A Race of Devils: Race-Making,Frankenstein,and The Modern Prometheus

Modern Promethean Political Theory

The Frankenstein story is familiar to the point of cliché: an ambitious scientist harvests the organs of cadavers, stitches them together to form a looming body with exaggerated human features, and uses his invention to send shockwaves of electricity through the hideous specimen to bring it to life. The powerful monster escapes into the night to become a ghastly, mindless mass-murderer incapable of being subdued by its creator. Contrary to the Hollywood embellishments largely responsible for its mainstream renderings, Frankenstein’s creation is far from an ignorant zombie. He is an intelligent autodidact, articulate and literate, devouring the likes of Milton, Goethe, and Volney (118). He has a rich appreciation of beauty and aesthetic sense to the point of resenting his own ugliness. Crucially, the Creature is not born recklessly aggressive and homicidal, but deeply empathic and sensitive. He originates in the republic of Geneva celebrated by Rousseau and evinces a fellow-feeling of a Rousseaian “noble savage,” even becoming a critic of inequality.

It follows that Shelley drew from Rousseau, Locke, and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac to formulate her account of the Creature’s development, portraying him in stark opposition to Hobbes’s dark view of human nature ²¹ as underwritten by a universal fear of violent killing and a quest for power that “ceaseth only in death.” ²² The economy of fear in Hobbes’s theory wagers that individuals would easily consent to trade their generalized terrified mistrust of each other as individuals in exchange for a shared fear of an almighty enforcer. Hobbes’s reflection that he and fear were born twins is often invoked as a prelude to his own political monstrosity, Leviathan, the awesome monarch without whom humans would be damned to a perpetual war of all against all. The term “Leviathan” references the terrifying sea-monster that appears in ancient Sumerian iconography, in biblical texts as a seafaring dragon, and arguably even the crocodile in the book of Job—a creature known for its mythological challenge to the solar deity, Horace (Isaiah 27:1, Ps 74:14). In Hobbes’s telling, the Leviathan virtually embodies the people whose communion makes the sovereign’s political power legitimate.

William Godwin, to whom Frankenstein is dedicated, advanced a controversial anarchism that made notable challenges to Hobbes’s core presumptions of human nature. Godwin’s An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice finds him more fearful of the effects governmental overreach than whatever might ensue if people were left to their own devices. ²³ In the final analysis, Godwin regards Hobbesian government as “monstrous.” ²⁴ As a counter to Hobbes, one might be inclined to read the Creature as a metaphor for the modern state and a warning against E Pluribus Unum (out of many, one) gone hideously wrong. ²⁵ Evocative of the Leviathan, who is composed of the populace, Frankenstein’s creation quite literally embodies the people in that his massive body is stitched together from pieces of dead humans. A Leviathan-as-Frankenstein monster resonates with Locke’s fear that Hobbes had authorized an omnipotent government able to cannibalize the natural right to life, liberty, and property. ²⁶ That the Creature is born benevolent and not naturally in need of an awesome government also aligns with Godwin’s anarchist sensibilities as well as Locke’s notion of the human mind as a tabula rasa. Notwithstanding the merits of approaching the politics of Frankenstein in terms of statecraft, the Creature’s development invites an encounter on the terrain of racecraft. ²⁷

Just as important as the Creature’s capacity to acquire knowledge to the point of erudition is how he learns. By casting him as an autodidact who learns by the surreptitious observation of others, his intellectual development is clearly analogous to that of the self-educated slave (111–118). And like the authors of fugitive slave narratives, in telling his own story the Creature’s expressive powers challenge his excommunication from the human estate. His education is broadly humanistic in content, but also inflected with the sensibilities of Lockean reason. ²⁸ Indeed, Shelley was reading Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding when she wrote Frankenstein. ²⁹ By rendering the Creature as naturally empathic and only made violent through mistreatment, Shelley also challenges her parents’ longtime adversary, Edmund Burke. As Elizabeth Young observes, Burke’s “critique of the excesses of the French Revolution is inextricable from his horror at the revolutionary uprising in Haiti and at the ‘savagery’ of Native Americans.” ³⁰ Paul Gilroy speaks to the fraught nature of the period’s racial politics more broadly:

Notions of the primitive and the civilized which had been integral to pre-modern understanding of “ethnic” difference became fundamental cognitive and aesthetic markers in the process which generated a constellation of subject positions in which Englishness, Christianity, and other ethnic and racialized attributes would finally give way to the dislocating dazzle of “whiteness.” ³¹

That the Creature becomes vicious by way of politics, and not nature, aligns with Wollstonecraft’s contention that “People are rendered ferocious by misery; and misanthropy is ever the offspring of discontent.” ³² While his empathic reason and ability to rise above the base satisfaction of desires are qualities associated with the “dazzle of whiteness,” his exclusion from the human race disbars him from being honored in the contracts that Hobbes and Locke deem essential hallmarks of modern rationality. To appreciate the story of Frankenstein’s nameless Creature, some remarks on his creator are in order.

