Standpoint in communication with prisoners affects accountability. Drawing insight from Fydor Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov (1880), a mid-twentieth-century philosopher put forward the ethical principle:

We are all responsible for everything and everyone in the face of everybody, and I more than the others.^

That principle includes an abstract, first-personal statement of accountability. More recent work in moral philosophy argues that the second-personal standpoint is essential to moral obligation and accountability:

moral obligation’s normativity essentially includes an irreducibly second-personal element. Moral obligations do not simply purport to provide supremely authoritative reasons. They are also what we are responsible to one another for doing, what members of the moral community have the authority as such to demand that we do by holding us accountable second-personally. … There is simply no way, I believe, to establish accountability except within a second-personal framework.^ ^

The argument for this position is primarily conceptual and analytic. It includes the idea that second-personal moral accountability occurs among persons who understand themselves to be free, equal, rational agents. Freedom, equality, and rationality are concepts used primarily in third-personal high political philosophy of morality and law. Circumstances of second-personal communications highlight particular inequalities between persons and actual differences in freedom and practical reasoning. That existential reality is particularly relevant to communication with prisoners. Second-personal communication with prisoners has considerable importance in supporting accountability for imprisonment.

The importance of personal communicative standpoint hasn’t been sufficiently appreciated. Empirical psychology indicates that personal communicative standpoint affects the actual embodied process of human understanding.^ Even in formal written texts, females differ from males in having a more personally involved communicative style. Much more frequent female use of the pronoun “you” is a prominent feature of sex differences in communicative style.^ For historical analysis, communicative standpoint offers the advantage of being less culture-dependent than the concepts of free, equal, and rational persons. Accountability for imprisoned citizens in fifth-century Athens compared to accountability in twenty-first-century America can be better understood in terms of personal communicative standpoints than in terms of high political philosophy.

Within competition for acclaim, tragic poets in fifth-century Athens had a second-personal standpoint. These poets and their addressees could easily meet personally in ordinary city life. They presented their work at city festivals that personally identified poets, that were important civic gatherings, and that institutionally enforced distinctions between creative genres. Poets in fifth-century Athens were understood to be teachers to their fellow citizens. Their fellow citizens were, in turn, judges of the poets as contestants. These circumstances made tragic plays second-personal communication between tragic poets and festival participants.

The second-personal standpoint implicated in tragic plays increased accountability for imaginary suffering. Ancient Greek tragedy isn’t well understand as presenting the ethical principle: “Everything present is just and unjust and equally justified in both.”^ Greek tragedies didn’t demand particular actions from festival participants. Tragic poets implored festival participants to respond to the acute suffering they presented. That response, in turn, could be reason for specific public action: “I must, because of what I saw and heard.” Accountability arose not just from the common experience (“you too saw and heard”) but also from the poets’ authorized role as teachers within a religious festival (“you who do not learn the lesson will be punished”). At the same time, festival participants held the poets accountable as teachers by judging them as contestants. To the poet-teachers claim “look and listen,” the judges-participants had the counter-claim, “you are best,” or “you are unworthy.” Tragic plays did not determine specific citizen action, but increased citizens’ accountability for represented suffering.

Competition for attention among authors in early nineteenth century England generated significantly different communicative style from that of classical Greek tragedies. “What is a Poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected from him?”^ In early nineteenth-century England, these questions intensely concerned authors.^ These questions show authors examining themselves, their work, and their public from a third-personal standpoint. Competition for attention implied circulating public work to as many persons as possible. The public work circulated independently of the writer’s knowledge of readers and reader’s knowledge of the writer. The public work itself imagined the readers and the writer. The public work in competition for attention implied an art of relational encapsulation, a politics of imaginative equality, and a communicative standpoint that was predominately third-personal.

A third-personal standpoint lessens authors’ accountability for their works and lessens public accountability for responding to represented suffering. In competing for attention in early nineteenth-century England, poets styled their texts as artifacts and impersonal sources of emotions:

poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings^

for what is poesy but to create
from overfeeling good or ill^

meaning by poetry an intense and impassioned power of communicating intense and impassioned impressions respecting man and nature^

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.^

This poetry made emotion an inward experience of the solitary self and distanced feeling from actual relations between persons. This poetry was not addressed to its readers. It was overheard. This poetry implicitly justified failure to attract contemporary attention and created possible impersonal effects now and in the future. Such third-personal public work has been uncritically universalized. Literary analysis now describes emotional response to fiction as third-personal and declares that “artworks, in the standard case, command attention, not action.”^ Emotions created through literary representations are now understood to have perception-shaping potential, rather than action-mobilizing potential.

Communicative standpoint has real effects. Communicative standpoint is a choice that occurs within different structures of communicative competition. The communicative structure of fifth-century Athens favored a second-personal standpoint. The communicative structure of literary competition in early nineteenth-century England favored a third-personal standpoint. Communication shifting from a second-personal standpoint to a third-personal standpoint lessens communication’s effect in promoting accountability. That shift particularly affects the communicative position of prisoners and the fundamental political responsibility of punishment.

Second-personal communication of suffering in fifth-century Athenian tragedy became third-personal in literary works competing for attention in early nineteenth-century England. Fifth-century Athenian tragedy, above all Prometheus Bound, broke civic silence about punishment and forced Athenians to see and hear punished figures. Prometheus Bound attracted considerable literary attention in early nineteenth-century England. The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound, and Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus were important early nineteenth-century adaptations of Prometheus Bound’s themes. In contrast to Prometheus Bound, those adaptations predominately present suffering from a third-personal standpoint.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of the most perceptive early nineteenth-century English poets, clearly recognized a new sense of communicative community. Writing about 1819 and anticipating post-modernism by more than century and a half, Shelley declared:

Nothing exists but as it is perceived. … the existence of distinct individual minds … is likewise found to be a delusion. The words I, you, they, are not signs of any actual difference subsisting between the assemblage of thoughts thus indicated, but are merely marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one mind. … The words I and you and they are grammatical devices invented simply for arrangement and totally devoid of the intense and exclusive sense usually attributed to them.^ ^ ^

The Earth, in Prometheus Unbound’s concluding vision of the renewed universe, declares:

Man, oh, not men! a chain of linked thought,
Of love and might to be divided not, …
Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul,
Whose nature is its own divine control^

The public constituted as readers of a widely circulated text might be understood as equal parts of one mind.^ I, you, and they among a text’s public have no distinct sense. The stones walls surrounding one reader, or the chains binding another, don’t matter. This understanding of the public isn’t a metaphysical universal. It’s an understanding of the public intrinsic to intense competition for readers’ attention.

Differences in the structure of symbolic competition best explain general shifts in communicative standpoint. Consider Lucian of Samosata. He was a rhetorician in the Mediterranean region about 1850 years ago. Like Shelley, Lucian competed for attention. For Lucian, this competition was probably weighted more toward oral than textual performance. In Lucian’s dialogue “Prometheus on Caucasus,” Prometheus’s first two speaking turns are second-personal claims to recognize his suffering:

hear me, Hephaestus! Hermes! I suffer injustice: have compassion on my woes!

O Cronus, and Iapetus, and Mother Earth! Behold the sufferings of the innocent!^

In his next speaking turn, Lucian’s Prometheus abruptly shifts to the style of a skilled forensic debater. All the rest of Prometheus’s many words in Lucian’s dialogue are in that style. Providing others with displays of rhetorical skill was Lucian’s primary public work. Prometheus’s second-personal claims of suffering in Lucian’s work function only as a parodic allusion to the lost world of the ancient Greek Prometheus Bound.

A similar textual shift exists in Shelley’s translation of Prometheus Bound. Shelley made that translation in 1817. It is telling context: The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound, and Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus were all written from late 1816 through 1819. In a key imaginative representation of second-personal address in the Greek text of Prometheus Bound, the character who actually carried out the authoritative order to enchain Prometheus declared, “Only this man himself {Prometheus} could blame me.” Shelley translated that line, “For this work no one can justly blame me.”^ Shifting from “this man” to “no one” shifts from second-personal to third-personal communicative accountability. That shift is much more general than this specific textual instance.

A general shift from second-personal to third-personal standpoints can be discerned in comparing the fifth-century Athenian tragedy Prometheus Bound to the early-nineteenth-century English masterpieces The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound, and Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. Communication with prisoners similarly shifted from extensive second-personal communication with prisoners prior to the nineteenth century to prisoners subsequently engaging predominately in third-personal communication with the outside world. That shift in communicative standpoint lessens accountability for prisoners’ sufferings.

In fifth-century Athens, tragic plays presented at civic festivals provided an alternate means for public experience of justice. Tragic plots generated questions of right and wrong action:

Punishment involves not only the punisher and the punished – each of whom is likely to define what the wrongdoer suffers in a contradictory way – but also the audience of citizen onlookers who must inevitably take one side or the other.^

Formally selected citizens judged tragedies presented at the Athenian civic festivals. Tragic speech, however, played across public formality and personal intimacy.^ Taking sides is neither necessary nor most important in second-personal communication with a person suffering punishment. Within the dominant civic silence about punishment in fifth-century Athens, tragic plays, especially Prometheus Bound, provided important second-personal communication of suffering in punishment.

Punishment in fifth-century Athens was associated with silence in practice. A claim for justice authorized and organized speaking to fellow citizens. A lawsuit ended with silence that marked legitimate punishment:

The typical Athenian response to punishment was to look at the body of the condemned but to say nothing about it. Details about the execution of punishment are generally sparse and can be gleaned only here and there in the historical texts.^

Plato’s Crito associates submission to the laws of the city with silence:

you should suffer in silence if it orders you to suffer something, whether it’s to be beaten or to be imprisoned^

A “variety of euphemisms and circumlocutions” substituted for direct references to punishment. A first-century-CE Greek historian described one such euphemism as being used by the Athenians “to cover up the ugliness of things.”^ When a wrong-doer’s punishment was loss of his right to speak, or when the punishment was memorialized through an inscription on a stela, political authority directly controlled sentences. Fines, a more common punishment in Athens, ended a lawsuit but did not silence the wrong-doer. In any case, punishment in democratic Athens did not make enemies into friends. It clarified who were friends and who were enemies. Punishing enemies meant bringing a new lawsuit. Contesting past punishments, and perhaps even merely speaking about experience of them, undermined legitimacy necessary for punishing enemies in the future.^

Tragic poets spoke to their fellow Athenians about punishment. One tragic poet described the communicative isolation of a wrong-doer within the community:

Some had respect and pity, and set a table for me as their guest: a separate table, alone, under the same roof as them. By their silence they built up the feeling that I couldn’t be spoken to (or that I might not speak) so I was apart from them in food and drink. Each enjoyed the pleasure of Bacchus, pouring an equal amount for all, but into private cups. … I was my mother’s killer. I hurt in silence, pretending not to notice. I cried. I hear my sufferings became a festival for the Athenians.^

The indirection “I hear my sufferings became a festival” points to what the gathered city knew: such a festival existed, and they were at a similar one.^ The suffering they saw and heard in the tragedies was also similar to existing suffering. Another tragedy linked ostracizing a wrong-doer to sanctified tradition passed down from ancient generations:

If the wife who shares his bed kills a man and the son of this one kills the mother in turn, and afterward the one born of this one does away with murder by means of murder, where will a limit of these evils be reached? The ancient fathers handled these matters nobly; whoever was stained with blood, they did not allow to come near to the sight of their eyes nor to encounter them – but rather required such a person to make matters holy by exile and not to exchange blood for blood.^

Persons “stained with blood” were a common sight in classical Greek tragedies. Performed at religious festivals, tragedies made these matters holy in an imaginative exile at the center of the city.

In Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus metatheatrically addresses festival participants with his suffering in self-punishment. The language of knowledge in Oedipus Tyrannus is seeing and hearing. Oedipus seeks to “bring truth to light.” Characters speaking of seeing and hearing trace the arc of developing knowledge. That arc nears its peak as a messenger warns, “prepare to hear / And see such horrors whose weight will pull you down / With grief!” The messenger then describes Oedipus repeatedly striking his eyes as his chanting soars. The messenger concludes:

He’s shouting to open the gates so all of Thebes
Can see him as he is, his father’s murderer,
His mother’s – no, I can’t, I can’t say it,
The unholy word!
…
But look! The gates! Now you will see a sight
To make his enemies weep.^

The doors of the theatre’s skênê then open and the blinded Oedipus is wheeled out for all to see. The chorus provides a common response, “Terrible to / say or / see!” The chaotic, agonized songs from the chorus and from Oedipus include Oedipus’s multi-voiced question:

Why then should I
wish, why wish to
see, why hear,
what could
never bring me
joy, my friends? ^

Attending the tragic festivals in fifth-century Athens was a civic responsibility. Oedipus’s question underscores the force of that responsibility.

Oedipus Tyrannus acknowledges and breaks silence concerning punishment. After his self-punishment, Oedipus cuts off questioning of it and declares his desire to be isolated:

No more counsel! No more! The punishment
I laid on myself was just: it could not be better!

Concerns about seeing and speaking, even after death, figure centrally in Oedipus’s subsequent explanation of why his punishment was best. Oedipus declares:

If I could have stifled the source of my hearing,
Confined this pitiable body
To a prison beyond the reach of hearing and sight,
I would have done so!

Oedipus’s speech ends with his disintegration:

No evil more vile!
Unspeakable!
Unspeakable!
I’ll say no more!

He then says more:

By all gods, take me away from Thebes,
Far from Thebes, hide me, kill me, throw me
Into the deep where you will never see me again.

These images of penal execution and disposal of the body contrast jarringly with the immediately ensuing personal appeal:

Come –
Come –
You mustn’t fear to touch me.
Don’t let my misery frighten you. I alone,
Of all men, can bear the weight of my evil.^

A touch could help guide the blinded Oedipus. A hand could help him stand. But he senses none. Clinging to the form of a great man, he declares that he alone can bear the weight of his evil. At the same time, the performance of Oedipus Tyrannus within the city festival necessarily required the whole city to bear that weight.

Communicating with persons suffering in punishment even more centrally structures Prometheus Bound. In fifth-century Athens, the setting for Prometheus’s punishment was one of social isolation at the metatheatrical center of the polis:

This is it.
Skythia.
Wasteland.
The world’s edge.
No man sets foot here.
…
So I nail you to this man-deserted crag
where no human voice will reach you,
or your eyes see human form.^

Prometheus remained bound to the crag on the stage, at the center of the crowd attending the festival, throughout the whole play.

Prometheus’s punishment was familiar to Athenians, but imaginatively enhanced. The most common means of executing persons in classical Athens was to bind them to a wooden plank to die from exposure. This punishment, called apotumpanismos, bound the condemned, probably with leather straps, in a way that did not draw blood.^ In Prometheus Bound, Hephaestos, an iron-working god, binds Prometheus to rock with iron hoops, shackles, and chains. The hardness of these components heightens the hardness of a punishment quite similar to apotumpanismos. So too did an additional, extraordinary component of the binding: under the order of the god Power, Hephaestos drives a wedge through Prometheus’s chest to rivet him to the rock. This action could not kill the immortal Prometheus. It serves to increase the imaginative force of his sufferings.

Prometheus’s punishment doesn’t produce silence. His punishment generates continual sounds and sights of suffering. Hephaestos tells Prometheus:

Your burden of torture will never leave.
Every minute of every day and every
night it will bear upon you.
…
You will cry and scream out your pain.
You will curse and groan.

Prometheus speaks to the cosmic elements in his impersonal isolation:

Here is my agony,
here is my torment,
…
bondage,
shameful,
unspeakable!
AIII!
AIII!
I groan in pain present,
and groan for pain to be!
When will it end?

Reason does not explain his speech:

To speak, not to speak,
both are hard, for both I am
punished.
…
To tell it is painful,
and painful not to tell.
There’s misery every way.^

Like Oedipus, Prometheus at one point wishes that he were dead in a place of death where no one could see him. His suffering, Hephaestos declares, is a sight that cannot be seen.^ But in fifth-century Athens, Prometheus’s suffering was seen and heard. Prometheus suffers and speaks in the midst of the festival participants throughout Prometheus Bound.

Disturbing punishment points to large political questions. In the course of Plato’s comprehensive verbal reforming of Athenian politics, Socrates recounts:

Leontios son of Aglaion when he was on his way up from the Piraeus along the outside of the north wall perceived corpses lying besides the executioner. At one and the same time he desired to look at them and was disgusted and repulsed at himself. He struggled over this and covered his head, but was nonetheless overcome by desire and, opening his eyes, he ran to the corpses, as he said, “Look then, you evil-spirits, and fill yourselves with the noble spectacle.”^

For Plato, Leontios’s response provided insights into the human soul. Those insights in turn shaped Plato’s design for the republic. Seeing Prometheus’s suffering also leads to large political questions. Prometheus tells a friend:

Look and take your fill of my
pain.
I, the friend of Zeus,
I, who set him on his
throne and put
power in his grip,
and this is my reward.^

Prometheus’s story calls into question friendship, a central idea of Athenian politics. Even more significantly, Prometheus’s story calls into question friendship among gods. In his first speech in the play, Prometheus summons the elements of the world, “I call on you to see what a god may suffer at the hands of gods!” With his last words in the play, Prometheus calls again to the world’s elements:

behold me now
see how unjust
my
suffering^

Tragedy usually involves violence among human family and friends.^ The question in Prometheus Bound is not merely whether the god Zeus or the god Prometheus will prevail. Has the divine order perished? The divine order supports the festival and the performance. Should the chorus stop dancing and the festival participant go home?^ What then?

Prometheus Bound subordinates these weighty third-personal questions to practical matters of standpoint and style in personal communication among gods. The play’s action consists almost totally of different characters speaking to or about the suffering god Prometheus. Zeus’s agent Power in the prologue and the messenger god Hermes in the final scene do not acknowledge reciprocal personal claims in communication with Prometheus. Power and Hermes communicate as agents of their offices. The god Oceanus and the heifer Io communicate personally with Prometheus, but they do so outside of substantial second-personal moral claims. The chorus of Oceanides, the daughters of Oceanus, communicate emotionally from a second-personal standpoint, but reason from third-personal and first-personal standpoints. Only the god Hephaistos embraces second-personal moral claims in communication with Prometheus.

Standpoint and style in communication were important matters to fifth-century Athenians. Socrates in Plato’s Meno describes different styles of communication depending on persons and relations:

if he were a philosopher of the eristic and antagonistic sort, I should say to him: You have my answer, and if I am wrong, your business is to take up the argument and refute me. But if we were friends, and were talking as you and I are now, I should reply in a milder strain and more in the dialectician’s vein.^

Gods were an ever-present reality to Athenians. Communication among gods closely paralleled in Athenians’ understanding communication among humans. In Aristophanes’s Birds, Prometheus, himself a god, borrows a line from Prometheus Bound to declare that he hates all the gods.^ An Athenian responds that Prometheus is just like Timon, a well-known (mortal) misanthrope. The way gods address each other in Prometheus Bound was in fifth-century Athens imaginatively close to the way Athenians addressed each other.

In his speaking, Zeus’s agent Power validates Prometheus’s silence. In the prologue, Power and Hephaistos speak in the presence of the silent Prometheus. The prologue ends with Power addressing Prometheus peremptorily:

Bastard!
Let’s see your defiance now!

Power’s ensuing rhetorical questions heighten the implicit assumption of Prometheus’s silence:

What can mortals do for you!
Ease your pain, your
agony?
Ha!^

Power’s speech to Prometheus ends with Power mocking Prometheus’s name and then departing. These actions further emphasizes that Prometheus, suffering in punishment, lacks the status of a person with the right to speak.

Hermes, Zeus’s messenger god, engages Prometheus in a second-personal verbal battle such as were common in the civic life of Athens. Hermes comes to Prometheus with Zeus’s order that Prometheus tell what he knows of Zeus’s disastrous future marriage. Hermes begins addressing Prometheus with an emphatic, second-personal deictic, “You! You there!” and then another, “I’m talking to you!”^ Hermes mocks Prometheus, describes the form of what Prometheus must say, and warns him to speak promptly. Prometheus counters by mocking Hermes, warning him of Zeus’s precarious position, and telling Hermes to leave. Hermes and Prometheus then engage in verbal combat: rapid, closely matched exchanges of sentences.^ Their communication isn’t the spontaneous, phatic, empathetic, and obliged communication common among friends and family.

The god Oceanus ego-centrically communicates with Prometheus. Oceanus plausibly approaches Prometheus in the orchestra as his daughters the Oceanides, who have been silently and sympathetically dancing closely around Prometheus, withdraw to the edges of the orchestra to give their father a larger speaking space. In his first words to the bound Prometheus, Oceanus focuses on himself — his long journey to see Prometheus and his control of the beast on which he has traveled. Oceanus then tells Prometheus, “I see your pain, Prometheus, / and I feel sorrow for your / misfortune.” Oceanus then mentions third-personally his kinship with Prometheus, evaluates third-personally that relationship, and discusses his own ethos from Prometheus’s standpoint. Oceanus concludes his opening address to Prometheus:

Just indicate what I must do to assist you;
For you will never say that you have
A firmer friend than Oceanus.^

Prometheus responds with a speech that focuses on just one point: look at me. Oceanus acknowledges this request and then, quickly, verbally passes by.

Oceanus and Prometheus do not engage each other in second-personal moral claims. Oceanus’s specific response to Prometheus’s suffering is to offer Prometheus wisdom. With words that might trigger for many persons painful memories of adolescence, Oceanus says to the suffering Prometheus, “I want you to hear some good advice I have for you.” Oceanus then offers commonly known Greek wisdom: “know yourself,” “control yourself,” “the braggart gets more than he bargained for,” and “foolish words never escape punishment.”^ ^ Oceanus acknowledges the nature of his words:

O I know what you’re thinking.
You’ve heard it all before.
Old advice.
Old, maybe, but none
better.

Prometheus, in response, urges Oceanus to distance himself even more:

My advice is to do nothing.
Stay clear of it all, for your
own sake. Steer clear of
harm. Keep your silence.^

Oceanus often doesn’t understand what Prometheus says. Oceanus also explicitly depreciates what Prometheus does say:

I’ll take my cue not from what you say,
but what you do.
…
Yes, I learn quickly. From the sight of you.^

Prometheus insists that Oceanus leave. Oceanus leaves. He explains his departure outside of their interpersonal circumstances: the beast he arrived on is eager to go home. While Oceanus and Prometheus are relatives and friends, substantial bonds of second-personal obligation hardly engage them.

Attending to the style of communication with Prometheus is important. A highly respected classical scholar describes Oceanus as “having shown courage.” He states that Oceanus “behaved with perfect dignity.” He asserts, “The scene has admirably achieved its purpose of bringing out the pride, courage, and obstinacy of Prometheus.”^ A much different communicative interpretation seems more sensible.

