Mary Shelley herself was the first to point to her fortuitous immersion in the literary and scientific revolutions of her day as the source of her novel Frankenstein. Her extreme youth, as well as her sex, have contributed to the generally held opinion that she was not so much an author in her own right as a transparent medium through which passed the ideas of those around her. "All Mrs. Shelley did," writes Mario Pm, "was to provide a passive reflection of some of the wild fantasies which were living in the air about her." Passive reflections, however, do not produce original works of literature, and Frankenstein, if not a great novel, was unquestionably an original one. The major Romantic and minor Gothic tradition to which it should have belonged was to the literature of the overreacher: the superman who breaks through normal human limitations to defy the rules of society and infringe upon the realm of God. In the Faust story, hypertrophy of the individual will is symbolized by a pact with the devil. Byron's and Balzac's heroes; the Wandering Jew; the chained and unchained Prometheus: all are overreachers, all are punished by their own excesses-by a surfeit of sensation, of experience, of knowledge and, most typically, by the doom of eternal life. But Mary Shelley's overreacher is different. Frankenstein's exploration of the forbidden boundaries of human science does not cause the prolongation and extension of his own life, but the creation of a new one. He defies mortality not by living forever, but by giving birth.