《TitleAnexcerptfromastudyofFrankensteinorTheNewPrometheus》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《TitleAnexcerptfromastudyofFrankensteinorTheNewPrometheus（4页珍藏版）》请在金锄头文库上搜索。
1、Title: An excerpt from a study of Frankenstein: or, The New Prometheus Author(s): Harold Bloom Publication Details: Partisan Review 32.4 (Fall 1965): p611-618. Source: Literature Resource Center. Detroit: Gale, p611-618. From Literature Resource Center. Document Type: Critical essay Bookmark: Bookma
2、rk this Document Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2009 Gale, Cengage Learning In his influential study of Frankenstein, excerpted below, respected American educator and critic Bloom focuses on solipsism and Prometheanism in the work, which he regards as an extreme example of “the Romantic mythology of the self.
3、”The motion picture viewer who carries his obscure but still authentic taste for the sublime to the neighborhood theater, there to see the latest in an unending series of Frankenstein, participates in a Romantic terror now nearly one hundred and fifty years old. The terror is a familiar and a pleasi
4、ng one, and few figures in contemporary mythology are as universally loved as Frankensteins once pathetic monster, now a star beaconing from the abode of television, comic strips and the sweatshirts of the young.“Frankenstein,” to most of us, is the name of a monster rather than of a monsters creato
5、r, for the common reader and the common viewer have worked together, in their apparent confusion, to create a myth soundly based on a central duality in Mary Shelleys novel. As Richard Church and Muriel Spark were the first to record, the monster and his creator are the antithetical halves of a sing
6、le being. Miss Spark states the antithesis too cleanly; for her, Victor Frankenstein represents the feelings, and his nameless creature the intellect. In her view, the monster has no emotion, and “what passes for emotion . are really intellectual passions arrived at through rational channels.” Miss
7、Spark carries this argument far enough to insist that the monster is asexual, and that he demands a bride from Frankenstein only for companionship, a conclusion evidently at variance with the novels text.The antithesis between the scientist and his creature in Frankenstein is a very complex one, and
8、 to be described more fully it must be placed in the larger context of Romantic literature and its characteristic mythology. The shadow or double of the self is a constant conceptual image in Blake and Shelley, and a frequent image, more random and descriptive, in the other major Romantics, especial
9、ly in Byron. In Frankenstein, it is the dominant and recurrent image, and accounts for much of the latent power the novel possesses.No Romantic writer employed the Prometheus archetype without a full awareness of its equivocal potentialities. The Prometheus of the ancients had been for the most part
10、 a spiritually reprehensible figure, though frequently a sympathetic one, both in terms of his dramatic situation and in his close alliance with mankind against the gods. But this alliance had been ruinous for man, in most versions of the myth, and the Titans benevolence toward humanity was hardly s
11、ufficient recompense for the alienation of man from heaven that he had brought about. Both sides of Titanism are evident in earlier Christian references to the story. The same Prometheus who is taken as an analogue of the crucified Christ is regarded also as a type of Lucifer, a son of light justly
12、cast out by an offended heaven.In the Romantic readings of Miltons Paradise Lost (and Frankenstein is implicitly one such reading), this double identity of Prometheus is a vital element. Blake, whose mythic revolutionary named Orc is another version of Prometheus, saw Miltons Satan as a Prometheus g
13、one wrong, as desire restrained until it became only the shadow of desire, a diminished double of creative energy. Shelley went further in judging Miltons Satan as an imperfect Prometheus, inadequate because his mixture of heroic and base qualities engendered in the readers mind a “pernicious casuis
14、try” inimical to the spirit of art.Blake, more systematic a poet than Shelley, worked out an antithesis between symbolic figures he named Spectre and Emanation, the shadow of desire and the total form of desire, respectively. A reader of Frankenstein, recalling the novels extraordinary conclusion wi
15、th its scenes of obsessional pursuit through the Arctic wastes, can recognize the same imagery applied to a similar symbolic situation in Blakes lyric on the strife of Spectre and Emanation:My Spectre around me night and dayLike a Wild beast guards my way.My Emanation far withinWeeps incessantly for
16、 my Sin.A Fathomless and boundless deep,There we wander, there we weep;On the hungry craving windMy Spectre follows thee behind.He scents thy footsteps in the snow,Wheresoever thou dost goThro the wintry hail and rain .Frankensteins monster, tempting his revengeful creator on through a world of ice, is another Emanation pursued by a Spectre, with the enormous difference that he is an Emanation flawed, a nightmare of actuality,
