Frankenstein

 This blog is based on Frankenstein and this task was assigned by Dilip Barad sir.

The Revolutionary Body: A Cultural-Studies Reading of Frankenstein From revolutionary births to the “Frankenpheme” in contemporary culture

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is not merely a gothic tale about a scientist and his monstrous progeny; it is a cultural archive. Written and revised between 1816–1831 amid political turbulence, intellectual ferment, and imperial expansion, the novel both encodes and interrogates the anxieties of its moment — and, crucially, furnishes a template for modern cultural anxiety about technology, the body, and the political order. This blog offers a sustained, postgraduate-level cultural-studies reading of Frankenstein. I divide the argument into two linked movements: (1) Revolutionary Births — how the Creature operates as a symptom and agent of socio-political tensions (class, race, empire, science); and (2) The Frankenpheme in Popular Culture — how Shelley’s figuration has become a repeatable cultural element (a “Frankenpheme”) that gets reworked across media to talk back to contemporary anxieties.

Part I - Revolutionary Births

1. The Creature as Proletarian: Class, Sympathy, and Revolt

At the heart of a cultural-studies approach is the insistence that literary forms encode social relations. The Creature’s origin — assembled, abandoned, denied social recognition — maps neatly onto Marxist and proto-socialist vocabularies of alienation and proletarian becoming. Several interconnected moves make this reading persuasive:

• Production without recognition. The Creature is literally produced as a commodity (assembled from parts), yet is denied status as a subject. This echoes the Marxian idea of the laborer who produces value yet is dispossessed of recognition and goods of social life. The Creature’s lack of legal and social standing intensifies his resentment and drives him into outlaw politics (violent reprisals, threats against Victor’s kin) — a tragic politics born of social exclusion rather than innate malice.

• Education as double-edged consciousness. The Creature’s autodidactic reading (Plutarch, Milton, Rousseau) gives him a theoretical language for injustice: he learns about human history, political ideas, and social contract rhetoric, which make visible his own exclusion. This mirrors the Marxist moment when class consciousness (the worker learning the history of exploitation) produces political subjectivity — but in Shelley, there is no collective organ (no proletarian party); the Creature’s rage remains individuated and catastrophic, which dramatizes the danger of isolated revolutionary subjectivity.

• Paradox of innocence and revolt. The Creature’s initial innocence compounds anxieties about revolutionary masses: sympathy (he is wronged) and fear (he may become violent). Shelley stages a dialectic: oppression produces monstrous responses; the social order’s fear of revolt legitimizes pre-emptive violence and exclusion. The Creature thereby embodies the ambivalent liberal imaginary — we pity the suffering many but also fear their capacity for violent retribution.

2. “A Race of Devils”: Otherness, Race, and Empire

Frankenstein is saturated with the language and anxieties of othering. Even where Shelley does not directly describe racial features, the rhetoric around the Creature (grotesque, unnatural, feared) participates in a longer European imaginary that racializes difference.

• Colonial unconscious. Victor’s language of mastery (“I had worked hard… I succeeded”) mirrors colonial mastery rhetoric — control of nature, extraction, and technological domination. The Creature’s displacement parallels the colonial subject: uprooted, decontextualized, and seen as a threat to an ordered social world. Victor’s refusal to take responsibility (returning to Geneva, fleeing) can be read as a settler-colonial logic of extraction followed by abandonment.

• Tropes of barbarism and civilisation. The Creature’s “othering” is narrated through tropes frequently used to justify imperial domination: he is made into a symbol of danger, a figure of contagion. At the same time, his eloquent self-reflexivity complicates any straightforward equation of monstrosity with racialized inferiority: Shelley forces readers to see that monstrosity is produced by social structures rather than by intrinsic racialized defects.

• Contemporary relevance. Reading Frankenstein alongside modern debates on migration, refugeehood, and racialized exclusion illuminates how the novel stages the symbolic mechanisms through which communities are dehumanized, criminalized, and denied personhood. The Creature’s liminality — neither fully human nor animal — echoes how colonial discourse creates in-between figures to justify exclusion.

3. From Natural Philosophy to Cyborg: Technology, Ethics, and the Posthuman

One of the most durable strengths of Shelley’s text is its technological imagination. What was then “natural philosophy” becomes a prophetic rehearsal for our contemporary debates about biotechnology, robotics, and AI.

• The ethics of making. Shelley centralizes the ethical dimensions of creative technologies: Who has the right to create new forms of life? On what social terms should such acts be policed? Victor’s private experiment — unregulated, secretive, motivated by hubris — is an allegory for the dangers of unaccountable scientific enterprise.

