Not My Model for Prometheus

Roseanne Montillo has compiled a history of grave robber and public autopsies couple with primitive experiments with electricity to set the stage for Mary Shelley's writing of Frankenstein, making it seem like a chronicle of current (no pun intended) events.  With the title, The Lady and Her Monsters, Montillo begs the questions of who exactly were the monsters?  Certainly Mary's father was cold and aloof, but what could you expect from a proper British gentlemen whose three daughters were acting like 19th Century Hilton or Khardasian girls, throwing themselves, literally running away from home, to cavort with the rock stars of their day, Bryon and Shelley.  Ad Montillo also plays up the improprieties of the poets, lethargy, opium, sex addicts, with a fascination for the occult under the guise of advancing science.

Keeping these three threads together seems just slightly beyond Montillo's reach.  And Mary suffers the most.  More than half of the book is about grave robbing, public lynchings, and gruesome dissections.  Another quarter or so tracks the paramours and illegitimate children of the poets.  Mary comes off like Shirley MacLaine in the Rat Pack, unrecognized for her own talents.

My personal interest is in the subtitle, Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus.  First, one has to disassociate the monster from his namesake creator, Victor Frankenstein.  VF lends himself more to the myth  Prometheus stole fire from the gods, VF uses electricity as the spark of life to steal creation from God.  Does the story bear re-reading as Ali Smith would suggest, so I can re-interpret the creator and not the creature as being the protagonist?

At the end of the book, Montillo grabs the reader in her epilogue, where she wants to show her theme goes on and on, as she relates the dreadful violation or remains that happened to good old Alastair Cooke of Masterpiece Theater fame, whose bones and organs were scavenged by a disreputable undertaker and sold to hospitals for transplants.  It would be a stronger book if instead, or as well, Montillo emphasized the themes that the poets, and Mary herself, explored, on defining life and the aftereffects of dying.  On to fame.