Why is Frankenstein called “The Modern Prometheus”?

The title page of 1818

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus appeared in London on January 1, 1818, in three volumes, with no author’s name. Mary Shelley had begun it in the summer of 1816 near Geneva, when Lord Byron challenged his guests to write ghost stories; she was eighteen. The title page carries a second clue, lines from Milton’s Paradise Lost in which Adam questions his maker:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?

Subtitle and epigraph point the same way. This is a story about making a living being, and about what the maker owes it.

Two Prometheuses in one name

The old myths give Prometheus two great deeds. The first is fire. In Hesiod he steals it for humans in a fennel stalk, and in Prometheus Bound, the play that has come down to us under Aeschylus’s name, he lists everything it led to: reading the stars, numbers, writing, tamed animals, ships, medicine, metals. He names the fire as the root of it all:

I hunted out and stored in fennel stalk the stolen source of fire that hath proved to mortals a teacher in every art and a means to mighty ends. Such is the offence for which I pay the penalty, riveted in fetters beneath the open sky.

The second deed comes from later writers. “Prometheus moulded men out of water and earth,” Apollodorus says (1.7.1), and Ovid offers, as one possible beginning of humankind, the son of Iapetus shaping earth mixed with rain into the image of the gods (Metamorphoses 1.76–88).

Mary Shelley’s scientist does both. He builds a man, and he seizes the force that brings him to life. On a dreary night of November, Victor recalls, he gathered his instruments “that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet” (vol. 1, ch. 4). Then comes his punishment, as sure as the eagle: the creature he abandons destroys the people he loves, and Victor dies far in the Arctic, still pursuing it.

Percy Shelley’s Prometheus

Two years later, in 1820, Mary’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, published Prometheus Unbound, a drama written mostly in Rome among the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla. Aeschylus had written a sequel of that name, now lost; as Shelley understood it, the Titan and Zeus were reconciled there once the secret about Thetis came out (the secret). Shelley wanted no truce. In his preface he says he “was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind.” In his version the tyrant falls and Prometheus walks free. Byron, in that same summer of 1816, had written a poem of his own called Prometheus.

What Promethean means

From these books comes the adjective. Promethean describes daring, original, creative work that pushes past the limits set for it, usually with a hint that a price will be paid. Science kept the name too: element 61, identified in the 1940s, is promethium. Writers still reach for the word whenever a new power arrives, sometimes as praise, sometimes as warning. Prometheus’s gift of fire, unlike Pandora’s jar, was meant as a blessing. Mary Shelley asks what happens when the gift-giver walks away.