It’s Alive?: A Posthumous-Posthuman Devil Race

After a blissfully Edenic childhood, Victor Frankenstein’s mother dies—the first, but hardly the last, woman to perish in the story. Mournful, but self-important and driven, Victor leaves his father and adopted sister for school in Ingolstadt to apprentice under a scientist named Waldman where he intends to unlock the mysteries of the universe. Perhaps forgetting that Isaac Newton was an alchemist, Waldman harshly criticizes Victor’s inspirations as antiquated fantasists who “promised impossibilities and performed nothing,” not to be confused with modern scientists who can take a microscope and “perform miracles” and even “command the thunders of heaven” (37–38). Entranced by such prospects, Victor becomes “insensitive to the charms of nature” and so intent on learning to give life to inanimate things that he “forgot those friends who were so many miles absent” (45). Thus begins Victor’s tragic descent into voluntary alienation from nature, his loved ones, and his own humanity. In keeping with the modern ethos of overcoming the past, rather than waste his talent on “useless grief,” he boasts of wanting to realize his worth lest he deprive humanity and “others . . . oppressed” of his great gifts (220). In the wake of his mother’s death, Victor grasps for the power to regenerate and create human life—typically the assumed prerogative of nature, women, and gods. By thinking he could escape his past and undo the natural order made painfully palpable by his mother’s passing, Victor uses science to create a being with the power to deny him a future. ³³

Despite the Creature’s innate benevolence, he is so hideous that he is rejected by society as an abomination. There is a direct relationship between his increasing erudition and his grasp of his own admissibility to the social order (129, 132–33). He pleads with Victor to make him a female partner so that he might escape total isolation by having at least one companion. Evoking Job’s curse of God, he implores Victor to “Make me happy . . . and in my dying moments I shall not curse my maker (148–49).” Victor initially agrees to make him a bride, only to break his promise for fear of giving birth to a “race of devils” (171). Upon hearing Victor’s refusal, the Creature responds by deploying the idiom of race, slavery, and rationality: “Slave, I before reasoned with you but you have proved yourself unworthy of my condescension” (172). His insurrection is dramatized by reversing the language of master–slave; “you are my creator, but I am thy master; obey!” (172) and “Mine shall not be the submission of the abject slavery” (148).

The multiple role-reversals are noteworthy. Victor intended for the Creature to be in his service, not the other way around. By explicitly conjuring the specter of a slave revolt, Shelley taps into a festering terror menacing the White psyche reeling from the Haitian Revolution. This was a Black Promethean rebellion that Europe believed impossible, a theft of fire from the self-ordained White gods that ignited widespread trepidation. ³⁴ Frederick Douglass, born the same year Frankenstein was published, wrote of a similar sentiment in the U.S., declaring “slavery is everywhere the pet monster of the American people.” ³⁵ If Victor will make him a companion, the Creature promises to vacate the White world (conspicuously set in the environs of Mt. Blanc) and flee to “live amongst the savages” of South America (149). Victor’s refusal to hold up his end of the bargain speaks to the novel’s political and historical import, as a fundamental tenet of liberal reason is the capacity to enter into contracts—an attribute that was itself racialized. In the modern colonial world of accelerating motion and discovery, making and keeping oaths was elemental and the alleged incapacity of non-whites to forge and honor agreements was invoked in specious arguments against their rationality and humanity. ³⁶ Hence covenant keeping was a racial and moral signifier whereby Whites were eligible to be credit-worthy and nonwhites imagined as duplicitous.

The Creature’s overture marks an alignment between his objectives and those of social contract theory. By identifying himself as one whom Victor has injured and thus deserving restitution, he aims to figure a way of sharing the world that does not require a particular affect or natural bond. ³⁷ Yet Frankenstein’s failure to keep his word reflects what Native peoples have long said about Whites. In the words of Sioux Chief Red Cloud: “the white man made me a lot of promises, and they only kept one. They promised to take my land, and they took it.” ³⁸ Unwilling to uphold a core tenet of contractarianism that distinguishes reasonable (read: White, male) individuals from irrational Others, Victor transgressed the racial boundaries of honorable White noblemen. Still, Victor’s actions remain inscribed within the bounds of whiteness to the extent they echo what Carole Pateman calls the settler contract. ³⁹ Initiated by settlers alone, this is a racial contract that excludes non-Whites who are nevertheless subject to it—and thus can make no legitimate claims against White contractarians. Such rank hypocrisy makes it all the more fitting that the nameless Creature learns what he regards as the “true history of humanity” from Milton’s Paradise Lost (130).

