Frankenstein and Its Classics by Weiner Jesse Stevens Benjamin Eldon Rogers Brett M

Author:Weiner, Jesse,Stevens, Benjamin Eldon,Rogers, Brett M.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350054899
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2018-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

Cupid and Psyche are present but as “stone deities” instead of living beings. They are “possessed by … the eternal fruition of love,” a vision of perfection from which Verney—embodying all of humankind—is excluded: “sacred gladness” means their “unsympathetic complacency” in divine pleasure and a “supreme indifference” to human suffering.60 Verney thus plays the role of Apuleian third party, envying and intruding upon the lovers’ relationship. By physically “coming between” them at the moment of their reconciliation, seeking to share in physical aspects of their love, Verney emphasizes his isolation.61 His self-awareness—“mockery,” “self-delusion”—links him to Victor: his isolation seems a literal, physical form of Victor’s more figurative experience—and a version too of the Creature’s sexual and biological solitude.62 Intensifying Frankenstein’s onanism and solipsism, LM replaces the climax of Apuleius’s story with an endless deferral, and thus a practical failure, of the soul’s loving communion with the divine.

‘The last man’ is thus also a Psyche, discovering that Cupid is ‘monstrous’—that love or “gladness” is distributed unfairly. As if recalling the imagined beginning of post-human life in Frankenstein, at the end of human history MWS depicts the biological imperative made vain. Whereas Victor variously reenacted Apuleius’s bedroom tableau, Verney merely regards literal art, able to see depicted but not to reach the highest point of the mystical ascent described by neo-Platonists. He is a former potential Psyche, written out of his own story, with no prospect of any child or ‘joy.’ This is not meaningfully changed by interaction with imagined readers, who may as well be “the illustrious dead” (LM 3.10: 339). LM’s final line emphasizes that only “the spirits of the dead, and the ever-open eye of the Supreme” (342), recalling the statues’ “supreme indifference” (338), “will behold the tiny bark, freighted with Verney—The Last Man” (342). Possibly the world will be “re-peopled” by “the children of a saved pair of lovers,” but this would be cold—“icy”—comfort.63

The same dissatisfying possibility frames the novel, which opens with a self-conscious supernaturalism that can lead us back to Apuleius through one of his sources, whom MWS also read, the first-century BCE Roman poet Virgil.64 LM claims to be the attempt of a nameless editor to give “form and substance to the frail and attenuated Leaves of the Sibyl” (‘Author’s Introduction’ 4). Meant here is the Cumaean Sibyl, a priestess of Apollo whose prophecies were important in ancient Rome and who guides the hero of Virgil’s Aeneid on his Underworld journey (book 6).65 Virgil’s Aeneas hopes the Sibyl will answer him in speech, lest any leaves scatter in the wind (Aen. 6.74–76); LM’s editor avers that “[d]oubtless the leaves … have suffered distortion and diminution of interest and excellence in my hands,” although already “they were unintelligible in their pristine condition” (‘Author’s Introduction’ 4). Making the allusion plain, the editor says the Leaves were discovered December 8, 1818 in “the Sibyl’s Cave,” which is “not indeed exactly as Virgil describes it” (meaning Aen. 6.9–44).66 MWS’s modern story about the future is thus framed as an

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