The Monster Reads Milton:

• Satan, resenting his lack of recognition in heaven, gathers a rebel army to overthrow God, whose only son banished the fallen angels to hell.

• In Shelley’s Frankenstein, reading Milton allows the Creature to realize that he is, in fact, a monster.

• “Evil thenceforth became my good,” he swears to himself while on a killing spree, as he knowingly quotes Satan’s speech from Paradise Lost: “all Good to me is lost; / Evil be thou my Good.”

• The similarities between his predicament and that of Satan are startling.

• Prometheus rebels against the King of the Olympians, who is doomed to be overthrown, and although the Titan is without hope for himself, he sets the stage for human innovation.

• Shelley’s allusion to Prometheus Bound does more than equate the gift of fire with Frankenstein’s secret studies of the mysteries of life and death.

• It imaginatively pairs Paradise Lost with Frankenstein, because Satan’s seduction of Eve allows Sin and Death to enter the world.

But it also allows in human history and redemption, which — like fire — resonate with the idea of a creation that destroys the creator and leaves something new.

What happens to Prometheus? Why?

Who is similar to Prometheus in Frankenstein? Why?

• But Eve, who is more imaginative than her husband in Paradise Lost, would seem superficially to be the one important character in Milton’s poem without an equivalent in Frankenstein: perhaps because Shelley herself identified with Eve.

What part of Shelley's life would make her identify with Eve?

• The entwining of artistic and biological creation is a particularly fertile theme in Frankenstein.

• Milton’s 10,565 lines took a skeletal story outlined in a few pages of Genesis (The Bible) — about a universe created and its human inhabitants expelled from a garden (the garden of Eden) — and retrofitted it with the trappings of classic narratives about heroic battles and perilous journeys.

If you don't know the story of Adam and Eve:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_and_Eve

Summarize in 3-5 sentences the story of Adam and Eve.

*Milton took the story of Adam and Eve, added in the epic nature of Homer's Odyssey, and created Paradise Lost.

(Epic = long difficult journey, lots of obstacles, etc.)

• Milton also turned the story of a serpent’s deception of Adam and Eve into a tale that paralleled an altogether different plotline about a war in heaven.

• Shelley also banks on her reader’s ability to see the similarity between Victor Frankenstein and Milton’s characters in Paradise Lost.

• Although Frankenstein begins his studies innocently, his quest for forbidden knowledge makes him, too, experience a fall from grace. What is Frankenstein's "fall from grace"? What happens to him?

• Paradise Lost became more than a narrative poem and, seen as a revolutionary and a prophet, Milton offered writers an example for the relationship between an artist and his or her art.

• When we nowadays consider artistic production as being a form of self-expression, instead of the result of following the rules to carefully laid out from old books of rules and measures, we are subscribing to Romantic theory about poetry. Shelley is a Romantic.

• Paradise Lost and Frankenstein both ask the hardest question that theologians ever have to answer: Why is there evil in this world?

• When Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin first read Paradise Lost in the fall of 1815, she and Percy Bysshe Shelley were living in sin, and Milton’s epic poem about the Fall of Adam and Eve had not yet figured in the background of the novel she began writing the following year. What does it mean to "live in sin"?

• In her 1818 Frankenstein, a monster is created but, before he becomes evil and vindictive, tries to educate himself by reading three books that fall into his possession.

• When Frankenstein oversteps the boundaries of appropriate science and refuses to name his son as his own, he becomes the cruel master of someone he sees as satanic.

• At the same time, his Creature sees Frankenstein the way Satan sees God: a tyrant rightly deserving destruction.

• As Satan cannot distinguish between justice and revenge, so Frankenstein’s monster feels that he has no choice but to exact vengeance on an unjust creator.

• For Romantic writers such as Shelley, it was the author of Paradise Lost, rather than any of his characters, who was heroic in his artistic endeavors to justify the ways of God.

• Milton’s story was, for them, less about original sin than about originality as sin. What does this mean: "less about original sin than about originality as sin"?

• Frankenstein’s Creature elicits at least as much sympathy as Milton’s Satan.

*Both tales touch on the power of creation.

*Why was Paradise Lost important to Mary Shelley? To Frankenstein's creature? To Dr. Frankenstein?

Information from:

http://exhibitions.nypl.org/biblion/outsiders/creation-remix/essay/essaymoeck

By Wm. Moeck | NYPL Exhibitions

*edited here and there because some big words are tricky and some sentences wordy.

• If Milton’s fallen Adam has redeeming qualities that Shelley’s monster lacks, it is worth considering why Shelley used Adam’s question to God as the title-page epigraph of Frankenstein.

• The 1818 edition subtitles the work “The Modern Prometheus,” as Shelley invokes a different ancient myth about creation, by Aeschylus, in which the Titan man Prometheus steals fire from Zeus to give to mankind.

• “It moved every feeling of wonder and awe, that the picture of an omnipotent God warring with his creatures was capable of exciting,” the Creature reflects about Paradise Lost.

• The epic poem causes him to reflect bitterly on the differences between himself and the poem's main character, Adam, who “had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous,” while he himself was “wretched, helpless, and alone.” How had the creature's master treated him in comparison to Adam?

• Satan, the Creature realizes, was “the fitter emblem of my condition.”

• On reading the popular novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Goethe, the Creature feels sympathy for the anguish of the young lover. What is sympathy? Why is this important to the creature's fate?

• Plutarch’s classic Lives, a compendium of biographies, teaches the Creature the difference between virtue and vice in the rulers of the ancient past.

• But the Creature’s reaction to reading Paradise Lost is most profound.

*What were the three books that Frankenstein's monster read? Which one was most important? Who wrote it?

• First published in 1667, Milton’s Paradise Lost was in the 18th century regarded as a worthy successor to the epics of Homer and Virgil, molding the English tongue into a fit vehicle for immortal verse.

The Monster Reads Milton:

Paradise Lost