INTRODUCTION It has been commonly accepted that John Milton knows Dante Alighieri who has a great influence on Milton's epic Paradise Lost. The meaning of the Divine Comedy for Milton lies above all in Dante's Inferno and Purgatory. Scholars1 have cited numerous echoes of Dante in Milton's works and have compared these two great poets for centuries. In the 19th century Mary Shelley used a mix of images and ideas from Milton's Paradise Lost (especially book ten) in Frankenstein – the work that established Mary's fame – to forge her fictional world of desire, deterioration and desperation . Therefore this novel has been studied several times for its Miltonic echoes and influences. In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley defines the relationship between man and nature resulting from scientific and technological progress with an epic theme of man's lust, limitation, and punishment. Overall the motif of this novel is an archetypal journey driven by the forbidden fire of man's desire. Since Dante has such a great influence on Milton whose work Mary borrows from and uses as a reference source, there should be some connection between Dante and Mary. When Victor first sees the monster alive, he describes that no mortal could bear the horror of that face. A mummy borne again with animation could not be so horrible as that wretch. I had contemplated it while it was unfinished; it was ugly then, but when those muscles and joints were made capable of movement, it became something that not even Dante could have conceived.2 (51)Here appears the first direct reference to Dante in this narrative. This ugliness also explains why fire for the sake of the creature is forbidden and impossible. Also... half of the sheet... id, Dante's Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost. Comparative Literature Studies 43.1 (2006): 134-152. Network. July 23, 2009Hustis, Harriet. “Responsible creativity and modernity of Mary Shelley's Prometheus”. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 43.4 (2003): 845-858. Network. JSTOR. May 15th. 2009Lamb, John B. “Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Milton's Monster Myth.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 47.3 (1992): 303-319. Network. JSTOR. December 29, 2013Punday, Daniel. “Narrative Performance in Contemporary Monster History.” The Modern Language Review 97.4 (2002): 803-820. Network. JSTOR. December 29, 2013Sharp, Michele Turner. “If It Were a Monstrous Birth: Reading and Literary Ownership in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.” South Atlantic Review 66.4 (2001): 70-93. Print.Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus. London: Everyman's Library, 1992. Print.