The Gothic is defined to be “tales of mystery and horror, intended to chill the spine and curdle the blood…monstrous apparitions”(Cuddon 356). Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is classified to be a Gothic text, and at its core, Frankenstein is a novel about a creator overtaken by his monstrous creation; yet, if we take the historical racial tensions of the early 19th century into account, parallels between Frankenstein’s creation and those enslaved by the British empire can be drawn, and Frankenstein becomes a novel that describes the victimizer becoming the victim and the victim becoming the oppressor. Nowhere in the definition of the Gothic is the idea of race brought up, but in novels like Frankenstein, there are definite connections between Frankenstein’s creation – a monster specifically designed to instill fear in the reader – and racial “others”, especially with those of African descent. What does Frankenstein do when it takes this clearly racialized being and turns them into the oppressor? What does the novel do when it reverses the power dynamic of the people who have been kidnapped, sold, commodified, and abused with their kidnappers, abusers, and sellers? The slave trade was able to erase a person’s identity through taking their name, their family, and connection to their culture and country, ultimately pushing them into a social and civil death. Frankenstein, in turn, erases the suffering of those enslaved by villainizing and turning the monster into the oppressor of a White man. Thus, Frankenstein is able to destroy the one thing that the slave trade could not: the lived suffering of those who were enslaved.

The first glimpse we get of Frankenstein’s creation is of a giant man on a sled being pulled by dogs. He is described by the Arctic explorer, Walton, as “a savage inhabitant of some undiscovered island.”(Shelley 16) Immediately, this man, who cannot possibly be human, is designated to the description of “savage”. In this way, Frankenstein’s creation is immediately racialized and deemed as “other” and this otherness makes it so that he cannot possibly be “human”. This then brings into question what Shelley’s implications are: if this being is not human then what is he? There is a glaring distinction made between Frankenstein and his creation: European and non-European, White and non-White, human and non-human. In doing so, Shelley creates in the reader’s mind a distinct racial otherness with Frankenstein’s creation. This racial otherness is a reflection on the historical time period in which Frankenstein was written, according to Malchow, “towards the turn of the century ideas about racial difference were consolidated and intensified.”(Malchow 94) Although one could claim that Shelley did not set out to deliberately create a racialized “other” with her monster, Shelley describes the monster to be larger than any human being, and to be able to perform feats that are superhuman. Her description “suggests the standard description of the black man in both the literature of the West Indies and that of West African exploration.” (Malchow 102) In more detail, Frankenstein’s monster is described to be in “the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature”(Shelley 15). Comparing this to early nineteenth descriptions of the Black body where “ repulsive features, brute-like strength and size of limbs featured prominently” (Malchow 103), it becomes obvious that to the nineteenth-century readers of Frankenstein that the monster is representational of the “racialized other.”

In many ways, with Frankenstein’s monster, Shelley tracks the journey of someone enslaved. In the beginning, Frankenstein’s monster knows nothing of the world that he was brought into; he was “a poor, helpless, miserable wretch” that “knew … nothing.” (Shelley 75) Olaudah Equiano, a former slave who was able to buy his freedom, describes his experiences of being kidnapped and sold into slavery. When he was first brought to America the White men there had “complexions too differing so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke, (which were different from any I had ever heard)” (Equiano 70-71) horrified him. In addition, both Frankenstein’s monster and Equiano know nothing about the language of the world that they are brought into, and must somehow learn it. These connections between Frankenstein’s monster and Equiano cannot be said to be intentional but Equiano’s account of his kidnapping and enslavement was first published in 1789 and Shelley’s Frankenstein came almost three decades later in 1818. The same naivety of Equiano in America is reflected in the naivety of Frankenstein’s monster when he is first created and has to struggle in the new world that he finds himself in. Furthermore, Frankenstein’s monster says that he “could subsist upon coarser diet; [he] bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to [his] frame.” (Shelley 87) This description lines up completely with what the apologists for slavery would say of those that they enslaved. They described those enslaved as having “more brute strength than the white man and could stand the heat of the Tropics which would…perhaps kill, a European”(Malchow 104), which means that Frankenstein’s monster can be seen as analogous to an African who had been enslaved by Europeans. Therefore, in addition to creating a racialized “other” with her monster, Shelley also unconsciously draws on experiences of those enslaved and applies them to her monster, causing most readers to see the monster as a stand-in to people that were enslaved.

