Les Ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791) by Constantin François
Chasseboeuf, comte de Volney (1757-1820) is one of the geniunely radical documents
produced in the early years of the French Revolution, a work that severely critiques
all the reigning ideologies of the world—whether political or theological—and proposes
their abolition. That the Creature should get his principal education into the institutions
of modern culture from such a profoundly antiestablishment work must have a significant
influence on his own subsequent distaste for human culture. But there is an ironic
side to it as well, for Volney's attempt to create the blueprint for the new revolutionary
man here falls on the ears of a uniquely revolutionary and wholly dispossessed individual.
The first English translation of Les Ruines, published as The Ruins, or a Survey of
the Revolutions of Empires (London: Joseph Johnson, 1792) was done by Godwin's close
friend James Marshall. Volney himself thought the translation too tame and in 1802
oversaw a new English version published in Paris, which was reprinted frequently and
became the standard conduit for his ideas throughout the English-speaking world. Among
those strongly effected by it was Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose Queen Mab shows considerable
debt to its ideas.

That the enterprizing Safie, who has managed to travel from Constantinople to Paris,
then to central Italy, and from there to this rural section of south-central Germany,
is so horrified attests to the intensity of fear aroused by the sight of the Creature.
That she deserts the entire family at this moment of crisis testifies to a primal,
irrational sense of self-preservation that is distinctly unGodwinian and stands as
an ironic counterstatement to all the Enlightenment ideals so accentuated in the paragraphs
leading up to this denouement.

Although Mary Shelley puts no extra emphasis on this point, still it is significant
that Safie, a woman with ambition and a mind of her own, is up to this point the best-traveled
figure in the novel. On some level of consciousness Mary Shelley must be aware of
her implicit links to Cythna, the liberated feminist heroine of Percy Shelley's contemporary
Revolt of Islam, published simultaneously with Frankenstein in 1818.

The resemblance to Satan stems at first from the Creature's sense of having no place
in the universe, of being designed for alienation in the fulfillment of the Genesis.
This is, indeed, the ground upon which his colloquy with Victor Frankenstein began:
see II:2:7 and note. The Satanic prototype will extend, however, to the point of having
external not simply psychological ramifications: as Satan's only acts are reactions,
attempts to undo the perfection of God's universe, so the Creature will claim Victor's
attention by destroying what he most values.

However important language is as an instrument to knowledge of the world and the self,
its compression to coherent meaning in literature is what affords the Creature his
true education.

The Mer de Glace, the great glacier decending from Mont Blanc: a popular tourist site
in 1816, when the Shelley party visited it that July, described in A History of a
Six Weeks' Tour, Letter IV. It was taken to be the very epitome of Nature's sublime
(and perhaps antihuman) power.

This not only makes sense in the context of the De Laceys' civilized demeanor, which
for many months now has served as the Creature's behavioral model, but also specifically
in respect to the elder De Lacey's explicit understanding of the dynamics of alienation
just witnessed in the Creature's night-time rampage. The use of political terminology
reminds us of the Creature's reading matter (particularly of the education furnished
him by Volney's Ruines), but also suggests that he still thinks it possible to negotiate
a place for himself within the human polity.

The Creature refers to the numerous philosophical speculations of Werter.

The self-deceit is, indeed, painful, since in his continual awareness that there is
no reality underlying his imaginings, the Creature testifies to the split existence
in which he lives. Here, the imagination is decidedly not a boon.

Whether or not this must necessarily be the case, it is a premise of Mary Shelley's
novel that normative aesthetic categories are, indeed, the instrument for ostracizing
the Creature from all human society.