Seeking to avenge the breach of contract, the Creature issues an ominous threat in vowing to be with Victor on his wedding night (173). And unlike Victor, the Creature keeps his promise. The racially and sexually charged peril he represents is eroticized in one of the book’s most harrowing scenes. Before Victor can consummate his marriage, he finds his creation standing over the murdered body of his betrothed. The image of a predator in the newlyweds’ bedroom conjures the terror of interracial rape, a well-established fixture of the discourse of Shelley’s era. Among the accounts of the alleged monsters of Haiti was Mary Hassel’s Secret History, or The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808) which told of a young white woman who refused one of Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s men. The “monster gave her to his guard, who hung her by the hook in the market place, where the lovely, innocent, unfortunate victim slowly expired.” ⁴⁰

Aggrieved and enraged, the Creature’s subsequent inability to restrain his passions is also a contrasting racial signifier. He is generally identified with destruction and Frankenstein with creation. Reprising Machiavelli’s Prince, he insists on instilling fear since he cannot be loved (148). The Creature threatens Victor with brute force and a violent resentment that becomes his proverbial fire foreshadowing the story’s end. Metaphorically, Promethean fire represents the capacity to destroy but also the “flame is a sign of the power of human beings to compensate for their natural frailties by fashioning helpful things from the materials offered in nature.” ⁴¹ Confronted with the impossibility of being assimilated into whiteness and the living death of an atomistic slavish obedience, the Creature’s proposed alternative is to live among Indigenous American “savages” closely associated with nature (149). Offering to “go Native” rather than go it alone, his threatened insurrection comes with a bid to be interwoven into Indigenous communities. As a being stitched together by the fabrications of slavery and colonialism, the racialization of modern Promethean powers comes to the fore.

Promethean Bondage Unbound

[W]hy will this Soul of White Folk,—this modern Prometheus,—hang bound by his own binding, tethered by a fable of the past? I hear his mighty cry reverberating through the world, “I am white!” Well and good, O Prometheus, divine thief! Is not the world wide enough for two colors, for many little shinings of the sun? Why, then, devour your own vitals if I answer even as proudly, “I am black!”

Shelley’s alternate title for Frankenstein is The Modern Prometheus, a direct reference to the ancient mythical figure of antiquity who stole fire from Zeus on behalf of humanity. The original Prometheus myth is often attributed to the Greek poet Hesiod, who chronicled it in his Theogony of eighth century BCE. Hesiod’s written cosmology was itself drawn from a combination of Homeric poetry, Greek tribal traditions, and the mythologies of the Near East. ⁴³ It was later adapted by the Athenian tragedian, Aeschylus, in fifth century BCE. In Aeschylus’s version, Prometheus not only brings humans fire, but also civilizational skills such as science, art, mathematics, writing, and agriculture. In Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Prometheus is depicted as the creator of humankind and an “important tradition depicts Prometheus as the creator of man and sometimes women is fashioned later and separately through the designs of Zeus.” ⁴⁴ In Plato’s rendering, Prometheus’s theft of fire from Zeus is coextensive with the gift of the arts “for without fire it was impossible for anyone to possess or use this skill.” ⁴⁵ The versions differ, but consistent throughout the accounts is that Prometheus is punished harshly for usurping the gods’ power. ⁴⁶ In Hesiod’s version, Prometheus is chained to a rock and humans retain the blessing of fire but are perpetually cursed with womankind.

As Norman O. Brown indicates, Hesiod’s Theogony stages a double progression of the cosmos, which transitions from a natural to anthropocentric order and from the primacy of a female-centered to a male-dominated world. ⁴⁷ In the beginning, Mother Earth reproduces parthenogenetically, mating with her offspring Sky and Sea as aspects of nature. Fast forward and the culmination is a human-centered world with the male Zeus as the “father of gods and men,” with the caveat that Zeus and the Olympians are themselves “the deified aspects of the life of man.” ⁴⁸ Earth challenges the masculine Sky and the result is his castration by his son, Cronus, with Aphrodite then born from the lacerated sex organs Cronus tosses into the sea. The upshot? “To be born thus from the father, not the mother, means, in the language of the myth, dependence on or subordination to the father; the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus had precisely the same significance.” ⁴⁹ The progeny of Hesiod’s monstrous creatures progressively resolved over time into the human-centered world dominated by men. Accordingly, Carole Pateman has subsequently reflected on the shift toward modernity as marking a departure from ancient figurations of the gods as sources of legitimacy and toward men as legitimating forces. ⁵⁰

W.E.B. Du Bois reminds us that not all men were created equal, or equally male, and the combination of whiteness and masculinity matters in terms of the myth’s role in the political imagination. Du Bois evinces how numerous iterations of the Prometheus myth have served as rich veins for critics and champions of European modernity alike. ⁵¹ He regards Prometheus as symbolic of a “new religion of whiteness” whereby the earth is colonized by White dominion and “white super-men and world-mastering demi-gods.” ⁵² In his exemplary study, Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery, Jared Hickman observes that Du Bois likens the myth to a “quintessentially modern racial theodicy: contemporary evil, in the form of slavery, racism, and colonialism, [which] is trace-able to the Promethean overreach of European modernity.” ⁵³ Yet Du Bois drew on Goethe’s Prometheus to also render the souls of Black folk in Promethean terms, affecting what Hickman calls a “racial romanticism.” ⁵⁴ The ancient insurrectionist move to parlay with the gods as equals is a key aspect of the Black Promethean disposition that Hickman finds amplified in Du Bois, James Baldwin, and others.

