Power

                
          

Basking in the warm sunlight of Crete, Daedalus dreams of escape. Enshrouded in the nighttime darkness of a laboratory, Victor Frankenstein is fascinated by life.

                If you hadn’t gathered yet, I am a rather visual person. So, when I think of these two scenes, I see this as one enshrined in light, dreaming of darkness and one consumed by darkness, creating light. Escaping from an island is generally done in the shadows of the night, embedded in the planks of a ship or a mad swim across the sea to a distant waiting ally, and the lights are usually on when someone is born. But Daedalus escaped during high noon, and Victor brings a creature into the world in the depths of the night. The man of light is doing dark things in the brightest way possible. The man of darkness is doing acts of light in the murkiest way possible.

                And through the act of creation, they are brought closer together and farther apart at the same time, all the way to the extremes.

                This aspect of such inversely parallel storylines is particularly intriguing to me because Daedalus is portrayed as a hero, a do-gooder, for wanting to leave, and I do not blame him for selfishly escaping for his son. Oppositely, Victor does the one of the most selfless things possible in the world for himself, not for his creation, and is thus portrayed as somewhat of an antihero. This is where their paths diverge, through creation, but it is also what brings their paths together. Bad being done for good. Good being done for bad.

                Soaring through the bright blue sky together, Daedalus and Icarus escape, exhilarated. Exhausted, Victor abandons his creation to the cruelty of the world.

                Daedalus finds himself doing good for himself and his family, flying high, but everything is going too well. Victor gives too little of a care for the greatest possible thing he could have done, and everything is going very poorly.

                Icarus tumbles down under the heat of the sun. The Frankenstein family is slaughtered under the light of the moon.

                Icarus tries to do too much, to, quite literally, fly too high. The monster does not even receive the bare minimum. These are the two paths to true tragedy: the overly confident and vengeful neglected, and the completely opposite actions of Daedalus and Victor foster them.

                Daedalus survives with the guilt. Victor dies in the cold.

                The ending of each intrigues me the most. Both outcomes carry the weight of tragedy, but Daedalus’ survival is the most significant difference structurally between the two tales. He lives on with the memory of his failed past instead of dying to it. The sun still beats upon his body. Victor is left a corpse of the ground, no one to remember him.

                This comparison of life or death starkly reveals the differences in internal motivations between the two. Without his son, Daedalus still sees value in pursuing his craft to improve the world for others selflessly. Without his family, Victor gives up and chases the monster into the darkness, giving himself up and giving up on himself. Daedalus could’ve let himself drown in the sea, but he didn’t. Thus, Daedalus’ brightness is evident in direct contrast to the shadow of Victor.

                Daedalus lived a complete life. Victor was just a specter.

                Generally, Victor and his monster are considered to parallel each other. The monster exists as the dark recesses of Victor’s conscious, his “Jungian shadow” (Telgen) as it is called by Carl Jung, funnily enough, and, for the monster, Victor represents his appearance holding him back from the life he dreams of living. Victor’s wish “to ignore his creature parallels his desire to disregard the darkest part of himself” (Telgen). But through that ignorance that darkness cannot be purged, and thus it takes him over, as shown through the monster’s vengeance. We cannot run away from our shadows because we create them ourselves. The monster pleaded with Victor to allow him to live his life to its fullest, but Victor refused, inevitably. Just as the monster’s appearance is unchangeable, Victor’s hatred of his own darkness remains hard and cold. The desire to truly live thus spirals the monster into a murderous rage.

                On the other hand, Daedalus and Icarus are opposites in action, but the cause is not contempt but quite the opposite. Daedalus is the cautious caring parent that does everything right, that tries to protect his child until the end: “Daedalus warns Icarus not to fly too close to the sun or the ocean” (Dorsch). Icarus is the child that wants too much and risks it all because his father is always there to catch him. Daedalus doesn’t wish to restrain him, and, thus, he flies too high.

