How Mary Shelley’s Classic Novel “Frankenstein” Addresses Prejudice and Racism in Society
Mary Shelley’s gothic novel “Frankenstein,” and its film adaptations, “Frankenstein” and “The Bride of Frankenstein,” directed by James Whale, are considered classics due to their status in popular culture. Frankenstein, the story about a creature looking to belong in a foreign world, and his creator, who attempts to create life but fails to foresee the ethical and social consequences of playing God, have been dissected in many essays over the years, and continue to frighten readers 200 years after publication. But one finds it difficult to ignore the theme of hate and prejudice when it is relevant in both the novel and film. Although James Whale’s film adaptation of “Frankenstein” differs greatly from Mary Shelley’s novel; the portrayal of the creature and how he deals with prejudice because of his deformities are intact. One only needs to look at the troubled lives of novelist Mary Shelley, and Director James Whale, to argue how much influence their personal lives had in bringing the story of Frankenstein to life on page and screen.
Mary Shelley grew up in England during a time when women were looked upon as child bearers and not serious thinkers. Conceived by famed feminist Mary Wollstonecraft; Mary Shelley emerged in an era of mostly male writers; some might even argue that Mary Shelley had feminism in her blood from birth (Mary Shelley Biography). The creature that Mary Shelley created was reflective to how she must’ve felt in a man’s world, or as an outsider looking in. Mary Shelley mirrored the prejudice she endured in life by creating the women characters of the novel as secondary figures to Victor and the monster. One can also make an argument that Mary’s portrayal of Dr. Frankenstein and his obsession to give life to the creature, details man’s continuing dominance and control over the women of the 19th century. With birth and motherhood being the primary role of women during that time period, one can only assume that man would want to take that gift away from women as well, thus, Victor creates his own life. As Ann C. Hall points out so brilliantly in her essay, “It is difficult to ignore the novel’s focus on reproduction as well as its tendency to spawn offspring” (A. Hall 212). Mary Shelley knew she was living in a man’s world, and her depiction of the doctor and his obsession with creating life, only furthers the debate on how men wanted to control everything that they could during the 19th century, including life itself.
One can also look at the history of slavery and race relations in Great Britain during the early 19th century, and how it played an important part, in how society viewed, and treated anyone that looked or acted different than what culture considered normal. Although slavery was well publicized in America; England was dealing with its own slave trade during the 19th century. It was not until The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 that Britain saw change (Olusoga). Mary Shelley saw prejudice first hand, not only as a woman growing up in early 19th century, but also in Great Britain where slavery of the negro was still prevalent. The creature can be described as “the other” in society: “Perceived as lacking essential characteristics possessed by the group, the Other is almost always seen as a lesser or inferior being and is treated accordingly. The Other in a society may have few or no legal rights, may be characterized as less intelligent or as immoral, and may even be regarded as sub-human” (The Other).
In my opinion, Mary Shelley specifically does not give the creature a name because she wanted to strip the creature of his identity, very much like a slave master. Victor is the master, and the creature is the slave, since the master had power over the slave, it is assumed that the power belongs to Dr. Frankenstein. Although Mary and her husband, Percy, were known to support abolition of slavery, “Percy Shelley was among those abolitionists who urged not immediate but gradual emancipation, fearing that the enslaved, so long and so violently oppressed, and denied education, would, if unconditionally freed, seek a vengeance of blood” (Lepore). During this period, even people who supported the ban on the slave trade were scared and frightened about a revolt. George Canning, abolitionist, Foreign Secretary, and leader of the House of Commons, invoked in 1824, during a parliamentary debate about emancipation. Tellingly, Canning’s remarks brought together the novel’s depiction of the creature as a baby and the culture’s figuring of Africans as children. “In dealing with the negro, Sir, we must remember that we are dealing with a being possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child,” Canning told Parliament. “To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength, in the maturity of his physical passions, but in the infancy of his uninstructed reason, would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance” (Lepore).
The idea that the creature was illiterate, and a man child, is the same reference used when referring to the negro during that time. Most African Americans were forbidden to learn to read and write, and much like the creature in the book, only learned through the actions of others.
