THERE'S ONLY THE FALL AND THE CRUCIFIXION:

Reading is at the heart of the most resonant retelling of Prometheus's crime and punishment, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Victor Frankenstein, the maddened scientist who animates a stitched-together corpse, is the first candidate for the "modern Prometheus" of the book's subtitle. His crime, like Prometheus's, is trespassing on divine ground by stealing for himself knowledge withheld from mortals. After years of fevered reading in disreputable, forbidden books, he describes a gift of fire: "a sudden light broke in upon me," he says; "I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter." He is cagey about the specifics of this illumination, because, he explains, the punishments that followed it were so severe. "I will not lead you on," he tells his interlocutor and, by extension, his reader, "unguarded and ardent as I then was, to your destruction and infallible misery. Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge."

Frankenstein's punishments are doled out by the Creature he makes, the living embodiment of the knowledge he regrets having acquired. Before he is through, the Creature murders Frankenstein's younger brother, best friend, and foster sister/fiancée, each a paragon in his or her own way. Seen in this light, the Creature is the serpent in the garden, bent on the destruction of the Rousseauvian childhood Eden in which Frankenstein was educated:

Our studies were never forced; and by some means we always had an end placed in view, which excited us to ardour in the prosecution of them. It was by this method, and not by emulation, that we were urged to application.

...

Neither of us possessed the slightest pre-eminence over the other; the voice of command was never heard amongst us; but mutual affection engaged us all to comply with and obey the slightest desire of each other.

Seen in another light, Frankenstein's Creature, product of his hands and flower of his learning, is Frankenstein's liberator, doing what Victor himself cannot: eradicating the demands of domestic life by destroying those who embody them. Frankenstein himself speaks piously of limitations, urging abstinence from "unlawful" study that "weakens your affections and... destroy[s] your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix." His Creature, meanwhile, powerful beyond containment, has no check on his feelings, and no inhibition in their expression. He is alloyed all through, his adoration mixed with hatred, erudition permeating his elemental existence.

Victor Frankenstein is one model of Prometheus, stealing fire under the name of "the cause of generation and life." His Creature, however, is another, and it is his story of transgression and punishment that echoes in the mind of the reader. This is because the Creature's crime is reading itself. He steals literacy, the spark of his nascent self-consciousness, from a world designed to keep it from him. His theft leads him to knowledge of himself, a poisoned gift that bestows a soul and the suffering that goes with it...

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