A Vindication of the Rights of the Racial Other: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Abstract

This essay re-reads Mary Shelley`s Frankenstein as a vindication of the rights of the racial echoing the wellknown book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman written by her mother Mary Wollstonecraft. Transcending the criticisms reading Shelley`s novel as a highly racist work, this essay aims to grasp in Shelley`s text some revolutionary moments to vindicate the racial other`s rights as equal human beings. In this reading against the grain, the Creature resists the unfair stereotypes stigmatizing racial others and upends such racial discourses themselves through his articulate voice. In fact, the text Frankenstein can be read in the context of colonialism. Victor Frankenstein and Henry Clerval represent England as a colonizer. Victor`s scientific endeavor along with Henry Clerval`s ambitious desire to join the East India Company and expend his energy in the pursuit of imperialist concerns reflects colonialist aspects of England in the late 18th and early 19th century. While Victor and Henry represent the imperial penetration into the East, the Creature plays the role as the racial other, who is colonized by such an penetration, The existence of the Creature can be interpreted as a kind of symptom of the uncomfortable feelings of the whites toward racial others in general rejected from the European culture. It is highly revolutionary of Shelley to give a voice to the Creature for his own part of storytelling. She brings to the surface the voice of the usually muted Other, The Creature`s life story reveals the important fact that the monster is not inborn but constructed by the social system, The monster does not come from without, but is constructed from within an exclusive society defining the Other as a threat while the Other only desires to belong to the society the Other is born or brought into. Considering the fact those corpses that provide their parts to the Creature are in effect Europeans, the Creature comes from nothing but Europeans. The novel seems to make this point quite clear by making Frankenstein and his Creature indistinguishable.