Told in the technique of an epistolary tale, the story revolves around the woeful narrative of a young idealist Genevan student of ‘natural philosophy’ (science) at the University of Ingolstadt, who stumbles upon the secret of infusing life into matter, and creates a living thing out of an assemblage of bones from charnel houses, which ultimately leads to his ruin and subsequent death. Furthermore, we can observe that in Frankenstein “God must be the origin of evil, if everything is assumed to originate in God” (Newlyn, 124). The paper therefore demonstrates how the intertext serves as a mirror for the development of the creature from good to evil, which Newlyn defines as the “carelessness of good” (Newlyn, 124). In Frankenstein we have the development of the monster from Adam to Satan, in other words: from good to evil. However, the main character in Paradise Lost is not Adam, but Satan. In Frankenstein, the protagonist artificially creates a monster and is therefore equal to the position of God in Paradise Lost. In Paradise Lost it is Adam who is created. Both pieces of literature have two important parallels: they both present the process of creation. Frankenstein consists of “a dense network of allusions” (Newlyn, 43) which hold together the construction of the narrative. In 1818 when Shelley started to write Frankenstein, Shelley made use of the intertext Paradise Lost, as it is an “honorary classic” (Newlyn, 42) which is “the story of Genesis” (Newlyn, 42), however transformed. With the possibilities of the transplantation of organs, it is a question which couldn’t be answered yet: Whether a human being who gets an organ transplanted experiences changes in his or her personal identity changes in his or her psyche or in the way he or she sees him or herself (Schicktanz, 201). The question of the moral ethics of creating artificial life is still relevant today. At the same time, interweaving the story of Paradise Lost and Frankenstein is a way to question whether it is morally acceptable to create life artificially, as Paradise Lost is about the creation of man and Frankenstein is about the creation of artificial life in the shape of the monster, composed of various parts of dead bodies. In the case of Frankenstein, the intertextual level is represented by Milton’s Paradise Lost.

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Intertextuality serves to mirror the development of the character of Frankenstein’s creature, which is from good to evil.

Paradise lost frankenstein