In a compelling analysis of Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom Hickman meditates on Douglass’s invocation of the Promethean metaphor to performatively unbind himself from the dialectical entrapment of Hegelian universal history. Douglass employs the Promethean myth to underline, and ultimately contest and exceed, the Hegelian binaries entrapping him between Africa and the Absolute. ⁵⁵ The image of Douglass performing a Black Promethean self-unbinding anticipates Africana philosopher Lewis Gordon’s worry that the “Promethean satisfaction” of the enslaved or colonized theft of knowledge lacks a “creative moment” in the “taking from instead of contributing.” ⁵⁶ Merely stealing White knowledge would be the proverbial tools that Audre Lorde famously declared incapable of dismantling the master’s house. ⁵⁷ Douglass’s metaphorical theft of fire ignites a rage to burn down slavery’s proverbial house with the self-created knowledge of how to use the embers generatively. Toward that end, Black Prometheus enjoins a broader inquiry into the other racial subject positions impacted by European modernity’s Promethean overreach. ⁵⁸

Speaking to the constructive contributions of Afro-Diasporic research, historian Robin D. G. Kelley maintains that part of the tradition’s richness lies in its ability to exceed parochialism and connect to “other streams of internationalism not limited to the black world.” ⁵⁹ Relatedly, when Fanon contends that “Europe is literally the creation of the third word,” I take his provocation to be that the imperial makers who unleash streams of cross-continental colonialism are remade in the process. ⁶⁰ In this Fanon follows Césaire’s insights on colonialism as a race-making, monster-making project divesting the colonizer of civility and humanity. By projecting animality, demonological tropes, and object status onto the colonized, Europeans descended into inhumane barbarism. What Césaire calls the “boomerang effect” of colonialism that makes monsters of its Euro-Promethean makers is evoked in the character of Victor Frankenstein. ⁶¹ In the process of creating another species and fearing a demon hybrid race, he willfully jettisons his own humanity and fails to acknowledge that of Others. Likewise, when Fanon, Césaire, and Sylvia Wynter fiercely reject “humanity as a monologue” but nevertheless imagine a decolonized humanist project worthy of affirmation, theirs might be read as a Black Promethean project aiming to radically exceed mere reaction to the inscribed limits of the human race. ⁶² At the same time, since the imposition of racial exclusivity is still a deadly concern, it behoves us to reckon with the multiple ways that “race is colonialism speaking” through the text’s evocations of slavery and coloniality. ⁶³

For Wynter, conquistador humanism is tied to the creation of Blackness as heathen through the fifteenth-century Christian humanism of Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, and then Enlightenment Man as requiring “the Negro” as a sensuous irrational Other. ⁶⁴ Her invocation of Las Casas also points to how muscular, hubristic pretentions toward assimilationist race-making were applied (unevenly) to Indigenous peoples across the colonial world. When Francisco de Vitoria bestowed rationality on Amerindians to humanize them, he was participating in a Promethean project. By making Native peoples intelligible to Europeans and available to the gospel, they could be subjected to jus gentium (the law of nations or peoples), proselytized to, and civilized since their allegedly bestial, cannibalistic, incestuous, savage proclivities meant they were failing to comport with the law. ⁶⁵ Notions that First Nations supposedly needed White arrivants gave colonists a self-styled moral license to trade, travel, and ultimately to expropriate and kill Indigenous peoples. If ascribing rationality to Indians and bringing the gospels couldn’t quite make them human, it could make them close enough to do business with. In 1539, Guatemala governor Alonso de Maldonado expressed this clearly, writing: “Father Bartolomé de Las Casas and other religious here are succeeding in the peaceful conquest of this warlike territory. To this end they have been carrying on negotiations with the Indians, unknown to any Spaniard save themselves and me.” ⁶⁶ In effect, Vitoria made Amerindians negotiable—like currency. And like currency, he made Native peoples expendable.

The friars and likeminded colonial apologists did not uniformly understand their conversion processes to effectuate passable White identity—as if Indians were embryonic Spaniards. Nor is the implication that Victor’s Promethean aspirations involved creating a creature who would be his equal. Rather, Frankenstein and the friars undertake a Promethean project of racial engineering in hopes of creating beings human enough to enlist as supplicants in a paternal relationship and bless them as patriarchs. The Salamanca fathers knew full well that allowing the possibility that Indigenous peoples had souls to be saved would open trade and the potential for safe passage over Native lands. ⁶⁷ The footprints of these projects are visible in early colonial praying towns, Christian missions, and the outright kidnapping of Native children into abusive Indian schools serving as civilizational laboratories. ⁶⁸ Consider such missionary impulses relative to Frankenstein’s stated hopes that:

A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs. Pursuing these reflections, I thought I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in the process of time. . .renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption. (44)

