The Modern Prometheus Unbound

Class, Race, Science, and the Afterlives of Frankenstein in Culture

A Cultural Studies Reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Assignment | Based on Prof. Dilip Barad's ResearchGate Article: Thinking Activity: A Cultural Studies Approach to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Introduction: Frankenstein Beyond the Monster

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) is habitually shelved as an origin point of Gothic horror or, more loosely, of science fiction. Both classifications are accurate, and both are insufficient. To read the novel only as a tale of a mad scientist and his monster is to mistake its surface for its substance. Frankenstein is, before anything else, a cultural text: a document produced at the intersection of Enlightenment rationalism, Romantic imagination, revolutionary politics, and an emergent industrial-scientific modernity, and it has continued to accumulate cultural meaning for two centuries after its composition.

Shelley wrote the novel in 1816, in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, in a household saturated with radical political theory. Her father, William Godwin, had argued in Political Justice (1793) that social institutions, not innate depravity, produced human vice; her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had extended Enlightenment rights-talk to women in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792); and Thomas Paine's Rights of Man circulated as a foundational text of the same intellectual milieu. Percy Shelley's own radicalism and the wider Romantic suspicion of unchecked rationalism form the immediate context in which the Creature is born. A cultural-studies approach does not treat this context as background decoration; it treats the novel as a site where these ideological currents collide, are dramatised, and are only partially resolved.

What follows is not a scene-by-scene summary, nor a mechanical run through a set of worksheet questions. It is a single, cumulative argument: that Frankenstein stages, and never fully settles, three linked anxieties of modernity the fear of the oppressed mass, the fear of the racialised or colonised Other, and the fear of a science that outpaces the ethics meant to govern it and that this triple anxiety is precisely what has allowed the novel's central figures to be endlessly repurposed, or 'reanimated,' across two centuries of popular culture. Each section moves through the same analytical arc: from a textual detail in Shelley's novel, to its nineteenth-century historical context, to the cultural meaning that context generates, to the later theoretical lens through which that meaning becomes newly legible, and finally to its bearing on the present.

I. Frankenstein and the Revolutionary Imagination

Shelley's generation inherited the optimism and the trauma of the French Revolution in roughly equal measure. The Revolution had promised the overthrow of inherited privilege in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity; it had also produced the Terror, and in England it produced, among conservative commentators, an enduring association between the language of rights and the spectre of mob violence. Frankenstein was composed in this climate of retrospective anxiety, only a year before the Peterloo Massacre (1819), when a peaceful crowd demanding parliamentary reform was cut down by cavalry in Manchester an event that confirmed, for radicals like the Shelleys, that the state itself could be monstrous in its violence toward the dispossessed.

Victor Frankenstein's project of assembling and animating a being from dead matter can be read, at this first level, as a version of the revolutionary fantasy of creating a new social order from the fragments of the old. Victor speaks the language of the Enlightenment scientist-as-liberator: he dreams that 'a new species would bless me as its creator and source' and imagines grateful subjects owing their existence to his intellect. The rhetoric is political as much as scientific the vocabulary of founding, of origin, of a new order brought into being by will and reason. That the created being turns from a benign dependent into an agent of violent retribution against his creator's family replays, in miniature, the conservative nightmare of revolution: an oppressed and initially reasonable populace, denied recognition and justice, that eventually turns to terror. The novel does not simply endorse this conservative reading, however; it also asks, with real discomfort, whether the violence of the created being is a natural depravity or a manufactured consequence of Victor's abandonment. That ambivalence sympathy for the revolutionary subject shadowed by fear of what an unrecognised populace might become is the interpretive knot the rest of this essay continues to work through.

II. The Creature as the Oppressed Other

Before the Creature can be read specifically as proletarian or specifically as racialised, it is worth naming the structure both readings share: Otherness is not a property the Creature possesses but a relation imposed upon him. He is born (the novel insists on birth imagery Victor's laboratory is explicitly a place of labour and delivery) without a name, without kin, without language, and without any social position from which to claim recognition. Every character who encounters Victor first among them responds to his appearance before any encounter with his character, and that visual judgment forecloses the possibility of relationship. The Creature's own account of his development, given at length to Walton and to Victor in the novel's central chapters, is the text's most radical formal choice: it grants full interiority and eloquence to the very figure that every other character perceives as inarticulate horror. The gap between what the Creature is (self-aware, articulate, initially benevolent) and what he is taken to be (monstrous, dangerous, without moral status) is the engine of the novel's two great cultural-studies readings class and race which the next two sections take up in turn, each on its own terms, without collapsing one into the other.

"I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded."

