DeFord 1

David DeFord
Professor VanWinkle
English 3311
23 January, 2015
Aspects of race in Frankenstein
The novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelly is truly an interesting and fascinating novel, full
of many different cultural and religious undertones. One cannot look at the novel and see that
Victor Frankenstein has put himself on par with God when he creates life. Yet we also see the
downfall of such actions. Shelly also does offer us different perspectives and aspects of race and
how it relates to us as a species. From issues that arise of physical appearances to those of
cultural differences, the novel can show us many different facets of this if we look at it closely.
Joshua Essaka in his article about sighted culture, notes the following about Shelly's
novel. "The Question is: can words overcome the prejudice generated by sight? It is already clear
that this prejudice may be so strongly ingrained in the characters of the novel that sometimes not
even words are efficacious" (Essaka 56). Essaka argues that our sight is both a blessing and a
curse at the same time. Words can have a powerful impact, but combined with what we see often
affects our prejudices. He notes that the creature is aware of this and says, "The creature is aware
of sighted culture to the extent that he believes Victor's younger brother, William, to be too
young to have been indoctrinated by it" (Essaka 56). Of course when the creature approaches
young William, the boy screams at the sight of him. Sight in this case overcomes even the most
unformed ideals of what makes a monster a monster and a person normal looking by comparison.

DeFord 2

Essaka also notes that of all the characters in the novel, De Lacey is the one that Shelly
uses to illustrate how much we depend on our sight when we make assumptions. "Mr. De Lacey,
is at the moral center of the novel. De Lacey is capable of hearing the creature's tale because he
is without the prejudices of a visual culture" (Essaka 57) By not being able to see and judge the
creature on sight alone, De Lacey has to rely on his hearing and of the sincerity of the creature to
make his judgments'. Essaka goes on by saying, "Blindness is used most often as a trope for
being without the kind of prejudice belonging to sighted culture: the fear of and stigmatization of
physical difference" (Essaka 57). If many of the characters were without their sight, would their
opinions of the creature change? One cannot be certain, but Shelly herself offers an example in
the novel itself, when the creature and De Lacey are talking. "A fatal prejudice clouds their eyes,
and where they ought to see a feeling and kind friend, they behold only a detestable monster"
(Shelly 93). De Lacey, of all the characters, is sympathetic to the creature based on his words and
not his looks. Even Victor, the creatures creator, has issues with listening to its tale without being
disgusted by what he sees. The creature, aware of this, even try's something almost childlike to
remedy this."Thus I relieve thee, my creator, he said, and placed his hated hands before my eyes"
(Shelly 69). The creature knows that Victors sight is the source of his issues, yet there is little
that he can do to change this.
Many of the film versions of the novel, take this to heart and focus more on the
grotesqueness of the monster, rather than on its words or it's intelligence. Scott Juengel mentions
in his article about the faces of Frankenstein, that the face is the most important feature for a
visual culture. "To gaze on Karloff is to participate in an endless visual reconstruction of the
monstrous body. Perhaps this is why we turn away, for ultimately the myth of Frankenstein is a
cautionary tale against just such replication" (Juengel 354). Karloff's performance of the monster

DeFord 3

is considered a classic by many, despite it being very different from the novel. As Juengel
remarks, "Here one can see why the cinematic renderings of Shelley's monster insist that horror
lies in a broken version of a recognizable whole: a spectre of our own dissolution, the sutured
face announces its unfashionedness and therefore preemptively structures the spectator's
estrangement" (Juengel 364). By having the monster look so disfigured, it makes the audience
retreat from the creature, rather than embrace it. In a sense, letting their eye's judge before
getting to know what the creature is about. Victor does this as well and makes the creature the
villain, as Juengel later states. "Frankenstein projects wickedness onto the creature based on his
disfigured "shape" and deformed "aspect," a verdict that has "an irresistible proof of the fact,"
despite Frankenstein's limited knowledge of his creature's history and temperament" (Juengel
362).
The creature is ultimately doomed from the beginning. It's shape is unpleasing to the eye
and is therefore something that is different from what people would call normal. Some would
call this a type of racism, as we judge what the external looks like, while ignoring the inside
altogether. As Juengel puts it, "Shelley's novel could be said to intimate the monster's centrality
to the visual culture of modernity" (Juengel 354). We live in a culture that thrives on visual
information. It isn't a surprise that we think people that look pleasant are so and those that are
ugly are unpleasant to be around. "This subtle categorical slippage between the body's beauty
and deformity suggests how the monster's subsequent legibility serves to reify a cohesive
narrative of malice and treachery" (Juengel 361). If we see deformity, then we instantly think that
they are evil in one form or another.
To look at this from another perspective, issues of race can also be determined by the way
a person is treated. Peter Melville and his essay on hospitality in Frankenstein illustrates this

