(regardless of whe

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850 Mary Shelley's Prometheus

"formal logic of equality and recipr

Prometheus suggests, the human r
lution as a species to such seemin
impulses.
The insufficiency of "objective pr
ter how "refined," is memorably d
flict between Frankenstein and his monster. Frankenstein's
response, when he cannot "sympathize" with his creatur
seek to "measure the formal logic of equality and recipro
determining whether his own "rights" outweigh the "sm
tion of happiness" he can offer him ("I had no right to w
from him the small portion of happiness which was yet
power to bestow"). Although an ethic of justice ideally a
that all competing claims can be resolved objectively and
equity achieved, the inability of Frankenstein and his mo
arrive at such moral reciprocity suggests that an ethic of
often assumes the benevolent exercise of power and a f
mental willingness to forgo one's own needs in favor of
nal compromise. Thus, even as Frankenstein weighs the
of his monster's claims, he implicitly recognizes the influ
own "power" will have on this supposedly objective measu
of equity. As Gilligan recognizes, in such a dilemma, "m
though seen as arising from the interplay between self a
ers, is reduced to an opposition between self and other.
such circumstances, "[t]he moral ideal is not cooperation
terdependence but rather the fulfillment of an obligation
payment of a debt, by giving to others without taking a
for oneself' (p. 139).
That Frankenstein and his monster seek to resolve their con-
flict with reference to this kind of moral ideal is apparent in
terms with which they attempt to negotiate reciprocity: disputin
their mutual obligations, they adopt opposing ethical "positio
from which to debate what each "owes" the other. The langu
of Frankenstein's monster exposes this association of "just
with debt and obligation when he sues for "clemency and aff
tion" on Mont Blanc: "'I am thy creature, and I will be even m
and docile to my natural lord and king if thou wilt also perfo
thy part, the which thou owest me. Oh, Frankenstein, be not equ
table to every other and trample upon me alone, to whom th
justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due'" (p
364, my emphasis). Clearly, the monster makes his cooperati
contingent upon Frankenstein's willingness to give him his "d
Similarly, from the very outset of his creative endeavor, Franken

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 Harriet Hustis 851

stein dreams of c
unprecedented m
me as its creator
would owe their b
his child so comp
emphasis). Frankenstein similarly remembers that the
"fulfill[ment]" of his own parents' "duties" was carried out "[w]ith
[a] deep consciousness of what they owed towards the being to
which they had given life" (pp. 291-2, my emphasis).
Thus, the moral conflict between Frankenstein and his mon-
ster exposes a fundamental shortcoming of objective principles
of justice: they cannot adequately (i.e., "sympathetically") assess
the responsibilities of a creator for the life he creates. The moral-
ity of Prometheus's actions stems, not from his abstract assess-
ment of what is "right" or "due" to human beings, but from an
overtly sympathetic response to their abandoned and helpless
condition. In effect, Shelley's modernization of the Prometheus
legend suggests that (male) participants in a moral conflict may
invoke "justice" and insist on theoretical objectivity simply to avoid
acknowledging responsibility for the dilemmas they have created,
conflicts which, when neglected, take on a life of their own. The
modernity of Shelley's Prometheus figure is illustrative of how,
when Promethean pity is overlooked in favor of appeals to jus-
tice, "fairness" can become little more than a means of denying
involvement in the problems of others, even when those "others"
are a creator's own progeny.16
Not surprisingly, therefore, Frankenstein's "measurements"
of reciprocity, his determination of what is "right" and what he
"owes" his monster, are exposed as inherently equivocal, subject
to the whims of his ever changing perception of the creature's
dilemma. Frankenstein initially admits the "justice" of the
monster's demand for a mate and eventually concludes that "the
justice due both to him and my fellow creatures demanded of me
that I should comply with his request" (p. 415, my emphasis).
After reconsidering his creature's demands, however, Franken-
stein ultimately refuses to create a companion for the monster:
"'Had I right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon ever-
lasting generations? I had before been moved by the sophisms of
the being I had created; I had been struck senseless by his fiend-
ish threats; but now, for the first time, the wickedness of my
promise burst upon me; I shuddered to think that future ages
might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesi-
tated to buy its own peace at the price, perhaps, of the existence

