Black Frankenstein

The Making of an American Metaphor

Elizabeth Young

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780814745373
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi afroamericani

For all the scholarship devoted to Mary Shelley's English novel Frankenstein, there has been surprisingly little attention paid to its role in American culture, and virtually none to its racial resonances in the United States. In Black Frankenstein, Elizabeth Young identifies and interprets the figure of a black American Frankenstein monster as it appears with surprising frequency throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. culture, in fiction, film, essays, oratory, painting, and other media, and in works by both whites and African Americans.

Black Frankenstein stories, Young argues, effect four kinds of racial critique: they humanize the slave; they explain, if not justify, black violence; they condemn the slaveowner; and they expose the instability of white power. The black Frankenstein's monster has served as a powerful metaphor for reinforcing racial hierarchy—and as an even more powerful metaphor for shaping anti-racist critique. Illuminating the power of parody and reappropriation, Black Frankenstein tells the story of a metaphor that continues to matter to literature, culture, aesthetics, and politics.

1

United States of Frankenstein

Slavery is everywhere the pet monster of the American people.

—Frederick Douglass, “Slavery and the Irrepressible Conflict”

I.

In 1831, American newspapers were filled with the story of a “monster in iniquity,” a murderer whose violent rampage constituted “a spectacle from which the mind must shrink with horror.” The monster was found upon capture to be surprisingly articulate, and his story, published in a popular narrative mediated by several different voices, was considered “eloquently and classically expressed.” This murderer sounds very much like The monster of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, who kills his creator’s brother, bride, and best friend, and who is also a figure of surprising eloquence in the first-person story that he tells at the center of the novel’s multiple layers of narration. Frankenstein, first published in 1818, had renewed visibility in 1831, when it was republished in Britain in a revised edition. But the “monster” reported in the news in this year was a real person, an African American slave; his crimes, assisted by a dozen others, were the murders of his master and some sixty other white people in Southampton County, Virginia; and his account was the document that came to be known as The Confessions of Nat Turner.¹

This parallel between Frankenstein and the most famous slave revolt in U.S. history provides an important point of origin for the cultural history of the figure of a black Frankenstein monster in American culture. To begin with, the parallel did not go unremarked at the time. The Turner revolt occasioned extensive debate over emancipation in the Virginia state legislature, and this debate, in turn, prompted proslavery apologist Thomas Dew to write a lengthy defense of slavery. Late in the essay, he quoted from a speech by George Canning, the British foreign secretary:

In dealing with a negro we must remember that we are dealing with a being possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child. To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical passions… would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance; the hero of which constructs a human form with all the physical capabilities of man, and with the thews and sinews of a giant, but being unable to impart to the work of his hands a perception of right and wrong, he finds too late that he has only created a more than mortal power of doing mischief, and himself recoils from The monster which he has made.²

Canning’s words were from an 1824 parliamentary debate about the emancipation of West Indian slaves; the British slave trade had been formally abolished in 1807, but slavery did not end until the Emancipation Act of 1833. His allusion to the “splendid fiction of a recent romance” was, most likely, to Richard Brinsley Peake’s 1823 stage adaptation of Frankenstein rather than to Shelley’s novel. His comment was one of many nineteenth-century conservative British uses of the Frankenstein story as a cautionary tale of social rebellion. Canning supported the abolition of the slave trade, but he favored a gradualist approach to ending slavery, and, in this speech, he argued against the immediate emancipation of West Indian slaves. He used the imagery of the Frankenstein story to represent the enslaved West Indian man as a mischievous and irrational child, albeit one with the “physical passions” of “adult manhood.”³

In quoting this passage, Thomas Dew brought together not only the Frankenstein monster with Nat Turner but also West Indian with North American slavery. Frankenstein, a British novel set primarily in continental Europe, translated smoothly to an American setting, although this was not so much a translation as a retranslation, since Dew restated the fear of black rebellion in the Americas to which Canning had already given voice; as we will see, this fear is already present in Frankenstein itself. Dew’s use of Canning is an expression of the reciprocal and mutually defining circulation of racial anxieties in Anglo-America, anxieties shaped here by the white experience and imagination of slavery. As Dew’s words suggest, the Frankenstein monster was a figure equally at home on the symbolically related sites, the West Indies and Virginia, in which slavery was practiced, as well as in the complementary political assemblies, the British parliament and the Virginia state legislature, in which the slave’s fate was debated.

