Literary Criticism

A Postcolonialist Reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:

by Marites Bundoc

The realization of his “otherness” or rather “othering” comes with the acquisition of cultural knowledge in a model of coming-to-consciousness and disproof of assumed innate incapacity that is a regular clement of the slave narrative: the correlation of freedom with literacy … became the central trope of the slave narrative (Smith qtd. in Shelley 554).

           In a colonialist setting, the other, the subaltern, the slave, is judged as inferior by the colonizer, or the superior group. The subaltern usually looks up to members of the superior culture (Tyson 248), and desires to mimic them (249). Frankenstein’s creature, symbolizing the subaltern, observing the DeLacey family and their civilized ways – reading, communicating with each other through words and thoughtful gestures, and serving one another, is greatly impressed and aspires to imitate them:

I looked upon them as superior beings, who would be the arbiters of my future destiny. I formed in my imagination a thousand pictures of presenting myself to them, and their reception of me. I imagine that they would be disgusted, until, my gentle demeanour and conciliating words, I should first win their favour, and afterwards their love. …

These thoughts exhilarated me, and led me to apply with fresh ardour to the acquiring the art of language (Shelley 105).

“… arbiters of my future destiny” means freedom from the creature’s isolation from society. He thought that education, or literacy, was his ticket to entrance into a civilized society that would accept him regardless of his physical appearance. The Creature had superior mental capacities which enable him to learn to speak and read, merely by his covert observation of the De Lacey family (Smith qtd. in Shelley 553). He learns languages, such as from Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. However, like the slaves denied of the right to learn and the masters prohibited from teaching their slaves on pain of legal penalty (CITE XXX), they learn secretly by listening to their masters or white children’s tutors explaining things or they taught each other in secrecy. However, he was wrong: the moment they saw him, they were disgusted and terrified, and Felix inflicted violence on him to drive him away from Mr. DeLacey, who talked with him earlier only because he was blind:

At that instant the cottage door was opened, and Felix, Safie, and Agatha entered.

Who can describe their horror and consternation on beholding me?

Agatha fainted; and Safie, unable to attend to her friend, rushed out

of the cottage. Felix darted forward, and with supernatural force tore me

 from his father, wo whose knees I clung; in a transport of fury, he dashed

me to the ground, and struck me violently with a stick. I could have torn

him limb from limb, as the lion rends the antelope. But my heart sunk

within me as with bitter sickness, and I refrained. I saw him on the point

of repeating his blow, when, overcame by pain and anguish, I quitted the

cottage, and in the general tumult escaped unperceived to my hovel

(Shelley 121). At this moment, the creature perceived his otherness, his othering, with unmistakable clarity: He was an outcast from the world, unwanted and feared by humanity, simply because he was different. Alas, how many individuals or groups of people are marginalized, dehumanized, mass-murdered because of their difference in looks or culture? One needs only to recall the horrors of the holocaust to affirm this truth of literature.

To avenge his sense of oppression, the creature becomes aggressive and violent; he killed Victor’s younger brother William, implicates the innocent Justine, and kills Victor’s best friend Clerval, for which crime Victor finds himself in solitary confinement in a prison cell:

.. chains and darkness were the only objects that pressed upon me; … I

 awoke and found myself in a dungeon. Melancholy followed, but by

degrees I gained a clear conception of my miseries and situation, and was

then released from prison. For they had called me mad; and during many months, as I understood, a solitary cell had been my habitation.

Like his creature, Victor experienced unhomeliness, an emotional state in which colonized people do not feel at home in any culture, even in their own homes, and therefore, do not feel at home in themselves (Tyson 248-9) after his release from prison, like the Southern slaves, exemplified by Harriet Jacobs, who escaped from their masters and were forever hiding:

            And now my wanderings began, which are to cease but with life, I have traversed

            a vast   portion of the earth, and have endured all the hardships which travelers, in             deserts and barbarous countries, are wont to meet. How I have lived I do not know;          many times I have stretched my failing limbs upon the sandy plain, and prayed for            death. But revenge kept me alive; I dared not die, and leave my adversary in being (Shelley 172).