                Daedalus cared too much and Victor too little.

                Both routes were opposite, but both led to the same outcome.

    Just as Daedalus crafted wings fine enough to fly across the sky, Victor Frankenstein brought a pile of flesh to life, a pair of miracles, successes, but, in the end, devastation was the only result. The cost was far too high.

    Victor Frankenstein was an intellectual monster, a soul committed to scientific study, and that science led to emotion, the monster.

    Daedalus was an emotional flier, a heart committed to his son, and that emotion led to scientific creation, the wings.

                Frankenstein hated the monster too much. The monster despised Frankenstein too much. Too much hate murders the Frankenstein family.

    Daedalus trusted Icarus too much. Icarus trusted the wings too much. Too much trust brings him crashing down.

    Daedalus and Victor act inversely all throughout their respective stories. Daedalus tries to do his best for Icarus. Victor cares not for the monster. But in the end tragedy destroyed both. The characters were polar extremes, but the outcomes of their stories were the same.

    Equivalently, in the long term, whether a story plunges into happiness or dives into depression, whether the intentions of any particular character are innocent or malicious, it truly does not matter to the audience as long as it flies to either extreme. As Frankenstein and Icarus reveal through their lasting individual impacts made upon history, certain, more surface level aspects of a story are more important to the lasting power of a tale than its more complex themes. Whether this be through a tragic event or an outbreak of euphoria, it does not matter just so long as they are strummed or intrigued.

                The duality of such tales with such different paths leading to the same outcome seems to indicate something about how people accept their stories. For society en masse, certain narrative paths have been shown to be the best ways to engage an audience; after all, the only reason that stories exist at all is to entertain those perceiving them.

                It is all about the mental and emotional stimulation provided. There is no point to living besides the colors you see and things you experience, so that is what great tales try to manipulate in order to drag the populous in. A story cannot be a well-described, dull lump of stone, but, on the other hand, it cannot be an enticing, see-through sheet of glass. It must be visually appealing and mentally enthralling.

                Both of these pieces satisfy each of those characteristics, painting streaks of night and sunlight across the mind that endure, cutting lasting images into the brain. The real question is why, for it certainly isn’t embedded in the natures of the characters that form their stories’ foundations.

    Direct parallels exist between the darkness that enchants Frankenstein’s story and the darkness that coats Mary Shelley’s life. Just as the Frankenstein family is dismembered by the monster, Shelley’s family shatters. Beginning with the suicides of two of her sisters and ending with the deaths of two of her three children as well as her husband, the Shelley family is destroyed, and Mary is left to live out her days with her one remaining son.

               Just as her history is often ignored, the true story of Frankenstein is often neglected by those discussing it. Instead, it is remembered by the monster, often called just Frankenstein, resurrected by lightning in the pitch of night. The true tragedy is left untouched. It is a cultural centerpiece far deeper than its commonly known identity, which allows those who are curious to fall into its world, but those who care not about depth to walk by unscathed.

                The fall of Icarus, on the other hand, is an ancient tale, a fundamental building block of storytelling history, built upon for millennia. A thin structure that has been left to be fleshed out by the masses. It has been portrayed in a variety of manners, through painting, poems, and sculpture, but its thematic heart remains constant throughout them all; the carelessness of a youth and the accompanying fear of his father, or any parent at that. Most everyone can relate to such a situation and its simplistic complexity, and that is what drags everyone in. They are aware of the complicated dynamics between a protective parent and a child desiring to experience the world to its fullest, and so they are ensnared in the pondering nature of the tale, the “What if I’d done that differently?” feeling that everyone knows.