The heifer Io and Prometheus communicate in the form of exchanging stories. In Greek mythology, Io was the daughter of a river god. Zeus fell in love with Io and transformed her into a heifer. Immediately after an idyllic vision of Prometheus and his goddess-bride coming to their wedding bed, the heifer Io enters abruptly, seeking a story:

What land is this?
What people?
What creature
beaten by storms
is yoked to this
rock?
What have you done
to suffer so terrible
a punishment?
Tell me.

This chant has an inconsistent communicative standpoint. The first three questions seem first-personal (to herself) or third personal (“What creature is this {Prometheus}”). Io then breaks to second-personal address: “what have you done.” Io moves on to sing of her suffering, describing the gadfly Argos hounding her on. She settles into speaking to herself, but then abruptly shifts addressees:

Where have I wandered?
Where am I wandering? {apparently addressed to Prometheus}
What did I do,
Zeus
son of Kronos, what,
to be yoked with such
suffering,
…
Lord, do you hear this
cow-horned girl? {addressed to Zeus}

Prometheus responds with a similarly weakly directed address:

The voice of Io,
daughter of Inachos!
How could I not know it?
You fired the heart of
Zeus with passion, and now,
gadfly-stung
you run through the world^

Here Prometheus’s references shift from a third-personal “it” to “you” within a description of her. These lines sound like an internal vocalization, not an address to Io. “You fired the heart of Zeus with passion” in internal address resonates with Prometheus’s own circumstances.

The disjointedness of the transitions between Io and Prometheus and peculiar interjections from the Oceanides are best understood as sensational story-seeking. Io asks Prometheus to tell her his name. Before he answers, she asks him to tell her of what fate lies ahead of her and of any possible cure. Prometheus responds with only his name. Io then shifts her narrative request:

But what was your crime?
Why are you suffering?
Tell me.

The ensuing dialogue mocks interest in hearing emotionally charged stories:

{Prometheus:} I’ve only now told my tale of tears.
{Io:} But not to me. Won’t you give me this gift?
{Prometheus:} Ask whatever you wish.
{Io:} Who nailed you to this ravine?
{Prometheus:} The will of Zeus, the hands of Hephaistos.
{Io:} What crime could earn such punishment?
{Prometheus:} No, it’s enough I’ve said what I’ve said.
{Io:} Then tell me the end of my wandering.
{Prometheus:} It’s better not to know.

After more dialogue of the gossip-seeking form “please, please tell me that sensational story,” Prometheus agrees to tell Io the horrors she will suffer. At that very point, an Oceanid interjects:

Not yet.
Let me, too, have a share of this
gift.
Let her tell us first what caused her
disease, her great misfortune,
and then she can learn from you
the suffering still to come.

Similarly, an Oceanid subsequently declares:

give one {story} to her and one to me.
Don’t begrudge me my share.
Tell her first about her wanderings,
and then me about your rescuer.
It’s what I want.^

Story-seeking is common human behavior. It was commercialized in the ancient world. A fifth-century Greek philosopher, who spent time in Athens, wrote a moralistic fable and then “he toured the cities and gave recitations of the story in public, for hire.”^ In first-century Rome, a writer began a public letter with a playful reference to story-mongers:

Get ready your penny and I will tell you a golden story, nay, more than one, for the new one has reminded me of some old tales, and it does not matter with which I begin.^

Story-seeking is effectively third-personal communication. In Prometheus Bound, lofty poetry ranging across the known world is embedded within criticism of sensational story-seeking. The effect would be comic if it weren’t for the terrible sufferings of Io and Prometheus. The effect is implicit, biting criticism of story-seeking.

The Oceanides communicate with Prometheus using several styles and standpoints. Like Io, they engage in some story-seeking in dialog with Prometheus. They also declare their immediate sense of Prometheus’s presence in second-personal address:

I see,
Prometheus,
I see,
I see in fear and with tears in my eyes,
I see you, see you
withering on this rock,
your body in pain,
shamefully bound by unbreakable bonds.
…
We hear you,
Prometheus,
and we answer you
…
I weep for you,
Prometheus,
I mourn for you

The Oceanides, however, also engage Prometheus in third-personal reasoning. Early in the play, the Oceanides say to Prometheus:

Don’t you see how you went wrong?
What else can I call it but wrong?
Believe me, this is no pleasure for me,
and for you it can only be pain^

“What else can I call it” implies socially valid naming from a third-personal standpoint. Prometheus recognizes that third-personal standpoint. He responds:

It’s easy for an outsider to
advise and criticize when he’s
free of the sufferer’s
pain.

The Oceanides are not socially outsiders. They are kin and friends of Prometheus. Other claims that the Oceanides make to Prometheus depend on third-personal ideas of right and good:

Yes, but you gave more than you should,
more than was right
…
His advice is good, Prometheus.^

Most significantly, the Oceanides’ abrupt decision to suffer with Prometheus depends not on a claim that Prometheus makes on them second-personally, but on their assertion of their own ethos in response to the speech of Zeus’s messenger Hermes:

How dare you tell me to be a coward?
I’ll suffer with him,
I’ll be at this side,
no matter what comes.^

“I’ll suffer with him” differs subtly but significantly from “I’ll suffer with you.” The former concerns third-personal sympathy; the latter, second-personal accountability. Similarly, Prometheus emotionally calls to the Oceanides second-personally:

Come,
step down,
…
Do as I beg you.
Please. Do as I beg you.

His speech, however, then shifts to a third-person standpoint:

for all of us suffer, each in
turn.
Sorrow wanders the world
settling first here, then there.^

The Oceanides declare that they came to Prometheus because they were his friends. The Oceanides’ dramatic action, however, comes as a response to the prospect of being socially characterized as cowards. Third-personal sympathy and social status, not second-personal obligation to Prometheus, governs the Oceanides’ action.^ Earlier, the Oceanides questioned third-personally:

Who could be so hard-hearted,
what god, what enemy,
as to take joy in your misery?

The Oceanides meta-theatrically challenge festival participants to be human:

The heart must be made of
stone, Prometheus, that
feels no pity for your suffering.^

Prometheus, who gave many gifts to man, is a friend of man. But just as in their own response to Prometheus, the Oceanides do not describe second-personal obligations in festival participants’ responses to Prometheus. The Oceanides refer only to the general nature of festival participants’ hearts.

Only the god Hephaistos recognizes second-personal moral claims in communication with Prometheus. In Hephaistos’s first speech, he addresses Prometheus second-personally. Hephaistos recognizes his kinship and friendship with Prometheus. Hephaistos describes Power as “hard-hearted” and lacking in pity because Power does not recognize the claims that kinship and friendship imply. Hephaistos is not merely concerned with the punishment of Prometheus as a state of the world. Hephaistos is acutely concerned about his own agency:

If only I weren’t the one who has to –

In visual and tactile communication with Prometheus, Hephaistos insists second-personally that Prometheus recognize Hephaistos’s lack of agency:

I’m not the one doing this, I want you to know.
This is no more my will than it is yours.

At the same time, Hephaistos recognizes the distinctiveness of his second-personal accountability:

Only this man himself could blame me.^

Politically authorized punishment depends on third-personal justice. Hephaistos recognizes that such justice doesn’t exclude second-personal moral claims in communication with persons suffering in punishment.

Athenians could not regard the bound Prometheus as merely imaginary. Tragedy connected to daily reality in fifth-century Athens:

the boundaries between the realm of the imagination and the realm of the polis were more fluid than we might think. The Athenian audience was better equipped than we are to move easily without qualms between the two realms. Much of the polis of the here and now was a construct of the imagination, composed of fictional fragments of the past, and conversely, the mythical past was perceived as a primordial image of the polis. Tragedy functioned as one of the most effective mediators between the realms, at least in Athens.^

The communicative standpoints of the gods in Prometheus Bound are like those of humans in Athens. By displaying different communicative standpoints and by leaving open the human dimension of the play, Prometheus Bound asks festival participants to consider how they communicate with persons suffering in punishment. The Athenian norm for punishment was civic silence. Athenians could not ignore the demand of Prometheus Bound for second-personal communication with persons suffering in punishment. The need for that second-personal demand remains today.

The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound, and Frankenstein indicate effects of a third-personal standpoint on represented suffering. These three works were written in about three years from late 1816 to late 1819. They transfigure ideas from the classical Greek tragedy Prometheus Bound across a wide range of early nineteenth-century literary forms. The Cenci, subtitled a tragedy and written for popular stage performance, describes its source as historical events in sixteenth-century Italy. Prometheus Unbound is a closet drama of poetic images and ideas intended as a revision of myth for elite literary readers. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel formally similar to popular epistolary and gothic fiction from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Suffering in punishment in these works implies less accountability than does suffering in punishment in the Prometheus Bound. Even across a wide range of literary forms, a third-personal standpoint on suffering makes turning away from suffering less troubling.

In 1811, in his book The return to nature, or, A defence of the vegetable regimen, John Frank Newton described the ancient Greek account of Prometheus as an allegory. After presenting an illustrious, early seventeenth-century English philosopher’s interpretation of that allegory, Newton argued for his own, rather different interpretation.^ Newton explained that Prometheus’s gift of fire brought disease and woe to humans because fire promoted cooking and eating meat.

Newton’s interpretation of Prometheus won over the young Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley presented Newton’s argument, with additional elaboration, in his polemical pamphlet, A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813). Shelley also incorporated Newton’s argument into notes to his long poem Queen Mab (1813).^ Shelley’s A Vindication of Natural Diet featured on its front cover an untranslated quotation in Greek from Hesiod’s Works and Days. In that quotation, Zeus declares that Prometheus’s theft of fire will bring a great plague to men. Newton’s and Shelley’s texts on vegetarianism included many classical references and quotations in Latin and Greek. Both Newton and Shelley used their allegorical interpretation of Prometheus in marshaling ancient authorities to support vegetarianism to elite readers.

A rage for Aeschylus, and particularly Prometheus Bound, gripped early nineteenth-century Britain. In 1773, Prometheus Bound became the first play attributed to Aeschylus to be printed in English translation.^ Four years later, Potter’s English prose translation of all of Aeschylus’s extant plays was printed.^ Interest in Aeschylus rose through the beginning of the nineteenth century. Potter’s translation was reprinted in 1808.^ In 1809 and 1810, three editions of Aeschylus’s Greek texts and two editions of English translations came out. An intense scholarly battle over recensions of Aeschylus’s Greek texts droned on. That controversy spanned the specialized quarterly Classical Journal, founded in London in 1810, the literary quarterly Edinburgh Review, and the general-interest monthly Gentleman’s Magazine.^ Between 1795 and 1825, British printers produced seven editions of Aeschylus’s collected works and fourteen editions of individual plays attributed to Aeschylus.^

Ambitious writers in early-nineteenth-century England studied and thought at length about Prometheus Bound. Byron, writing to his publisher in 1817, declared:

Of the Prometheus of Aeschylus I was passionately fond as a boy (it was one of the Greek plays we read thrice a year at Harrow) ; — indeed that and the ‘Medea’ were the only ones, except the ‘Seven before Thebes,’ which ever much pleased me. … The Prometheus, if not exactly in my plan, has always been so much in my head, that I can easily conceive its influence over all or any thing that I have written ^

In addition to his short poem “Prometheus,” Byron referred to Prometheus in Manfred (1817) and Don Juan, Canto the First (1819). William Wordsworth invoked Prometheus in The Excursion (1814). John Keats did so in Endymion (1817). In 1825 before the Royal Society of Literature in London, Samuel Taylor Coleridge gave a lecture entitled On the Prometheus of Aeschylus.^

Shelley, like those leading literary men of his time, studied and thought at length about Prometheus Bound. Thomas Medwin, one of Shelley’s close friends, described Shelley’s activities in Geneva in the summer of 1816:

He reads incessantly. His great studies at this time were the Greek dramatists, especially Aeschylus’s Prometheus, whom he considered the type of Milton’s Satan. He translated this greatest of tragedies to Byron, a very indifferent Greek scholar, which produced his sublime ode on Prometheus^

Shelley became devoted to reading ancient Greek and Roman works in the original languages.^ In her journal’s list of books that Shelley read in 1816, Mary Shelley recorded Prometheus Bound.^ About a year later, Mary Shelley noted in her journal: “S {Shelley} traslates {translates} Promethes Desmotes {Prometheus Bound} and I write it.”^ From July 22 to Aug. 5, 1817, Shelley read “plays of Aeschylus.”^ About the first third of an English translation of Prometheus Bound, written in Mary Shelley’s hand, has survived. Shelley apparently did that translation in the summer of 1817.^ Traveling through the Alps on March 26, 1818, Shelley marveled at the scenery. He wrote in Mary Shelley’s journal:

The scene is like that described in the Prometheus of Aeschylus – Vast rifts & caverns in the granite precipices – wintry mountains with ice & snow above^

Shelley’s close friend Thomas Medwin reported that, during the the winter of 1820-1821:

he {Shelley} translated to me the Prometheus of Aeschylus, reading it as fluently as if written in French or Italian^

Shelley, drowned while sailing in 1822, reportedly died with a volume Aeschylus in his jacket pocket.^ Aeschylus, and especially Prometheus Bound, deeply shaped Shelley’s imagination.

