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From Revolutionary Creature to Cultural Icon
A Cultural Studies Reading of Frankenstein
This blog is written as a task assigned by the head of the Department of English (MKBU), Prof. and Dr. Dilip Barad Sir. Here is the link to the professor's worksheet for background reading: Click here.
Introduction
In the summer of 1816, a teenager sat in a rented villa near Lake Geneva and invented one of the most durable images in modern culture. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was eighteen. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had written A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; her father, William Godwin, was a radical political philosopher. She was surrounded by Romantic poets, by talk of galvanism and electricity, and by a Europe still shaking from the French Revolution. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was published anonymously in 1818, and it has never gone out of circulation since.
Mary Shelley, whose novel turned a private nightmare into a public myth
The historical moment matters. Britain in the 1810s was living through three upheavals at once. The French Revolution had shown that the poor could overthrow the powerful, and conservative writers had already begun describing revolutionary crowds as monsters. The Industrial Revolution was pulling workers into factories and cities, creating a new class that owned nothing but its labour. And natural philosophy, the older name for science, was moving fast: Humphry Davy was lecturing on chemistry, Luigi Galvani's experiments had made dead frogs twitch with electricity, and the boundary between living and non-living matter suddenly looked negotiable.
Read only as Gothic horror, the novel shrinks. There is a laboratory, a storm, a corpse that walks. But almost nothing in Frankenstein works like conventional horror. The Creature is articulate, well-read and morally reasonable for most of the book. Victor, the respectable gentleman, is the one who behaves badly. The horror comes from a social situation, not a supernatural one.
This is why Cultural Studies is such a useful approach here. Cultural Studies does not ask only "is this a good novel?" It asks what a text does inside a society: whose fears it carries, whose voices it silences, how it circulates, and what happens to it when advertising, cinema and slang get hold of it. Frankenstein is unusually rich for this kind of reading because it touches class, race, empire, gender, science, technology and celebrity all at once.
My argument is this: Frankenstein remains culturally powerful because the Creature is not really a monster at all. He is a container. Each generation pours its own anxiety into him: fear of revolution, of the urban poor, of racial difference, of colonised peoples, of runaway science, of machines that might outgrow us. The novel survives because that container keeps getting refilled.
1. Revolutionary Births: Frankenstein and the Politics of Its Time
1.1 The Creature as Proletarian
A proletarian, in simple terms, is a person who owns no property and no means of production, and who survives only by selling their labour. The word was becoming meaningful exactly when Shelley was writing, as enclosure and industrialisation pushed rural people into wage work.
The Creature fits this description almost exactly. He owns nothing. He has no family, no name, no inheritance, no legal standing. He is made from discarded material, assembled by a man of means, and then abandoned the moment he is no longer interesting. That is a recognisable economic relationship, not just a personal failure.
The anonymous first edition, 1818, dedicated to William Godwin
What makes the novel politically serious is that Shelley refuses to make the Creature simply innocent or simply dangerous. He begins gentle. He secretly gathers firewood for the De Lacey family. He saves a drowning girl and is shot for it. Only after years of rejection does he turn violent, and even then he explains himself with painful clarity: "I am malicious because I am miserable."
That sentence reverses the usual logic. Society tells itself that the dangerous are dangerous by nature. The Creature insists that misery came first and malice followed. Shelley puts the causal argument in the mouth of the accused.
His demand is equally reasonable: "Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous." He is not asking for power. He is asking for a minimum of recognition and companionship, and he offers cooperation in return. It is close to a labour negotiation.
The refusal produces the threat. "Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful." Here is the conservative nightmare of the 1790s and 1810s in a single line: a man with nothing left to lose. Edmund Burke had described revolutionary France in similar monstrous terms. Shelley's originality is that she lets the monster speak back.
This is the paradox of the Creature. He is victim and aggressor, oppressed and terrifying, sympathetic and murderous, all without contradiction. Cultural Studies is comfortable with that paradox because it treats "monstrosity" as something a society produces rather than something it merely discovers.
1.2 The Creature as the "Other": Race, Empire and Privilege
The "Other" is a concept used to describe the figure a culture defines itself against. We know we are civilised because they are savage; normal because they are deviant. Othering is not neutral description. It is a way of organising power.
The Creature is Othered entirely through appearance. Everyone who meets him judges him in a second: the villagers, Felix, William, and Victor himself. The blind old man De Lacey is the single exception, and that exception is the point. Character becomes visible only when appearance is removed.