In the paternalist language of grateful children, one can hear echoes of the priests discussing the saved as the converted and born again by the civilizing discipline. In what was essentially a promise of cultural genocide as an alternative to outright extermination, the project of annihilating the Indian to save the man was one where to be saved meant acceding to whiteness as destiny. To be perpetually Other was often tantamount to disposal amid the “damned of the earth.” ⁶⁹

The descent of ancient Promethean paternalism and pride of civilizational creation is audible in Aeschylus’s Prometheus, who boasts bitterly after being shackled to a rock:

For men at first had eyes but saw to no purpose; they had ears but did not hear. Like the shapes of dreams they dragged though their long lives and handled all things in bewilderment and confusion. They did not know of building houses with bricks to face the sun; they did not know how to work in wood. They lived like swarming ants in holes in the ground, in the sunless caves of earth. . . . It was I who first yoked beasts for them in the yokes that made of those beasts the slaves of trace chain and pack saddle that they might be man’s substitute in the hardest tasks. . . . Such were the contrivances I discovered for men . . . ⁷⁰

Bound by Hephaestus with bronze manacles to the Caucuses, in retrospect it is uncanny that Prometheus is made a permanent, iconic (and, perhaps, the first?) Caucasian. Deeper still are the resonances between Prometheus’s description of humans prior to his intervention and the European discourse of nonwhites after so-called first contact. As Timothy Kaufman-Osborne astutely asks: “prior to the receipt of Prometheus’s gift, just who were these beings? Should we assign them to a class of animals? Or perhaps to that of automatons? Or to that of monsters, beings for whom no class seems quite right?” ⁷¹

As a rejoinder, I ask: how are those questions of the Prometheus myth different from what the priests arrogantly debated in Spain with regard to Native Americans? Substitute Indigenous peoples for Aeschylus’s incomplete beings, with ears but not hearing and in need of Prometheus’s “contrivances,” and one arrives at Fanon’s mockery of the inane White mythology of precontact Natives as always having been waiting for European saviors to bring them “gifts.” ⁷² These facets of the messianic White savior complex fit snugly with images of Indigenous generosity and humanity reduced to expressions of obsequious servility.

In effect, Euro-modern Promethean race-making projects conjured anxieties about the mysterious origins and descent of non-Europeans, the progeny of sexual intercourse between races, and the latent uncertainties around the physical and intellectual powers of blowback from colonial attempts to harness otherness. ⁷³ As Lisa Lowe puts it, “Even as racial categories drew on fictions of distinction and purity, an insistent discourse about racial difference admitted the existence of a creolized and miscegenated population borne of colonialism. The colonial relations of production, which precisely required race mixing, constituted what we might call the ‘political unconscious’ of modern European taxonomies of race.” ⁷⁴

Lowe’s analysis of the hysteria over race-mixing, racial misattribution, and racial classification conveys how the productive work of race-making required myth-making. Frankenstein traffics in the latent terrors haunting the political unconscious and lurking beneath all that is disavowed. For the people of First Nations whose descent from the biblical Adam and scientific genealogy was unclear to Europeans, the white Promethean project was an encroaching monstrosity reflected in the doubling of the monster in the text; Victor and the Creature, the victorious civilized and vanquished-demon-barbarian. Where the missionaries sought new and eternal life through Christian rebirth, Victor seeks to craft a subordinate species as prelude to the resurrection of dead human life on earth. In the meantime, both these “fathers” fashion their humanoid creations as sites of extraction and dominion. (Victor revealingly shifts from trying to turn lead into gold to a vitalist project of animating dead flesh—effectively moving from one form of transubstantiation to another.) As intimated here, Shelley’s abolitionist politics did not immunize her against the biases that bedeviled many progressives of her day. With that in mind, a turn toward the text’s limits is illuminating. ⁷⁵

Colonial Race-Making & Modernity’s White Prometheans

He [the Aryan] is the Prometheus of mankind from whose bright forehead the divine spark of genius has sprung at all times, forever kindling anew that fire of knowledge which illuminated the night of silent mysteries and thus caused man to climb the path to mastery over the other beings of this earth.

Victor Frankenstein makes sure to tell his listener that he is a descendant of an aristocratic family of legislators in Geneva. His adopted sister Elizabeth was a special delight. A poor orphan girl rescued by his mother because of her beauty, she is described in highly racialized terms. Victor’s mother first sees Elizabeth in the care of a peasant woman, where she was distinguished from the other “dark eyed, hardy little vagrants” as if from a “different stock,” with beautiful blue eyes and hair “of the brightest living gold” (22). With whiteness in stark contrast to the swarthy castaways, Elizabeth appeared to be of a “distinct species” and “fairer than a garden rose among dark-leaved brambles” (23). These characteristics are not incidental, as Shelley revised them in 1831. ⁷⁷ Unsurprisingly, we learn Elizabeth was descended from nobility, surrendered by a disenfranchised Milanese nobleman whose German wife died giving birth, like Shelley’s mother. Upon bringing the orphan home, Victor’s mother says she has a “pretty present” for young Victor who, with a budding sense of male entitlement, “looked upon Elizabeth as mine . . . till death she was to be mine alone” (24). The passage ominously anticipates Elizabeth’s murder at the hands of Victor’s creation.

