snow and frost are banished
Fanciful representations of the North Pole as an edenic clime, however
nonsensical they might appear in the light of modern science, are fairly
common in early mythology. Percy
Bysshe Shelley, writing
contemporaneously with Frankenstein, stages part of the first canto of The Revolt of
Islam in such a polar paradise derived from Indian sources. The
oxymoronic combination of fire and ice is a conspicuous feature of the
edenic paradise of Xanadu in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," published in 1816 and read that summer in the
Geneva circle as Mary Shelley
began writing Frankenstein. A
strongly ironic version of this coexistence of opposites informs the
Creature's plans for his self-destruction in the penultimate paragraph of
the novel (Walton 16).