— The Creature, Frankenstein, Vol. II, Ch. II

III. Class, Labour, Alienation and the Proletarian Creature

A cultural-materialist reading of Frankenstein does not require anachronistically calling the Creature 'the proletariat' a term and a fully theorised class analysis that postdate the novel by decades (Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto appeared in 1848, three decades after Frankenstein). What the novel does anticipate, through the vocabulary available to Shelley's own moment of Godwinian radicalism, is the structural argument that later Marxist criticism would formalise: that a being's character is shaped by material conditions of labour, education, and social recognition rather than by an innate essence. The Creature has no property, no wage, no family name, no legal standing, and no access to the institutions school, church, guild, parish that structure belonging in early nineteenth-century society. His only education comes from clandestine observation of the De Lacey family and from books he happens upon in the forest; his only labour is performed in secret and unpaid, chopping wood for a family that does not know he exists. He is, in the most literal sense, outside the economy of recognition and reciprocity that constitutes civil society.

The paradox the worksheet asks us to hold is exactly this: the Creature begins, by his own testimony, as tender-hearted and generous he feels 'a strange multiplicity of sensations' at the sight of the moon, weeps at Safie's music, and secretly gathers firewood for a family he loves without their knowledge. His transformation into a vindictive, murderous figure occurs only after repeated, violent rejections: the De Laceys flee in horror when he finally reveals himself; a father shoots him after he saves a drowning child; Victor himself abandons him at the moment of his 'birth.' Read through a cultural-materialist lens, this is not proof of innate monstrosity but a demonstration of how systematic exclusion from social, economic, and educational goods can turn a sympathetic subject toward violence the novel dramatises alienation in something close to its later theoretical sense, a being estranged from his own labour, his own image, and any community that would confirm his humanity.

Yet the reading has real limits, and a postgraduate argument should name them rather than smooth them over. Unlike a class position, the Creature's exclusion is grounded first in his singular, monstrous physical difference rather than in a shared economic role; he has no class of fellow-sufferers, no possibility of collective action, and his violence is aimed at Victor's private family rather than at any social structure. The novel's ideological work is therefore double-edged: it generates real sympathy for a rejected, labouring, uneducated outsider, while simultaneously licensing fear of that outsider once he acquires eloquence, strength, and the capacity for organised revenge precisely the fear that a post-Revolutionary, pre-Reform-Act English readership held toward the labouring poor. Frankenstein does not resolve this tension; it holds sympathy and dread in the same sentence, which is arguably its most historically honest achievement.

IV. Race, Imperialism and the Construction of the Other

A second, distinct reading follows the worksheet's phrase 'a race of devils' into the vocabulary of colonial discourse. It is important to be historically precise here: Shelley was not writing a postcolonial novel, and nineteenth-century race science as a formal discourse was still consolidating in her lifetime. What the novel offers is not a deliberate allegory of empire but a set of tropes physical monstrosity read as moral danger, the desire to control and 'civilise' a created being, the rhetoric of a 'race' that must be prevented from multiplying that later postcolonial theory allows us to recognise and interrogate. The distinction matters: we are not claiming Shelley anticipated Edward Said or Frantz Fanon, but that their frameworks illuminate ideological structures already latent in her text.

Victor's language about the Creature repeatedly borrows the vocabulary of imperial anxiety. When the Creature demands a female companion, Victor's refusal is justified by the fear of a 'race of devils' propagating themselves and threatening 'the very existence of the species' language structurally identical to colonial fears of racial proliferation and 'contamination.' Victor casts himself as the sole authority entitled to decide whether an entire population may exist, a God-like and also strikingly administrative power over reproduction and territory that echoes the coloniser's assumed right to govern, contain, or exterminate a subject population framed as an existential threat.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's influential essay 'Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism' (1985), though focused on Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and Frankenstein together, offers a directly relevant framework: Spivak argues that the production of the European (or European-derived) individual as a fully human subject often depends on the simultaneous production of a non-European or non-normative other who must be othered, silenced, or eliminated to secure that subjecthood. Applied to Frankenstein, Victor's selfhood as scientist-creator is constituted precisely through his disavowal of the being he has made; his humanity is purchased at the price of the Creature's exclusion from the human community. The Creature's own eloquent, Miltonic self-narration he reads Paradise Lost and identifies alternately with Adam and with Satan can be read as the colonised subject's appropriation of the coloniser's own literary and moral vocabulary in order to indict him, a gesture postcolonial theory recognises as central to anti-colonial writing back.

