All the Lonely People: Connection Through Isolation in 'Prometheus Unbound' and 'Frankenstein'

(source: getty images)

When John Rieder argues that the real conflict of Prometheus Unbound ‘lies not between Prometheus and Jupiter but within Prometheus’, and testifies to the ‘intense psychological’ nature of their discord, he gestures towards the isolated, divorced status of both parties throughout the lyrical drama. Their mythic mutual confrontation is denied dramatic exposure in Percy Shelley’s work, and their battle is instead inner, personal and remote – the inimical equivalent of the abiding, loving connection between Asia and Prometheus. Frankenstein similarly deals with the paradox of isolated communities: Victor and his creature are simultaneously estranged and cognitively twined; the creature’s attitude to human society is both one of yearning for integration and of despairing alienation; and the novel’s very structure plays with the text’s fraught and varying communities of audience and narrator.

Prometheus Unbound instantly converges the notions of isolation and community; the vast-scale pluralisations of Prometheus’s first lines (‘Gods and Daemons, and all Spirits (1)) are undercut by ‘I alone’ (3); he insists that his ‘empire’ is one of ‘torture and solitude,/ Scorn and despair’ (14-15). He instantly encapsulates his relationship with Jupiter the ‘monarch’ as one of paradoxically isolated communion: it is ‘Thou and I alone’ (3) who see the universe with ‘sleepless eyes’ (4) – individually sharing in identical experiences despite their distance and antagonism. Indeed, as Asia will later argue in Act II, ‘To know nor faith, nor love, nor law, to be/ Omnipotent but friendless, is to reign’ (48) – power, albeit something Prometheus has not had for ‘three thousand years’, is inextricable from abject loneliness.

Paul Hamilton claims that Prometheus’s ‘immortality is a limitation not an advantage in his attempt to recall the curse he pronounced upon his imprisoner’ – but it is also a personal, emotional limitation: he laments how he ‘wandered once’ (122) with Asia, another instance whereby a reminiscence of communion is swiftly, subsequently undermined by the words ‘me alone’ (125). His exclamation concluding the speech signals desperation: ‘Why answer ye not, still? Brethren!’. It is an over-insistent call for reciprocity of communication, which is perhaps more for the sake of contact than for an answer to his request – and his repeated claims to ‘hear a sound of voices’ (112) and his commands (‘Speak, Spirit!’) seem to support this. It is thus apt that his former, now recollected, curse upon Jupiter formulates an auxesis of punishment, which reaches its retributional apotheosis in ‘self-torturing solitude’ – the layering of ‘self’ upon ‘solitude’ heightening the harshness of the isolation with which he imprecates the tyrant.

As the Phantasm recounts, Prometheus’s former words cursed Jupiter with ‘envenomed agony’ (289), a ‘crown of pain’, and ‘ill deeds’, before utterly disembodying and displacing him in an exile to ‘boundless space and time’ (301). Prometheus’s instinct, like Victor’s creature’s, is one of community and generosity – he bitterly regrets the prior curse, insisting that ‘I wish no living thing to suffer pain’ – and the act concludes with his staunch belief that ‘love’ is the least ‘vain [of] all hope’ (808). Panthea encourages him, insisting not only that his beloved Asia awaits him, but that the communion he so longs for is already existent; for Asia’s ‘transforming presence [would] fade/ If it were mingled not with thine’ (832-3). Even in Asia and Prometheus’s respective ‘scene[s] of [...] sad exile’, there is a latent psychological and sustaining hope through love which is maintained and transported into Act II in the shape of Asia’s celebration of ‘the golden dew/ Whose stars the noon has quenched not (130-1). 

If an indissoluble cognitive connection of love exists between Asia and Prometheus even in their states of isolation, then the connection between Prometheus and Jupiter is equal and opposite – its confrontative correspondent. When Demogorgon states in Act II that ‘all spirits are enslaved which serve things evil’ (110), he alludes to the existence of, in John Rieder’s words, ‘a psychological and moral partnership where each depends on the other for the maintenance of the relationship’ between protagonist and antagonist. They both share perspectives of similar scope; Jupiter’s bewilderment at Demogorgon’s transgressive appearance at the opening of Act III (‘Awful shape, what art thou? Speak!’ (52)) exposes the same ignorance of the demon’s existence as that of Prometheus in the first Act – Earth has to inform him of the ‘supreme Tyrant’.

Demogorgon tells Jupiter that he is ‘mightier than thee’ (55), and calls for the same shrouded communion between offspring and father which seems to exist between Prometheus and Jupiter: ‘we must dwell together/ Henceforth in darkness’ (55-6). Jupiter’s response is telling; he laments that even his ‘judge’, Prometheus, ‘would not doom me thus’ (66) – Prometheus is ‘Gentle, and just, and dreadless’ (67), the ‘monarch of the world’ (68). The war between father and offspring becomes incongruously intimate and mutually reliant: Jupiter commands Demogorgon to ‘Sink with me then’ (70) – a reciprocal, assured destruction intensified by Shelley’s seemingly negatory coalescence of water and fire imagery throughout his speech. Hell’s ‘mounded oceans of tempestuous fire’ (75) forge a relationship between two usually paradoxical and isolated elements, mirroring the characters’ incongruously intimate connection through hatred and isolation: their ‘inextricable fight’ (73). 

