Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Milton's Monstrous Myth

Abstract

t A the close of Frankenstein, the monster locates a significant event in his history in a moment of self-identification laden with Miltonic overtones: Evil thenceforth became my good. Urged thus far, I had no choice but to adapt my to an element which I had chosen.' It would be a mistake, however, to read Mary Shelley's novel as a nineteenth-century reenactment of the of Milton's Satan, despite her conscious use of such Miltonic parallels. For the only real sense in which the monster's history can be read as a fall, fortunate or unfortunate, is in his fall into culture and language, especially into the limited and limiting ontology of Milton's Paradise Lost. The monster's error has not been in his rebellion against the father, but in his mistaken assumption that his nature was a thing that he could willingly choose. As Frankenstein makes quite clear, the monster's identity has been shaped by a cultural myth in which the fallen can be only Adam or Lucifer. He finds the answer to his agonizing question What was I? in the pages of Paradise Lost, and in so doing recapitulates the hegemonic, that system of meanings and values encoded in Milton's epic,