• The cyborg anticipates the Creature. Though developed centuries later, the concept of the cyborg (hybrid human–machine) gestures toward the same anxieties Shelley dramatizes: boundary blurring, identity instability, and socio-ethical responsibility. The Creature’s body is assembled; the cyborg’s body is engineered. Both unsettle essentialist notions of human nature.

• Lessons for contemporary science. Frankenstein insists on two lessons: (1) technological innovation cannot be disentangled from its social context — the moral and political environment determines how technologies are used and who bears their costs; (2) technologies that produce novel forms of life or cognition demand collective deliberation and institutional responsibility, not purely private ambition.

Part II -The Frankenpheme in Popular Culture: Fiction, Drama, Film, Television

Timothy Morton’s term “Frankenpheme” (a cultural unit derived from Frankenstein) is useful because it captures how the novel’s imagery and tropes have been modularized, recombined, and deployed across media and discourses. The Frankenpheme is not only a figure in horror films; it is a rhetorical resource deployed in politics, technology debates, food policies, and ethics.

1. Why Frankenstein Endures: Adaptability as Resistance

Several features explain Frankenstein’s cultural longevity:

• Structural ambiguity. The novel resists a single, stable moral verdict. Is Victor the monster or the Creature? This ambiguity allows adaptations to emphasize different moral vectors (scientific hubris, social injustice, parental abandonment), making Shelley’s narrative extremely adaptable.

• Symbolic polyvalence. The Creature can stand for labor, race, migrant bodies, disabled bodies, AI; Victor can stand for the entrepreneur, the scientist, the settler—all of which makes the novel reusable in different ideological struggles.

• Emotional immediacy. The language of abandonment, grief, and vengeance transmits across cultural contexts, allowing audiences to empathize with or fear the Creature according to interpretive choices.

2. How Retellings Reshape the Message

Adaptations selectively foreground certain themes, thereby reshaping Shelley’s critique:

• Horror/monster focus (early cinema, Universal canon). These versions often foreground spectacle and physical monstrosity, eliding the novel’s social critique and emphasizing fear. The Creature as cinematic icon can domesticate the radicalism of Shelley’s text into a consumable horror object.

• Satire and deconstruction (e.g., comedies, parodies). Works like Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks) play with genre conventions to expose cultural anxieties in comedic form—again showing the novel’s capacity for reinvention.

• Philosophical SF (e.g., Blade Runner lineage). Many science-fiction works recast Frankenstein’s core interrogation—creation, responsibility, and personhood—in technologically updated terms (androids, replicants, clones). These retellings often return to ethical questions about personhood and rights, aligning with Shelley’s own concerns but in a retooled context.

• Cultural translations (including Hindi/South Asian adaptations). When Frankenstein enters non-Western film and stage traditions, its tropes are reworked to reflect local anxieties — caste and class hierarchies, post-colonial trauma, or familial duties. These translations reveal which aspects of the novel are globally transportable and which must be culturally adapted.

3. Frankenphemes Beyond Literature and Film

The novel’s imagery leaks into political rhetoric (“Frankenfood,” “Frankensteinian science,” etc.), where the label is mobilized to generate public anxiety about technological novelty. Cultural-studies attention to such rhetorical uses reveals two things:

• Metaphorical power. Attaching “Franken-” to a new technology is a shorthand that mobilizes fear without technical argument — a powerful political device.

• Ideological uses. The Frankenpheme can be used by diverse actors: industry critics, political demagogues, ethical watchdogs. Cultural studies asks: whose interests does the deployment of “Franken-” serve? Does it occlude substantive ethical debate by replacing it with affective scare-language?

Suggested Seminar Questions 

1. Is Victor Frankenstein a figure of modern capitalism? In what ways does the novel critique private accumulation of knowledge and its social consequences?

2. How does the Creature’s education — his reading list and language — function as a critique of Enlightenment teleologies?

3. To what extent does Frankenstein participate in, but also call into question, imperial epistemologies of mastery over nature?

4. How do filmic and theatrical adaptations domesticate or radicalize Shelley’s politics? Give concrete examples of formal strategies that effect those changes.

5. Can the Creature be read as a feminist figure (in terms of reproductive labor and male-created progeny)? How does Shelley’s text complicate gendered accounts of creation?

Conclusion - Frankenstein as Critical Resource, Not Nostalgia

Reading Frankenstein through cultural studies reframes Shelley’s novel as an argument about social relations, responsibility, and the politics of technological creation rather than as a simple horror story. The Creature’s path from abandonment to revolt is a social indictment: monstrous outcomes are often the predictable effects of social neglect. At the same time, the novel’s adaptability — its role as a Frankenpheme  makes it an ongoing resource for cultural critique. The pedagogical aim should be to preserve Shelley’s political edge: to read the book as a living, contested cultural text that still forces us to ask who bears responsibility when we create new forms of life, labour, or intelligence.

Thank You !