RACE/POLITICS—intersection/conflation of race, politics, or imperialism with monsters; fear of class; fear of the mob; Black Frankenstein: American black bodies conflated with the Creature.
To begin, the Creature’s outcast nature is notably “unclassed” in relation to Victor Frankenstein’s clear upper class status. Frankenstein is a novel born of a Revolutionary Age, especially the reverberations of the French Revolution of 1789, which centers on matters of class conflict. One of the first larger cultural uses of Mary Shelley’s Creature is in representations, in both contemporary illustration and political speech, of the fear of mobs of working class Irish, a connection at once of class and race. Readings that locate part of the Creature’s power in its representation of the laboring lower classes, immigrants, and racial others emerging in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, or in the movement of capital around the world in Imperalism, or in serious questions about the “abjection” of certain subjectivities in our economic and political systems as “inhuman,” gains power from Mary Shelley’s own radical political leanings; she supports revolutionary organizations, like the Carbonari, a group fighting for Italian Independence, even late in her life, long after some critics have claimed a more conservative turn in her thinking.
The development of the robot in later sf out of Frankenstein’s Creature also supports readings of the Creature as embodying questions of political outcasts from the new order. As the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction explains:
The word “robot” first appeared in Karel Capek’s play R.U.R. (1920; trans 1923), and is derived from the Czech robota (statute labour), making it clear that Čapek intended his drama to comment on Slavery (see Imperialism), class, race (see Race in SF), and social revolution.
The robot is a creature whose marginal status marks it as of the disenfranchised lower class in capitalist society, and as racially oppressed in a white dominant society. Stories with built or made creatures who “awaken” to oppression and embody class struggle draw on Mary Shelley’s Creature as a precursor text concerned with society’s attempts to demonize and control lower class bodies.
Recent, modern influential readings have developed the argument that Frankenstein enables a postcolonial critique of the “othering” of Imperialism and its racialized fear of the foreign. Key texts include Gaytri Spivak’s “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985) and Anne Mellor’s “Frankenstein, Racial Science, and the Yellow Peril (2001). These readings bring together Shelley’s work, its history, and readings of power, particularly through the lens of race. As we move forward in time from Shelley’s era, stories continue to use monstrousness to critique the imperial and postcolonial conditions of our world, to embody the fear of retribution by “others” who have been cast aside, and to give an impossible voice to the monstrous and abject subaltern.
“Black Frankenstein” is a new term offered by Elizabeth Young in Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor (2007) that crystallizes and describes the use of the Creature in complex ways to represent slavery, black bodies, violence against people of color, and more in American society and culture. Her powerful readings offer Frankenstein as an important precursor text to be recast for new purposes in the emergence of Afrofuturism and other futurities imagined by people of color. Just as women writing in genre fiction find a key ancestor in Mary Shelley, so her text and its non-white Creature offer a point of contact for the embodiment and voicing of otherized bodies. The Creature’s longing to be accepted as “human” resonates in matters of race. In fact, it feels all too relevant today.
References:
For Spivak’s essay: http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/spivak.html
See Mellor’s essay: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08905490108583531?journalCode=gncc20
See also: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/race_in_sf
See also the SF Encyclopedia entry for Afrofuturism: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/afrofuturism