The Creature understands this before we do. "Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?" The question is asked in a state of genuine uncertainty. He has not yet accepted the label; he is testing whether society's verdict is true.
And he names the injustice precisely: "Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?" The fault is placed on the maker, not the made.
The first illustration of the Creature, 1831: the moment of creation is also the moment of abandonment
We should be careful here. The Creature is not a coded representation of any single racial group, and claiming so flattens both the novel and real histories of racism. What can be said responsibly is that the novel is organised around the same structures that imperial and racial thinking used: visible difference, assumed danger, denial of speech, denial of kinship.
Those structures are historically specific. Shelley was writing during intense British debate about slavery, abolition and colonial expansion. The language used to justify empire relied on exactly this move: describing colonised people as physically and morally different, therefore unfit for self-government, therefore legitimately ruled.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" is the standard critical entry point. Spivak argues that nineteenth-century English literature, including Frankenstein, cannot be separated from the imperial project that made English domestic life possible, and she reads the Creature as a figure who exposes the limits of European humanism: he is produced by Enlightenment science and then excluded from the category of the human that science claimed to serve.
Victor's own position is worth noticing. He is wealthy, Genevan, university-educated, free to travel across Europe, free to abandon his obligations and recover his health in the Alps. He creates a being and then decides unilaterally that it has no claim on him. That combination of creative power and refused responsibility is a fair description of how imperial power often worked.
The contemporary resonance is direct. Debates about migration and refugees still turn on who is assumed dangerous before they are heard. Racial profiling still treats appearance as evidence. Shelley's insight remains uncomfortable: exclusion tends to produce the very behaviour it claims to be defending against.
1.3 From Natural Philosophy to Cyborg
Victor's ambition is stated in explicitly transgressive terms: "Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world." The metaphor is Enlightenment light, knowledge as illumination. The problem is what he does after the light arrives.
Shelley grounds this in real science. Victor begins with the alchemists, Agrippa and Paracelsus, then is redirected at Ingolstadt toward modern chemistry. That movement from occult to experimental knowledge mirrors the actual history of natural philosophy in the period. Galvanism was not a fantasy; it was a widely discussed research programme.
The subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, carries the argument. In Greek myth, Prometheus steals fire from the gods to give to humanity and is punished eternally. The gift and the crime are the same act. Victor is "modern" because his fire is scientific method, and because his punishment is not divine but social and psychological: isolation, grief, the destruction of everyone he loves.
Walton's frame narrative delivers the warning: "Learn from me... how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world." But Shelley does not endorse this straightforwardly. Walton, the character receiving the lesson, is an explorer pushing into the Arctic for glory. The novel is too intelligent to be simply anti-science.
Galvanic experiments: the real science behind Shelley's imagined one
The real question the novel poses is narrower and harder: just because humans can create something, does that mean they are ethically prepared to take responsibility for it?
Victor's failure is not the experiment. It is the flight from the room. He runs, sleeps, falls ill, and lets someone else be hanged for a murder he indirectly caused. The Creature's later demand for a mate, and Victor's destruction of her out of fear that "a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth," shows Victor still reasoning about consequences only after the fact and only under panic.
This is why the novel travels so easily into modern technology. Genetic engineering and CRISPR gene editing raise the question of heritable change made by people who will not live with the result. Cloning, from Dolly the sheep onward, raises the question of a being created as a demonstration. Artificial reproduction and biotechnology raise questions about who has authority over new life. Artificial intelligence and robotics raise it most sharply of all: systems are released publicly and their social effects are studied afterwards. Cyborg technologies, from prosthetics to implants, unsettle the boundary between made and born that Victor crossed first.
None of these is automatically Frankensteinian. The novel does not say creation is wrong. It says creation without ongoing care is catastrophic.
2. The Frankenpheme in Popular Culture
2.1 From Novel to Film
Timothy Morton, in his Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, offers the useful term "Frankenpheme." Think of it as a unit of Frankenstein that breaks off and travels independently: the bolt-necked figure, the mad scientist, the lightning-lit laboratory, the phrase "It's alive!" These fragments circulate far beyond anyone who has read the book. A Frankenpheme is what happens when a novel becomes raw material for a whole culture.
The Creature's first screen appearance, Edison Studios, 1910
Frankenstein (1910), the Edison Studios short, retains the creation scene and the psychological doubling of maker and made. It drops the Creature's entire education and eloquence. Its anxiety is essentially moral: the Creature is Victor's bad nature made visible, and dissolves once Victor's love purifies him.