It is telling that phenotype and corporeality are key indexes for interpreting Frankenstein through the prism of race. The Creature’s patchwork of skin is initially described as yellow, evoking the stereotype of the Asian marauder of the time, ⁷⁸ but then darkens to an appearance likened to “the color and apparent texture of a mummy”—that is, dark brown or black. Notably, his face is hideous but his body is symmetrical and aesthetically pleasing “in proportion, and . . . beautiful (48).” His strength and height parallel descriptions of Black men in the West Indies and the explorations of West Africa with which Shelley was familiar. ⁷⁹ Stitched together from the decomposing corpses of a charnel house, he literally embodies death. Blackness has long symbolized death and unbridled sexuality in the White imaginary—and both are alive in the novel. The image of Death walking jealous among the living makes the Creature’s murderous threats all the more ghastly.

In its form Frankenstein is a stitched together hybrid epistolary merging slave narrative and colonial adventure. Slave narratives typically required the protagonist’s voice be legitimated by a White authority, here provided by the explorer/whaler, Robert Walton. The story is framed as a letter from Walton to his sister, Margaret Saville, containing the confession of Victor Frankenstein, whom he testifies to having rescued in the Arctic. The story of Victor’s Creature is positioned at the book’s center. Like the fugitive authors of slave narratives, there is no mistaking that the Creature’s literacy conveys intelligence and human sensitivity that makes him a sympathetic figure to readers. Alan Lloyd Smith reads Walton as the surrogate for the book’s skeptical audience. ⁸⁰ But the ultimate recipient is Walton’s sister, Margaret Saville. She is clearly an object of affection, vaguely analogous to Elizabeth, and an unspeaking passive destination for masculine exploits run amok.

Couched in a Homeric epic of male heroism and odyssey rebooted for a neocolonial age, Walton and Victor are figures of White male desire bridging antiquity and modernity onto a warning of a monstrous future. ⁸¹ A proto-Prometheus seeking transformation through his own heroism, Walton serves as an avatar of willful exploration, dominion over nature, Enlightenment rationality, and hyper-masculinity testing its limits. All are conjugated to maximum effect to make him an ideal foil for the warnings conveyed by the dueling monstrosities of Victor and the Creature. Walton’s background in whaling is poignant, as whales were the floating oil wells of the industrial revolution. Their increasing scarcity around mainland shores made whale ship captains into the explorers and cartographers of their age. ⁸² It follows that Walton identifies as an aspiring producer of scientific knowledge and a glory seeker. As a composite symbol, he represents exploitative male conquest of a monstrous seafaring leviathan, intercontinental colonial voracity, and the will to map the natural world with Cartesian coordinates.

Victor’s best friend Henry Clerval is depicted as a sensitive humanist. He is a student of Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit languages and Eastern literature that Victor feminizes as “different from the manly and heroical poetry of Greece and Rome!” (61). Portrayed as a loyal, sympathetic character with the warm affect lacking in the cerebral Frankenstein, Clerval is also an ambitious colonist. He wishes to put his fluency in Indian customs and language to good use in that country by “materially assisting the progress of European colonization and trade. In Britain only could he further the execution of his plan” (163). Alas, Clerval’s imperial designs were never realized for he was murdered by Victor’s Creature shortly after leaving London. Clerval reflects the text’s broader orientalist regard of non-Europeans as inert material ripe for fashioning by more dexterous hands. ⁸³ Echoing such caricatures, Frankenstein’s Creature absorbs the history of imperialism by overhearing teachings from Volney’s Ruins of Empires (118), which “purported to be a prefiguration of the French Revolution, published after the event and after the author had rounded off his theory with practice.” ⁸⁴ The Creature learns of “slothful Asiatics, of the stupendous genius and mental activity of the Grecians, of the wars and wonderful virtue of the early Romans—of their subsequent degeneration. . . . I heard of the discovery of the American hemisphere and wept with Safie over the helpless fate of its original inhabitants” (118).

When the family he secretly watches suffers poverty, the Creature brings them firewood so they might have more time to grow food. In a blatant jab at Adam Smith, they believe the wood was left by “an invisible hand” (111). Yet when those he has so happily helped finally see their unsightly benefactor, they reject him as an abomination. Safie flees from the Creature who had wept with her over the plight of the Native Americans. Her failure to demonstrate an ethos of reciprocity so prized by liberals approximates numerous stories of starving settlers rescued by the human decency of Native peoples, only to be demonized and driven from their land. After saving a life and being almost shot to death in return, the Creature resentfully exclaims, “This was the reward for my benevolence” (142). When he tries to compel Victor to make him a bride, it is his promise to abscond to South America that most terrifies Victor; his threat to retrace European colonialism makes Victor renege on his promise. We know the Creature regards Victor as intellectually superior because he believes he cannot make a partner for himself. Why, then, does Victor worry about creating a devil race to the point of being willing to risk everything and everyone in order to kill his progeny?

