Patagonian Giants, Frankenstein's Creature, and Contact Zone Catastrophe

Abstract

“Patagonian Giants, Frankenstein’s Creature, and Contact Zone Catastrophe” historicizes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as an intervention in the discourse of exploration predicated upon the Creature’s affinities with the pseudo-scientific Patagonian giants of eighteenth-century debate. Famously associated with the circumnavigator John Byron, described by his grandson Lord Byron, and evidently known to Mary Shelley from her reading, the Patagonian Giants strikingly resemble Frankenstein’s eight feet tall, ice-dwelling Creature. I enlist Mary Louise Pratt’s investigation of representations of encounters in the “contact zones” to reconstruct the important context of three centuries of European reports of Patagonian giants, trace Mary Shelley’s evident exposure to the legend of the giants and their meeting with Commodore John Byron, and argue that by displacing, replacing, and surpassing Robert Walton in the role of explorer-protagonist, the Patagonian-like Creature reproduces the violent actions and rhetoric of...