The Other: Race, Rage, Violence and the Protest Novel in M. Shelley's Frankenstein

Since its publication in 1818, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has inspired the imagination with its ghoulish vision of death, rebirth and revenge. A parable about the inanity of science over nature, Frankenstein seeks to horrify its readers in much the same way of a good ghost story. 

Shelley's aims, though, achieve a far deeper and more meaningful fright: that of the arrogance and evil in man in a corrupt society, particularly when it is far removed from nature. Frankenstein, like many of the novels written during the Romantic period, alludes to Rousseau's theory of the natural man as a sort of noble savage who is free from the constraints of civilization, but is nonetheless corrupted by his mere proximity to it. Frankenstein's creature, very much a natural man, turns violent and corrupt only when he is rejected by civilization. 

While the novel concerns itself with these Romantic ideals, the purpose of this essay is to pursue this interpretation further, particularly with contemporaneous ideas about the societal effect of oppression, especially in matters of race, on the individual and the individual's response to his/her marginalization and oppression. It might seem like a stretch to interpret Shelley's Frankenstein in racial and psychological terms, since the novel deals with neither, until one considers Shelley's themes of rejection, marginalization and rage. 

The creature's rejection, first by his master and creator, Victor Frankenstein, and then by society and his violent response to his own oppression share the same elements of many of the post-WWII protest novels, such as Richard Wright's Native Son or Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. I do not mean to suggest that Frankenstein is a protest novel in the traditional sense or should be regarded as one. Nor do I suggest it is a treatise against racial oppression. I merely intend to point out the similarities in ideas regarding marginalization and oppression between Shelley's Frankenstein and twentieth-century protest novels.