Frankenstein (1931), directed by James Whale with Boris Karloff, is the version that replaced the novel in public memory. It retains the abandonment and the pursuit. It changes almost everything else: the Creature is given a criminal brain by laboratory error and, crucially, is made mute. Removing his speech removes his argument. In the novel the Creature's case against society is unanswerable; in the film he can only grunt. The social critique is converted into spectacle, and the anxiety becomes 1930s anxiety about mob violence and scientific hubris in an era of economic collapse.
Karloff's flat-headed Creature, 1931: the image that overwrote the book
Bride of Frankenstein (1935) partly restores what 1931 removed. The Creature learns a few words, shares bread and wine with a blind hermit, and briefly becomes sympathetic again. It also foregrounds the mate plot that Victor aborts in the novel, and adds a female creature who refuses her intended role. The new anxiety is about consent and about women made to specification.
Young Frankenstein (1974) is parody, which is itself evidence of saturation. You can only parody what everyone already knows. Mel Brooks affectionately reproduces the 1931 imagery while emptying it of fear, which shows how far the Frankenpheme had travelled from terror to comfort.
Blade Runner (1982) is the most faithful adaptation that is not an adaptation. Roy Batty confronts his maker Tyrell and demands more life; he is intelligent, articulate, violent and wronged. The film restores the Creature's voice and his grievance. The anxiety has shifted from galvanism to corporate biotechnology and disposable engineered labour.
More recently, films such as Ex Machina and Her, and the long line of AI narratives that follow them, keep the structure intact: a maker, a made being, a failure of responsibility. In Indian cinema, films like Enthiran (Robot, 2010) work through the same logic, where the scientist Vaseegaran's android Chitti develops emotion and is rejected, reprogrammed and turned destructive. The Frankenstein pattern is visible even where Shelley is never mentioned.
2.2 Popular Retellings and Cultural Transformation
Each retelling makes a trade. Gain spectacle, lose argument. Gain sympathy, lose menace. Gain topicality, lose the specific 1818 politics of class and revolution. What survives every version, remarkably, is the abandonment. That is the load-bearing element of the myth.
2.3 Frankenstein and the Misunderstanding of the Monster
Everyone knows the correction: Frankenstein is the scientist, not the Creature. The Creature has no name at all. He is called wretch, daemon, fiend, creature, being.
But the "error" is more interesting than the correction. Culture has quietly decided that creator and creation share one name, which is arguably what the novel itself argues. Victor calls the Creature "my own spirit let loose from the grave." The popular confusion has absorbed the book's central claim while forgetting the book. That is exactly the kind of process Cultural Studies exists to study: meaning made by audiences, not authors.
3. Education, Language and the Making of the Creature
The Creature's education is the most radical part of the novel and the first thing every adaptation discards.
He learns speech by watching the De Lacey family through a chink in a wall, and language by listening to Felix teach Arabic to Safie. His reading list is three books found in a portmanteau in the woods.
Plutarch's Lives gives him history and political virtue, models of public greatness he can never enter. Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther gives him inwardness, longing and the vocabulary of despair. Milton's Paradise Lost gives him theology, and he reads it as history.
His identification is precise and devastating: "I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed." Adam was made in love and placed in a garden. Satan fell through his own act. The Creature occupies a third position with no scriptural name: cast out for nothing he did. He also notices what Adam had that he lacks, a maker who returned.
Literature gives the Creature language, and language gives him the measure of his exclusion
Does education empower him or deepen his alienation? Shelley answers directly: "Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was." And more sharply: "Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on the rock."
Both are true at once. Education gives him the ability to make his case, which is the only power he ever holds. It also gives him the ability to understand fully that his case will be refused. Without it he might have suffered less. With it he becomes a subject rather than a thing.
This is a live Cultural Studies question. Who gets access to language, literature and credentials? Does education dissolve exclusion or make the excluded articulate about their exclusion? The Creature's answer is uncomfortable: it did both, and the second part hurt more.
4. Frankenstein and Contemporary Science and Technology
Six examples, each worth stating carefully.
Large language models and chatbots: Systems like generative AI assistants are trained on enormous quantities of human writing and then released to millions of users. The Frankenstein question is not whether they are conscious. It is who is accountable for harms that appear after release, and whether the speed of deployment outpaced the ethical planning.
CRISPR gene editing: In 2018, He Jiankui announced the birth of gene-edited infants in China. He was widely condemned by the scientific community and later imprisoned. The case is a near-perfect modern parallel: capability existed, oversight did not keep pace, and children now live with a decision made for them.