In intimate communication, Shelley invoked Prometheus Bound from a third-personal standpoint. Shelley left his child and his pregnant wife Harriet in July, 1814, to pursue a relationship with Mary Godwin. In October, 1814, facing imprisonment for debt to a coach-maker, he desperately wrote to Harriet:

I cannot raise money soon enough – unless you can effect something I must go to Prison & all our hopes of independence be finished. I see no resource. I must hide myself til the 6^th & then if you can raise no money, go to Prison to save my bail.

… If once in prison, confined in a damp cell, without a sixpence, without a friend (for I have mortgaged my income to Mr. Hookham) I must inevitably be starved to death.^

Thomas Hookham was a bookseller and a person whom Shelley addressed as a friend in 1812.^ Soon after he wrote the above to Harriet, Shelley wrote to Mary Godwin:

If you see Hookham, do not insult him openly. I have still hopes. We must not resign an inch of hope. I will make this remorseless villain loathe his own flesh – in good time. He shall be cut down in his season. His pride shall be trampled into atoms. I will wither up his selfish soul by peacemeal {sic}.^

Passive-aggressiveness seems to have been an aspect of Shelley’s personality.^ Shelley appended to this letter a quotation in Greek from Prometheus Bound. In English translation, the Greek quotation was “hissing terror from his horrid jaws.” Shelley commonly quoted or referred to authors he was reading or had just read.^ Shelley apparently was reading Prometheus Bound in Oct, 1814. Reading Prometheus Bound influenced Shelley’s personal communication in circumstances of acute personal stress.

Shelley’s Greek quotation from Prometheus Bound in his letter to his lover Mary Godwin concerns the monster Typhos. According to Prometheus Bound, Typhos violently challenged the ruling god Zeus. Zeus responded by hurling lightening at Typhos:

… blasting his
boasting tongue and scorching his
heart, his strength sent packing.
He lies there now,
helpless, limp

A few lines later in the same speech, Prometheus recounted what will happen at some indefinite future time:

One day rivers of fire will
leap from that peak, and flowing,
devour Sicily’s fruitful plains.
This will be Typhos,
Typhos burnt to ashes by Zeus’ thunderbolt,
but his rage will spew out
mountains of glowing
rock and fiery spray.^

Typhos, like Prometheus, endured punishment from Zeus. Unlike Prometheus, Typhos struck back violently. Shelley seems to have imagined himself as Typhos in Prometheus Bound. A critic has discerned more generally in Shelley’s poetry “an essentially retributive aesthetic … a highly self-conscious embrace of penal retributivism.”^

Within Shelley’s letter to his lover Mary Godwin, the quotation from Prometheus Bound is third-personal communication. Shelley quoted Prometheus Bound in ancient Greek. Mary Godwin could not read Greek. Shelley didn’t append the quotation to his letter to impress Mary with his classical knowledge. That would have been inappropriate for the letter’s circumstances and unnecessary in any case. The quotation is best understood to be Shelley connecting his letter to what he perceived to be a third-personal force in the imaginative universe: retributive justice.

Writing personally to Mary, Shelley didn’t consistently maintain a second-personal standpoint. He wrote:

I wander restlessly about I cannot read – or even write. But this will soon pass. I should not infect my own Mary with my dejection. She has sufficient cause for disturbance to need consolation from me. Well we shall meet today. I cannot write. But I love you with so unalterable a love that the contemplation of me will serve for a letter.^

Shelley’s cosmic view of himself is “this will soon pass.” With respect to Mary, Shelley shifted to first-personal self-address (“I should not infect my own Mary with my dejection”). Mary’s “disturbance” was her pregnancy with their child. Shelley also shifted to Mary’s second-personal standpoint: “contemplation of me will serve for a letter {to you}.” Shelley’s letter to Mary was not consistently second-personal address to her.

A Promethean theme from a third-personal standpoint unite The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound, and Frankenstein. None of these works achieved immediate success in the intense competition for attention in early nineteenth-century England. Both The Cenci and Frankenstein were initially offered publicly as anonymously authored works deliberately presented in ways to attract public attention. Prometheus Unbound, in contrast, Shelley seems to have written to circulate through only poetic means and forces. That intentional authorial distinction didn’t make a difference for Shelley’s Promethean communicative standpoint. The distinction between a second-personal standpoint and a third-personal standpoint is fundamentally important for moral accountability. The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound, and Frankenstein together indicate that a third-personal standpoint was a deep structural feature of literary imagination within the communicative circumstances of early-nineteenth-century England.

The Cenci is a Promethean work in which third-personal claims about a just public order dominate second-personal communication of suffering. Prometheus in Prometheus Bound insists that the friends who visit him see his suffering. Prometheus insists that his visitors hear his account of the wrong Zeus has done to him. Prometheus’s rebellion against the current world order forms the background for valorizing second-personal communication with a person suffering in punishment. In The Cenci, Beatrice refuses to express even to her family and friends the injury that she has suffered. Beatrice insists that what has happened to her cannot be expressed. The second-personal communicative standpoint in the The Cenci serves to privilege third-personal condemnation of the current world order.

The Cenci positions its audience in a third-personal standpoint. The Cenci’s preface describes the drama’s source as a historical account in a manuscript from the Cenci Palace archives in Rome. The preface opens, “A manuscript was communicated to me during my travels in Italy.” The preface subsequently declares:

On my arrival in Rome I found that the story of the Cenci was a subject not to be mentioned in Italian society without awakening a deep and breathless interest; and that the feelings of the company never failed to incline a romantic pity for the wrongs, and a passionate exculpation of the horrible deed to which they urged her, who has been mingled two centuries with the common dust. All ranks of people knew the outlines of this history, and participated in the overwhelming interest which it seems to have the magic of exciting in the human heart.^

An ancient, obscure manuscript, the “not to be mentioned” subject, the sensational story – these are all conventional components of exotic travel accounts and gothic fiction popular in early-nineteenth-century England. The drama begins in a palace and then moves to a castle. Catholic institutions and practices figure importantly in it. Among fiercely Protestant, middle-class London theatre-goers, The Cenci represents geographically, historically, culturally, socially, and religiously distant others. Communication among the gods in Prometheus Bound was much closer to the ordinary life of Athenians in fifth-century Athens.

Speaking for over-hearers is at The Cenci’s dramatic climax. Like the false confession under a priest’s threat of “hell fire” in Frankenstein^, the true confession under judge-ordered torture in The Cenci is spoken for others to hear. Count Cenci commits horrible violence against his family and community. Beatrice, Count Cenci’s daughter, leads his son, wife, and hired accomplices in arrangements to kill her father.^ The dramatic tension reaches its peak in their trial for his murder. Beatrice proclaims their innocence and implores the others not to confess to the killing even under torture. The Cenci poetically addresses this extraordinary claim of innocence to the whole imagined patriarchal, monarchical, God-ruled world. Denying the killing is a noble lie. Beatrice assimilates this lie to her demand to the others to speak the truth at some higher level of abstraction.^ “Speak the truth” and “tell me the truth” are not the same moral imperative. The Cenci is primarily concerned with the former, third-personal moral imperative.^

Beatrice, the saintly and violated heroine, stands at trial with her step-mother Lucretia and brother Giacomo. They face Marzio, a vassal of their house. Beatrice violently threatened Marzio and paid him to get him to kill her father. A judge interrogates Beatrice:

A judge. Look upon this man;
When did you see him last?
Beatrice. We never saw him.
Marzio. You know me too well, Lady Beatrice.
Beatrice. I know thee! How? where? when?
Marzio. You know ‘twas I
Whom you did urge with menaces and bribes
To kill your father. When the thing was done
You clothed me in a robe of woven gold
And bade me thrive: how I have thriven, you see.
You my Lord Giacomo, Lady Lucretia,
You know that what I speak is true.
(Beatrice advances toward him; he covers his face, and shirks back.)
O, dart
The terrible resentment of those eyes
On the dead earth! Turn them away from me!
They wound: ‘twas torture forced the truth. My Lords,
Having said this let me be led to death.
Beatrice. Poor wretch, I pity thee: yet stay awhile.^

Beatrice then turns to address a church authority attending the trial. Her words to Marzio, “Poor wretch, I pity thee: yet stay awhile,” position her as a trial official speaking third-personally to Marzio. That implicit standpoint contrasts sharply with Marzio’s pathetic, second-personal lines, “You know me too well, Lady Beatrice. … You my Lord Giacomo, Lady Lucretia, / You know that what I speak is true.”

Beatrice ultimately forces Marzio to speak third-personally. Continuing to double herself with a trial lawyer and judge, Beatrice says to Marzio:

Beatrice. Fix thine eyes on mine;
Answer to what I ask.
(Turning to the Judges)
I prithee mark
His countenance: unlike bold calumny
Which sometimes dares not speak the thing it looks,
He dares not look the thing he speaks, but bends
His gaze on the blind earth.
(To Marzio)
What! wilt thou say
That I did murder my own father?
Marzio. Oh!
Spare me! My brain swims round … I cannot speak …
It was a horrid torture forced the truth.
Take me away! Let her not look on me!
I am a guilty, miserable wretch;
I have said all I know; now, let me die!

Beatrice’s second-personal claims in communication are figured as more painful than torture:

Marzio. Oh, spare me! Speak to me no more!
That stern, yet piteous look, those solemn tones,
Wound worse than torture.

This high melodrama pushes even higher before Beatrice overpowers Marzio:

Beatrice. … Think
What ‘tis to blot with infamy and blood
All that which shows like innocence, and is,
Hear me, great God! I swear, most innocent,
So that the world lose all discrimination
Between the sly, fierce, wild regard of guilt,
And that which now compels thee to reply
To what I ask: Am I, or am I not
A parricide?
Marzio. Thou are not!
Judge. What is this?
Marzio. I here declare those whom I did accuse
Are innocent. ‘Tis I alone am guilty.
…
Marzio. Torture me as ye will:
A keener pain has wrung a higher truth
From my last breath. She is most innocent!
Bloodhounds, not men, glut yourselves well with me;
I will not give you that fine piece of nature
To rend and ruin.