Victor Frankenstein attempted to create a creature in his own image, but after Victor realizes that the creature looks nothing like him, he runs away. From one of the most famous paragraphs of the novel, Victor describes the horror and disgust of seeing the creature: “How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! — Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriance’s only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips” (Shelley, Frankenstein 35).
“When Mary Shelley writes of a yellow skinned man, with long black hair and dun-colored eyes — most of Mary Shelley’s nineteenth-century readers would immediately have recognized the Creature as a member of the Mongolian race, one of the five races of man first classified in 1795 by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the scholar who, more than any other, founded the modern science of physical anthropology” (MELLOR 481–487).
In my opinion, I feel the creature was cast out by Victor due to his skin color and bone structure, which were much different from his own. Instead of creating a race of his own kind, which was his intention; Victor created a yellow skinned devil from Dante’s deepest pits of hell. The mention of “pearly white teeth” and “black lips” could also be described as negro characteristics as Evelynn Hammonds talks about in her book “The Logic of Difference: A History of Race in Science and Medicine in the United States.” She describes in her book the practice of science and physicians of the 19th century, “The thing about looking for differences is once you look, you find them. Physicians would look for differences in sizes of chests, breadth of chests, length of limbs, capacity of lungs, these kinds of things. And, of course, they read those differences through the lens of race. By the end of the 19th century, if we just take African Americans as an example, there’s not a single body part that hasn’t been subjected to this kind of analysis. So, you’ll find articles in medical literature about the Negro ear, and the Negro nose, and the Negro leg, and the Negro heart, and the Negro eye, and the Negro foot, and it’s every single body part. It is this endless catalogue of differences and these perceptions that they brought with them, that there are some fundamental differences between African Americans, between Chinese, between Native Americans, and whites and those people they categorize as whites, that they will be able to see and find differences in the body” (HAMMONDS).
Later in the book, Victor refuses to create another being in the creature’s image when he states, “Begone! I have answered you; you may torture me, but I will never consent” (Shelley, Frankenstein 101). This statement is important because it shows the monster’s portrayal of “The Other,” and how appearance effected the attitudes towards non-Britons in the nineteenth century and accepting differences” (Themistocleous). “The belief in the superiority of the British and European races fed the expansion of the empire. The British empire grew from the idea ‘that the British were the best race to rule the world” (Racist ideas). The idea that another race would procreate and take over as the dominant race surely must’ve weighed heavily on Victor’s mind when declining the creatures request for a mate. Other races, especially those of African descent, were looked upon as savages, and I believe, the Mary Shelley novel takes that approach when depicting the creature as a murderous villain, who will stop at nothing to get that which he desires, which is to procreate.
Scholars have argued about how much influence the death of Mary’s mother and child had over the story of Dr. Frankenstein and his obsession with creating life from death, but I beg to differ. It is no secret that Mary suffered a great deal of pain in her life, between a cheating husband, to losing several children, and her mother at birth, and her strained relationship with her father, but I believe above everything else, these unfortunate circumstances had caused her to become an outcast, much like the creature. When Mary started an affair with free love thinker and poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, it was scandalous to say the least. Mary was a radical thinker like her mother, but she was smitten with Percy, and much like the creature she created, both were in search of that one thing we all strive for: LOVE. Unfortunately for Mary, Percy had already been married when he started the forbidden relationship with the teenager (Reiman).
The idea once again comes back to what I previously said about “the other” and how Mary felt she didn’t fit into society norms. Mary was a radical thinker and her relationship with Percy was frowned upon by many in society.
The first edition of Frankenstein was published anonymously in London in 1818 (Harris). The very fact that Mary Shelley felt compelled to publish Frankenstein anonymously is proof of the prejudice that Mary Shelley was subject to as a woman writing in the 19th century. Florence Fenwick Miller, a midwife turned journalist, described woman’s position during the 19th century as this, “Under exclusively man-made laws, women have been reduced to the most abject condition of legal slavery in which it is possible for human beings to be held…under the arbitrary domination of another’s will, and dependent for decent treatment exclusively on the goodness of heart of the individual master” (From a speech to the National Liberal Club) (Wojtczak).