DeFord 4

quite well. "There is no hospitality without its opposite-hostility" (Melville 180). In the novel,
several instances show this type of racism in loud and sometimes subtle tones. Melville uses
Victor as the first example of this. He states that, "accepting an invitation to hospitality can
render the guest hostage to another's person's host-age" (Melville 179). Melville is rather fond of
this host-age type of scenario, as uses examples of when the host becomes the guest and vice
versa. "Witnessing the creature's coming to life as a second subjectivity in the room, Victor is
made aware that he is no longer simply at-home with himself, but is now forcibly made host to
another within the most private of his domestic spaces" (Melville 181). When the creature
awakens for the first time, makes Victor a type of hostage as he is now subject to another's will
and refuses to acknowledge that he is part of something. By rejecting the creature, he shows not
hospitality, but hostility to it from the start. Melville alludes to the fact that Victor saw something
in the creatures eyes that day. "Victor to gaze upon himself as if for the first time, to see himself
as he thinks he must look to others" (Melville 180). Perhaps Victor saw that he was truly a
foreigner in the unexplored realms of creation and knew that he wasn't welcome.
Another example the Melville uses is the complications that come from Safie's father,
which the creature see's for himself through a crack in the floor. "Safie's father and the monster
are therefore connected in the novel's metonymy of alienation and rejection" (Melville 183). As
it is stated in the novel, Safie's father is a Turk, and the thought of his daughter being married to
a Christian man, isn't something that sits well with him. He knows of the rejection he has
because of his beliefs and does all he can to protect his daughter. As Melville states, "A
mistreated foreigner, whose beliefs and cultural practices are made monstrous by his passing
through multiple narratives and points of view, the Turk is able, all too well, to anticipate the

DeFord 5

disapproving gaze" (Melville 184). Yet despite all of this, Safie eventually makes it to the De
Lacy cottage and is able to be with her beloved, despite all of the issues her race presents.
Melville also makes another interesting connection in the novel in regards to race.
"Useful comparison between the creature's inhospitable rejection in the De Lacey cottage and the
experience of early nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian "half-castes in London"" (Melville 183).
This idea of being severed from what you know and being rejected by everyone around you, is
beyond similar to what the creature endures in the book. Melville continues, "Like the half-castes
of London, the creature knows only too well what Homi Bhabha might identify as the difference
between being human and merely mimicking the human in a way that threatens the very meaning
of humanity" (Melville 183). Being rejected and forced to act the part, but never fully embracing
it, is something that the creature exemplifies. It is possible that Shelly drew upon these cultural
feelings when she put Frankenstein together, no pun intended. Like these early Indian settlers in
London, the creature is rejected on so many accounts. As Melville concludes, "The creature
[becomes] abruptly decolonized by his experience with the De Laceys, whose beliefs and
appearance he has been taught to admire, but whose acceptance he will be forever denied."
(Melville 183).
Andrew Burkett's article on the Mediating Monstrosity also let us see another aspect of
the creature and his regard for his identity of himself. "The creature is careful to convey to Victor
his self-awareness of bodily experience and of the various ways in which he has become a
sensitive, intelligent being" (Burkett 594). Burkett would argue that the creatures body, although
hideious, is something that he cannot change and thus he is stuck in this cycle of loathing and
rejection from all he meets. He goes on to say, "Most important, the creature sees his body as
essential to his sense of self and irreducibly tied to cognition" (Burkett 594). Despite all that he