An appeal to “higher truth” is not just a move of heroes, ideologues, and pretentious dissemblers. Beatrice’s appeal to Marzio casts second-personal communication as a lower activity that can heroically serve third-personal ideas. Her appeal to higher truth devalues second-personal claims.

Beatrice’s suffering in The Cenci has less imaginative force than Prometheus’s suffering in the ancient Greek Prometheus Bound. Both Beatrice and Prometheus rebel against the ruling order and suffer weighty punishments for their actions. In a parody of Prometheus Bound’s ending, The Cenci ends with Beatrice speaking calmly of mundane details as she and her mother prepare to be dragged to their hanging:

Give yourself no unnecessary pain,
My dear Lord Cardinal. Here, Mother, tie
My girdle for me, and bind up this hair
In any simple knot; aye, that does well.
And yours I see is coming down. How often
Have we done this for one another; now
We shall not do it any more. My Lord,
We are quite ready. Well, ‘tis very well.^

This sardonic use of ordinary discourse might provoke theatre-goers’ moral outrage. It’s outrage well-distanced from second-personal claims on them. The implicit concern is clearly figured third-personally in one of Beatrice’s earlier declamations:

What!
Will you give up these bodies to be dragged
At horses’ heels, so that our hair should sweep
The footsteps of the vain and senseless crowd,
Who, that they may make our calamity
Their worship and their spectacle, will leave
The churches and the theatres as void
As their own hearts?^

Beatrice’s concern in punishment is the content of everyone else’s heart. Prometheus Bound, in contrast, ends with Prometheus, chained to a crag, intensely chanting to the Athenians: “see how unjust / my / suffering.”

The Cenci reverses key aspects of Prometheus Bound’s second-personal communication. Beatrice’s father, Count Cenci, is an evil, thoroughly tyrannical Italian count who commits many wrongs. Unlike Zeus for the Athenians, Beatrice’s father has little specific importance to the world of The Cenci’s theater-goers. A specific wrong that Beatrice’s father commits against Beatrice drives the central action of killing him. Beatrice appears first to her step-mother after this wrong. Her step-mother repeatedly asks what has befallen her, what ails her, what her father has done. Beatrice refuses to say. She finally says:

What words would you have me speak?
I, who can feign no image in my mind
Of that which has transformed me. I, whose thought
Is like a ghost shrouded and folded up
In its own formless horror. Of all words,
That minister to mortal intercourse,
Which wouldst thou hear? For there is none to tell
My misery: if another ever knew
Aught like to it, she died as I will die,
And left it, as I must, without a name.^

Beatrice’s unwillingness to reveal her personal trauma parallels the behavior of Victor in Frankenstein. Like Victor, Beatrice adopts the ego-centrism of Oceanus in communication with Prometheus. Namelessness in Frankenstein emphasizes the controlling force of the narrator’s perceptions and psychology.^ Here, like the wisdom that Oceanus serves to the suffering Prometheus, Beatrice offers an externalized, universalized psychological abstraction to her step-mother. No one has suffered what she has suffered. And if anyone has, she could not have named her suffering either. Oceanus’s speech in Prometheus Bound teaches Athenians how not to speak with a person suffering in punishment. Beatrice speaks to her beloved step-mother statements much like those of Oceanus. Other characters in The Cenci give Beatrice’s statements the authority of compelling, impersonal truth.

While story-seeking in the Prometheus Bound mimics low-status practices, story-seeking in The Cenci is meant to create lofty melodrama. In Prometheus Bound, Io, the Oceanides, and Prometheus haggle over story-telling using the low-level morality of gift and exchange. The intense suffering in the ensuing stories contrasts sharply with the low moral circumstances of their production. In The Cenci, refusing to tell a story has great moral significance and substitutes for telling of suffering. When her friend and suitor Orsino enters, Beatrice says to him:

Welcome, Friend!
I have to tell you that, since we last met,
I have endured a wrong so great and strange,
That neither life nor death can give me rest.
Ask me not what it is, for there are deeds
Which have no form, sufferings which have no tongue.^

This highly rhetorical greeting, which differs greatly from that of a real person suffering a terrible psychological wound, naturally prompts Orsino to ask questions about the wrong. Beatrice responds with much poetical expression. But she refuses to describe the wrong she has suffered. Orsino concludes:

For it is such, as I but faintly guess,
As make remorse dishonour, and leaves her
Only one duty, how she may avenge

Orsino then hints of killing Beatrice’s father. Beatrice’s mother forthrightly asks whether they should devise her husband’s death. Beatrice declares yes, they should kill her father “suddenly,” being “brief and bold.”

The “unutterable,” “expressionless” wrong that Beatrice suffered creates a story with such moral power that it signifies without Beatrice having to speak. Subsequent to that wrong, Beatrice displays excellent reasoning, high verbal skill, and great emotional control. Compared to Beatrice’s verbal performances after her father’s decisive wrong to her, Prometheus’s verbal performances in Prometheus Bound are much less controlled. Prometheus’s words vary greatly in emotional level, verbal texture, and topical and situational coherence. Beatrice’s refusal to speak about the wrong she suffered is a third-personal rhetorical strategy of moral domination. Prometheus’s insistent, incoherent speaking is affective second-personal communication. Prometheus’s second-personal communication better serves personal accountability and justice in truth.

Shelley’s early nineteenth-century drama Prometheus Unbound refigures the second-personal communication of the ancient Greek tragedy Prometheus Bound. Written in competition for acclaim, the ancient Greek Prometheus Bound insists on second-personal communication with Prometheus suffering in punishment. Prometheus Bound’s imperative to Athenian citizens was to act in administering justice with the experience that Prometheus Bound provided to each of them. Prometheus Unbound, in contrast, backgrounds personal agency. It rejects personal striving in competition for attention in early nineteenth-century England. In Prometheus Unbound, third-personal poetic utterances echoing throughout the cosmos bring about justice without personal agency.

Prometheus Unbound and Shelley’s play The Cenci have some obvious connections. Shelley wrote The Cenci in 1819. He was then also writing Prometheus Unbound. Each work contains a preface envisioning the work’s production, purpose, and addressees. Both prefaces have a similar style and tone. Both dramas concern rebellion against an unjust order and the effects of that rebellion. Both dramas incorporate clear textual relations to the ancient Greek Prometheus Bound.

Nonetheless, Shelley’s designs for these two works differed significantly. Shelley created The Cenci as a tragedy that would play successfully on a popular London stage. Prometheus Unbound he wrote as a lyrical drama for elite personal reading.^ Shelley described the dramatic interest in The Cenci as “the restless and anatomizing casuistry” that Beatrice evoked. In Prometheus Unbound, he sought to create a Prometheus who didn’t evoke “pernicious casuistry.”^ In the preface to The Cenci, Shelley claimed to have “endeavored as nearly as possible to represent the characters as they probably were” and to have “avoided with great care … what is commonly called mere poetry.” In the preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley stated that he drew imagery “from the operations of the human mind” and that he sought to present to poetic readers “beautiful idealisms of moral excellence.”

The epigraph to Prometheus Unbound highlights Shelley’s poetic address. The epigraph contains a line from Aeschylus’s tragedy Epigoni: “Do you hear that, Amphiaraus, hidden under the earth?” Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations gave this line to the voice of a loyal student lamenting to his dead teacher the betrayal of another of the teacher’s students.^ One of Shelley’s notebooks indicates that Shelley directed this line “To The Ghost of Aeschylus.”^ Shelley understood himself to be challenging the teaching of Aeschylus. Shelley’s position in relation to Aeschylus is thus opposite that of the loyal student in Cicero. As an epigraph for Prometheus Unbound, the speaker, addressee, and meaning of the quote from Epigoni is a matter of complex textual relations.

In the preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley combatively challenges Aeschylus. The preface figures Aeschylus as Shelley’s rival and predecessor. The preface refers to Aeschylus as Shelley’s model. Shelley, an ardent atheist, regarded Prometheus as more poetically worthy than Satan:

The only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgement, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage, majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandizement, which, in the Hero of Paradise Lost {here meaning Satan}, interfere with the interest. … Prometheus is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends.^

Available textual fragments indicate that the Prometheus Unbound historically attributed to Aeschylus reconciled Prometheus and Zeus. Shelley refused to follow that story line:

I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion {Prometheus} with the Oppressor {Zeus} of mankind. The moral interest of the fable, which is so powerfully sustained by the sufferings and endurance of Prometheus, would be annihilated if we could conceive of him as unsaying his high language and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary.

The phrase “catastrophe so feeble” describes catastrophe like an art for which the grandest is most valued. The claim that the moral interest of the fable would be “annihilated” is inconsistent with Aeschylus’s historical renown for the Prometheus trilogy. Moreover, reconciling Prometheus and Zeus doesn’t necessarily imply Prometheus “quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary.” The violence of Shelley’s challenge to Aeschylus signals Shelley’s intense concern to triumph over Aeschylus in competition for poetic acclaim that Shelley imagined trans-historically.

Shelley’s relation to Aeschylus is more complex than trans-historical competition for acclaim. In Prometheus Unbound’s preface, Shelley declares that an “attempt to restore the lost drama of Aeschylus” would invoke a “high comparison.” Aeschylus was highly regarded in early-nineteenth-century England. Shelley himself was a devoted reader of Aeschylus. Shelley states that Prometheus Unbound’s imagery is like that of ancient Greek poets. He asks readers to attribute this similarity to his study of Greek poetry “since a higher merit would probably be denied me.” His preface concludes with a warning in the third person:

let none trouble themselves to heap the dust of oblivion upon his efforts; the pile they raise will betray his grave which might otherwise have been unknown.

The third-personal “his” carries the reference “my,” meaning Shelley. While presenting at Athenian festivals assured Aeschylus of civic attention, Shelley had no such assurance. Lack of attention to his works deeply troubled Shelley. Shelley’s combative challenge to Aeschylus seems mainly to reflect Shelley’s anxiety about his status, the reception of his work, and competition for attention.

Shelley’s literary name-dropping is consistent with status anxiety. In his four-page preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley explicitly refers to Aeschylus, Milton, Dante, Shakespeare, Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, Virgil, Horace, Petrarch, Fletcher, Dryden, Pope, Plato, Bacon, Paley, and Malthus. Most of these names occur in Shelley’s discussion of imitation. That discussion begins with Shelley noting charges of imitation directed at “poems far more popular, and indeed more deservedly popular, than mine.” Shelley concludes his discussion of imitation by declaring that he has done only what these illustrious authors have done: “If this similarity be the result of imitation, I am willing to confess that I have imitated.” In his preface, Shelley avoids naming one author while questioning that author’s motivation:

Let this opportunity be conceded to me of acknowledging that I have what a Scotch philosopher characteristically terms, ‘a passion for reforming the world’; what passion incited him to write and publish his book, he omits to explain. For my part I had rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon, than go to Heaven with Paley and Malthus.

The unnamed Scottish philosopher is Robert Forsyth. He ranked much lower than Paley and Malthus in literary fame. Shelley apparently omitted naming Forsyth, not because he particularly disliked Forsyth’s work, but because Forsyth was not notable.

