Being a fragment of
Science Fiction, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley has been one of its kind too in
an era that was derided by female writers due to the stigma of being unintellectual
and inappropriate. The novel exhibits the tale of a creator, Victor
Frankenstein, and his creation, the ultimate monster. The monster, therefore,
becomes the colonial subject for Victor under the light of Frantz Fanon’s Black
Skin, White Masks. The novel carries colonial thematic concerns and
colonization in various instances is understood by gendered dichotomies.
The novel unfolds the
imperial agenda of Western Europeans to sanction the East as savage, inferior,
and monster. The monster initially was just entitled as a creation that yearned
for basic desires such as love and respect. The denial of humane treatment from
the humans led to his anguish against Victor and his family which led him to
the pathway of being a monster. The racism of Victor and his family brews up
from the ugly and filthy appearance of the monster. The rejection from the very
own master and creator forges the monster to have psychological tensions. The
sobriquets used for the monster are, ‘Demon, Monster, Savage, Devil’; all thus
primarily have negative connotations. Fanon notes a similar phenomenon in the
construction of the black in postcolonial societies: “...the Other, the white
man…had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, and stories ' (Burkhart
2020, pp.2). Implicating Fanon’s concept of black and white in the novel will
represent Victor as white while the monster is black, who is excluded by the
white on all the landscapes. The identity of being a monster or a black is
projected at the monster which due to psychological torment gets internalized
in its psyche accepting itself as a low-born or outcast.
The monster tries all the
efforts to assimilate with Victor and his family which Fanon calls a process of
‘Lactification’, which means to attract the white or be like a white. Yet, the
monster's recurrent denial by Victor urges him to ask for a female counterpart
just like himself from his master. Victor refuses to do so, disseminating his
immense hold over the monster's life and relations. This control of Victor over
the monster’s erotic and reproductive mechanism depicts his hegemonic hold over
the monster’s life. Victor’s refusal is similar to what Fanon calls “White
Violence” and in the case of the novel, Victor commits the same violence on a
monster. Victor limits the monster's race propagation by dismantling and
destroying the monster's female counterpart. The European exceptionalism of
Victor and Othering phenomenon implied on monster also deems the novel to be an
“Oriental discourse” in the words of Edward Said’s literary theory. Therefore,
the monster’s attack on Victor in Fanon’s words is, “The black man is a toy in
the hands of the white man. So, to break the vicious cycle, he explodes”
(Burkhart 2020, pp.4).
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