Cloning: Dolly the sheep, born in 1996, showed that mammalian cloning was possible. The public debate that followed was almost entirely Frankensteinian in vocabulary, which shows how the novel supplies the language a society uses to think about new biology.
Genetically modified organisms: GM crops have measurable benefits and real regulatory questions. The tabloid term "Frankenfood" did not describe the science; it imported the emotional charge of the novel into a policy debate and made careful discussion harder.
Surveillance and digital identity: Social media platforms create versions of us assembled from data fragments, which then circulate beyond our control and shape how others judge us. The parallel to a being stitched together and read only by its surface is not exact, but it is suggestive.
Climate and environmental crisis: This is Victor's failure at planetary scale: processes set in motion by people who benefited from them, with consequences left to others and to the future.
Every new creation revives an old question: who takes responsibility afterwards?
5. Frankenstein in Popular Culture Today
Beyond science, the Frankenpheme lives in ordinary speech. A "Frankenstein" is any assembled thing that escapes its assembler: a committee's policy, a patched-together piece of software, a political movement that turns on its founders. Politicians regularly accuse opponents of having "created a monster." A "Frankenstein bill" is one stitched from incompatible parts.
The Creature also appears every October in plastic form: green skin, neck bolts, a flat head, none of which is in Shelley's text. Halloween costumes, cereal mascots, cartoons, comics and advertisements have made the figure friendly and profitable.
Each reuse trades depth for portability. "Frankenfood" keeps the fear of unnatural creation and deletes the ethics of care. The cartoon monster keeps the silhouette and deletes the grief. Nothing of the novel's argument survives in the plastic mask, and yet the mask keeps the novel's title alive. That is the strange economy of cultural survival.
From political metaphor to plastic mask: the Frankenpheme in everyday life
6. What Does a Cultural Studies Reading Reveal?
Frankenstein is legitimately all of the following at once, and Cultural Studies is the approach that lets us hold them together rather than choosing one.
📚 Reading Frankenstein Through Different Lenses
The critics named in the worksheet each open one door. Timothy Morton gives us the Frankenpheme and therefore a way to study the novel's afterlife rather than only its text. Spivak connects the novel to imperialism and to the limits of European humanism. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher, in The Endurance of Frankenstein, ask the central question of durability: why this book, for this long? Johanna M. Smith, in "'Cooped Up' with 'Sad Trash'," shifts attention to domesticity and gender, showing how the novel's science is entangled with the household and with women's excluded labour. Wilfred Guerin's Handbook is the map that shows how these approaches relate.
What Cultural Studies finally reveals is that a text is not a fixed object. It is a site where a society negotiates with itself, repeatedly, across centuries.
Conclusion
Frankenstein has lasted more than two hundred years because each generation finds a different fear waiting inside it. Shelley's readers found revolution and the mob. Victorian readers found evolution and degeneration. Cold War readers found the atom. We find algorithms, edited genomes and a warming planet. The novel does not change. The anxiety poured into it does.
Two centuries, one question
So the Creature is not simply a monster. He is the most reasonable speaker in the book, and his violence is a response, not an essence. Victor is not simply a scientist. He is a case study in what happens when brilliance is unaccompanied by obligation. And the novel is not simply a horror story. It is a cultural mirror, and what societies see in it is a fairly accurate picture of what they are currently afraid of and who they are currently excluding.
The Creature's final position is a warning without a villain: "I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on." He is describing what was done to him, in the vocabulary his rejectors taught him.
Shelley's lasting point is not that we should stop creating. It is that creation is the beginning of a relationship, not the end of a project. The laboratory door closes behind Victor in chapter five, and everything terrible that follows flows from that single act of walking away. Two hundred years later, as we build things faster than we can understand them, the difficult instruction the novel leaves us with is simply this: stay in the room.
References
Guerin, Wilfred L., et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 6th ed., Oxford UP, 2011.
Levine, George, and U. C. Knoepflmacher, editors. The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel. U of California P, 1979.
Morton, Timothy. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: A Routledge Literary Sourcebook. Routledge, 2002.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 1818. Edited by M. K. Joseph, Oxford UP, 1998.
Smith, Johanna M. "'Cooped Up' with 'Sad Trash': Domesticity and the Sciences in Frankenstein." Frankenstein, edited by Johanna M. Smith, 2nd ed., Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000, pp. 313–33.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism." Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1, 1985, pp. 243–61.
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