Shelley’s creativity encompassed means for promoting the effects of his work. One of Shelley’s ideas was to put political ballads and broadsides into bottles, toss the bottles into the ocean, and hope that the west wind “will waft ye to some freeborn soul.”^ Shelley also attached such writings to hot-air balloons. He hoped that the writing, when it eventually fell to earth somewhere, would be:

A watch-light by the patriot’s lonely tomb,
A ray of courage to the oppressed and the poor,
A spark though gleaming on the hovel’s hearth
Which through the tyrant’s gilded domes shall roar,
A beacon in the darkness of the Earth,
A Sun which o’er the renovated scene
Shall dart like Truth where Falsehood yet has been.^

These writings, which included Shelley’s anonymously written “The Devil’s Walk: A Ballad” (1811-12) and “Declaration of Rights” (1812), strongly imagined unseen readers. They also provided rich material for their readers to imagine the author. Shelley’s anonymously written “Declaration of Rights” declared of the rights it proclaimed:

They are declared to thee by one who knows thy dignity, for every hour does his heart swell with honourable pride in the contemplation of what thou mayest attain, by one who is not forgetful of thy degeneracy, for every moment brings home to him the bitter conviction of what thou art.

Attaching writings to sea-born bottles and hot-air balloons lessened risks of persecution for distributing politically dangerous texts. These distribution strategies and the associated sonnets figure words as fire that naturally spreads and necessarily has effects in the world.

In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley took a more ambitiously literary approach to the effects of his work. The ancient Greek tragedy Prometheus Bound begins with a silent Prometheus being bound amid two speaking characters. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound begins with a long speech from Prometheus. This opening speech ends with the decisive action of Shelley’s play: Prometheus seeks to “recall” his curse of Jupiter (the Roman name for Zeus). While Prometheus in the Prometheus Bound calls upon the elements of the world – light, sky, winds, rivers, oceans, earth, sun – to see his suffering, Prometheus in the Prometheus Unbound calls upon the elements of the world – mountains, springs, air, whirlwinds – to say back to Prometheus the curse he has said. These elements in reply tell of the tremendous effects of Prometheus’s words. A voice from the springs proclaims:

Never such a sound before
To the Indian waves we bore.
A pilot asleep on the howling sea
Leaped up from the deck in agony,
and heard, and cried, ‘Ah, woe is me!’
And died as mad as the wild waves be.^

Shelley imagines Prometheus’s words as sound of unprecedented power, sound that spreads naturally throughout the world, sound effective enough to drive mad even a sailor who could sleep on a ship’s deck amid a howling sea. Prometheus Bound presents a bound body. Prometheus Unbound attributes liberating effect to a disembodied voice circulating throughout the world.

Communicative effects in Prometheus Unbound are primarily third-personal. Without direct address to them, characters experience communicative effects such as “an awful whisper rises up!”; “Obscurely through my brain, like shadows dim, / Sweep awful thoughts, rapid and thick”; “Speak the words which I would hear, / Although no thought inform thine empty voice”; “A spirit seizes me and speaks within.”^ Shelley attributes lines in the drama to voices such as “Fourth Voice (from the Whirlwinds),” “Second Echo,” “Sixth Spirit,” “Second Faun,” “Voice of Unseen Spirits,” “Chorus of Hours,” “Chorus of Hours and Spirits,” “A Voice from Above,” “A Voice from Beneath,” and “A Confused Voice.” This literary approach imagines a world of sounds, words, and ideas that exist and persist apart from their material form and their person-to-person communication. Prometheus Unbound presents “the deep music of the rolling world.”^ That music is not addressed to anyone. It simply is.

The material text of Prometheus Unbound was bound to other poems that similarly envision third-personal communication. Prometheus Unbound was first published in 1820 in a book entitled Prometheus Unbound, with Other Poems. One of those other poems envisions a skylark, unseen high above. As a spirit, an “unbodied joy,” the skylark sings, unbidden, to no one in particular. The hidden bird keeps singing unbidden until the world is transformed:

Like a poet hidden
in the light of thought
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not

Shelley the poet extols and envies the skylark:

Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow,
The world should listen then – as I am listening now.^

With a parallel to Shelley’s “To a Balloon, Laden with Knowledge,” Shelley’s anxiety of attention drives his poetic address to the west wind:

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!^

Shelley objectifies his words as fallen leaves of a tree or fallen leaves of a manuscript. He imagines them circulating impersonally by the wind. These images, like those of the skylark and the persistent voices in Prometheus Unbound, are an imaginative solution to the challenges Shelley faced in competition for attention to his work.

Prometheus Unbound figures intimate communication with little respect for communicative standpoint. Prometheus addresses the earth as his mother:

Mother, thy sons and thou
Scorn him, without whose all-enduring will
Beneath the fierce omnipotence of Jove,
Both they and thou had vanished, like thin mist
Unrolled on the morning wind. Know ye not me,
The Titan? he who made his agony
The barrier to your else all-conquering foe?
…
Why answer ye not, still? Brethren!^

Here in addressing his mother, Prometheus refers to himself in the third person and describes his heroic acts. He queries whether his mother knows him. This high poetic form astonishingly resolves into second-personal, childish pestering, “Why answer ye not, still? Brethren!” Prometheus in Prometheus Unbound is a serious, elevated figure. Reading Prometheus Unbound seriously requires communicative standpoint to matter little.

The much different communicative standpoints of Hephaistos and Hermes in Prometheus Bound are conflated in Prometheus Unbound. In Prometheus Bound, Hephaistos poignantly affirms second-personal claims in communication with Prometheus. Hermes, in contrast, serves Zeus and engages in rhetorical battle with Prometheus to vindicate Zeus’s right. In Prometheus Unbound, Mercury’s communicative standpoint drifts between that of Hephaistos and Hermes:

Alas! I pity thee, and hate myself
That I can do no more – aye from thy sight
Returning, for a season, Heaven seems Hell,
So thy worn form pursues me night and day,
smiling reproach.^

Being troubled by Prometheus’s “smiling reproach” suggests Prometheus’s second-personal moral claim on Mercury. Pity, however, is typically a third-personal sentiment. Mercury subsequently shifts to place himself alongside Prometheus in relation to Jupiter. Mercury associates inflicting and receiving punishment:

Oh, that we might be spared: I to inflict,
and thou to suffer!

Mercury seeks to induce Prometheus to provide information about the period of Jupiter’s rule in exchange for freedom:

If thou might’st dwell among the Gods the while,
Lapped in voluptuous joy?

Mercury’s invocation of a heaven, like Hermes’s rhetorical thrusts in ancient Athens, is culturally contextual persuasion. Mercury’s response to Prometheus’s refusal of this other world, “Alas! I wonder at, yet pity thee,” perhaps hints at Mercury’s admiration for Prometheus’s singular ability to reject the popular enticement of heaven. Hephaistos and Hermes introduce and conclude Prometheus Bound with communicative forms that were clearly distinct and significant to Athenians. Mercury, in contrast, appears in the middle of the first act of Prometheus Unbound and has no formal distinctiveness in personal address.

In Prometheus Bound, Prometheus presents his suffering as a specific injustice personally accountable to Zeus. Prometheus insists that others see the suffering that Zeus has imposed on him specifically because he gave fire and other gifts to humankind. Prometheus describes his suffering as “a sight that does dishonor to Zeus.”^ Only in rhetorical battle with Hermes does Prometheus express indifference to Zeus’s punishment. In that rhetorical battle, Prometheus imagines increased punishment from Zeus with the verb “let him.”^ That rhetoric is a common form for expressing strength, boldness, and fearlessness in a fight.

In Prometheus Unbound, Prometheus actively seeks suffering more generally associated with the state of the world. Prometheus’s curse of Jupiter begins with a description of Prometheus’s action and then implores Jupiter to pour down suffering on “me and mine”:

Fiend, I defy thee! with a calm, fixed mind,
All that thou canst inflict I bid thee do;
Foul Tyrant both of Gods and Humankind,
One only being shalt thou not subdue.
Rain then thy plagues upon me here,
Ghastly disease, and frenzying fear;
…
Let thy malignant spirit move
Its darkness over those I love:
On me and mine I imprecate
The utmost torture of thy hate ^

Prometheus refuses Mercury’s pity: “{pity} Not me, within whose mind sits peace serene.” He then declares: “how vain is talk! / Call up the fiends.”^ To the Furies who approach him not for combative speeches, but like a “death-bird after battle” to “rend thee bone from bone, and nerve from nerve,” Prometheus declares:

I laugh your power, and his who sent you here,
To lowest scorn. Pour forth the cup of pain.^

Prometheus Unbound refigures Prometheus’s punishment for a specific offense into Prometheus’s masochistic protest against the whole ruling order. Prometheus in Shelley’s poetry is a new Jesus, one without personal communion.

Prometheus’s suffering in Prometheus Unbound has little imaginative force. It doesn’t break Prometheus into shrieks, chants, declarations, and songs. Instead, Prometheus most directly expresses his suffering in a formal lament, repeated nearly verbatim three times, “Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, forever!”^ When Heracles frees Prometheus, Heracles describes Prometheus as the form that “wisdom, courage, and long-suffering love … animate.” Suffering by a form of abstract qualities lacks visceral effect. Prometheus’s first words upon being unbound are to declare to Heracles, the mighty champion of heroic deeds:

Thy gentle words
Are sweeter even than freedom long desired
And long delayed.^

That’s delicate, odorous, and daedal poetry. But most persons would prefer freedom from imprisonment to gentle words.

Across different levels of meaning, Prometheus Unbound obscures second-personal accountability for suffering. After Heracles frees Prometheus, Prometheus declares to Asia their perpetual marital union: “Henceforth we will not part.” Prometheus turns to the Spirit of the Hour and orders Ione:

Give her that curvèd shell, which Proteus old
Made Asia’s nuptial boon, breathing within it
A voice to be accomplished, and which thou
Didst hide in grass under the hollow rock.

The “voice to be accomplished” is “like lulled music sleeping” in the shell. The voice’s speaker and its addressees are obscure and irrelevant. That the shell was a gift to mark an intimate occasion (“Asia’s nuptial boon”) seems to make no corresponding claim on how Prometheus disposes of it. Prometheus orders the Spirit of the Hour:

Go, borne over the cities of mankind
On whirlwind-footed coursers: once again
Outspeed the sun around the orbèd world;
And as thy chariot cleaves the kindling air,
Thou breathe into the many-folded shell,
Loosening its mighty music; it shall be
As thunder mingled with clear echoes

Zeus with thunder intensified Prometheus’s punishment at the conclusion of Prometheus Bound. Asia’s nuptial boon is an alternative form of thunder that acts third-personally to change the world for the better. The Spirit of the Hour reports:

Soon as the sound had ceased whose thunder filled
The abysses of the sky and the wide earth,
There was a change: the impalpable thin air
And the all-circling sunlight were transformed,
As if the sense of love, dissolved in them,
Had folded itself round the spherèd world.
Willful injury no longer occurs in personal relations:
None, with firm sneer, trod out in his own heart
The sparks of love and hope, till there remained
Those bitter ashes, a soul self-consumed,
And the wretch crept a vampire among men,
Infecting all with his own hideous ill^

Prometheus Unbound reverses Victor’s creation of the monster in Frankenstein, but not Frankenstein’s communicative standpoint. In Prometheus Unbound, the necessity and practice of second-personal accountability fall away as words of Prometheus are recalled third-personally. The sound of recalling words produces third-personally a world encircled with love.

Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound has been called “one of the greatest poems in the language” and Shelley’s “major achievement.”^ It has nonetheless attracted little public attention. The world has not been encircled with love. In the U.S., an exceptionally high share of persons are literally held as prisoners. Lack of accountability for that development is in part a poetic problem of communicative standpoint.