I believe a lot of Mary’s personal life and what was happening at that time had tremendous influence over the novel, but one can’t deny the prejudice that the creature endures throughout the story, and its similarities to Mary Shelley’s personal dealings with prejudice as a woman. I don’t think Mary felt like she belonged or was taken seriously. To this day, people still argue that it was her husband, Percy Shelley who wrote Frankenstein, thus, proving that time does not change all that much when it comes to woman having literary minds that are equal to, or greater than men.
If it was Mary Shelley who wrote the creature, then it was James whale’s vision that brought the creature to life. Which leads me to my next brief discussion, one that includes the James Whale film adaptations of the Mary Shelley novel. Like Mary, James was born in England during the end of the 19th century and grew up during a period when things were still very much segregated. “Whale was an uncloseted gay man in Hollywood during the 1930s. Critics and gay activists have often interpreted the Frankenstein films as a coded account of Whale’s sexuality — his feeling that he was a misunderstood outsider, a lonely monster” (Rose).
“Like the frightened man-made child who was pieced together from dead bodies, Whale lived his life as an outcast. Being openly gay was virtually unheard of at the time. Some have also opined that through the Frankenstein Monster, as it was portrayed by Boris Karloff, Whale expressed some of his own frustrations regarding what it was like to be gay in a straight, hostile world. In later films, the Monster was seen as a hulking brute who killed on instinct. But in “Frankenstein” and “Bride of Frankenstein” (1935), the Monster was a heartbroken child, desperately longing for love in a world that could neither accept nor understand him” (Nahmod).
As Ann C. Hall points out in her essay, “Making Monsters,” James Whale’s version of Frankenstein’s creature is created using the brain, but in “Bride of Frankenstein” the female is brought to life using the heart. Caroline Picart notes, “it carries on the cliché that men think, and women feel” (A. C. Hall). One has to question if James Whale’s sexuality didn’t have at least some influence on the decision to make the bride all heart, and the man creature all brain. After all, it was men James was attracted to, and women during the 1920’s and 30’s were still not considered equals to most men. The brain in Frankenstein would play on the old Bible verse saying, “Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor” (1 Timothy 2:11–15). This Bible verse speaks volumes on how men were looked at as the intelligent beings, and women as the submissive housewives.
In one of my favorite scenes in “The Bride of Frankenstein,” the creature finds himself outside a cabin belonging to a blind hermit. This scene, taken almost verbatim from the novel, is a perfect example of how we look at others and judge what we don’t know. It shows how quick we are to judge when all we see are colors and scars. The blind hermit knew nothing of the monster’s race or discrepancies and treated the creature as an equal. The creature is soothed by the music of the violin and the melody of Ave Maria played by the blind hermit. This scene can describe how slave music comforted those who suffered at the hand of their masters. “In DuBois’ classic book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” in the chapter titled “Sorrow Songs,” he writes about the religious melodies that were created by Southern slaves and how those songs spoke of justice and a perception that slave and master would one day meet, with the old realities tossed aside, and that their meeting would be as equals” (Music and the struggle against slavery).
I love this verse by Dubois because it speaks volumes on how the creature must have felt. He wanted nothing more than to be looked upon as an equal, and this religious song, “Ava Maria” was enough to bring this creature and man together. The hermit doesn’t see the creature as a threat, because the hermit is not judgmental because of his blindness. The creature is shown warmth, and compassion for the first time by the hermit, and it causes the creature to shed a single tear down upon its cheek. When I look at this scene, and how the creature feels the love of the old man, it reminds me of a lost soul looking for someone to love him for what he is. It makes the creature human, and I believe that is what James Whale wanted to get across.
I believe James Whale felt that because of his own sexuality, many looked at him as being an outsider, or evil. I think he was just wanted people to look at him as a man, and not what society has labeled him. This one scene between a man and a creature ends abruptly when a mob storms through the hut and chases the creature away.
The angry mob scene can also date back to the time of Jim Crow, and the creature being chased down by a racist group such as the Ku Klux Klan to destroy this other race or being. “Nearly 4,000 African Americans were victims of “racial terror lynching’s” in the South between 1877 and 1950, according to a new report by the Equal Justice Initiative” (Weathers). During the filming of The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), race relations in the south were still in turmoil over Jim Crow laws. “Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a white man, began performing the act that would make him famous: he painted his face black and did a song and dance he claimed were inspired by a slave he saw. The act was called “Jump, Jim Crow” (or “Jumping Jim Crow”). He would put on not only blackface makeup, but shabby dress that imitated in his mind — and white people’s minds of the time — the dress and aspect and demeanor of the southern enslaved black person” (Little).
