My, thy Myth!

Northrop Frye’s “The Archetypes of Literature” delivers an amalgamation of previous literary and cultural theorists, including Feud and Jung, that clarifies and systematizes, while he intersperse his own highly accessible emendations and deviations. Like Freud and Jung, Frye delves into what was once considered peripheral; he approaches the obscure, like myths and dreams, with a critical attentiveness that enables him elicit and establish meaning from the marginal. Where Freud is concerned with the epistemological questions that can be raised and addressed through dreams, Frye appears to follow Jung down an avenue leading to ontological issues. The essay, along with Frye’s own delineation of his methods, shows that Frye is able to clarify the concepts that are obfuscated by Jung’s seaming impenetrability. The complete title of Shelley’s work – Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus – is enough to direct the reader’s attention to the mythological influences that Northrop Frye considers to direct and inform literary production. I immediately considered the Monster’s narrative, and the seasonality of the cottagers’ and his own related experiences delivered in some sort of succinct collage of mythemes. It is also interesting to note the Monster’s fascination with Paradise Lost while locked in his own myth configuration. In his discourse, it seems that the Monster speaks with a peculiar mythological meta-cognition. This is an interesting issue that asks the reader to not only consider the mythological underpinnings of a work and its characters, but to what extent and to what end the characters (or authors) themselves are cognizant of their own myth-influenced/informed existence. Frye writes that “the human cycle of waking and dreaming corresponds closely to the natural cycle of light and darkness, and it is perhaps in this correspondence that all imaginative life begins” (1313). This section makes me consider if ever we hear of the Monster dreaming. Then I considered how the majority of the monster’s existence challenges the diurnal/nocturnal binary that Frye identifies as one of the foundations of “imaginative life”. Once the cottagers began their soporific correspondence with the night, the monster explains how “if there was any moon, or the night was star-light, I went into the woods, and collected my own food and fuel for the cottage” (76). Frye posits that “it is in the darkness of nature that the “libido” or conquering heroic self awakes”, but in the case of the Monster the night signifies a period of perfunctory obligations and deeds - one may consider altruistic – that benefit others.