The Creature’s physical, but not intellectual, superiority over Victor is itself a salient racial distinction whereby Shelley “rescues her monster from the status of frightening brute, but she does so by making him a dependent victim.” ⁸⁵ Tellingly, Victor doesn’t just fear the Creature’s power to destroy, but also his (Other) Promethean power to create new life, thereby potentially implicating the scientist in the genesis of devil race. Victor’s fear that he might be wrong about the “nature” of his Creature terrifies him. With Victor as the virtual embodiment of Prometheus, and the Creature as his revolting doppelgänger, he fears birthing a demonic race and being cursed by future generations. His horror at possibily initiating a Promethean doubling with the potential to go viral puts creator and creation on a path of mutual destruction. That terror reflects fundamental anxieties around differences shadowing liberal humanism’s perilous, imperial race-making projects and the monstrous futures they portend.

Sympathy for the Devil: Speaking of Monsters

The future is necessarily monstrous: the figure of the future, that is, that which can only be surprising, that for which we are not prepared, you see, is heralded by a species of monsters. A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future; it would be a predictable, calculable and programmable tomorrow.

On approximately the bicentennial anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein, Shelley’s synthetic interpolation of the Prometheus myth evokes the stitching together of mythologies, historical disavowal, pseudoscientific alchemy, and affective contagion still operative in ascriptions of racial identity. In trying to fashion a new species, Victor makes a monster of, and despite, himself. Frankenstein can be read as dramatizing a broader failure to grasp the monstrosity of liberal humanist projects haunted by the raced and gendered fixations of Euro-modern colonial imposition. After the Creature has succeeded in destroying Victor and all he loves, he assures Walton of the conclusion: “He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish” (232). The statement is multiply ironic. First, the forgetting occasioned by cinematic versions of Frankenstein largely neuters the story of its literary power and aesthetic-political content—often rendering the Creature a brain-dead zombie hybrid. Second, the novel provides a venue to contemplate the politics of White modernity’s willful erasure of liberal humanism’s implication in colonial race-making enterprises. The disavowal endemic to Euro-modern historical amnesia is the venue for Shelley’s restaging Greek tragedy’s Promethean lessons, and the colonial rush to build the world anew is alive in her portrayal of Victor Frankenstein. ⁸⁷

In the spirit of the etymological root of “Prometheus,” as foresight or forethought, the closing remarks register text’s oversights and warnings. I do so acknowledging the dual emphasis on the theorist as seer and the belated turn toward race and decolonial scholarship as theoretical destinations. In Fanonian parlance, the text’s patchwork of demonological tropes disclose the psycho-affective attachments of race. These attachments fix colonial subjects by their appearance, distorting or even muting altogether the voices of people of color in White ears. To contemplate how deafness and myopia are produced through Shelley’s own inscription within the liberal humanism of the White metropole, Frankenstein might productively be read alongside Fanon’s declaration that he is not fixed by an essence, but an appearance. ⁸⁸ Scrutinizing the dynamic of fixing racial others makes the text legible with respect to how the epidermalized colonial past is reflected in Shelley’s phenomenological Eurocentrism. Ironically, Enlightenment discourse insists on the primacy of motion and empirical observation. Yet irrespective of the prolific empirical evidence of nonwhite humanity, Whites complusively fail to acknowledge the movement of racial others beyond their gaze. Given the centrality of vision to Euro-modern political theory, it is telling that the only person who sees the Creature’s humanity is blind (133).

All three of the text’s narrators are knowledge seekers searching for insight in relative isolation only to be unsettled by what they learn of solitude. Arguably, the novel’s critique of heroic solitude as perilous for pathbreakers is fairly obvious, and deaf insularity in the service of vision has produced many a political monster indeed. So rather than extend the text’s criticism of nonrelational epistemology, I want to draw attention to how the novel succumbs to it by registering its oscillation between the radical and reactionary. Chris Baldick has noted the tendency of Romantic literature to deploy the labor of the creative artist as symbolic of all human endeavors, with the effect of making its circular self-reference spiral outward in a bid for the universal. This observation lends itself to a reading of Frankenstein as “a dramatization of just this perversity in the Romantics’ self-referring quest for universal meanings—which would make the novel self-referential to the second power.” ⁸⁹ The temptation to descend into an infinite regress becomes all the more seductive if we leave the racial and colonial problematics of the novel uninterrogated. Furthermore, the text’s assemblage of racial tropes as demonological and monstrous makes any arch toward universality especially perilous.

In addition to Clerval’s colonial-developmental-capitalist agenda and the Creature’s intellectual dependency sketched earlier, Safie’s blindness is particularly illustrative of the work’s political limitations. As a Christianized “Arabian” (sic), Safie cannot bear returning to Turkey after experiencing female emancipation from the Muslim world. Although the Creature learns with Safie from afar through a Caliban-esque education, Gayatri Spivak observes that Shelley “cannot make the monster identical with the proper recipient of the lessons [Safie].” ⁹⁰ He weeps with her over the American Indians, yet she flees in the face of his appearance. Spivak concludes that “the simple suggestion that the monster is human inside but monstrous outside and only provoked into vengefulness is clearly not enough to bear the burden of so great a historical dilemma.” ⁹¹ But what historical dilemma is that?

