A term you'll meet in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Mary Shelley's full title is Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus — and the subtitle is not decoration. It tells you exactly how she wants you to read Victor Frankenstein, by pointing you to one specific Greek myth before the novel has even started.
Prometheus was a Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity — the act that made human civilization possible: cooking, metalworking, warmth, light. Zeus punished him for it with one of mythology's cruelest sentences: chained to a rock, his liver eaten daily by an eagle, only to regenerate overnight so the torture could repeat forever.
Promethean, as an adjective, names the whole shape of that story: a defiant act of creative or technological power that crosses a line meant to separate humans from gods or nature, followed, inevitably, by punishment proportional to the transgression.
Victor Frankenstein steals a different kind of fire: the secret of animating dead matter, a power Shelley pointedly keeps vague — she never explains the science, because the point isn't the method but the overreach. Like Prometheus, Victor's "gift" of life where there was none is double-edged: powerful, but built without consent of the recipient and without thought for the consequences. And like Prometheus, Victor is made to suffer endlessly for it, not through divine punishment but through the creature's escalating revenge, which destroys everyone Victor loves before finally destroying him.
Mary Shelley's husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote his own major Prometheus work, Prometheus Unbound (1820), in the same period — the Romantic era's fascination with Prometheus as a rebel-hero against tyrannical authority was very much in the air the Shelleys breathed. Where Percy's Prometheus is ultimately liberated and triumphant, Mary's "modern Prometheus" is given no such redemption: Victor's fire-theft produces only ruin, which is itself a kind of quiet argument with her husband's optimism.
"Promethean" is now used well beyond Shelley's novel for any audacious, civilization-altering overreach where the power gained is real but the cost is only discovered afterward — nuclear weapons, genetic engineering, and increasingly artificial intelligence have all been called Promethean by commentators reaching for exactly the myth Shelley reached for first: extraordinary power, stolen rather than earned, that the thief cannot fully control.
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