[For TrIG with Mel Wensel, but I thought this would be interesting for some]

An Exegesis of Racial Discourse in Frankenstein [title of my imaginary paper]

Annotated Bibliography

MALCHOW, H.L. Was Frankenstein’s Monster ‘A Man and a Brother’? Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth Century Britain. Stanford University Press 1996

            H.L. Malchow exposes the parallels between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and racial ideas prevalent in Europe in the early 19^th century. Particularly topics concerning the slave trade in the West Indies and the expansion of Western Empire over Asia and Africa. Malchow does not claim to present concrete evidence or a magic key to unlock all hidden meaning and intention in the text. Her interests lay, rather, in identifying the connection of Shelley’s subtext to stereotypes that were popular of the time.

PIPER, Karen. Inuit Diasporas: Frankenstein and the Inuit in England. Romanticism 2007 (13.1) pp. 63-75.

            At the end if the 18^th century an Inuit man stowed away on board a ship sailing for Scotland and became on of many who would be presented as gifts to the king and queen. Karen Piper’s essay relates this tale and many other tales portraying Inuit peoples (Inuk), commonly caught by arctic explorers, as a spectacle in court from the 16^th through the early 19^th centuries. In contrast, “yellow peril” became a prevalent throughout Europe at the end of the 19^th century. Piper argues that Shelley’s descriptions of the creature and omission of arctic indigenes from Walton’s expedition clearly connect the creature to Inuk (i.e. instead of encountering Inuk on their expedition Walton encounters the creature). Further, the portrayal of the creature as a grotesque monster is a precursor of “yellow peril” ideas.

RICHARD, Jessica. “A Paradise of My Own Creation”: Frankenstein and the Improbable Romance of Polar Exploration. Nineteenth-Century Contexts 2003 (25.4) pp. 295–314.

            This essay discusses the parallel of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and romanticism of polar expeditions funded by Britain at the beginning of the 19^th century. Richard analyzes documents to present the reader with a clear idea of the British government funded race to map an arctic route around the world. This is salient to Frankenstein because the mystery of arctic travel was popular topic in 1818, when Shelley was revising for publication.

SAMUELS, Robert. “Frankenstein”’s Homosocial Colonial Desire. Writing Prejudices: The Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy of Discrimination from Shakespeare to Toni Morrison. State University of New York Press, Albany 2001.

            In chapter five of Writing Prejudices Samuels dissects Shelley’s commentary on Captain Robert Walton’s and Victor Frankenstein’s identification of the creature as an Other and connects this to colonial/empirical enslavement of indigenous peoples. The chapter is quite extreme in exegesis, however Samuels makes two important claims about Frankenstein: firstly, he argues that Victor Frankenstein is a symbol of “repressed desires... that he reflects onto his debased Other”; second, the creature is “a victim of prejudice who attempts to escape his enslaved state”(73).