MODERN PROMETHEUS
Prometheus, in one strand of the
myth, created human beings from clay, animating them with fire stolen from
Zeus. In another strand he stole fire in order to free humanity from
dependence upon the gods and was punished by Zeus by being chained to a
peak in the Caucasus mountains; there as an emblem of human frustration
an eagle daily tore at his liver, which was restored by night. Mary
Shelley's father, William Godwin,
to
whom she dedicated her first novel, stressed the second of these strands
in the section on Prometheus he wrote for his children's book, The Pantheon, or, Ancient History of the
Gods of Greece and Rome, which he published under the pseudonymn
Edward Baldwin in 1806. Mary
Shelley's novel unifies all strands of the myth in a complex, multifaceted
form. Its "modernity" for the second decade of the nineteenth century may
apply broadly to revolutionary developments in political and scientific
arenas over the previous generation that transformed the intellectual
landscape of Europe. Although in the years intervening since the initial
publication of Frankenstein, those terms may be thought to have
changed radically, the novel's modernity seems to have remained curiously
unaffected by such shifts in its local application.
Mary Shelley's husband Percy Bysshe
Shelley began his own modernization of the Prometheus legend barely
nine months after the publication of Frankenstein; or, the Modern
Prometheus. His Prometheus
Unbound was published in 1820.