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852 Mary Shelley's Prometheus

of the whole human race"' (p. 436)

perceived as little more than "fiend
isms," Frankenstein believes the vi
justified. As Gilligan observes in her
with the dilemma of an unwanted
an abortion decision as a "conflict
an ethical impasse: 'The attempt to
flict of rights turned it into a cont
the possibility of a moral decision
be construed as selfish from one
142). Thus, what previously appear
obligation to create a mate for the
ish." Frankenstein's continued reluctance and indecision dem-
onstrates how "either resolution could be construed as selfish
from one or the other perspective."
Interestingly, Victor Frankenstein's moral reasoning at
point in the novel proceeds through developmental stages
similar to those observed by Gilligan in her abortion study
she notices how "[i]n separating the voice of the self from
voices of others, the woman asks if it is possible to be resp
to herself as well as to others and thus to reconcile the dis
between hurt and care" (p. 82). Victor Frankenstein effec
attempts a similar reconciliation of the "disparity between
and care" when he wonders, "Had I right, for my own bene
inflict this curse upon everlasting generations?" However,
ing to Gilligan, failure to obtain this reconciliation leads
recognition that "[t]he exercise of such responsibility req
new kind of judgment, whose first demand is for honesty
responsible for oneself, it is first necessary to acknowledg
one is doing. The criterion for judgment thus shifts from
ness to truth when the morality of action is assessed not
basis of its appearance in the eyes of others, but in terms
realities of its intention and consequence" (pp. 82-3). Signifi
as his tendency to retrospectively blame "Chance" and "the
of Destruction" indicates, Victor Frankenstein never attains this
stage of moral "recognition" and thus never acquires its contin-
gent capacity for responsible action. Instead, he continues to as-
sess the morality of his actions "on the basis of its appearance in
the eyes of others": "I shuddered to think that future ages might
curse me as their pest." Even when he rages against the immo-
rality of his creature's behavior, Frankenstein avoids acknowl-
edging the extent of his own responsibility for his creature's
murderous rampage.

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 Harriet Hustis 853

The "modernity"
traced to Victor F
that "[t]he willin
judgment stems f
indirect action, t
Responsibility for
injunction not to
tains the ideal of
It is this failure t
action, to self and
leaves Frankenstein
Moritz and the murders of William, Elizabeth, and Clerval: he
can only retrospectively curse the injustice of his fate, a gesture
which tragically suggests that such moral recognition ultimately
eludes him.
The myth of Prometheus thus serves as a particularly reso
nant example of the necessity of assuming "responsibility for judg
ment," particularly when it involves the creative act. Wherea
Prometheus dares to pity an abandoned creation (the human ra
at great personal cost, and despite the fact that he is not its physi
cal creator, his "modernized" counterpart, Frankenstein, fails t
exercise such moral responsibility for the single life he creat
because he regards creativity as an abstraction. Mary Shelley's
reconfiguration of the legend of Prometheus emphasizes the f
that the responsibilities of a creator for his progeny cannot b
conceived of as a debt to be paid or an obligation (or "duty") to
fulfilled; to do so is to misunderstand the creative act in a pot
tially disastrous manner. Ultimately, this mistake is one whic
Mary Shelley herself will carefully avoid when she accounts f
the creation of her own "hideous progeny" in the 1831 preface
Frankenstein.
The explanatory preface that Mary Shelley added to her no
in 1831 has remained a site of extensive critical discord; perh
no other preface in literary history has been so frequently e
ployed to detract from the significance of the text that it preced
or to diminish the genius and self-conscious artistry of its a
thor. For example, George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher int
duce their anthology of critical essays on Frankenstein by
questioning the purposiveness of the novel's textual "energies
"How much of the book's complexity is actually the result of M
Shelley's self-conscious art and how much is merely the prod
of the happy circumstances of subject, moment, milieu? The no
intimates that it knows little about its implications (although

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854 Mary Shelley's Prometheus

seems clear enough about its litera

fiction, and Romantic poetry). Are no
self-conscious and accidental?""17 L
gues in 'The Ambiguous Heritage of F
as central and various as Feuerbach, Comte, Darwin, Marx, Frazer,
and Freud, we can find Victor Frankenstein's activity," he never-
theless concludes that "[t]his argument puts Mary Shelley in some
rather remarkable company, but, of course, the point is not to
equate the achievement of her little 'ghost story' with that of the
great thinkers named."'8 Implicit in Levine's unwillingness to
"equate" Shelley with other "great [male] thinkers" of the nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries is the suggestion that such
a gesture would be profoundly destabilizing; hence, it must be
beside "the point."
However, the reasons why critics have been nervously but
adamantly opposed to placing Mary Shelley and her novel in the
company of other mythmakers of the early modern era have little
to do with the quality of her work. Although the clumsiness and
purple prose of Frankenstein were initially cited as conclusive
evidence of the novel's flawed execution, Anne Mellor's detailed
analysis of early drafts of the novel has proven that the awk-
wardness is in fact all Percy Shelley's: "He is . . . in large part
responsible for the stilted, ornate, putatively Ciceronian prose
style about which many readers have complained."'19 Interest-
ingly, this information has in no way discredited the talent and
genius of Shelley's husband; instead, it has once again been cited
as proof of her own shortcomings, even by Mellor herself: "Mary
Shelley's willingness to accept virtually all of these revisions strik-
ingly reveals her own authorial insecurity, her deference to what
she saw as Percy's more legitimate literary voice."20 Clearly, what
is seen as particularly troubling about Shelley's authorship is
the fact that she allowed other literary "voices" to merge with,
and thus potentially overpower, her own (witness, for example,
the original "author's preface" to the 1818 edition, written en-
tirely by Percy).21 Mary Shelley's rampant contextualization of the
creation of Frankenstein is thus interpreted as proof of literary
inferiority or, at best, of a near-crippling authorial anxiety.
However, in light of the above reading of Shelley's "modern-
ization" of the Prometheus myth, it is not surprising that she
would eschew a language of individualism in favor of an "insis-
tent contextual relativism" (in the form of personal "digressions")
when she accounts for her own creative impulses in the 1831
preface to Frankenstein. In particular, her propensity for credit-

