Shelley and the Miltonic Element in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Phillip Wade
Milton and the Romantics, 2 (December 1976), 23-25

{23} An attentive reader will hear many echoes of Milton's Paradise Lost in Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein. Their presence is a distinctive feature of the work, and the
frequency with which they occur suggests that Mary intended a series of parallels between
the characters and events in Milton's poem and those in her novel. Among students of
Mary's work, however, only Christopher Small has attempted to show that she did in fact
execute such a scheme of comparisons.1 Small's thesis, insofar as it touches on the Miltonic
aspect of the novel, is that the monster, beginning as a newly-created, Adam degenerates
through rejection until he becomes a Satan, the adversary of his creator Victor
Frankenstein. The monster's own comment on his degeneration, "'But it is even so, the
fallen angel becomes a malignant devil,'" Small concludes, "touches the centre of the whole
theme."2 This is a perceptive and, I think, altogether justified interpretation. But it fails to
account for the true origin of the Miltonic element in Frankensteinwhich, I submit,
was Percy Shelley's contribution to the novel.
Frankenstein, it should be kept in mind, was the eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley's
first venture into the craft of authorship. And it was Shelley, himself already the author of
two Gothic romances, Zastrozziand St. Irvyne, who encouraged her to write it and who
served as her adviser and editor as she worked. That his influence on the novel was a
continuing and pervasive one is an inference supported by her correspondence as well as
the entries in her Journal,3 entries as early as that for August 21, 1816 (the summer she
began Frankenstein): "Shelley and I talk about my story," and as late as that for May 14,
1817, when it was almost completed, "Shelley corrects . . . 'Frankenstein.' Write Preface.
[Shelley wrote it, we learn from Mary's preface to the 1831 edition] Finis." Even more
revealing of the part Shelley played in the writing of Frankenstein is Mary's letter to him
written on September 24, 1817, as Lackington was preparing the book for the press:
I sent you my dearest another proof -- which arrived tonight in [sic] looking it over
there appeared to me some abruptness which I have endeavored to supply -- but I am tired
and not very clear headed so I give you carte blanche to make whatever alterations you
please.4
Given the languid, if not indifferent, tone of her letter we may reasonably infer that
her husband had exercised authorial as well as editorial carte blanche in helping her
with Frankenstein.
Shelley's admiration for John Milton's work, particularly Paradise Lost, has been
well documented. The late Frederick Jones, in an attempt to "gather from all the best
original sources everything of the least importance which can illumine the relationship of
Shelley to Milton," found 322 traceable borrowings from Milton in the Shelley canon. 5 Of
these, forty-one are direct quotations and the rest verbal echoes of phrases (e. g., "palpable
obscurity") which are unquestionably Miltonic. In concluding his study Jones compiled a
table of Shelley's specific sources in Milton, showing that about ninety percent of his

borrowings come from Paradise Lost. Given Shelley's role as Mary's adviser and editor,
then, along with the abiding admiration for Milton evidenced in his own work, it is not
surprising that Frankensteinshould have a palpable Miltonic aura.
In some instances Shelley's Miltonic influence on Frankenstein seems to have been
direct, suggesting his conscious supervision of Mary's work -- or even his own hand in the
novel. The marked resemblances between his own Gothic romances
and Frankenstein support this supposition. The title page of Zastrozzi, for example, bore
an epigraph from Milton:
That their God
May prove their foe, and with repenting hand
Abolish his own works. This would surpass
Common revenge.
Paradise Lost, II, 368-371
The title page of Frankenstein, as it was first published in 1818,6 likewise bore a
Miltonic motto:
Did I request thee, Maker, from my Clay
To mould me Man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?
Paradise Lost, X, 743-745
(Mary omitted this motto from the second edition in 1831. I have more to say of this
later.)
Shelley's earlier characterization of Zastrozzi with his "lofty stature" and "dignified
mein and dauntless composure"7 clearly owed much to Milton's Satan, as did that of
Wolfstein in in St. Irvyne, described as having a "towering and majestic form" and
"expressive and regular features . . . pregnant with a look as if woe had beat to earth a mind
whose native and unconfined energies had aspired to heaven "8 In this second romance
Shelley had also pictured a character "whose proportions, gigantic and deformed, were
seemingly blackened by the inerasable traces of the thunderbolts of God."9 This kind of
description, so patently imitative of Milton's characterization of Satan, is as evident
in Frankenstein as it is in Shelley's juvenile romances. To give an example:
in Zastrozzi there is a scene played in a conventional Alpine setting. A lightning storm,
properly terrifying, rattles from crag to crag. And there Matilda:
Contemplated the tempest which raged around her. The battling elements paused,
an uninterrupted silence, deep, dreadful as the silence of the tomb, succeeded. Matilda
heard a noise -- footsteps were distinguishable, and looking up, a flash of lightning
disclosed to her view the towering form of Zastrozzi. His gigantic figure was again
involved in pitchy darkness, as the momentary lightning receded. A peal of crashing
thunder again madly rattled over the zenith, and a scintillating flash announced Zastrozzi's
approach, as he stood before Matilda.10