The novel does not stabilise a single position on this axis. It grants the Creature a voice sophisticated enough to expose Victor's hypocrisy, which works against any simple reproduction of colonial ideology; but it also allows the narrative to end with the Creature's self-immolation in the Arctic wastes, disappearing from the very geography the polar frontier that nineteenth-century imperial exploration was in the process of charting and claiming. The Other is given voice and sympathy, and is still, finally, removed from the stage. Frankenstein, in other words, both stages a critique of domination and reproduces some of its assumptions, which is exactly the kind of contradiction a cultural-studies reading is equipped to hold without forcing a resolution.

"You are my creator, but I am your master; obey!"

— The Creature to Victor, Frankenstein, Vol. II, Ch. IX

V. Scientific Modernity: From Natural Philosophy to Cyborg

Victor Frankenstein is not, in the novel's own terms, a scientist in the modern disciplinary sense; he is a student of 'natural philosophy,' trained partly on the outdated alchemical writings of Paracelsus and Agrippa before he encounters the more rigorous experimental chemistry of his university professors. This transitional intellectual position matters: Shelley is writing at the historical hinge between an older, quasi-magical natural philosophy that sought to master nature's secrets for personal transcendence, and an emerging modern science organised around institutions, peer verification, and (at least in principle) ethical accountability. Victor's tragedy is that he retains the alchemist's private, secretive, glory-seeking relationship to knowledge; he works alone, at night, in isolation from his family, his university, and any community of practice that might have checked his ambition or shared responsibility for its consequences.

This is why the most productive way to read Victor's experiment is not as an example of simply 'bad science' but as a cultural fantasy about crossing boundaries that a society has designated as sacred: the boundary between life and death, between the natural and the manufactured, between reproduction and fabrication. Victor does not simply build a machine; he attempts to bypass sexual and maternal reproduction altogether, assembling a being from corpse-matter through solitary, unshared labour. Anne K. Mellor and other critics have long noted the novel's anxious relationship to female reproductive power Victor's creation scene is haunted by imagery of pregnancy and birth performed by a man, alone, outside of any domestic or maternal structure, and this usurpation is punished, in the novel's moral economy, by the death of every woman connected to Victor's own family.

Read forward rather than backward, Frankenstein becomes a durable cultural template for every subsequent controversy about a technology that claims to improve on, replace, or bypass 'natural' processes of generation: in vitro fertilisation, cloning (Dolly the sheep, 1996, was immediately covered by journalists using Frankenstein headlines), genetic modification of crops and embryos, and today the possibility of artificial general intelligence. The important scholarly caution here one this essay repeats deliberately is that Shelley did not 'predict' any of these technologies. What she did was dramatise, with unusual precision, a structural problem that each new technology reproduces: the gap between what becomes technically possible and the ethical, social, and emotional infrastructure required to take responsibility for it. Victor's crime, in the text's own terms, is not that he created life but that he refused to take responsibility for what he created; he flees the laboratory in disgust at the very moment his creature opens its eyes. The recurring cultural question Frankenstein bequeaths to every later debate about biotechnology is precisely this one: what happens when capability outruns responsibility?

VI. The Frankenpheme: Frankenstein in Popular Culture

Timothy Morton, in his Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (2002), coins the term 'Frankenpheme' to describe the fragments of Shelley's novel the stitched body, the lightning-animated laboratory, the pursuing mob with torches, the cry of 'it's alive' that circulate independently of the novel itself, reproduced and recombined across journalism, political cartooning, advertising, and film long after most of their users have stopped reading, or ever read, the source text. A newspaper headline about 'Frankenfoods' (genetically modified crops) or a political cartoon depicting a 'Frankenstein economy' assembled from incompatible policies both draw on the Frankenpheme without any direct textual reference; the name itself has become a portable cultural shorthand for the fear that a created thing might outgrow and destroy its creator.

This is the cultural-studies point worth dwelling on: the Frankenpheme's power lies precisely in its detachability from Shelley's own carefully ambivalent narrative. The novel's Creature is eloquent, philosophically serious, and initially benevolent; the Frankenpheme that circulates in popular culture is almost always mute, purely physical, and immediately threatening. Popular culture has not so much adapted Frankenstein as cannibalised it, retaining the emotionally efficient image (the monstrous created body) while discarding the emotionally and intellectually demanding content (the monster's own voice, and the argument that his creator is morally responsible for him). Each of the sections that follow examines a further stage of this process.