The early nineteenth-century novel Frankenstein gave birth to one of the most well-known stories in the English-speaking world. Frankenstein in popular understanding is typically associated with a man-made monster. The novel Frankenstein originally had the added title clause or The Modern Prometheus. An under-appreciated aspect of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is third-personal communicative standpoint. The ancient Greek tragedy Prometheus Bound forcefully demanded second-personal communication with Prometheus the prisoner. Frankenstein, in contrast, communicates third-personally in strange and horrible ways. That third-personal standpoint lessens accountability for prisoners’ suffering.

Frankenstein’s literary form places readers in a third-personal standpoint at multiple levels of narration. Frankenstein is structured as letters from Robert Walton to his sister Margaret Walton Saville. In these letters, Walton asks substantially nothing of his sister, says nothing about her situation, and records nothing about her responses. Walton is “very doubtful” that he will receive letters from his sister. He nonetheless urges her to write because he might receive the letters “on some occasions when I need them most to support my spirits.”^ Walton also questions the transmission of his letters to her:

A scene has just passed of such uncommon interest, that although it is highly probable that these papers may never reach you, yet I cannot forbear recording it.^

Walton varies the form of his closing: “Your affectionate brother, / R. Walton.”; “Your affectionate brother, / Robert Walton.”; “Most affectionately yours, / R.W.”^ After three letters to his sister, Walton’s texts mix the style of letters and journal entries. He includes salutations to his sister, but no further closings. Walton’s letters present the reader with one-sided, ego-centric, weakly addressed correspondence.

Most of Frankenstein’s text is third-personal address within Walton’s correspondence to his sister. Three closed letters from Walton to his sister lead to a fourth. The fourth letter consists of three dated entries breaking into a record of Victor Frankenstein’s narrative:

I have resolved every night, when I am not engaged, to record, as nearly as possible in his own words, what he {Victor Frankenstein} has related during the day. If I should be engaged, I will at least take notes. This manuscript will doubtlessly afford you the greatest pleasure: but to me, who know him, and who hear it from his own lips, with what interest and sympathy shall I read it in some future day!^

In the Thomas copy of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley underlined “pleasure” and wrote below, “impossible.”^ Most of Frankenstein formally consists of Walton’s manuscript of Victor’s narrative. The time between night and day further separates the manuscript record from the spoken words it claims to record. Underscoring the third-personal standpoint of the manuscript in the letter, Walton emphasizes his own interest in reading it in the future.

Within Walton’s journal of Victor’s tale is Victor’s record of the creature’s tale. The latter tale is transmitted orally:

I weighed the various arguments that he had used, and determined at least to listen to his tale. … seating myself by the fire which my odious companion had lighted, he thus began his tale.^

Victor never interrupts this story-world. It takes up about 19% of the pages of the novel. However, the creature (“my odious companion”) at several points addresses Victor and hands him text:

I have copies of these letters …. Before I depart, I will give them to you, they will prove the truth of my tale; but at present, as the sun is already far declined, I shall only have time to repeat the substance of them to you. …

It was your journal of the four months that preceded my creation. You minutely described in these papers every step you took in the progress of your work; … You, doubtless, recollect these papers. Here they are.^

Victor himself subsequently neither describes these texts nor explicitly hands them on to Walton to provide a conventional documentary claim for the novel as a whole. Formally, the reader reads a letter from Walton to his sister. That letter that contains Walton’s recollection of what the creature told Victor that Victor much later told Walton. Frankenstein does not use a third-personal standpoint as a device for literary realism. It functions as a device for externalizing and circulating stories.

Other formal characteristics of Frankenstein also prioritize narrative externalization and circulation over realism. Within Walton’s recollection of Victor’s oral account are several additional letters. These letters have the formal structure of written letters: they include addresses, salutations, signatures, and dates.^ They are unrealistic representations of recollected speech. One letter, a letter from Victor’s father to Victor, refers to the letter itself and alludes to the popular practice of reading:

I wish to prepare you for the woeful news, but I know it is impossible; even now your eye skims over the page, to seek the words which are to convey to you the horrible tidings.^

Gothic and horror novels attracted readers with the allure of reading horrible events. Abstract moralizing was less attractive to readers of gothic novels. Victor’s father understood the imperatives of the novel market:

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 tranquility. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. …

But I forget that I am moralizing in the most interesting part of my tale; and your looks remind me to proceed.^

Even the creature, self-taught and three persons removed from the author of Frankenstein, expresses in his oral tale the novel-market imperative of keeping the story moving and retaining the good-will of the reader:

I now hasten to the more moving part of my story. …

I will soon explain to what these feelings tended; but allow me now to return to the cottagers^

Despite the marked boundaries between the narrations of Walton, Victor, and the creature, all three narrations have similar style, diction, and tone. Frankenstein doesn’t contain realistic writing within gothic conventions. Frankenstein formally and poetically externalizes narratives and directs attention to third-personal relations of their transmission.

Encapsulating relations of address within a text contributes to positioning it as a third-personal artifact. Writing early in 1820, Shelley imagined an “electric life” in written words:

It is impossible to read the productions of our most celebrated writers, whatever may be their system relating to thought or expression, without being startled by the electric life which there is in their words.^

Describing “electric life” in the text figures the text as a living artifact able to address any reader. That address, however, carries no moral obligation: every text doesn’t demand accountability from every person, including those who don’t read it. To create a second-personal claim, one person might direct a text to another and, with relational and institutional support, demand that she or he read it. Because colleges and universities held few persons in early nineteenth-century England, such demands had little to do with textual audiences then. Authors designed their texts knowing that persons encountered them from a third-personal standpoint in competition for attention.

Frankenstein was designed for popular circulation as an anonymous novel with textual signs of its author. Frankenstein went on sale in January, 1818. It was then sold in a portable format (three volumes, duodecimo) and at a rather high price (16s. 6d). Those features indicate that Frankenstein was commercially targeted to circulating libraries offering popular reading.^ Frankenstein’s publisher was associated with low-status works concerning “magic, the illegitimate supernatural, and horror.”^ Frankenstein was published anonymously. Anonymous publication was typical for novels of that time. In the years 1817 and 1818, about 60% of British novels were published anonymously. However, late in printing Frankenstein, Shelley asked the printer to insert a dedication: “To / WILLIAM GODWIN, / Author of Political Justice, Caleb Williams, &c. / These Volumes / Are respectfully inscribed / By / The Author.”^ William Godwin was a famous figure. Being a follower of Godwin was a significant literary, philosophical, and political marker for imagining Frankenstein’s author.

The preface to the 1818 edition of Frankenstein provided additional resources for imagining the author. The preface refers to prominent persons and literary works: Dr. Darwin, “psychological writers of Germany,” the Iliad, “tragic poetry of Greece,” “Shakespeare, in the Tempest and Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Milton, in Paradise Lost,” and the author’s friendship with a highly popular writer. The preface refers to the pleasurable society of two friends. It notes, “a tale from the pen of one of whom would be far more acceptable to the public than any thing I can ever hope to produce.” That’s plausibly Shelley referring to Byron’s popular success. “Dr. Darwin” refers to Erasmus Darwin. He was a physician, a natural philosopher, and Charles Darwin’s grandfather. In Zoönomia (1794–1796), Erasmus Darwin proposed that all living organisms evolved “from one living filament, which the great First Cause endued with animality.” That view was associated with atheism and “the free-thinking physiologists of Germany.”^. Shelley was profoundly atheistic. He was also highly sensitive to his intended audiences.^ Shelley’s preface ironically declares, “I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination.” With the phrase “serious faith,” Shelley signaled a sophisticated strategy of social deniability.

Frankenstein predominately represents suffering third-personally. While desire for personal aggrandizement apparently motivated Victor, he declares that he sought to be useful to his fellow-creatures:

“When younger,” said he, “I felt as if I were destined for some great enterprise. My feelings are profound; but I possessed a coolness of judgment that fitted me for illustrious achievements. This sentiment of the worth of my nature supported me, when others would have been oppressed; for I deemed it criminal to throw away in useless grief talent that might be useful to my fellow-creatures. … But this feeling, which supported me in the commencement of my career, now serves only to plunge me lower in the dust. All my speculations and hopes are as nothing; and, like the archangel who aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell.^

Victor’s words have a flat, third-personal tone that stretches across the semantic range from “My feelings are profound” to “I am chained in an eternal hell.” He is speaking to himself about himself. Within such third-personal self-address, recognition of second-personal communicative absence is an implicit turning point:

He drinks deep of the fountains of knowledge, and is still insatiate. The magnificence and beauty of the external world sinks profoundly into the frame of his conceptions, and affords to their modifications a variety not to be exhausted. So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous, and tranquil, and self-possessed. But the period arrives when these objects cease to suffice. His mind is at length suddenly awakened and thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself. He images to himself the Being whom he loves. … He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception. Blasted by his disappointment, he descends to an untimely grave.^

Victor, even when suffering acutely, describes himself from an external standpoint:

I was formed for peaceful happiness. During my youthful days discontent never visited my mind; and if I was ever overcome by ennui, the sight of what is beautiful in nature, or the study of what is excellent and sublime in the productions of man, could always interest my heart, and communicate elasticity to my spirits. But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt then that I should survive to exhibit, what I shall soon cease to be – a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to others, and abhorrent to myself.^

Victor, unhappy, full of self-loathing, and sensing his impending death, declares that he felt he should survive to exhibit himself as a spectacle.

While Prometheus in Prometheus Bound was fundamentally concerned with personal claims, Frankenstein; or, the modern Prometheus cares most about universal utility. Victor evaluates his own actions from a utilitarian perspective:

I created a rational creature, and was bound towards him, to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being. This was my duty; but there was another still paramount to that. My duties toward my fellow-creatures had greater claims to my attention, because they included a greater proportion of happiness or misery.^

After stating that his intimate friends are dead but their voices are with him in life or death (‘wherever I am”), Victor declares:

but one feeling in such solitude can persuade me to preserve my life. If I were engaged in any high undertaking or design, fraught with extensive utility to my fellow-creatures, then I could live to fulfill it. But such is not my destiny; I must pursue and destroy the being to whom I gave existence; then my lot on earth will be fulfilled, and I may die.^

The claim of Victor’s friends on him is subordinate to a “high undertaking … fraught with extensive utility to my fellow-creatures.” Victor imagined creating the creature to be such an undertaking:

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.^

In pursuing this undertaking, Victor remained away from his native town for two years, stopped writing to his parents, and forgot his friends. Victor’s intent in creating the creature was quite unlike that of the God of Genesis in creating Eve for Adam.

Frankenstein embraces the universal, utilitarian moral calculus of William Godwin and Jeremy Bentham. In a letter to William Godwin on Dec. 7, 1817, Shelley declared that he sought to preserve his life primarily because of the utility of his life to others:

It is not health, but life, that I should seek in Italy, & that, not for my own sake — I feel that I am capable of trampling on all such weakness — but for the sake of those to whom my life may be a source of happiness, utility, security & honour – & to some of whom my death might be all that in the reverse.^

Godwin’s book Political Justice (1793) presented the hypothetical of being able to save only one person from a burning room. One had to choose between saving a literary author about to compose a famous work, or saving one’s mother, a chambermaid. Reasoning based on social value, Godwin’s Political Justice argued one should choose to save the literary author rather than one’s mother.^ Frankenstein includes a dedication page to William Godwin.