Abandoned and isolated by his elements, Jupiter’s fall ‘Dizzily down, ever, forever, down’ (81) is a realisation of Prometheus’s curse: a ‘lagging fall through boundless space and time!’ (301). Yet at his death, Jupiter’s final thought is one which extols Prometheus, and it is the newer, unknown Demogorgon who enacts his overthrow. Demogorgon’s self-ascribed appellative identification via ‘Eternity’ is also redolent of the dually isolated and connected relationships characterising the drama: the mythological figures rely on ‘eternity’ for their power and immortal existence, but it is also the force which proves most destructive, painful and limiting. Prometheus can’t retrieve the terms of his curse in Act I because he does not know ‘the language of the dead’ (138), and the eternity of his punishment is what renders his suffering so tremendous – to the extent that it is inarticulable: ‘pain, pain ever, forever!’ (30), a linguistic breakdown which will be paralleled by Jupiter’s ‘down, ever, forever’ in Act III (81).

Although Demogorgon’s culminating speech is one of hope, abiding love and re-creation, the tension between isolation and community lingers: ‘Eternity’ is aged, rendered frail, ‘with infirm hand’ (565), and ‘Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance’ (562) are cited as the ‘spells by which to reassume/ An empire o’er the disentangled doom’. Yet this celebratory claim is problematised by the preposition ‘o’er’; Demogorgon doesn’t pioneer an image where the ‘doom’ has been entirely dispelled, but instead the new utopian society is described in terms of the very power-play which proved so ruinous throughout: the empire will preside over doom, or occupy a higher spatial realm, but can’t guarantee its lasting termination. ‘Eternity’ then, is again, the limiting factor to any sense of permanent resolution. Demogorgon’s final line nods again to the drama’s preoccupation with isolation: ‘This is alone Life’ (578) [italics mine] – a cyclical transposition of Prometheus’s opening account of his and Jupiter’s isolated togetherness (‘Thou and I alone of living things’ (3)). 

Frankenstein’s very structure gives expression to the tension between isolation and community which imbues Prometheus Unbound. Each character narrates their tale to an audience too distant, remote or insubordinate to comprehend the story’s full impact – they do not truly reflect on their words, but regurgitate the previous story. Walton and his sister are separated not only by geographical distance, but also by a dramatised temporal potential: ‘If I succeed, many, many months, perhaps years, will pass before you and I may meet. If I fail, you will see me again soon, or never.’ Victor’s narrative is parroted through Walton’s words, an interlocution easily missable due to the adventurer’s utter disappearance from the plot; and despite their close communion, a dislocation in understanding emerges – Walton misinterprets Victor’s character, celebrating his ‘lofty design and heroism’, and introduces him as ‘a celestial spirit, that has a halo around him’.

The creature’s own story is also isolated and distorted despite its centrality in the novel’s frame narrative; prefigured by Victor’s bildungsroman and denunciation of his offspring, the ‘hideous phantom’ is instantly forced into a defensive, vindicatory position, the reader’s attitude already framed and prejudiced by the protagonist’s hostility. The harmonious, if mournful, circle of the De Lacey family (‘lovely creatures’ of ‘grace, beauty, and delicate complexions’) is thus aptly set in the very physical centre of Frankenstein; a society at the heart of a narrative formed of concentric circles of isolated narratives, fragments of poetry, and disjointed letters – a nucleus of community framed in isolation. The uneasy relationships between storytellers and recipients throughout the novel, isolated despite their extensive communications, heighten the irony of the tale’s apparent preservation for the amusement of Margaret Saville, and each characters’ misreading or failure to engage with the contents of the story they recount, sets up a dialectic whereby the reader’s own interpretative authority is called into question. 

Walton’s epistolary opening with its atmospheric and isolated setting-creation of ‘icy climbs’ and note of solipsistic self-aggrandisement (‘I preferred glory to every enticement that wealth placed in my path’) foreshadows Victor’s self-absorbed, societally removed individualism. Victor’s self-identification with the indelible and inchoate ‘secrets of heaven and earth’, and ‘natural philosophy’, ‘the genius that has regulated my fate’ intensifies the novel’s mythic parallel to Prometheus. That his explosive intellectual inspiration is first kindled upon witnessing lightning’s destructive ‘stream of fire’ and its aftermath, a ‘blasted stump’ implies that it is obliteration, not creation, which propels and fascinates him. Where Percy Shelley immortalises and extols the fire-benefactor and great emancipator Prometheus, as a glorious Titan, Mary Shelley subverts this: Victor’s inspiration through fire’s destructive capacity is suitably mirrored by the creature’s painful fascination with it. He initially discovers it in a ‘cry of pain’, then avenges himself in an incendiary night at the De Laceys’ cottage, and finally commits himself to ‘the torturing flames’ of his ‘funeral pile’.