VII. Adaptation, Cinema and the Transformation of Shelley's Message

James Whale's Frankenstein (1931), the film most responsible for the Creature's enduring cultural image, makes the transformation described above concrete. Boris Karloff's Creature does not speak; he communicates through inarticulate sound and expressive movement, and the film's most famous line 'It's alive!' belongs to Henry Frankenstein, not to the being he has made. The screenplay, adapted through a stage play by Peggy Webling rather than directly from Shelley's text, relocates the story's moral centre from the Creature's own testimony (the structural heart of the novel) to Victor's laboratory spectacle. What is gained is unforgettable visual iconography the flat-topped head, the neck bolts, the looming, wordless body and what is lost is the epistolary, philosophically dense frame narrative through which Shelley had insisted that the reader hear the Creature indict his creator in his own words.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935) partially restores interiority Karloff's Creature speaks haltingly, learns the words 'friend' and 'alone,' and is granted a longing for companionship that echoes the novel's central demand for a mate while Young Frankenstein (1974) turns the entire Frankenpheme toward parody, using the audience's over-familiarity with the visual iconography established in 1931 to generate comedy rather than dread; the film assumes its audience already knows the Frankenpheme well enough that its inversions (a Creature who tap-dances, a scientist embarrassed by his own name) register as jokes. Blade Runner (1982), finally, displaces the Frankenstein plot onto a science-fiction register: the Tyrell Corporation manufactures replicants as a corporate, mass-produced act of creation rather than a solitary experiment, and it is the replicant Roy Batty, not any human character, who is granted the novel's kind of eloquence at the moment of his death his monologue about memories 'lost in time, like tears in rain' functions as a late-twentieth-century echo of the Creature's own grief at being unloved and unacknowledged by his maker.

Across these adaptations a consistent pattern emerges, and naming it is the real analytical payoff of this section: each period remakes Frankenstein according to its own dominant technological fear. The 1930s films register anxieties about electricity, galvanism, and the newly industrialised body; the 1970s parody signals a culture confident enough in its familiarity with the myth to laugh at it; and Blade Runner relocates the anxiety to corporate biotechnology and the ethics of manufactured personhood, anticipating, with real prescience, contemporary debates about artificial intelligence and its moral status. What consistently disappears across adaptation, however, is Shelley's most radical formal choice: full narrative authority granted to the created being replaced by spectacle, action, and, in comic registers, laughter that manages the very anxiety the original novel refused to resolve.

Work / Year	Medium	Creature's Voice	Victor's Complexity	Cultural Anxiety Foregrounded
Novel (1818)	Epistolary fiction	Eloquent, philosophical, self-narrating	Full — ambition, guilt, self-justification	Revolution, Romantic science, social exclusion
Frankenstein, dir. James Whale (1931)	Sound film	Silenced — grunts only, no interiority	Reduced to obsessive scientist archetype	Industrial-age fear of uncontrolled technology
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)	Sound film	Partially restored — halting speech, longing for companionship	Slightly expanded — guilt, coercion by Pretorius	Domesticity, companionship, the 'unnatural' family
Young Frankenstein (1974)	Parody film	Comic, exaggerated, later articulate	Satirised — vanity and inherited ambition mocked	Anxiety defused through laughter; genre self-awareness
Blade Runner (1982)	Science-fiction film	Displaced onto replicants (Roy Batty's own eloquence)	Split between Tyrell (creator) and Deckard (hunter)	Corporate biotechnology, artificial personhood, mortality

VIII. Education, Language and the Making of the Self

The Creature's education, narrated in Volume II of the novel, is the text's most sustained meditation on the relationship between literacy and selfhood. Hidden in a hovel adjoining the De Lacey cottage, he learns language by listening to the family teach Safie, the Arabian refugee, to speak and read French a scene that quietly links his own acquisition of language to another outsider's, both of them learning the tongue of a community that will ultimately exclude them. His formal education comes from three books he discovers in the forest: Milton's Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, and Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. Each shapes him differently Plutarch gives him a vocabulary of civic virtue and public greatness; Werther gives him a vocabulary of romantic sensibility and despair; and Paradise Lost, read by the Creature (crucially) as historical truth rather than fiction, gives him a theological framework in which to understand his own origin.

The famous line 'I ought to be thy Adam,' the Creature tells Victor, 'but I am rather the fallen angel' captures the novel's central irony about education: literacy does not simply liberate the Creature into social belonging; it gives him the conceptual and rhetorical tools to fully understand the scale of his exclusion. Before he can read, he is merely unhoused and hungry; after he can read Milton, he possesses a cosmology in which his creator's abandonment is equivalent to a divine injustice, and his own violence can be narrated, self-consciously, as a Satanic rebellion against an unjust god. Knowledge, in other words, does not resolve alienation; it articulates and intensifies it. This is the paradox the worksheet specifically asks students to hold: education both dignifies the Creature his prose is more eloquent than Victor's own and deepens his suffering, since he now measures his condition against an ideal of belonging he can name but never reach.

