The Is No God and I Hate Him: Shelly's Enlightened Freedom

“It should come as no surprise that Shelly viewed Christianity as the enemy. The more Shelley became convinced that he was in possession of the secrets of nature, the more violent became his hatred of “unnatural” conventions like the family, the state, and religion. “Yet here I swear,’ Shelly wrote in a letter, ‘and as I break my oath may Infinite Eternity blast me, here I swear that never will I forgive Christianity!... Oh how I wish I were the Antichrist, that it were mine to crush the Demon, to hurl him to his native Hell never to rise again.’ ‘Oh I burn with impatience for the moment of Xtianity’s dissolution,’ he continued, ‘it has injured me; I swear on the altar of perjured love to revenge myself on the hated cause of the effect which even now I can scarcely help deploring. –Indeed I think it is to the benefit of society to destroy the opinions which can annihilate the dearest of its ties… Let us hope that the wound which we inflict tho’ the dagger be concealed, will rankle in the heart of our adversary.’”

Michael E. Jones, Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film, pg. 32

We're Not So Very Post-Anything When You Look At It That Way

“For her part, in creating Frankenstein out of the flotsam and jetsam of her years with Shelley and the ideas he attempted to forge into a coherent revolutionary system, Mary Shelley created the myth of our epoch—an epoch roughly coterminous with the Enlightenment. Indeed, one of the indications that the epoch is with us still is the fact that the Frankenstein story continues to be retold. And it will continue to be retold as long as the Enlightenment, with its penchant for manipulating humans according to the laws of ‘nature,’ continues to hold its sway.”

Michael E. Jones, Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film, pg. 94

Hasn't Changed Much

“The iconography of horror is about as fixed as that of any genre. By comparison, Chinese literature looks positively innovative. There is Frankenstein, and there is Dracula, and then there are various combinations of the two: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Wolfman, and so on. Both icons made their appearance as literary tropes because of one event in Shelley’s life—and extended house party at the Villa Diodati on the banks of Lake Geneva during the stormy summer of 1816. Frankenstein was modeled on Shelley by Shelley’s second wife; the Vampire was modeled on fellow poet Lord Byron by Byron’s physician John Polidori, who lived vampire-like for a while on Byron’s reputation and finally himself committed suicide.”

Michael E. Jones, Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film, pg. 95