As the proper recipient of the lessons, Safie is an emancipated-post-Muslim-Christian-female. While she and the Creature are both positioned on the margins of empire, the assimilable Safie is ultimately not to be confused with an ungovernable Other who cannot be inscribed within the confines of liberal law. The Law, as personified by a Genevan magistrate, can promise to punish the Creature “proportionate to his crimes,” but that would be futile, since his monstrosity would make measured reciprocity “impracticable.” ⁹² In the calculus of liberal jurisprudence, the inability of the law’s long arm to corral the Creature renders him irredeemable. Socioculturally, the fact that he is ugly and not born an innately vengeful savage does not account for Shelley’s forcing him into the realm of the damned and demonic. Inadmissible to the political order, both living and dead, his “(n)ontology” exceeds categories of analysis and strategies of containment and thereby excites desires to define and exterminate. ⁹³ The Creature sorrowfully accedes to his own destruction as a foregone conclusion, putting himself on the path of extinction. Akin to settler colonial presumptions of Indigenous peoples as fated to vanish, we watch him progress toward inevitable disappearance. His presumed self-immolation is not shown, only his moving toward a receding horizon beyond the text’s aperture to ultimately be “lost in the darkness and distance” (233).

The visual image of the Creature escaping into distant obscurity is emblematic of the narrative’s lack of a relational experiment that fully engage voices of “monstrous” creatures. After listening to, yet not hearing, his unnamed creation, Victor pursues him wondering “What his feelings were whom I pursued I cannot know (213).” Revealingly, the Creature’s facility of speech—an innovation key to the text’s radicality—is ultimately subverted. Readers are left with an intercepted letter of secondhand accounts, and the composite shortcomings of a ventriloquized slave narrative fused with an epic tale of heroic colonial discovery—relayed to a female recipient who also does not speak. The resulting work speaks of monsters and for the monstrous but not with them dialogically to generate new capacities for hearing otherwise. Performatively reinstating the boundaries of the human as fixed, the ending leaves muted monsters to mutate and return to haunt polities convinced that they will not be unmade by their race-making. ⁹⁴ “And we do have something else to say,” writes Susan Stryker, speaking back to Victor Frankenstein, “if you will but listen to the monsters: the possibility of meaningful agency and action exists, even within fields of domination that bring about the cultural rape of all flesh. Be forewarned, however, that taking up this task will remake you in the process.” ⁹⁵

In the final analysis, the sympathies for monsters cultivated by The Modern Prometheus stall at the level of what Édouard Glissant calls the “thought of the Other,” without carving a path toward the relational self-remaking he theorizes as “the Other of thought”:

Thought of the Other is the moral generosity disposing me to accept the principle of alterity, to conceive of the world as not simple and straightforward, with only one truth—mine. But thought of the Other can dwell within me without making me alter course, without ‘prizing me open,’ without changing me within myself. . . . The Other of thought is precisely this altering. Then I have to act. This is the moment I change my thought, without renouncing its contribution. I change, and I exchange. This is an ethics of turbulence whose corresponding ethics is not provided in advance. ⁹⁶

Liberal political sympathies capable of thinking the Other, but not the Other of thought, leave the thinker unmoved by the difference that monsters make. The myriad practices needed to cultivate critical receptivity toward heterogenous Others and their corresponding opportunities for self-(re)making could fill many manuscripts. One can modestly surmise that the dangerous fictions of purity encountered in race discourses above counsel an abundance of restraint before deploying purity tests to police what counts as a “properly decolonial” or relational approach. Shelley’s own abolitionism is fair warning to those who might assume their politics is inoculated against psycho-affective attachments to purity. How might the race of puritanical impulses make monsters still?

In closing, The Modern Prometheus warns of the dangers and liabilities of race-making figured as a kinetic, processual, and alchemical experiment of creatures professing to be resolutely rational yet who still traffic in the ritual magic of race. Frankenstein foretells the horror conjured by modern Promethean practices of colonial unknowing that wield the fires of empire in the forge of racial formation, only to dehumanize both the maker and the made. ⁹⁷ Victor’s destruction of the bride he makes to accompany the Creature to live among the Indigenous of South America is an act of annihilating the Indian to save [the White] man. By tearing her body apart, Victor’s act of (in)humanity foreshadows the fires of his own self-annihilation—a pyrrhic victory if ever there was one. The Euro-modern Promethean and his nameless Creature meet their ends, but Aimé Césaire’s Promethean warning reverberates still. “These heads of men, these collections of ears, these burned houses, these Gothic invasions, this steaming blood, these cities that evaporate at the edge of the sword, are not to be so easily disposed of.” ⁹⁸