The cultural-studies stakes of this section extend beyond the Creature's individual case. Shelley's novel quietly poses the question of who is permitted to participate in a culture's literary and intellectual inheritance: the Creature acquires Milton and Plutarch entirely outside any institution, by theft and accident, and is denied the ordinary social credentialing (schooling, family, community) that would let him deploy that knowledge without being seen as a monstrous imposter. His self-education thus dramatises, in an extreme and gothic form, a question central to any theory of cultural capital: literacy and learning do not automatically confer social belonging if the structures of recognition name, family, appearance, social position remain closed to the learner.

IX. Frankenstein in the Age of AI and Biotechnology

It has become almost a journalistic reflex to invoke Frankenstein whenever a new technology raises questions of control, consciousness, or moral status — large language models are periodically described in the press as having been given a 'Frankenstein moment,' gene-edited organisms are called 'Frankenfoods,' and debates about CRISPR-edited human embryos regularly cite Shelley by name. The temptation this essay has resisted throughout is to treat these references as evidence that Shelley 'predicted' any specific technology; the more precise and more useful claim is that she identified an enduring structural relationship between creative capability and ethical responsibility that each new technology reactivates in its own terms.

Applied to artificial intelligence, the Frankenstein template illuminates several live debates: the question of whether a sufficiently sophisticated created system might develop something resembling autonomous will (the Creature's own demand for recognition and a companion is, in this sense, a demand for status that his creator refuses to grant); the question of corporate or institutional diffusion of responsibility, dramatised more directly by Blade Runner's Tyrell Corporation than by Shelley's solitary Victor, but present already in Victor's own evasions of accountability; and the ecological dimension of technological hubris, since Victor's abandonment of his creation in the wilderness leaving him to survive, unsupported, in a hostile natural world anticipates contemporary anxieties about technologies (nuclear waste, plastic pollution, genetically modified organisms released into ecosystems) that persist and act long after their creators have moved on to other projects.

The most durable lesson the novel offers to this contemporary conversation is not a warning against creation as such Shelley does not condemn Victor for seeking knowledge, and the novel takes obvious intellectual pleasure in the ambition of scientific inquiry but a warning against creation without relation: Victor's failure is not that he made the Creature, but that having made him, he refused to name him, house him, educate him, or take moral responsibility for the consequences of his own act. Any contemporary technology that generates a new form of agency artificial, biological, or otherwise inherits exactly this same unresolved obligation.

Conclusion: Why Frankenstein Still Haunts Culture

The argument this essay has traced runs through three linked structures of exclusion the Creature as an oppressed labouring outsider denied economic and social belonging, the Creature as a racialised or colonised Other whose voice both indicts and is ultimately erased by his creator's authority, and the Creature as a technological creation whose maker's ambition outpaces his ethical responsibility and through one recurring cultural mechanism, the Frankenpheme, by which these entangled meanings are simplified, detached from Shelley's own ambivalence, and redeployed across two centuries of adaptation to address each era's own anxieties. None of these readings cancels the others; the novel's durability comes precisely from the way class, race, and technology are braided together in a single narrative body, much as the Creature's own body is assembled from mismatched parts.

Frankenstein continues to haunt culture not because Mary Shelley foresaw genetic engineering or artificial intelligence, but because she diagnosed, with unusual clarity for a nineteen-year-old writer in 1816, a structural feature of modernity that has not gone away: the human capacity to create whether a social order, a subjugated population, or a technology routinely outstrips the human willingness to take responsibility for what has been created. Every generation that has retold this story, from Whale's silent, iconic monster to Blade Runner's dying replicant to today's headlines about 'Frankenfoods' and artificial minds, has been retelling that same unresolved obligation in its own cultural vocabulary. The monster, finally, was never the Creature. It was always the act of abandonment that followed his birth. Here is Mind Map of Blog: Click Here

Infographic:

Youtube Video:

Works Cited:

Guerin, Wilfred L., et al. "From Paradise Lost to Frank-N-Furter: The Creature Lives!" A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature, 5th ed., Indian ed., Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 305–311.

Levine, George, and U. C. Knoepflmacher, editors. The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel. University of California Press, 1979.

Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. Routledge, 1989.

Morton, Timothy. Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Routledge, 2002.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus. 1818. Project Gutenberg, 1993, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/84.

Smith, Johanna M. "'Cooped Up' with 'Sad Trash': Domesticity and the Sciences in Frankenstein." Frankenstein: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical, Historical, and Cultural Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Johanna M. Smith, Bedford Books, 2000, pp. 227–240.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism." Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1, 1985, pp. 243–261.

Nidhi Pandya

Monday, 21 September 2026

CS and Frankenstein