Yet the relocation of the Frankenstein monster from a British debate about slavery to an American one also changed The monster’s meaning. Thomas Dew enlisted the figure of the Frankenstein monster on different political grounds than Canning, arguing unambiguously against abolitionism and in support of slavery. His words also changed the ground of the metaphor in another sense. Canning had spoken to British parliament about slave rebellions that could take place in the distant West Indies, but Dew was writing about rebellions that had already come intimately within the homes of white Virginians. Locating The monster within his home country, Dew made his threat all the more terrifying. As Virginia politician James McDowell noted in 1832, “a Nat Turner might be in every family.”⁴ Invading the domestic interiors of homes and bedrooms, Nat Turner had menaced the supreme icons of domesticity, white women, and he had penetrated the most volatile white interior of all: the psyche. After the Southampton revolt, Dew notes, “reason was almost banished from the mind, and the imagination was suffered to conjure up the most appalling phantoms.”⁵ The white slaveowner from whose mind “reason” had been “banished” would henceforth be haunted by the “appalling phantoms” of slave revolt.

The literary genre for representing such phantoms is the gothic, and the writings of the American architect of the genre in this period, Edgar Allan Poe, are haunted by the story of his fellow Virginian, Nat Turner. Images of slave rebellion structure Poe’s fiction: the black servant, Jupiter, who threatens to whip his white master in “The Gold-Bug”; the orangutan who murders two white women in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in an era when racist anthropology habitually aligned black people and orangutans; the dwarf court jester who costumes his tyrannical employerking as an orangutan and then murders him in “Hop-Frog”; and, above all, the black inhabitants of a mysterious South Sea Island who first appear to befriend and then rise up violently against the white protagonist of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Displaced across location to foreign settings, across species to the orangutan, and across bodily norms to the dwarf, these narratives refract white American fears of slave revolt.⁶

Like Poe’s fiction, Shelley’s Frankenstein offers an oblique account of white anxiety in the face of slave rebellion. Like Poe, Shelley presents a white protagonist who is haunted and undone by the rebellious monster whom he has created. In turn, we could see Poe’s Pym as his version of Frankenstein, since its plot features several of the same ingredients as Shelley’s novel: ship mutinies, monstrous “savages,” episodes in which corpses appear to come back to life, and a setting near the edge of the Earth. Frankenstein begins and ends near the North Pole, and Pym ends near the South Pole, a setting with white birds and animals and a mysterious gigantic figure of “perfect whiteness.”⁷ Toni Morrison has argued that these images of whiteness at the conclusion of Pym offer a “strong suggestion of paralysis and incoherence; of impasse and non sequitur.”⁸ Frankenstein falls outside the scope of Morrison’s study, but as with the South Pole of Pym, we can see the North Pole of Frankenstein as Shelley’s meditation on the “impasse” of whiteness in the face of slave rebellion. The North Pole, where The monster appears at the start of the novel and where Victor Frankenstein dies at its end, signifies not the omnipotence of whiteness but rather its impotence. In Shelley’s anxious account, the North Pole is a land of frozen whiteness where the white man can only draw his dying breath.

In bringing Frankenstein to America, then, Thomas Dew showed how the figure of The monster could be used to condemn rebellious slaves, but his comment also made visible the gothic specter of the white slaveowner undone by his rebellious creation. Shelley’s novel emphasizes this specter, focusing on Victor Frankenstein’s decline and censoring him for his treatment of his creation. The monster’s violence in the novel is not the consequence of putatively premature emancipation from slavery, as George Canning and Thomas Dew suggested, but the result of abandonment and abuse. The monster does not initially think of himself as monstrous; he must be taught to do so by others. In Shelley’s account, monstrosity is socially as well as literally constructed, and this social construction is laid bare for the reader’s condemnation. The novel is not so much a conservative fantasy as a radical caution to those in power against creating the conditions that will result in rebellion against them.

Destabilizing the slaveowner, Frankenstein also humanized the slave. Like the slave who is forced to take his master’s surname, The monster who has come mistakenly to be known only as “Frankenstein” is an eloquent figure whose sufferings, like those of the protagonists of slave narratives, command the reader’s sympathy. Formally, too, the structure of Frankenstein is not unlike that of a slave narrative. The monster’s first-person story is mediated by two white men’s voices, Captain Walton and Victor Frankenstein— as, for example, Frederick Douglass’s narrative was enfolded within the authenticating frames of Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison. The Confessions of Nat Turner offered an extreme version of the racial hierarchy involved in such framing, since Turner’s words were rearranged by Thomas Gray, an impoverished slaveowner hoping to profit from the Confessions.⁹ Frankenstein both imitates and revises the slave narrative’s structures of mediation. As in a slave narrative, The monster’s story is framed by those of others; his first-person story is retold by Victor to Walton. As the frame recedes, The monster’s voice seems to stand alone and undistorted in its relation to the novel’s reader.¹⁰

Nat Turner’s words are, however, unlike those of The monster in Frankenstein, since Turner’s account is dominated by divine portents of millennial violence. In African American literature of this era, a voice closer to that of Shelley’s monster appears in the 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, the antislavery manifesto authored by free African American David Walker. At the outset of the Appeal, Walker declares that “we Coloured People of these United States, are, the most wretched, degraded and abject set of beings that ever lived.”¹¹ He prophesies the revenge of the abject:

[W]hat is the use of living, when in fact I am dead. But remember, Americans, that as miserable, wretched, degraded and abject as you have made us in preceding and, in this generation, to support you and your families, that some of you, (whites) on the continent of America, will yet curse the day that you ever were born. (72)

For Walker, slaves are like living corpses, “made” by white oppression and symbolically deadened by slavery, but soon to be brought to life by rebellion. This language resonates with that of Mary Shelley’s creation, a self-described “poor, helpless, miserable wretch,” who declares, “I will revenge my injuries.… I will work at your destruction… so that you shall curse the hour of your birth.”¹² Although there is no evidence that Walker read Shelley, the substantial rhetorical overlap between these passages suggests the affinity of Frankenstein with the vocabulary of racial rebellion. This was a vocabulary to which David Walker gave nonfictional voice but for which Mary Shelley had provided a fictional blueprint: a story about a monster whose body incarnates the political ideas of collectivity and reawakening and whose behavior signals political revolt. “Remember that I have power,” declares Shelley’s monster, sounding like David Walker: “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!” (116).

Echoing Frankenstein’s account of reversible mastery and enslavement, Walker’s Appeal also suggests the overlap between Frankenstein and specifically American iconographies of national identity. In the early nineteenth century, dominant narratives of national origins presented the United States as the patrilineal creation of Founding Fathers. This birth myth was all-male, with men laboring to make a male baby America, and all-white, with Founding Fathers who were themselves slaveholders excluding slaves from American citizenship. Reappropriating this iconography, African American men stayed within its male terms but criticized its racism. David Walker, for example, uses the Declaration of Independence against itself: “Compare… your Declaration of Independence, with your cruelties and murders inflicted by your cruel and unmerciful fathers and yourselves on our fathers and on us” (75). So great is the suffering of slaves, suggests Walker, that “America is more our country, than it is the whites — we have enriched it with our blood and tears” (65). Walker’s Appeal exemplifies what Eric Sundquist has outlined as a central irony of this era: that rebel slaves, excluded from dominant definitions of American identity, were actually its best exemplars of nationhood. As Sundquist puts it, “The slave, not the master, was the truer American.”¹³

Compare Frankenstein: it too is an all-male story of origins in which a Founding Father ignores his son, and it too offers a sympathetic counternarrative in which a revolutionary son exposes the hypocrisy of that father and demands rights and recognition from him. In Frankenstein, as in David Walker’s Appeal, it is the enslaved monster, angrily offering his own declaration of independence, who is the truer republican citizen. The closest symbolic descendants of Frankenstein in antebellum America are illegitimate black sons, debased from and by their white paternal foundations. Yet in real-life antebellum America, the voice of the master trumped that of the slave: Thomas Dew, a respected member of the Virginia elite, became president of the College of William and Mary, while Nat Turner was caught, tried, and executed, and his body probably given to surgeons for dissection.¹⁴ We can see Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster, whose body is assembled from corpses stolen from dissecting rooms, as anticipating and avenging Nat Turner’s fate. In the end of Nat Turner’s body was the Frankenstein monster’s beginning, or to put it another way, the united states of the body of the Frankenstein monster were, from the start, not only American but African American.

In this chapter, I explore the consequences of this beginning, analyzing the meaning of the Frankenstein story in nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture. Building an archive of nineteenth-century references to the story, I argue for the importance of this archive to narratives of national self-definition and racial revolt. As the examples of Thomas Dew and David Walker suggest, the works under discussion are uneven in their proximity to Frankenstein; Dew makes reference to a theatrical version of the novel, while Walker’s imagery is only homologous with it. Both Dew and Walker, however, wrote in a culture in which crisis over slavery prompted a heightened interest in the gothic imagery of rebellion, an imagery for which Mary Shelley had provided an organizing template. Even when Frankenstein is not named as a direct source, traces of this template suffuse U.S. culture throughout the nineteenth century because the novel had so effectively given form to existing vocabularies of rebellion. Politically, these vocabularies are diverse: as the examples of Dew and Walker also suggest, the works under discussion exploit both conservative and radical dimensions of the Frankenstein story. But although the story was used by political conservatives, it was more compatible, I argue, with a radical language of racial rebellion. Across the political spectrum, moreover, these works show the intimacy of the story with questions of national self-definition. They suggest the importance of Frankenstein as a story at once transatlantic in origins and specific to questions of national and racial formation in the nineteenth-century U.S. body politic.

I begin with an analysis of Frankenstein’s origins. The novel’s multivalent sources include British debates over slavery, abolition, and racial mixture, along with those over empire, revolution, and class conflict. Examining Frankenstein in its British context highlights the importance...