This racialization of Frankenstein’s monster as well as the connections of the monster’s experience with the account of those actually enslaved paired with the events surrounding Shelley’s writing of the novel, seems to suggest that there are parallels between Frankenstein’s creation and the slave rebellions occurring during the early and mid nineteenth centuries. Shelley’s characterization of Frankenstein’s creation causes Frankenstein’s monster to become the villain of the novel, and in crafting several connections between Frankenstein’s monster and those enslaved by the British empire, Shelley is able to vilify those enslaved and their struggle for freedom. First brought into a strange new world where the monster has no name and no family history, where he does not know the language and faces discrimination and abusive prejudice because of his perceived differences. Frankenstein’s monster is not accepted anywhere and it is with this realization that Frankenstein’s monster realizes his own monstrosity and begins to act with vengeful rage against those that have wronged him. In having her monster become vengeful and act on his monstrosity, Shelley implies, with the racialization of her monster, that the slave rebellions occurring in the West Indies and West Africa can only be interpreted as a monstrous act by those enslaved. Indeed, “Shelley drew upon contemporary attitudes towards non-whites, in particular on fears and hopes of the abolition of slavery in the West Indies.”(Malchow 90) In doing so, Shelley creates a strong line of connection with a creation battling with his creator to be an allegory of the slave rebellions against White masters. As a matter of fact, the “Indian Mutiny, the Jamaican rebellions of 1831 and 1865, the countless little wars fought by Victoria’s armies against Maori, Ashanti, Zulus or Canadian Metis all contributed to the emotional appeal of a text which presented the Other as a rebellious and ungrateful child that owed its very existence to a white male patron.”(Malchow 127) Furthermore, this connection with slave rebellions becomes obvious when Frankenstein’s monster goes on a murderous rampage: he burns down De Lacey’s village after being beat out of their house by Felix, and he goes on to kill both Frankenstein’s fiance and he also kills Frankenstein’s child brother. During this time, Shelley would “have read Edward’s rather more explicit description of the horrors of a slave rebellion that saw, he claimed, widespread ‘death and desolation’” where they “set fire to the building and canes. In one morning they murdered between thirty and forty Whites, not sparing even infants at the breast.”(Malchow 109-110)These accounts already set up the slave rebellions to be acts of murderous rage that seemingly happen in a vacuum and have large-scale effects on how society viewed these slave rebellions. Thus, for Shelley to create a monster out of these slave rebellions would have only solidified how the many people that participated in the slave trade would view the slave rebellions happening across the West Indies and West Africa.

Going further, Frankenstein completely reverses the power dynamic between Frankenstein and his monster. After Frankenstein refuses to create a female companion for his monster, the monster says to him that “[Y]ou are my creator, but I am your master; – obey!”(Shelley 126) Here, there is a power shift of the oppressor becoming the oppressed, the victim becoming the victimizer. This power shift is representational at large, of how Britain, and other slave trading countries viewed the the slave trade and the slave rebellions. To many of these countries, the act of a slave rebellion was a monstrous act, backed up by the pseudoscience left by the Enlightenment. To these countries, the people that they enslaved were actual “monsters” capable of inhuman and unspeakably cruel acts. Therefore, Frankenstein’s monster is not just a made up fantasy thought up by Shelley during a dark and stormy night, it is a “dredged up …bogyman which had been constructed out of a cultural tradition of the threatening “Other” – whether troll or giant, gypsy of Negro – from the dark inner recesses of xenophobic fear and loathing.”(Malchow 103) Shelley, with her monster, is able to sharply create the idea that it is the slave traders and people who are participating in the slave trade that are the actual victims and that those who are rebelling against the slave trade – a shockingly cruel and abusive practice – to be the oppressors and the actual monsters. In doing so, everything that happened to those enslaved suddenly becomes “justifiable” and “excusable,” and their lived suffering is erased. Frankenstein is a novel that was able to reaffirm the idea that those that were enslaved were not human, and thus every cruel act against them was “justifiable” as it was not “humanity” that was being harmed but rather that the slave trade was actually a fight to combat “monstrosity.” Ultimately, Shelley’s Frankenstein solidified the idea that those participating in slave rebellions were monsters and that the suffering of those enslaved were then less meaningful and insignificant. Shelley, with her monster, was able to erase the suffering of tens of millions of people.

Frankenstein is a novel that creates a caricature of “racialized others.”The monster is not just an amalgamation of dead body parts, he is a cobbled together being that takes all of the stereotypical ideas of “racial others.”He is full of vengeful rage and through this monster, Shelley creates a conduit in which to portray an allegory of the slave rebellions occurring across the West Indies and West Africa. With her monster, she is able to show that the monster is the true oppressor of Victor Frankenstein. In other words, she shows through Frankenstein’s monster that it is those that are enslaved that are the oppressors of the White man. This is done through the racialization of Frankenstein’s monster and the connections with the violent acts of the monster with accounts of violent slave rebellions. In doing so, Frankenstein’s monster becomes the villain of the novel and in the same vein, those enslaved become the villain in their fight against their captors. In doing so, the history of the monster is largely forgotten; his violent and cruel acts take center stage, and similarly the historical suffering of those enslaved also become erased as their oppressors begin to view them similarly, as monsters. Therefore, Frankenstein can be seen as a microcosm of what the Gothic does: creating villains out of “racialized” others and taking away the one thing that the slave trade could not by erasing their lived, historical, and documented suffering.