            In that way, Icarus’ story has left its imprint in the minds of many throughout the ages as it has been twisted around, Horace, a Roman poet, being one of the ponderers. He applies its messages to the insecurity of his own life; “… he could never be quite certain whether he was soaring across the Roman Empire or plummeting into the Adriatic Sea” (Hornbeck). He feels as if he can relate to a child being let free to explore his surroundings for the first time and the father begging his son to stay close at the same time. Everyone has a bit of each inside of them, and that is what Icarus tries to tease out of everyone, that conundrum. For everyone is both parts of the story, the exploratory and the cautious, the falling and the fearful. 

           Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, quite literally, paints “the accessory nature of Icarus” (Allen) within the greater functions of the world. Even the most important thing to Daedalus in his entire existence plays but a small role in the world’s activities around him. This is contradictory to the story’s historical influence, though, because through the years the questions it has brought up, the conversations it has started, the relationships it has ignited, are greater than any physical moment. That is what makes its story powerful, the ability to make such an insignificant blip in time as meaningful as any story ever created. It’s not powerful because of the literal impact of its occurrence but because of the psychological impact it inspires. The most influential moments are often not the grandest but the most personal. Everyone has feelings. Everyone has thoughts. Everyone has ideas. Great art is great, not because of its scale, but because it makes people tap into those emotions. 

            Feeling is easily gleaned through the recognizable. People tend to latch on to the features of a story that they feel the most comfortable with. Whether that be the heartfelt connection between parent and child or a hodgepodge monster made from discarded body parts “that casual readers and filmgoers refer to … as Frankenstein” (Bomarito and Whitaker), it doesn’t matter. People desire a life in which they feel safe, and that yearning goes all the way down into the media that people consume. They want something that they think is cool and has drama. They want wings soaring through the air, a creature animated by lightning. They want a boy crashing down from the sky, a family slaughtered. The more intricate, detailed aspects rarely matter.

When people talk about Icarus’s fall and of the story of Frankenstein, the first thing to come to mind isn’t the complicated, moralistic issues that they discuss or the inverse paths they take to debate them, but, instead, the sensational and relatable facets take center stage. The intricacies of their light and dark hearts don’t matter so much anymore.

             Through the cultural impact of “Icarus” and Frankenstein, it is revealed that the internal and external struggles portrayed in a story are not as important to the audience as the motifs and emotional intensity, showing that people glance over the true meaning of things in favor of a more comfortable view of the world. In the long run, we only recall those things that are great successes or great failures, upheavals of great happiness or eruptions of great tragedy because they make the most sense to us, but, in order to obtain a more complete view of the world, sometimes we need to look at things a bit differently, think a bit more.

Works Cited

Allen, Elizabeth. "The Ghost of Icarus." Southerly, vol. 68, no. 1, Spring 2008, p. 176+. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A182663271                    /LitRC?u=lom_macombtgps&sid=LitRC&xid=69a39665. Accessed 8 Jan. 2021.

"Frankenstein." Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, edited by Jessica Bomarito and Russel Whitaker, vol. 170, Gale, 2006. Gale Literature Resource Center,                 link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1410001725/LitRC?u=lom_macombtgps&sid=LitRC&xid=73b47511. Accessed 8 Jan. 2021.

"Frankenstein." Novels for Students, edited by Diane Telgen, vol. 1, Gale, 1997, pp. 180-202. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX2591400019                                       /GVRL?u=lom_troyhs&sid=GVRL&xid=157fab0d. Accessed 8 Jan. 2021.

Hornbeck, Cynthia. "Caelum Ipsum Petimus: Daedalus and Icarus in Horace's Odes.'" The Classical Journal, vol. 109, no. 2, Dec. 2013, p. 147+. Gale Literature                 Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A353692718/LitRC?u=lom_macombtgps&sid=LitRC&xid=969a4e4f. Accessed 8 Jan. 2021.

"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." Poetry for Students, edited by Kristen A. Dorsch, vol. 60, Gale, 2019, pp. 77-92. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps                                /doc/CX3670300016/GVRL?u=lom_troyhs&sid=GVRL&xid=16886504. Accessed 12 Jan. 2021.