This blog is part of a Thinking Activity assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad sir it's focuses on classroom module on “Cultural Studies in Practice: Reading Frankenstein,” designed to encourage postgraduate students to explore the novel through the critical lenses of ideology, power, race, science, and cultural memory.
Introduction: Frankenstein as a Cultural Text
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) stands as one of the most remarkable literary achievements of the nineteenth century. While often labeled as the first modern science fiction novel, Frankenstein transcends genre to become a cultural myth — a narrative that continues to reflect humanity’s anxieties about creation, technology, and power. Written during an age of political upheaval, revolutionary thought, and rapid scientific advancement, the novel not only mirrors the intellectual ferment of the Romantic era but also anticipates many philosophical questions that dominate our modern world.
Cultural Studies, as a discipline, seeks to interpret literature as a cultural artifact — a site where ideologies, identities, and social power are negotiated. According to Raymond Williams, culture is “ordinary,” a living process intertwined with material life and historical experience. From this perspective, Frankenstein is not merely a Gothic story of horror; it is a cultural narrative of rebellion and marginalization, a text that interrogates the structures of domination — class, gender, race, and science — within the Enlightenment’s project of progress.
The creature’s story is thus not an isolated tale of monstrosity but a political allegory of exclusion, mirroring the oppressed and silenced of Shelley’s world: women, the working class, and colonial subjects. The following analysis examines Frankenstein through four major cultural frameworks: Marxism and class struggle, postcolonialism and racial otherness, techno-science and posthuman ethics, and popular culture adaptation — what Timothy Morton calls “The Frankenpheme.”
1. The Creature as Proletarian: A Marxist and Political Reading
One of the central interpretive frameworks in Cultural Studies is Marxism, which examines how literature reflects and resists systems of power and production. In this light, Frankenstein becomes a political allegory of industrial capitalism and alienation.
Mary Shelley, daughter of political radicals Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, was deeply aware of revolutionary discourse. Writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution and amidst early industrial capitalism, Shelley encoded in her novel a critique of modernity’s dehumanizing logic. Victor Frankenstein, the “modern Prometheus,” represents the intellectual bourgeoisie — the elite class obsessed with mastery over nature and knowledge. His creation, meanwhile, is the “proletarian monster,” a being produced by labor but denied recognition and humanity.
Raymond Williams in Culture and Society (1958) argues that industrial modernity created new forms of alienation and inequality. The Creature’s narrative voice exemplifies this alienation. “I am malicious because I am miserable,” he laments — an echo of Marx’s theory that human estrangement arises from material and emotional deprivation.
Fred Botting, in Making Monstrous (1991), interprets the monster as a “cultural projection of revolutionary terror.” The creature’s rebellion mirrors the anxieties of post-revolutionary Europe, where social order feared the uprising of the oppressed. Yet Shelley’s sympathy lies not with the fearful bourgeoisie but with the outcast. Her narrative gives the monster eloquence — a human voice that exposes the failure of Enlightenment humanism.
In this sense, Frankenstein anticipates Karl Marx’s idea of the “estranged laborer.” The creature is created by human hands yet denied social participation. His quest for companionship and justice parallels the working-class demand for recognition. Shelley’s radical imagination transforms the Gothic into a political myth of the dispossessed.
2. “A Race of Devils”: Postcolonial and Racial Otherness
Another vital strand of Cultural Studies concerns race, empire, and the construction of “Otherness.” The nineteenth century, while marked by the ideals of progress, was also the age of colonial expansion. In Frankenstein, Shelley reveals the racial and imperial anxieties of her age through the representation of the creature.
The moment Victor beholds his creation, he calls it “a wretch…a demoniacal corpse.” This moment of horror is not only aesthetic but ideological — a refusal to acknowledge the humanity of the “Other.” Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) argues that Western discourse defines itself by constructing the non-Western as “irrational, savage, and inferior.” Similarly, Victor’s rejection of the creature mirrors the colonizer’s denial of the colonized subject.
The creature’s physical difference and social exclusion thus represent more than monstrosity; they symbolize the racialized body, excluded from the norms of whiteness, beauty, and civilization. The creature learns language, culture, and ethics — a kind of colonial “mimicry” that recalls Homi K. Bhabha’s theory in The Location of Culture (1994). Yet his efforts to assimilate fail; humanity refuses him entry. He becomes a hybrid being — both human and inhuman, a mirror of colonial identity trapped between imitation and rejection.
Anne K. Mellor in Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (1988) notes that the creature “stands for all those who are constructed as the Other — women, slaves, colonized peoples — denied full participation in the Enlightenment’s promise of universality.” Shelley’s text, therefore, questions the very notion of universal humanism by showing that humanity itself is defined through acts of exclusion.
The creature’s plea, “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel,” reveals his self-awareness — a consciousness of displacement, echoing the postcolonial subject’s divided identity. In this light, Frankenstein becomes not only a Gothic allegory but a proto-postcolonial critique of how Enlightenment rationality produces both knowledge and subjugation.