The novel’s eponymous, mythologised Promethean echo (subtitled 'The Modern Prometheus') is also undermined by Victor’s physical weakness and ill health: he faints several times, ‘become[s] emaciated with confinement’, is incapable of protecting himself and others from the creature’s violent actions, and repeatedly blames his mistakes upon ‘fortune’ and ‘fate’. The same uneasy relationship between master and slave, or creator and creature, of Prometheus Unbound is present here – although Victor is desperate for ‘no community between you and me’, the characters share similar experiences within their isolated conditions. Their cognitive communion is present both in the creature’s detailed reading of Victor’s diary, and the uncanny, almost telepathic connection between the two: Chapter X sees Victor invoke the ‘wandering spirits’ of the mountains, his call to be answered immediately by the ‘superhuman’, ‘bound[ing]’ creature, who expresses his isolation – ‘alone, miserably alone’. Even the life-forces between Victor and his creature become mutually reliant: it becomes true that they are ‘bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us’, as Victor’s death is swiftly followed by the creature’s plangent resolution to ‘consume to ashes this miserable frame’. 

Zoe Beenstock notes how Victor’s self-isolation mirrors Rousseau’s introspective desire to philosophise far removed from community: ‘completely forgetting the human race, I made for myself societies of perfect creatures’. Victor and Rousseau desire the incongruous and impossible: to procreate, or at least re-create – to forge a community – as an isolated individual. Not only does this introduce gendered exclusion, an uneasy elimination of those considered unworthy, and parental truancy, but also calls into question Percy Shelley’s fervent atheism. Victor’s – and Prometheus’s – attempts to overthrow God’s (or Jupiter’s) hegemony by artificially creating and endowing life are portrayed as subversive transgressions by Mary Shelley.

In Frankenstein’s 1831 Preface, she explicitly attests to the ‘supremely frightful’ hypothetical effects of ‘human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world’. Victor’s endeavours to ‘break through’ ‘life and death’, be blessed as ‘creator and source’ of a ‘new species’, and ‘pursue[] nature to her hiding places’ are a grandiose desire for social utopia, but one reduced by his self-absorbed, myopic solipsism and breach of more than just orthodox religion: of natural order too.

Victor’s societal withdrawal in favour of obsessive, self-isolating ambition critiques a rejection of what Mary Shelley described in On Ghosts as ‘something beyond us of which we are ignorant’. Indeed, the creature’s indictment of his creator is an explicit censure of Victor’s presumptuous attempt to overthrow God’s authority, and of his self-alignment with God’s cosmic power: ‘How dare you sport thus with life?’. However, community is not simply glorified as a utopian ideal or foil to isolation throughout the novel. It is the creature’s experience of socialisation and community which disillusions him and destroys his innocent purity: ‘all men hate the wretched’ – yet he insists that human society is one of ‘bliss’, from which he is ‘irrevocably excluded’; perhaps seemingly paradoxically, he desires inclusion within the very same network of humankind which he knows to be cruelly prejudiced towards the aesthetic or ‘unnatural’ other.

Ultimately, Frankenstein and Prometheus Unbound are both texts interested in the inchoate and enduring bonds of human community within the most isolated states and places. Their characters attempt to overthrow or replicate the authority of a God – whether it be the tyrannical sovereign Jupiter, or Mary Shelley’s less explicitly delineated, and perhaps thereby more sympathetic, version of God. Prometheus’s isolated martyrdom is mythologised and glorified by Percy Shelley in Prometheus Unbound, but his human parallel in Victor Frankenstein is ironised and rendered vehemently anti-heroic: responsible for destruction, murder, and perhaps most tragically, the abject suffering and alienation of a fellow-creature. Percy Shelley’s legacy suffuses Frankenstein: Victor’s exploitation of fire’s power not only mirrors Prometheus’s act, but also echoes Percy Shelley’s revolutionary rhetoric. In Ode To The West Wind, Percy Shelley also seeks to reclaim fire and harness the natural elements: he demands of the wind to ‘Scatter [...] ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!’, ‘to quicken a new birth’. Similarly in his Preface to Prometheus Unbound, he insists that ‘Poets [...] are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations, of their age’. His rousing cry for a potential utopian community forged by the individual, dramatised poet is subsequently questioned, even satirised, by Mary Shelley’s depiction of Victor’s self-isolated failure to (pro)create a community in Frankenstein.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)

Percy Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (1820)

Secondary Sources

Beenstock, Zoe, ‘Lyrical Sociability: The Social Contract and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’, Philosophy and Literature, 39.2 (2015), 406-21

Christie, William, The Two Romanticisms and Other Essays: Mystery and Interpretation in Romantic Literature (2016)

Clark, Timothy, Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (1989)

Hamilton, Paul, Percy Bysshe Shelley (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2000)

Hogle, Jerrold E., Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)

Rieder, John, ‘The ‘One’ in Prometheus Unbound’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 25, no. 4 (1985): 775–800. https://doi.org/10.2307/450674 

Shelley, Mary, On Ghosts, (1824), accessed via: https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0602881h.html 

Shelley, Percy, Ode To The West Wind, (1819), accessed via: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45134/ode-to-the-west-wind