Religion, as looked at by many anthropologists, is the institution that
mediates the relations between the sacred domain and the profane, or, if you prefer,
the sacred and the mundane, that is, the not sacred rather than the anti-sacred.
Whatever it is one looks at though, one tends to see the sacred as hierarchically
above us. The sun is often the greatest of the Gods in any given religion.
The heavens are also the place where the sky is, and the heavens are where rocket ships go.
It's understandable that science fiction, offering one way of gaining
knowledge, stands against revelation, a different way of gaining knowledge, and so
the questions that religion raises might well be in science fiction, and they are.
However, from Mary Shelley on, the use of religion in science fiction is not
typically to argue for religion and certainly not for a specific,
institutionalized religion, but rather, to get the reader to examine the issues that
religion takes as its concern. So, in Frankenstein, the notion that there is a
natural goodness to people and that one would naturally be virtuous unless society
pushed one out, this notion of natural virtue is measured against the ideas of
virtue which organized religion might well tell us. But it's not organized religion
we're asked to embrace. What we're asked to embrace is not something hierarchical,
but something collateral: community and the bonds of community. Nonetheless, in
order to bring those issues to mind, Frankenstein and many, many, many science
fiction books ever since, have used religion to bring us from the allusion to
the issue. The title page of Frankenstein says, Frankenstein or The Modern
Prometheus. Now, to us moderns, Prometheus is just a figure of Greek mythology. But
once upon a time, Prometheus was truly among the Gods. And he was the God who
disobeyed the supreme God to bring fire down as a gift to humanity. Humanity
gained by the disobedience, as in these mythic stories so often one gains by
disobedience, but Prometheus himself was said to suffer eternally. The idea of
bringing the fire of the Gods down to empower humanity is in effect what Victor
Frankenstein intends to do, to bring the lightning from the sky, not the heavens,
down to galvanize the dead limbs of humans and animate them again. He will take the
power from the heavens, the sky, and create life where it no longer exists,
or more properly, recreate life. He is setting himself not only against the Gods
if you believe that the religious picture of the universe is valid, but he is
setting himself to be disobedient and do the unnatural, no matter whether you
believe in institutionalized religion or not. The reference to the modern
Prometheus reminds us of this even before there is Christianity. For the English,
perhaps the greatest epic of Christianity is Milton's Paradise Lost. It's a story
that aims to justify the ways of God to man. It talks about the fall from Eden.
It talks about that great disobedience. It explains all that goes before that act and
it says what will happen immediately thereafter. But just before it tells us
what will happen immediately thereafter, there is the promise that eventually,
there will be redemption, but that's just before the end. We live in a fallen
world. The epigraph for all of Frankenstein comes from Paradise Lost.
"Did I request thee, Maker, from my Clay/To mold me Man, did I solicit thee/from darkness
to promote me?" Adam is saying to God, you have made me as I am. How can you punish
me for being as you made me? This is the cry of Victor's monster to Victor. This
is the cry of the creature to the creator. One does not have to be Christian to
accept the responsibility that's implicit here. Mary Shelley clearly is not arguing
that Victor Frankenstein needs to be a more Christian fellow. What he needs to
do is perform the natural obligations of a father to a child, of a creator to a
creature. And yet to remind us of this reference, this natural virtue, Shelley
keeps bringing in references to Paradise Lost. We get, in the beginning of Chapter
fifteen, the monster's own reading list. He is an incredibly articulate character.
He learns to read by looking through a hole in the cottage. And he reads, first
and foremost, Paradise Lost. He also reads Plutarch's Lives, a famous ancient set of
short biographies of the noble Greeks and Romans, giving the virtues that people
should, in fact, all follow. And the third of the books that are listed in the
monsters reading list is The Sorrows of Werter, that story about love lost and
suicide. One can see that these three books together are not simply the
monster's reading list, they are also the thematic core of what Mary Shelley wants
us to understand about domestic affection and universal virtue. In fact, references
to other books occur more frequently in the novel than simply the explicit ones
would make clear. For instance, Paradise Lost ends with these famous lines. After
Adam and Eve have been cast out, they look back, they see the flaming sword that the
angel keeps turning this way and that so that the may not return to Eden. And so,
in the last lines of the last book of Paradise Lost, "they," Adam and Eve, "looking
back all Eastern side that is of Eden beheld of paradise. So late their happy
seat, waved over by that flaming brand the gate with dreadful faces thronged and
fiery arms. Some natural tears they," Adam and Eve," dropped but like them soon."
Here are the last four lines of Paradise Lost, lines burned into every British
school child's mind. "The world was all before them where to choose. Their place
of rest, and providence their guide. They hand in hand, with wandering steps and
slow, through Eden took their solitary way." Listen again. "The world was all
before them, where to choose their place of rest. And providence their guide, they
hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, through Eden took their solitary
way." Solitary, in that last line, cannot mean solitary from Adam and Eve, it means
solitary from God. They have each other. This great epic to justify the ways of God
to man gives Adam and Eve each other, so that ultimately the world will be
perfected. But in Chapter sixteen of Frankenstein, having been spurned by the
De Lacey's, the monster becomes his own avenging angel, sets fire to their
cottage, "fired the straw and the cottage was quickly enveloped in flames which
clung to it and licked it with their forked and destroying tongues," their
forked tongue reminiscent perhaps of the devil. "As soon as I was convinced that no
assistance could save any part of the habitation, I quited the scene and sought
for refuge in the woods." Habitation, the same word used for Adam and Eve of Eden.
"And now," the monster says, "with the world before me, whither should I bend my steps."
To the person who knows the reference when the monster says," the world before me,"
rather than us, we realize that Victor, who would ape God, has been much worse
than any God we have ever imagined because he created someone for whom there can
never be salvation. The monster in this book is not the one Victor calls the
monster, it is that creature's doppelganger, Victor Frankenstein himself.