3. From Natural Philosophy to Cyborg: Science, Technology, and Power
The third major aspect of Cultural Studies is its interrogation of science as ideology. Mary Shelley’s novel is often read as a cautionary tale about unrestrained scientific ambition, but within a cultural framework, it becomes a critique of technological power and patriarchal control.
Victor Frankenstein’s experiment reflects the Enlightenment’s obsession with mastery — over nature, death, and creation itself. By appropriating the power of generation, Victor usurps the feminine principle of birth, thereby enacting what Anne Mellor calls a “male appropriation of the female act of creation.” This act of domination mirrors both patriarchal and capitalist ideologies that treat nature and bodies as resources to be controlled.
Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) offers a postmodern lens: the creature is literature’s first cyborg, a hybrid of organic life and human technology. Like Haraway’s cyborg, the monster blurs the boundaries between human and machine, nature and culture, creator and creation. Yet unlike Haraway’s emancipatory cyborg, Shelley’s creation suffers from the absence of ethical responsibility. Victor’s sin is not his scientific curiosity but his failure to acknowledge kinship with what he makes.
Timothy Morton extends this reading in Frankenstein and the Birth of Environmentalism (2016), suggesting that Victor embodies “ecological arrogance” — the modern belief in human mastery over life. The creature, conversely, represents the excluded ecology — the living force that modernity refuses to recognize. Shelley thus anticipates ecocritical and posthumanist discourses, portraying creation as both scientific and moral rebellion.
In an era when artificial intelligence, cloning, and genetic engineering dominate ethical debate, Shelley’s Frankenstein remains hauntingly prophetic. It exposes the cultural logic that privileges progress over empathy, invention over responsibility — a logic that still shapes our technological age.
4. The “Frankenpheme”: Rewriting the Myth in Popular Culture
Cultural Studies also examines how canonical works are reinterpreted and circulated in mass culture. Frankenstein has evolved from a Romantic novel into a global cultural icon, what Timothy Morton calls the “Frankenpheme.” This term refers to the recurring symbolic fragments derived from Frankenstein that resurface across media — from cinema and television to political rhetoric and biotechnology debates.
The first film adaptation in 1910 already transformed Shelley’s complex narrative into a visual myth of monstrosity. James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935) humanized the creature, emphasizing emotion and loneliness over horror. Later films like Blade Runner (1982) and Ex Machina (2014) reinterpret Shelley’s myth for the technological age, portraying artificial beings who demand recognition from their creators.
In India, this myth echoes in films such as Robot (Enthiran) (2010) and Ra.One (2011), where artificial intelligence rebels against human control. Each retelling reflects its socio-historical anxieties — industrialization, nuclear fear, digital dependence — reaffirming Shelley’s narrative as a flexible cultural code.
Fred Botting argues that Frankenstein’s endurance lies in its “capacity to articulate the unspoken fears of each generation.” Today, the Frankenpheme is visible not only in art but also in political discourse: the term “Frankenfood” denotes genetically modified organisms, and “Frankenstein science” describes unethical innovation. The novel’s imagery of creation and rebellion thus continues to shape collective cultural imagination.
5. Revolutionary Births: Feminism, Maternal Anxiety, and Cultural Reproduction
Although often discussed for its scientific themes, Frankenstein also bears deep feminist implications. Written by a woman who experienced both childbirth and loss, the novel explores maternal fear, gendered creation, and patriarchal control. Shelley’s act of creation — writing the novel at nineteen — itself becomes a counterpoint to Victor’s act of technological creation.
Anne Mellor identifies Frankenstein as “a woman’s myth of creation.” Victor’s attempt to create life without a woman reflects the patriarchal desire to eliminate female power. His failure exposes the ethical vacuum of masculine science, detached from emotional and social responsibility.
Furthermore, Shelley’s portrayal of the creature’s longing for nurture and the absence of maternal compassion highlight a cultural critique of parenthood and care. The monster’s tragedy stems not from his creation but from abandonment — a commentary on how modern culture produces life without love.
In this sense, Frankenstein becomes a feminist allegory of creative rebellion — Shelley rewrites the myth of Prometheus not as triumph but as warning, questioning both scientific and patriarchal authority.
6. Conclusion: Frankenstein as Cultural Memory
From revolutionary politics to gender and ecology, Frankenstein remains a multi-dimensional cultural text — a mirror reflecting humanity’s shifting relationship with power, identity, and responsibility. Through the lens of Cultural Studies, the novel reveals how literature is never isolated from society but deeply embedded in its ideological structures.
Mary Shelley’s creation anticipates the concerns of modernity: alienation in capitalism, racial exclusion in empire, domination in technoscience, and dehumanization in mass culture. The creature, though monstrous, becomes the moral center of the narrative — a voice for the oppressed, the forgotten, the othered.
As Raymond Williams reminds us, “Culture is not a set of objects but a whole way of life.” Frankenstein embodies that truth — it is not only a story of horror but also a story of humanity’s endless struggle to recognize itself in its own creations.
In every retelling, from the nineteenth century to the digital age, Shelley’s question echoes still:
What happens when creation is separated from compassion, and power from responsibility?
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