A Race of Devils: Race-Making, Frankenstein, and The Modern Prometheus

• Published date: 01 February 2022
• Date: 01 February 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591720988686
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720988686

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(1) 86 –113

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591720988686

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Article

A Race of Devils: Race-

Making, Frankenstein, and

The Modern Prometheus

P. J. Brendese1

Abstract

This essay engages Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus as

a salient intervention into modern political theory. I analyze the work as a

cipher for the tensions inhabiting Euro-modernity’s stitched together fictions

of racial determinism and racial dynamism legible in slavery, assimilationist

projects and White fears reverberating throughout. Adapting the mythical

ancient Prometheus as one who steals fire from the gods to create humans

and civilization, Frankenstein dramatizes the risks and monstrous results

of White imperial masculinity as a Euro-colonial Promethean project of

subject formation and race-making. Viewed through the prism of the Modern

Prometheus, modernity in general and liberal humanism in particular are recast

as monster-making projects. The European “discovery” of Indigenous peoples

amplified Promethean aspirations to create subjects through civilizational

processes of religious conversion, the infusion of Enlightenment rationality,

and assimilation into whiteness. Politically, the Promethean capacity to

engineer humans and proto-humans using Native peoples as raw material

allowed progressives to argue against outright extermination in favor of

cultural genocide. Seeking to create a subserviant species, Victor Frankenstein

confronts a revolting insurrection of his own making—a Creature who refuses

slavery, claims mastery over his creator and demands a female companion.

Yet Frankenstein’s fear of creating “a race of devils” betrays a terror of what

Whites know, but refuse to acknowledge, about themselves and racial others.

Keywords

race, Frankenstein, monstrosity, colonialism, Prometheus, humanism

1Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

Corresponding Author:

P. J. Brendese, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles St,

357 Mergenthaler Hall, Baltimore, MD 21218-2625, USA.

Email: pbrende1@jhu.edu

988686PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720988686Political TheoryBrendese

research-article2021

Brendese 87

This essay explores how Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein or The

Modern Prometheus dramatizes the blindness and insights of modern politi-

cal theory and the role race has historically played in shaping and contesting

the boundaries of the human.1 I do so by attending to Euro-modernity as a

race-making, monster-making project contested and pluralized by colonial

encounters with racial others. Never out of print since it was first published

200 years ago and frequently credited as the first work of science fiction, the

novel also engages core, if understudied, tensions of Western political theory

and modernity.2 The daughter of feminist icon Mary Wollstonecraft and

anarchist William Godwin, Mary Shelley’s intellectual debts to the political

theories of her parents resound throughout the work, along with a host of

influential figures spanning Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Niccolo

Machiavelli, and Thomas Hobbes, among others. Still, the most familiar

interpretation of Frankenstein is as an archetypical warning against the

potential that technological innovations could outshine the brilliance of their

innovators.

Whereas the ancient Prometheus was famously punished for stealing fire

from the gods and sentenced to have his liver recursively eaten away in per-

petuity, The Modern Prometheus Victor Frankenstein is undone by creating

a being that viciously overpowers him.3 Book and film adaptations of

Frankenstein have long featured ambitious inventors whose arrogance invites

the proverbial wrath of the gods and its terrible horrors. The fear of unleashing

a monster whose awesome powers radically exceed those of its creators is

alive within so many political projects as to admit a range of monsters and

interpretive possibilities. Following the etymological roots of the word mon-

ster (monstrum) as “to warn,” “to demonstrate; or to show,” this essay show-

cases how the work traffics in a contagion of colonial anxieties over modern

subject formation as they pertain to race, gender, and liberal humanism.4

Shelley resurrects an ancient terror at human creation shifting away from

women as earthly birth-mothers and toward the alienated, hubristic masculin-

ity embodied by that alchemist-turned-scientist Victor Frankenstein. Beginning

his work with a drive to improve upon humanity and then restore life,

Frankenstein aspires to create “a new species [that] would bless me as creator

and source” (44). Instead, he creates a “hideous progeny” that he regards as

perpetually unredeemable, ultimately refusing to create a female companion

for his creature for fear of unleashing “a race of devils” (171).

Borne of a ghost-story competition with her husband Percy Shelley and

Lord Byron, Mary Shelley attributes her intellectual inspiration for the book

to her own nightmares (xii).5 Yet the Creature did not emerge fully formed

from Shelley’s dreamscape but reflects the era’s racialized fears augured by

colonialism, debates over slavery in general, and the epic slave revolt of the