What role does Asia play in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound?
Or
Discuss the relationship between Prometheus and Asia in
Prometheus Unbound.
Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, a
Lyrical drama in four acts, dramatizes the defeat of evil by the spirit of life.
Prometheus here represents human reason at its noblest and Asia love. When love
and reason are united, evil is doomed. In love Shelley finds much than a power
which sets reason to work:
“Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance and Change? To these
All things are subject but
eternal love”
In the ancient myth, Asia is a
daughter of Ocean but here she is the incarnation of love. Her love for Prometheus
begins with a dream of him and ends in a splendid scene in which she sings of
the power which carries off to the music of unseen spirits. And this is the
signal and the occasion for the release of the forces which are to dethrone
evil. Prometheus Unbound, thus, veers round the theme of love and it is by
his love for Asia that Prometheus shows he is completely fit to be freed, that
he has positive virtues as well as the stoic qualities which have enabled him
to survive torture and temptation.
The dramatic element in Prometheus
Unbound consists in the awful mythological story of the conflict between
Jupiter and Prometheus of which centuries ago Aeschylus produced the dramatic
version Prometheus Bound. Prometheus is suffering nailed to the rock,
his heart being eaten up by an eagle. The furies torture him. Mercury comes for
conciliation which Prometheus rejects. The main action, however, comes in the
last part of act ii and act iii of the play when Asia penetrates into the den
of Demogorgon followed by the fall of Jupiter with happiness restored
everywhere.