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 Harriet Hustis 855

ing the men arou

their respective r
indication of litera
of her articulatio
conception of "in
ing on the capabi
and fashioning id
ativity can never
a solitary impuls
nurturing act: a
his/her progeny
an idea, or a monster) and moulds and fashions it in the context
most suitable for its development and success.22
Consequently, as Leader argues, Mary Shelley never harbors
"illusions of authorial autonomy" because she conceives of "her
writings as 'progeny."'23 This approach keeps her from repeating
the mistakes of her protagonist: as Paul A. Cantor argues in Crea-
ture and Creator: Myth-making and English Romanticism, Mary
Shelley realizes that "[t]o be the sole creator of one's world seems
like a glorious prospect, until one realizes the consequences of
seeing one's self mirrored everywhere one turns."24 To fail to credit
her upbringing, her parentage, the ghost story contest, the pres-
sures of intellectual association with Byron, Percy Shelley, and
John Polidori, the encouragement of her husband, and her own
"waking dream" (p. 264) with their respective roles in the cre-
ation of Frankenstein is to transform the creative impulse into a
depersonalized, solipsistic (and thus, paradoxically, sterile) "spark"
of genius. Both the 1831 preface and Frankenstein itself suggest
that true authorship lies in the postpartum assumption of re-
sponsibility for one's creation, not in the assertion of singular
reproductive power. It is thus not surprising that Shelley will
insist, "I certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor
scarcely of one train of feeling, to my husband, and yet but for
his incitement it would never have taken the form in which it was
presented to the world" (p. 264). In this strikingly assertive dec-
laration, Shelley overtly repudiates the language of debt and ob
ligation ("I certainly did not owe") so disastrously employed by
Frankenstein and his monster, in favor of an alternative image o
reciprocity ("yet but for his incitement it would never have take
... form") that her preface itself personally contextualizes.
Shelley's 1831 preface to Frankenstein, consistently read as
a testimony to one writer's inadequacies, should perhaps be re-
considered as an enactment of that writer's differing conception

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 856 Mary Shelley's Prometheus

of what it means to create, a perfor

fashioning, or "modernizing," of the
the "modernity" of Frankenstein's r
myth is viewed as a meditation on th
panies the creative act, Shelley's own authorial intentions no
longer appear "inconclusive" and "diffuse," the mark of an anx-
ious and insecure woman writer. Instead, her repeated
contextualization of the circumstances under which her "hideous
progeny" was conceived becomes yet another expression of
ethics of creative responsibility, born of Frankenstein's own e
ploration of irresponsible creativity.

NOTES

'Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), in Three

Gothic Novels, comp. Peter Fairclough (Harmondsworth UK: Penguin, 1968)
pp. 257-497, 284. Subsequent references, will appear parenthetically in the
text.

2 Christopher Small, Ariel like a Harpy: Shelley, Mary and "Frankenstein"

(London: Victor Gollancz, 1972), p. 48. In Creature and Creator: Myth-Mak-
ing and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), Paul
A. Cantor argues that Shelley incorporates the inherent ambiguity of the
Prometheus figure by bifurcating her representation of it; thus, "both Fran-
kenstein and the monster have their Promethean aspects" (p. 104).
3 Harold Bloom remarks: "what makes Frankenstein an important book,
though it is only a strong, flawed novel ... is that it contains one of the most
vivid versions we have of the Romantic mythology of the self, one that re-
sembles Blake's Book of Urizen, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and Byron's
Manfred, among other works. Because it lacks the sophistication and imagi-
native complexity of such works, Frankenstein affords a unique introduction
to the archetypal world of the Romantics" (Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein"
[New York and New Haven: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987], p. 4).
4 Zachary Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1996), p. 172.
5 Leader, p. 175.
6 Interestingly, as Anne K. Mellor observes in Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her
Fiction, Her Monsters, Percy Shelley "introduced the oft-quoted description
of the monster as 'an abortion"' in his revision of Mary Shelley's early draft of
the novel. Mellor argues that Mary Shelley "saw the creature as potentially
monstrous, but [unlike Percy] she never suggested that he was other than
fully human" ([New York and London: Methuen, 1988; rprt. Routledge, 1989],
pp. 62-3; subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text).
The fact that she nevertheless incorporated her husband's suggestion into
the final version of the novel may be less a mark of deference to his literary
authority than of an awareness that the term "abortion" invokes precisely
those issues of responsibility and creativity that her novel examines.

