“It’s Promethean, Man!”: The Frankenstein Myth and Rhetorical Invention

ABSTRACT

Frankenstein myths circulate widely in Western culture and offer robust indices of common anxieties about invention. This essay articulates a version of the Frankenstein myth that emphasizes potential contributions to the practice and teaching of rhetoric. Specifically, this essay suggests that this myth about the practice of invention in general can contribute to understandings of rhetorical invention in particular, especially with regard to the extent to which rhetorical invention may, in some instances, be informed by themes associated with deception, duality, and autonomy. The essay closes with a discussion of implications and limitations.

KEYWORDS:

• Ex machina
• Frankenstein
• myth
• rhetorical invention

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to my colleague Monique Morgan for helping me to begin work on this project, and to Jacqueline Rhodes, Rebecca C. Conklin, and the anonymous reviewers, whose careful reading and insightful comments improved the essay quite considerably.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Throughout the remainder of this essay, I refer to the Prometheus story, to Shelley’s novel, and to Ex Machina as stories that articulate this version of the ubiquitous cultural narrative that is the Frankenstein myth. I acknowledge that this distinction is at least somewhat arbitrary.

² Hesiod tells two versions of the Prometheus story, one in Theogony and the other in Works and Days. Vernant notes that “the two versions can be considered to be complementary, together combining to form a single unit” (191), and they will be so considered throughout this essay.

³ The distinction between nature and culture, or the natural and the artificial, which seems to inform Victor’s actions, is characteristic of Western culture and is bounded by that context. Gabriela Kütting, for example, describes this Western perspective as a “mechanical view of nature” that asserts that the world consists of independent and interchangeable parts, as opposed to an “organic” perspective that emphasizes connectedness and interdependence (31–32). George Dyson offers a particularly intriguing suggestion, that as digital technologies continue to evolve, the strict and identifiable distinction between the natural and the artificial that has informed Western culture since the “industrial epoch” will become increasingly less relevant (6–7).

⁴ The analysis in this section is strongly influenced by Zigarovich’s review of the trans legacy of Mary Shelley’s novel.

⁵ This bit of dialog is in the published script but is not included in the film.

⁶ The threat of autonomous texts has a long history. Near the end of the Phaedrus—a drama about rhetorical invention that is, like the Frankenstein myth, infused with erotic desire—Plato has Socrates tell an allegedly Egyptian story about the invention of writing and entails the worry that a written text tends to wander “all over the place” because “it doesn’t know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong” (274c–75e).

⁷ Wong and Jelača provide important and insightful analyses that explore the implications of the racialized figures within the film. also offers some suggestive critical directions.