The identical scene occurs in Frankenstein, with Victor Frankenstein finding

himself in the Alps during an electrical storm:
{24} I watched the storm, so beautiful yet terrific . . . . This noble war in the sky
elevated my spirits; I clasped my hands, and exclaimed aloud, 'William, dear angel! this is
thy funeral, this is thy dirge!" As I said these words, I perceived in the gloom a figure . . . A
flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me, its
gigantic stature . . . instantly informed me it was the wretch, the filthy demon, to whom I
had given life.11
Granted, storm scenes are not unusual in Romantic literature; one need only
recall Byron's Childe Harold. But the Miltonic image of a titanic Satan silhouetted by fires
in the pitchy blackness of Hell bears the unmistakable mark of Shelley's influence.
Writing as the ostensible author of Frankenstein, Shelley speaks in the preface (to
the first edition) of his endeavor in the novel to "preserve the truth of the elementary
principles of human nature, while I have not scrupled to innovate their combinations,"
adding that, "The Iliad . . . Shakespeare . . . and most especially Milton, in Paradise Lost,
conform to this rule" [Preface 1]. Just what "truth of the elementary principles of human
nature" was to be revealed in Frankenstein, Shelley made clear in an anonymous
review written to accompany the publication of the novel. The monster's "crimes and
malevolence," Shelley wrote there, "are the children, as it were, of Necessity and Human
Nature. In this the direct moral of the book consists; it is perhaps the most important, and
of the most universal application, of any moral that can be enforced by example. Treat a
person ill, and he will become wicked."12 The thematic kinship between Shelley's preface,
his review, and the Miltonic parallels between Frankenstein's monster and Satan becomes
explicit in the monster's declaration that "the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil." And
the extended analogy between Satan and the monster culminates in this allusion.
Most of the allusions to Paradise Lost in Frankenstein are consistent with the
scheme of comparison I have attempted to delineate. Usually it is the monster who points
to parallels between himself and Milton's Satan: "I am the fallen angel. . . . Misery made
me a fiend" (95); or "I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition; for often,
like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors [the De Laceys], the bitter gall of envy
rose within me" (125). And, again, the most significant comparison in the novel: "I cannot
believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and
transcedent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so, the fallen
angel becomes a malignant devil" (219). Sometimes, however, it is Victor Frankenstein
who compares himself to Satan -- "like the archangel who aspired to omnipotence, I am
chained in an eternal hell" (208) -- while the monster likens himself to Milton's Adam: "No
Eve soothed my sorrows, nor shared my thoughts; I was alone" (127). After burning the De
Lacey's cottage, the monster echoes Milton's description of Adam and Eve leaving the
Garden of Eden: "And now, with the world before me, whither should I bend my steps?"
(135). There are, moreover, a great many ad hoc Miltonic allusions throughout the novel.
The key to the presence of these random allusions is probably to be found in Mary's
Journal where, in the month after she began Frankenstein, Mary wrote, "Shelley and I talk
about my story [Frankenstein]. Finish 'Herman and Una' and write. Shelley reads Milton"

(August 21, 1816). Entry after entry records the fact that Shelley was reading Paradise Lost.
And they show that more often than not he read it aloud to Mary. Representative entries
read: "Draw, write, read Locke and Curtius. Shelley reads Petrarch and Locke, he reads
'Paradise Lost' aloud in the evening. I work" (November 17, 1816); "Shelley reads Locke,
and in the evening 'Paradise Lost' aloud to me" (November 20, 1816), and again, "Write,
read Locke . . . . After tea Shelley reads 'Paradise Lost' aloud" (November 21 1816). The
greatest concentration of these entries occurs during the period in which Frankenstein was
being written (between July 1816 and February 1818), although similar entries followed
through 1819. Perhaps some reverberations of Milton's organ voice found their way into
the novel indirectly through Mary. It is just as possible, of course, that their presence
in Frankenstein is attributable to Shelley who permeated his own juveniles with random
allusions to Paradise Lost.
I mentioned earlier that Mary chose to omit the Miltonic motto from the second
edition of Frankenstein (1831). Her doing so was very likely a corollary of her desire to
minimize Shelley's part in the novel, which was evidenced in her preface to that edition, "I
certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident nor scarcely one train of feeling to my
husband, and yet but for his incitement it would never have taken the form in which it was
presented to the world" [Introduction 12]. In dropping the Miltonic motto, however, Mary
may have unwittingly revealed to us that Shelley had more to do with the actual writing
of Frankenstein than she was willing to concede in 1831. If in her judgment the motto was
not integral in the context of the work, perhaps she was unaware of the central importance
of the Miltonic element in the novel. Certainly if one may judge by Mary's work after
Shelley's death, Milton's poetry and thought had little significance for her. Aside
from Frankenstein, the only one of her works wholly written and published in Shelley's
lifetime, nothing she wrote might be described as faintly Miltonic. And she wrote five more
novels and over twenty tales and stories.
The final inference is clear. The Miltonic element which is unique
in Frankenstein among Mary's works must be attributed to Shelley's influence on the
novel. In her preface to the second edition, Mary reported that she had begun
writing Frankenstein with an idea for only a brief Gothic story, but that Shelley had
encouraged her "to develop the idea at greater length" [Introduction 12]. Lacking at
eighteen the artistic experience as well as the intellectual depth necessary to sustain a
novel dealing with the implications of a mortal's imparting life to a creature of his devising,
Mary -- as her letters and journal entries show -- turned to Shelley for advice and direction.
Never one to curb his magnanimity, Shelley for his part saw Frankenstein as a thesis novel,
"a vehicle for useful and momentous instruction "13 And, as we have seen, Shelley stated
the novel's thesis in his review; justified his method in the preface by citing Milton as a
precedent; and by developing the analogy between Satan and the monster, "enforced by
example" what he had called "the direct moral of the book. . . . Treat a person ill, and he
will become wicked."