yard. His fall is metaphoric: the male's desire to master both Nature and the female voice is humorously, if rather brutally, undercut. Morgan's narrator usurps the role of one of Rosa's male banditti, but he is clearly harmless.
The female may not be so harmless, however. With broken arm and leg and severely gashed forehead, Horatio, taken into the Castle, falls into a delirious slumber: 'I dreamed that the Princess of Inismore approached my bed, drew aside the curtains, and raising her veil, discovered a face I had hitherto guessed at, than seen. Imagine my horror-it was the face, the head, of a Gorgon!' Again, the terror of the Burkean sublime-here represented as a man's fear of female sexuality, power, and his own castration-is parodied: 'I cast my eyes through a fracture in the old damask drapery of my bed, and beheld-not the horrid spectre of my recent dream-but the form of a cherub hovering near my pillow-it was the Lady Glorvina herself!'
For Morgan, the sublime is characteristically the way into a love founded not on the male psyche's narcissistic absorption of his female antithesis or soul mate-as in Shelley's «Epipsychidion» or Byron's Manfred-but on the recognition of both difference and compatibility. Recovering from his injuries, the welcome guest of Glorvina and of her father, the Prince of Inismore, Horatio is ever more attracted to Glorvina, and the attraction is mediated by Rosa's sublime landscapes.
We both arose at the same moment, and walked in silence towards the window. Beyond the mass of ruins which spread in desolate confusion below, the ocean, calm and unruffled, expanded its awful waters almost to apparent infinitude;… the tall spectral figure of Father John, leaning on a broken column, appeared the very impersonation of philosophy moralizing on the instability of all human greatness.
What a sublime assemblage of images!
'How consonant, thought I, gazing at Glorvina, 'to the tone of our present -345- feelings!' Glorvina bowed her head affirmatively, as though my lips had given utterance to the reflection.
How, think you, I felt, on this involuntary acknowledgement of a mutual intelligence?
Where Rosa or Burke would have represented Father John solely as a memento mori, in Morgan's rewriting his spectral presence instead inspires two people to enter into an unspoken dialogue that finally produces a shared feeling not of fear but of love. For Morgan, the heightened awareness of the self produced by the sublime leads not to selfabsorbed reflection but to communication with other selves, to a 'mutual intelligence' between two independent, sensitive people. Morgan finally hails this «sympathy» or domesticated sublimity as the essence of 'reason and humanity.'
The most profound analysis of the damage done both to men and to women by a patriarchal domestic ideology that confines the domestic affections to the private sphere and constructs Nature as a female other to be possessed rather than respected occurs in the finest Gothic novel of the Romantic period, Mary Shelley's
Why does Victor Frankenstein abandon his child? Initially, because he is large and ugly, a creature whose countenance Victor immediately «reads» as evil, as the face of 'a miserable monster.' But as the creature pursues Victor into the Alps, declaring his need for a female companion and his right to be included among the human species, Victor at last acknowledges his parental responsibilities and agrees to construct a female creature as an Eve for his Adam. Halfway through this second creation, Victor stops, and 'trembling with passion tore to pieces' the female body lying before him, feeling the next morning 'as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being.' Victor's violent destruction of the female creature, a destruction that is represented almost as a rape, points to the hidden agenda of Victor's scientific project. Insisting that he has killed the female in order to protect mankind, Victor's explanation uncovers a deeper anxiety:
She might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate, and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness. He had sworn to quit the neighborhood of man, and hide himself in deserts; but she had not; and she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation. They might even hate each other; the creature who already lived loathed his own deformity, and might he not conceive a greater abhorrence for it when it came before his eyes in the female form? She also might turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty of man; she might quit him, and he be again alone, exasperated by the fresh provocation of being deserted by one of his own species.
Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror.
What Victor Frankenstein most fears is the existence of an independent female, one who might think for herself and have her own desires, one so large and angry that she could obtain her own sexual mate by force if necessary (even, potentially, by raping Victor), and above all, one with the reproductive power to create an entire new species.
Terrified of the power of female sexuality, Victor both tries to destroy it (by tearing apart the female creature and by abandoning his own bride to his creature on her wedding night) and to possess it, by penetrating - 347- the womb of Mother Nature and discovering the secrets of 'her hiding places.' Drawing on the most advanced scientific research of the early nineteenth century-the chemical experiments of Sir Humphrey Davy and the use by Luigi Galvani of electricity to animate dead bodies-Frankenstein undertakes the project of the entire scientific revolution, as Mary Shelley understood it: to usurp the powers of Mother Nature in order to increase the prestige and social control of (male) scientists and, finally, in the most terrifying potential consequence of Victor's ability to create a man without a mother, to eliminate the biological and hence the cultural need for women altogether.
However, in Shelley's novel, Victor Frankenstein does not realize his goal of becoming the worshiped creator of a new race of supermen, because Mother Nature fights back, cursing Frankenstein with both physical and mental diseases so severe that he dies of exhaustion at the age of twenty-five. Moreover, she pursues him with fire and electricity-the very 'spark of life,' that he has stolen from her-hurling lightning, thunder, and rains upon him as he carries on his experiments. These atmospheric effects are not merely the conventional accoutrements of the Gothic novel, but also the manifestations of Nature's elemental powers, furies that pursue Victor like Orestes to his hiding places. Nature further punishes Victor by making it impossible for him to engage in normal reproduction, first by eliminating the natural bond of Victor as mother with his child-which would have enabled him to empathize with his creature and thus to prevent the creation of a freak who frightens all who see him-and second by ensuring that Victor's unnatural creation will destroy his wife, his family, and finally himself. The penalty of violating Nature, in Shelley's novel, is death.
Implicit in Frankenstein is an ideal: Shelley's belief that civilization can only be forwarded by human beings who constantly exercise the domestic affections. As Frankenstein comes to recognize,
A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country; America would -348- have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had