The close personal and ideological relationship between Shelley and Jeremy Bentham has been under-appreciated in the scholarly literature on Frankenstein. Thomas Love Peacock, one of Shelley’s close friends, dined regularly with Bentham. Leigh Hunt, to whom Shelley effusively dedicated The Cenci, was close to Bentham. Bentham visited Hunt when Hunt was imprisoned. Shelley read Bentham’s Traités de legislation civile et pénale in 1814. In 1817, Shelley authored two political pamphlets under the pseudonym “The Hermit of Marlow.” That pseudonym echoed Bentham’s sobriquet, “Hermit of Westminster.”^ Shelley, like Bentham, had wide-ranging proposals for reform. Both despised Christian institutions and beliefs. Shelley explicitly compared his work A Philosophical View of Reform (1820) to Bentham’s work, probably meaning Bentham’s Plan of Parliamentary Reform. In A Philosophical View of Reform, Shelley declares approvingly:

The result of the labours of the political philosophers has been the establishment of the principle of Utility as the substance, and liberty and equality as the forms, according to which the concerns of human life ought to be administered.

Shelley singles out “Godwin and Bentham” as “political philosophers of our own age” who have built upon “great luminaries of the preceding epoch.” He specifies “Godwin and Hazlitt and Bentham and Hunt” as “those who have already a predestined existence among posterity.”^

In Frankenstein, second-personal moral claims produce only despair. Consider the creature and the blind cottager De Lacey. When the creature introduces himself to De Lacey, the creature doubles De Lacey and his family as unnamed others. The creature describes De Lacey and his family as “friends.” They are persons who “have never seen me, and know little of me” and who are “prejudiced against me.” De Lacey offers to help the creature by “undeceiving” these others. He gives a third-personal reason for his expressed willingness to act: “it will afford me true pleasure to be in any way serviceable to a human creature.” The creature responds:

Excellent man! … I trust that, by your aid, I shall not be driven from the society and sympathy of your fellow-creatures.

With the same distancing, De Lacey in turn responds:

Heaven forbid! even if you were really criminal; for that can only drive you to desperation, and not instigate you to virtue.

The contrasting references to “human creature” (De Lacey in reference to Frankenstein’s creation) and “fellow-creatures” (Frankenstein in reference to De Lacey’s family) further fracture the dialog. Hearing the blind man’s family returning spurs the creature to an urgent second-personal appeal to De Lacey:

Now is the time! – save and protect me! You and your family are the friends whom I seek. Do not you desert me in the hour of trial!^

To that appeal, De Lacey responds, “Great God! who are you?” De Lacey’s family enters and chaos ensues. The creature is violently attacked, but manages to escape. The family deserts its cottage. The creature, in extreme anguish, burns down the cottage. The dialogue between the creature and De Lacey, sustained in third-personal abstraction, collapses when it shifts to a second-personal moral claim.

Second-personal moral claims that produce despair mark other important points in Frankenstein’s plot. The creature demands of Victor:

You must create a female for me, with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being. This you alone can do; and I demand it of you as a right which you must not refuse.^

After an intense rhetorical battle, Frankenstein acquiesces. He subsequently balks. The creature, enraged, sets out on a murderous path. The creature then brings about the death of five of Victor’s intimates. Keen for revenge, Victor seeks out a criminal magistrate, recites his case against the creature, and declares:

This is the being whom I accuse, and for whose detection and punishment I call upon you to exert your whole power. It is your duty as a magistrate^

The magistrate describes the task as inauspicious. He urges Victor “to make up your mind to disappointment.” In short, the magistrate rejects Victor’s second-personal appeal. Victor leaves the magistrate’s office “angry and disturbed, and retired to meditate on some other mode of action.” Victor resolves to pursue the creature himself. He pursues the creature from Germany to the “wilds of Tartary and Russia” and then toward the Arctic. This pursuit across a wide expansion of the world recalls the gadfly chasing Io in Prometheus Bound.

The narrator Walton finds Victor on an ice-raft in the sea north of Russia. Near death, Victor implores Walton:

when I am dead, if he should appear, … swear that he shall not live – swear that he shall not triumph over my accumulated woes …. thrust your sword into his heart. I will hover near, and direct the steel aright.^

Victor dies. Then the creature appears to Walton. Walton “endeavored to recollect what were my duties with regards to this destroyer. I called on him to stay.”^ The ghost of Victor, if it had been hovering near, would have dissolved in despair at Walton’s response.

Frankenstein suspends ordinary practices of communication. In writing to his sister, Walton discusses at length a man he has met. He describes the man as an “interesting creature,” “my guest,” and “the stranger.” He declares, “I begin to love him as a brother.”^ But Walton never tells his sister the man’s name. Like Victor in Walton’s introductory letters, the creature never gains a proper name.^ Despite the creature’s humanly sympathetic personality and verbal acuity, his “hideous appearance” decisively controls any communication between him and others. The creature, however, travels across towns and countries without attracting widespread attention. Victor refuses to describe the creature to anyone for most of the story. Others show little interest in seeking out the creature whose effects they observe. All these aspects of communication in Frankenstein are extraordinary deviations from ordinary practice.

Frankenstein replaces ordinary practices of communication with representations of powerful sentiments. Upon meeting the imprisoned Justine, who has confessed to murder, Elizabeth exclaims, “why did you rob me of my last consolation?” Then an even more peculiar exchange occurs:

“And do you also believe that I am so very, very wicked? Do you also join with my enemies to crush me?” Her voice {Justine’s voice} was suffocated with sobs.

“Rise, my poor girl,” said Elizabeth, “why do you kneel, if you are innocent? I am not one of our enemies; I believed you guiltless, notwithstanding every evidence, until I heard that you had yourself declared your guilt. That report, you say, is false; and be assured, dear Justine, that nothing can shake my confidence in you for a moment, but your own confession.”

“I did confess, but I confessed a lie.”^

Elizabeth statement, “That report, you say, is false” anticipates Justine recanting her confession. The wordless converse of Elizabeth and Justine’s love for each other apparently generated Elizabeth’s foreknowledge of Justine’s statement. This pattern of communicative anticipation characterizes Prometheus Unbound. Examples in Prometheus Unbound include Panthea’s departure at the end of Act I, and the wordless converse of Asia and Panthea in Act II, Scene 1. Narrative anticipations of others’ voices also occur with respect to the texts of Rosalind’s husband’s will and Lionel’s verses in Shelley’s Rosalind and Helen.

Rather than presenting Justine’s execution, Frankenstein describes Elizabeth’s and Victor’s resulting despair. Executions drove the sale of popular print in early nineteenth-century England. Frankenstein doesn’t include an account of Justine’s execution. In a fragment probably written in 1816^, Shelley argued that public executions produced false emotions:

The spectators who feel no abhorrence at a public execution, but rather a self-applauding superiority, and a sense of gratified indignation, are surely excited to the most inauspicious emotions. The first reflection of such a one is the sense of his own internal and actual worth, as preferable to that of the victim, whom circumstances have led to destruction. The meanest wretch is impressed with a sense of his own comparative merit.^

Rather than describing Justine’s execution, Victor asserts his own, greater suffering:

I rushed out of the court in agony. The tortures of the accused did not equal mine; she was sustained by innocence, but the fangs of remorse tore my bosom, and would not forego their hold. …

I cannot pretend to describe what I then felt. I had before experienced sensations of horror; and I have endeavored to bestow them adequate expressions, but words cannot convey an idea of the heart-sickening despair that I then endured. …

The poor victim, who on the morrow was to pass the dreary boundary between life and death, felt not as I did, such deep and bitter agony. …

I was a wretch, and none ever conceived of the misery that I then endured.^

After learning that Justine is innocent of the crime for which she will be executed, Elizabeth declares:

do not mourn, my dear girl. I will every where proclaim your innocence, and force belief. Yet you must die; you, my playfellow, my companion, my more than sister. I never can survive so horrible a misfortune. …

I wish … that I were to die with you; I cannot live in this world of misery.^

Accounts of executions designed for popular circulation lack the moral force of suffering communicated second-personally. So too do Victor’s and Elizabeth’s assertions that their suffering resulting from Justine’s execution exceeded Justine’s own suffering.

Elizabeth’s response to Justine’s execution mocks popular literature of crime and punishment. Justine’s execution turns Elizabeth into a caricature of the pious mourner:

she no longer took delight in her ordinary occupations; all pleasure seemed to her sacrilege toward the dead; eternal woe and tears she then thought was the just tribute she should pay to innocence so blasted and destroyed. … She had become grave, and often conversed of the inconstancy of fortune, and the instability of human life.^

Elizabeth describes popular accounts of crime and punishment as closer to reason and less imaginatively affective than her personal experience:

When I reflect … on the miserable death of Justine Moritz, I no longer see the world and its works as they before appeared to me. Before, I looked upon the accounts of vice and injustice, that I read in books or heard from others, as tales of ancient days, or imaginary evils; at least they were remote, and more familiar to reason than to the imagination; but now misery has come home, and men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other’s blood.

Rather than emphasizing Justine’s innocence (“I will every where proclaim your innocence, and force belief”), Elizabeth’s reflections primarily concern the alleged crime and appropriate punishment:

Every body believed that poor girl to be guilty; and if she could have committed the crime for which she suffered, assuredly she would have been the most depraved of human creatures. For the sake of a few jewels, to have murdered the son of her benefactor and friend, a child whom she had nursed from its birth, and appeared to love as if it had been her own! I could not consent to the death of any human being; but certainly I should have thought such a creature unfit to remain in the society of men.

Her ensuing assertion of Justine’s innocence doesn’t even have sufficient force to stand on its own:

Yet she was innocent. I know, I feel she was innocent; you are of the same opinion, and that confirms me.

Elizabeth declares that she would prefer to be executed for murders she did not commit than to have committed murder and gone free:

William and Justine were assassinated, and the murderer escapes; he walks about the world free, and perhaps respected. But even if I were condemned to suffer on the scaffold for the same crimes, I would not change places with such a wretch.^

Elizabeth also wishes to escape from the world. She expresses this wish after abstractly evaluating retributive punishment:

Oh! how I hate its shews and mockeries! when one creature is murdered, another is immediately deprived of life in a slow torturing manner; then the executioners, their hands yet reeking with the blood of innocence, believe that they have done a great deed. They call this retribution. Hateful name! When that word is pronounced, I know greater and more horrid punishments are going to be inflicted than the gloomiest tyrant has ever invented to satiate his utmost revenge. Yet this is not consolation for you, my Justine, unless indeed that you may glory in escaping from so miserable a den. Alas! I would I were in peace with my aunt and my lovely William, escaped from a world which is hateful to me, and the visages of men which I abhor.^

Although spoken to family and friends, Elizabeth’s words are highly rhetorical and emotionally wooden. She is delivering an address to a crowd of selves.

Victor’s father similarly offers third-personal reasons to Victor for lessening his suffering. Victor’s father declares:

“Do you think, Victor,” said he, “that I do not suffer also? No one could love a child more than I loved your brother;” (tears came into his eyes as he spoke); “but is it not a duty to the survivors, that we should refrain from augmenting their unhappiness by an appearance of immoderate grief? It is also a duty owed to yourself; for excessive sorrow prevents improvement or enjoyment, or even the discharge of daily usefulness, without which no man is fit for society.^

Victor’s father’s statement, “No one could love a child more than I loved your brother,” obscures his father-son relationship with a universalized comparison of affection. His reference to “survivors” and his concern with man’s fitness for society are also components of third-personal reasoning. The father’s argument has the advantage of applying to everyone. It has the weakness of making no specific moral claim on anyone. That’s quite unlike the second-personal communication of suffering that Prometheus Bound created in fifth-century Athenian theatre.

Frankenstein is a public work written in competition for attention. Competition for attention favors a third-personal communicative standpoint. Frankenstein, along with The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound, show the literary circumstances of early-nineteenth-century England transforming Promethean imagination toward third-personal communication.