DeFord 6

endures, the creature knows that his body is the source of this hatred and so in turn, turns this
hostility onto Victor for the prejudice that he has. Burkett goes into greater detail about his
theories about the creatures body exemplifying his scientific work, but suffice to say, the creature
is still shown to be tragic.
Perhaps most convincing of all though is Anne Mellor's article about racial science at
work in Frankenstein. She notices early on that Shelly wants us to know the creatures skin color.
"The observation that the Creature is of a different skin color and hence of a different race is
made for the reader long before we enter Frankenstein's attic laboratory and witness the climax
of Frankenstein's experiment" (Mellor 2). This skin color plays a pivotal piece in Shelly's work,
something that is often overlooked by the main story. Mellor notes that the creatures skin is
something that lets it go unnoticed through the journey it leads Victor on through the Arctic. "A
yellow-skinned man crossing the steppes of Russia and Tartary, with long black hair and duncolored eyes- most of Mary Shelley's nineteenth-century readers would immediately have
recognized the Creature as a member of the Mongolian race" (Mellor 2). By having the creature
have yellow skin, it would almost blend in at certain parts of the world. But Mellor says that this
could mean something entirely different though.
The Image of the yellow man or those of Asian descent, would be something that many
Europeans would have an uneasy fear about. Shelly's novel may have added some fuel to the fire,
unintentionally. "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein of 1818 initiates a new version of this Yellow
Man, the image of the Mongol as a giant" (Mellor 11). Mellor says that the Mongol threat was
something that many Europeans feared. She goes on by saying, "By the 1880s the gigantic
yellow man had become a synecdoche for the population of China as a whole, a population so
enormous that it could, if mobilized, easily conquer all of Asia and Europe" (Mellor 11). With

DeFord 7

this threat on many people's mind, those with yellow skin would defiantly be looked down upon
and defiantly shown racial prejudice.
Even in the America's, the yellow scare was a persistent worry. Chinese were shown in
propaganda and in newspapers as being a monopoly on various jobs and crafts in large cities.
Mellor finds that, "The rabble-rousing cry against the "yellow peril" was a staple of American
and British anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese propaganda during the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War"
(Mellor 14). It's sad to think that this is part of our nation's history, but these were large issues
during the first and second world wars. With Japan entering the war, this scare only escalated
further. Mellor's research on the subject finds that, "The Japanese male was explicitly identified
as an insidious sexual threat to defenseless white Caucasian females" (Mellor 14). By helping to
enflame these feeling during the war, no doubt helped motivate many soldiers into fighting. One
could say that long before the wars, these feelings were already there, simmering under the
surface. We can only look at some of these early accounts to see this type of racism slowly
building pressure.
Mellor concludes with an interesting thought. "Does the Creature's yellow skin-together
with the animal as well as human parts from which he is constructed-indicate that he is by his
very bodily nature a degenerate being, both racially and evolutionarily inferior to his Caucasian
creator, and hence necessarily a monster?" (Mellor 17-18). Shelly must have known that these
feelings were there or perhaps chose instead to use the color yellow as a representation of
decayed flesh. In either case, the monster shows elements of racial fears and worry's that Shelly
was aware of during her lifetime. The Creature becoming more than just simply a monster, but a
representation of those fears that many felt would soon overtake them if they were not careful.

DeFord 8

Why then has this novel managed to stay within the spectrum of society while others
have fallen by the way side and forgotten? Some argue that the elements of science are what
makes it still relevant. The aspects of hospitality and visual sight perhaps? Or the idea that the
monster is something that stirs in the minds of Shelly's early readers, the idea that certain types
of skin colors were a threat to everything that they hold dear. It should be noted that the creature
doesn't become violent until Victor denies him the mate that he so desperately desires. Perhaps
this is the idea that freaks Victor out the most in the novel. The idea that he may have created a
more flawed race than man is that could one day overtake his own race as supreme.
Regardless of the point of view, Frankenstein is a novel that is captivating in its many
views and concerns. If we look close enough, it may be that we find something unexpected
staring back at use as Victor find's that night when the monster first wakes.

DeFord 9

Works Cited
Melville, Peter. "Monstrous Ingratitude: Hospitality in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" European
Romantic Review. 2 (2008 Apr): 179-185. Web. 29 April 2015.
Juengel, Scott J. "Face, Figure, Physiognomics: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the Moving
Image" Novel: A Forum on Fiction. 33 (2000 Summer): 353-76. Web. 29 April 2015.
Burkett, Andrew. "Mediating Monstrosity: Media, Information, and Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein" Studies in Romanticism. 51 (2012 Winter): 579-605. Web. 29 April 2015.
Joshua, Essaka. "Blind Vacancy: Sighted Culture and Voyeuristic Historiography in Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein" European Romantic Review. 22 (2011 Feb): 49-69. Web. 29 April 2015.
Mellor, Anne K. "Frankenstein, Racial Science, and the Yellow Peril" Nineteenth-Century
Contexts. 23 (2001): 1-28. Web. 29 April 2015.
Shelly, Mary. Frankenstein. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: Norton & Company, 2012. Print.