In an ironic twist of fate, the master becomes the slave. By destroying the bride he had promised the creature, the latter promises to be there on his wedding night to have his revenge. Believing that he would be the creature’s next victim, Victor becomes a slave to his own paranoia:

Slave, I have reasoned with you, but you have proved yourself unworthy

of my condescension. Remember that I have power. You believe yourself

miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be

hateful to you. You are my creator. But I am your master – obey!

…

I is well, I go; but remember I shall be with you on your wedding night

(Shelley 146).

And we know what happens on Victor’s wedding night: the creature kills Victor’s bride, Elizabeth, another innocent victim. It is hard not to think of the angry mob of the French Revolution here. In Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, the rage of the mob, the oppressed, the subalterns, sends the aristocrats to the gallows – how about the innocent ones? To be fair, there were Elizabeth Lavenzas among those punished for the crimes of the oligarchs. How about the innocent Romanov children massacred along their parents, the czar and czarina of Russia, because of the hegemonic power instigated by the intellectual elites? Now the power is in the hands of the proletariat, the working class, in the hands of Victor’s monster.

            I am all for freedom and equality: did I not come from a colonized country? I sympathize with my former countrymen who, for centuries, suffered under the yoke of European colonizers. Still, I am inclined to see both sides of the coin. Coleridge was deeply disillusioned by the results of the French Revolution, where the masses’ savior, Napoleon, became the next tyrant, so much so that he retired from politics and spent the rest of his life writing poetry (Friends of Coleridge; Kitson). The same thing happened to Cicero in ancient Rome: Disappointed by Julius Caesar’s transformation from leader to despotic conqueror/ruler, he retired to his country home and dedicated the rest of his life to philosophy and literature (Cicero xiv-v).

With the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, slave ownership was finally outlawed in England and in all British colonies in the world – you must have watched Amazing Grace, with idealist William Wilberforce leading the petitioners for the Act –  although the Abolitionists had hoped that the practice of slave trade would end in 1807, as it was technically declared illegal in Great Britain in 1772 (Sheposh para. 1-2). Based on the ending of Frankenstein, where Victor, the “slave owner” and himself a slave to his creature dies, and where the creature goes off to perish in the North Pole, Mary Shelley’s novel was making a statement in favor of the Abolition. In America, the abolition of slavery was constitutionally enforced in 1865 with the Thirteenth Amendment (“Milestone Documents” para. 1). Yet even today, shades of master-slave relationship can still be felt in world societies, in the workplace between employer and employee, and even among families, between husbands and wives, a practice of domestication deeply-rooted in the patriarchal system. Some would justify this system by quoting Ephesians 5.22: “wives, obey your husbands.” This interpretation of scripture is a misnomer, however, because according to Kingdom principles, this passage in the Bible means “the wife’s submission is to be matched by the Christ-like love and consideration of the husband, as a parallel to Christ’s loving relationship with his Bride, the Church, even as the headship of husband to wife, his body, is parallel to Christ’s headship of the Church, which is the Body of Christ (Bruce 1438).

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Bruce, F. F., General Editor. “Ephesians.” New International Bible Commentary. Zondervan, 1979.

Sheposh, Richard. “1833, Act on the Abolition of Slavery in the British Empire.” EBSCO, 2023. https://www.ebsco.com. Accessed 11 Jun 2025.

Milestone Documents.” National Archives. https://www.archives.gov. Accessed 11 Jun 2025.

Seigel, Lee. “Lionel Trilling’s Warning.” City Journal, 27 May 2021, www.city-journal.org/article/lionel-trillings-warning. Accessed 8 Jun. 2025.

Smith, Allan Lloyd. “This Thing of Darkness”: Racial Discourse in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, Edited by Johanna Smith, 3rd ed., 2016.

Tyson Lois. Using Critical Theory: How to Read and Write About Literature.2nd ed., London, Routledge,2011, pp. 245-50.