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 Harriet Hustis 857

7 Ellen Moers, "Fem

says on Mary Shelle
(Berkeley: Univ. of C
8 Moers, p. 87.
9 Hesiod, The Work
(Ann Arbor: Univ. o
10oAeschylus, Prom
Tragedies, ed. Gree
Univ. of Chicago Pr
11Aeschylus, 1:327
12 David Marshall, T
Rousseau, and Mary
1988), p. 3.
13 Many critics hav
reproduction throug
a monster: thus, as C
of creativity, father
wholly his own, in f
to regard his creatio
14 Frankenstein claims that "Chance-or rather the evil influence, the
Angel of Destruction . . . asserted omnipotent sway over me from the mo-
ment I turned my reluctant steps from my father's door" (p. 305).
15 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's
Development (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), p.
100. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text.
16As Leader notes, "[T]here is the example of [Mary Shelley's] father,
William Godwin, to whom the novel is dedicated. Godwin's idealism was no
mere matter of theory; in his private life, too, the personal or familial was
sacrificed to the public, parental responsibility was neglected" (p. 173).
17 Levine and Knoepflmacher, introduction to The Endurance of "Fran-
kenstein, " pp. xi-xvi, xii-xiii.
18 Levine, "The Ambiguous Heritage of Frankenstein," in Levine and
Knoepflmacher, The Endurance of "Frankenstein," pp. 3-30, 7-8.
'9 Mellor, p. 60.
20 Mellor, p. 59. Leader seeks to reverse this assessment by arguing that
Mary Shelley's acceptance of Percy's revisions is in fact evidence of her "au-
thorial ambition": she believed "he would improve her novel" (p. 171). Never-
theless, even relatively recent feminist criticism has revealed a somewhat
disheartening tendency to emphasize Mary Shelley's authorial "anxieties"
and insecurities: thus, in The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as
Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen
(Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), Mary Poovey argues
that "in 1831, the mature Mary Shelley is able to countenance the creation
of Frankenstein-and, in effect, the creation of her entire artistic role-only
because she can interpret these creations as primarily the work of other
people and of external circumstances" (p. 104). She thus concludes that
Shelley's career is founded on the myth of "feminine helplessness":
"[p]aradoxically, this wholehearted acceptance of an essentially subordinate
and passive role . . affords Mary Shelley precisely the grounds she needed

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858 Mary Shelley's Prometheus

to sanction her artistic career" (p. 105). L

spite [a] tradition of female authorship, M
of her own literary voice" (p. 53), that "[t
1831 preface] goes well beyond the conve
female modesty ... In giving birth to her
able to conceive only a monster" (p. 55).
21 Mary Shelley's tolerance of others' i
cited as proof of the "accidental" and "un
ary energies, but also serves as a sour
Frankenstein's coherence and structural integrity. Thus, Levine and
Knoepflmacher marvel at the novel's very existence, since, based on its 1831
preface, they perceive Mary Shelley as "[w]orking from a parlor game ghost
story contest, out of a mind cluttered with an extraordinary profusion of
serious reading, with the political philosophy she derived from her father
and from her dead mother's writings, the science she learned from Shelley,
[and] the moral ideas she adopted from all three" (Levine and Knoepflmacher,
preface to The Endurance of "Frankenstein, " p. xiii).
22 As a modernized myth of Prometheus and an examination of the ethi-
cal implications of responsible creativity, Frankenstein articulates a "differ-
ent voice," one strikingly similar to that which Gilligan associates
predominantly with the moral development of women. Interestingly, Gilligan
herself acknowledges that this "different voice" and its attendant ethics of
responsibility are often unsettling to those trained to conceive of moral de-
velopment in terms of an ever increasing awareness of and respect for the
rights and independence of the individual. As she points out, misunder-
standing can often arise: "a morality of rights and noninterference may ap-
pear frightening ... in its potential justification of indifference and unconcern.
At the same time . .. a morality of responsibility appears inconclusive and
diffuse, given its insistent contextual relativism" (p. 22).
23 Leader, p. 186.
24 Cantor, p. 124.

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