Some might argue that the creature in “Frankenstein,” and his manner of dress, is similar to that of the minstrel show negro in “Jump, Jim Crow,” and others might argue it is what was worn by those during the Great Depression. I am not sure why the clothes were chosen for Boris Karloff to wear as Frankenstein, but it is fascinating to think about.
One can spend hours deciphering all the hidden clues throughout Mary Shelley’s novel, and James Whale’s films, but it is hard not to notice the theme of hate and prejudice riddled throughout the novel, and film. The townsfolk who resemble early lynching mobs are so quick to judge and destroy something they can’t or don’t want to understand. Maybe if they would have just looked a little beyond the surface, they could have discovered an honest to God friend, but what they got instead, was the monster which they all played a part in creating.
Works Cited
“1 Timothy 2:11–15.” The Holy Bible. n.d.
Hall, Ann C. “The Philosophy of reproduction in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Universal Films Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein.” Making Monsters. n.d. 224. document. 15 Feb 2018.
Hall, Ann. “The Philosophy of Reproduction in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Universal Films Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein.” Making Monsters. n.d. 212. document.
HAMMONDS, EVELYNN. “Race: The Power of an Illusion.” 2003. Pbs.org. WEB.
Harris, Colin. “Frankenstein’ is Published.” n.d. WorldHistoryProject.org. WEB. 18 Feb 2018.
Lepore, Jill. “The Strange and Twisted Life of “Frankenstein”.” 12 Feb 2018. The New Yorker. WEB. 21 Feb 2018.
Little, Becky. “Who Was Jim Crow?” 6 August 2015. National Geographic. WEB. 18 Feb 2018.
Mary Shelley Biography. 27 April 2017. A&E Television Networks. WEB. 16 Feb 2018. <https://www.biography.com/people/mary-shelley-9481497>.
MELLOR, ANNE K. “Frankenstein, Racial Science, and the Yellow Peril.” A NORTON CRITICAL EDITION. Ed. J. PAUL HUNTER. 2nd. New York *London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012. 481–487. book. 15 Feb 2018.
“Music and the struggle against slavery.” 4 Feb 2006. Workers World. WEB. 17 Feb 2018. <https://www.workers.org/2006/us/music-0209/>.
Nahmod, David-Elijah. “James Whale: Gay in 1930s’s Hollywood.” 292018 Oct 2015. South Florida Gay News. WEB. 18 Feb 2018.
Olusoga, David. “The history of British slave ownership has been buried: now its scale can be revealed.” 11 July 2015. TheGaurdian.com. WEB. 16 Feb 2018.
“Racist ideas.” n.d. PortCitiesBristol. WEB. 21 Feb 2018. <http://www.discoveringbristol.org.uk/slavery/after-slavery/wider-world/black-white-in-britain/racist-ideas/>.
Reiman, Donald H. “Percy Bysshe Shelley.” n.d. https://www.britannica.com/. WEB. 14 FEB 2018.
Rose, Lloyd. “James Whale, the Man With a Monster Career.” 29 November 1998. The Washington Post. WEB. 18 Feb 2018.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: Open Road Media, 2014. E-book. 17 Feb 2018.
— . Frankenstein. New York: Norton, 2012. BOOK. 15 Feb 2018.
The Other. 4 FEB 2009. WEB. 17 FEB 2018. <http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/other.html>.
Themistocleous, Mike. “Frankenstein: A Racial Analysis.” 8 May 2014. The Modern Beart. WEB. 15 Feb 2018.
Weathers, Cliff. “4,000 African Americans Were Lynched by White Mobs.” 10 Feb 2015. Alternet. WEB. 17 2018 2018.
Wojtczak, Helena. “WOMEN’S STATUS IN MID 19TH-CENTURY ENGLAND.” n.d. Hastings press. WEB. 20 Feb 2018.
