A Myth for Modernity and a Revolutionary Mother.

Mary Wollstonecroft (Mother of Mary Shelley)

It is almost impossible to truly define satisfactorily what a myth actually is. There is no unified theory of myth just as there is no unified theory of particle physics and the universe. The attempt to marry quantum mechanics with the standard theory of the universe is proving tortuous and complicated. However, one of the fundamental differences between myth and science is that the term mythos lacks an explicit distinction between false or true narratives. In science an event is either true or not true but in myth this isn’t even relevant. In colloquial speech the term is commonly used to denote a false narrative.

For Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism writes: ‘‘myth is an art of implicit metaphorical identity’’ (136) and distinguishes “three organizations of myth and archetypal symbols in literature”: the undisplaced myth of two worlds of gods and demons represented by the apocalyptic and the demonic respectively; romance, or “implicit mythical patterns in a world more closely associated with human experience”; and realism, “to throw the emphasis on content and representation rather than on the shape of the story” (139–40). The Promethean figure shows interesting mythological elements from all three ‘organizations’: the ritual of sacrifice, the origin of fire and the divine/heroic trickster but of course as I have tried to show it represents so much more…