The Sexual Politics of Frankenstein

Main Argument

The video argues that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is best understood not as a warning against science itself, but as a story about responsibility: responsibility for what we create, for the beings affected by our actions, and for the social systems that shape them. The narrator reads the novel through sexuality, parenthood, gender, environmental ethics, and political power. These are interpretations of the text, not claims that Shelley explicitly stated all of them.

Context and Choice of Edition

• The narrator contrasts the novel with its popular image, shaped largely by the 1931 Universal film Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. These films helped turn the creature into a symbol of the outsider and the oppressed.
• Shelley wrote amid rapid industrialization and the rise of scientific rationalism. The video places her work in the context of Romantic writers who challenged industrial capitalism, social hierarchy, and conventional morality.
• Mary and Percy Shelley’s unconventional lives—including their rejection of traditional marriage and their interest in vegetarianism—form part of the intellectual background the narrator sees in the novel.
• Shelley published versions of the novel in 1818 and 1831. The video focuses on the 1818 edition, which it regards as more radical and more attentive to nature, feeling, and social equality. It describes the later edition as more pessimistic and fatalistic.

Nature, Science, and Domination

• The video introduces “dark green religion,” a term associated with scholar Bron Taylor. It describes an outlook that treats nature as sacred, emphasizes the interdependence of life, and rejects the idea that humans are entitled to dominate other beings.
• The narrator contrasts this outlook with a model of science that treats nature as a female object to be penetrated, mastered, and exploited. Victor Frankenstein’s secretive pursuit of creation is interpreted as an expression of that urge to dominate.
• In this reading, Victor’s key failure is not that he seeks knowledge, but that he pursues creation without considering its consequences or accepting responsibility for the being he brings into existence.
• The narrator also contrasts the novel with Dracula, presenting Shelley’s book as more radical and less committed to religious or social hierarchy.

Victor as Creator and Failed Parent

• Victor describes his scientific work in language the narrator reads as intensely sexual. He works secretly, studies the dead, and pursues the power to create life while refusing to explain his process.
• The narrator interprets Victor’s creation of the creature as a violation of nature: he uses bodies from graveyards and slaughterhouses, disrupts natural cycles, and attempts reproduction without women.
• When the creature comes to life, Victor is horrified and abandons him. He then hides the truth rather than taking responsibility—even when his silence contributes to Justine’s wrongful execution and leaves his family unprepared for danger.
• The narrator reads Victor’s attraction to creating a male being, his anxiety about making a female companion, and his avoidance of Elizabeth as signs of sexual shame and possible homoerotic desire. These are provocative textual interpretations offered by the video.
• Victor’s failure culminates in his destruction of the unfinished female creature. The narrator suggests that he fears her independence and the possibility that she might not obey the role planned for her.
• Victor’s final advice to Walton—to avoid ambition and seek peace—rings hollow because Victor himself has been driven by ambition and remains largely unaware of his own responsibility.

Motherhood, Birth, and Loss

• The video connects Shelley’s biography to the novel’s themes. Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died shortly after giving birth to her. Shelley also lost her first infant daughter and wrote of dreaming that the baby had come back to life.
• The narrator emphasizes that childbirth and new parenthood can involve fear, grief, trauma, or ambivalence, even though cultural expectations often demand uncomplicated joy and maternal devotion.
• Victor’s creation scene is read as a birth scene: he brings a dependent being into the world, is terrified by it, and flees rather than care for it. His response parallels taboo feelings some new parents may experience, though the video presents this as a literary analogy, not a clinical diagnosis.
• The creature’s abandonment echoes Shelley’s own experiences of loss and separation, including her difficult relationship with her stepmother and periods spent away from home.
• The video argues that Victor’s real failing is not simply that he cannot be a “good father,” but that he refuses the sustained care and responsibility often associated with motherhood.

The Creature: Innocence, Exclusion, and Violence

• At first, the creature is curious, gentle, and connected to the natural world. He finds food and shelter in the woods and, like Victor, experiences nature as a source of solace.
• His education changes him. He watches the De Lacey family, learns language, and longs for their affection. He gradually learns how society defines beauty, status, family, and belonging—and realizes that he is excluded from them.
• The video links his outsider status to several forms of marginalization:
  • Gender: Feminist readings compare his exclusion to women’s exclusion from patriarchal society.
  • Race: The narrator notes that Shelley’s descriptions draw on racialized stereotypes, while emphasizing that the creature’s intelligence and sensitivity challenge society’s judgments of him.
  • Class and political power: The creature’s exclusion and later retaliation are read against the privileges enjoyed by the Frankenstein family.
  • Species: The creature’s sympathy for animals and vegetarian diet connect the novel to criticism of human supremacy and animal exploitation.
• The creature’s violence develops after rejection and neglect. He says he was benevolent until misery made him destructive. The video reads his actions as both personal vengeance and a response to institutional and social violence—not as proof that he was inherently evil.
• His request for a companion is presented as a plea to live apart from humanity, not to rule it. Victor’s decision to break his promise destroys that possibility and intensifies the tragedy.
• The creature’s final grief over Victor’s death shows, in the narrator’s reading, that he has not lost his capacity for love and sympathy. He recognizes his own suffering and the pain he has caused.

Conclusion and Wider Ethical Question

The novel’s central lesson, in the video’s interpretation, is that creation entails obligations. A scientist, parent, or society cannot responsibly bring beings into existence and then abandon them to the consequences.

The narrator connects this lesson to modern environmental and reproductive concerns. He shares his own decision to have a vasectomy and argues that having children is ethically consequential, particularly in a climate crisis. He does not call for banning childbirth; he urges people to think more seriously about its effects.

The creature’s ambiguous disappearance at the end leaves the consequences of Victor’s actions unresolved. The narrator uses this to suggest that the results of irresponsibility cannot simply be abandoned or made to vanish.

Speakers and Sources

Speakers

• Andy (Atun-Shei Films) — the video’s narrator and principal speaker.
• Justin Sledge (Esoterica) — guest speaker in a brief segment about alchemy, magic, and historical ideas about creating life.
• The video also includes brief quoted or sampled lines from film and literary material; these are not presented as additional interview speakers.

Key Texts, Thinkers, and Sources

• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818 and 1831 editions), including her 1831 introduction, diary entries, and letters
• James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
• Bram Stoker, Dracula
• Bron Taylor, Dark Green Religion
• Anne K. Mellor (whose name appears inconsistently in the auto-generated subtitles)
• Ellen Moers, Carol J. Adams, Alan Coffee, and Leslie S. Klinger
• Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab, The Mask of Anarchy, and A Vindication of Natural Diet
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, including Discourse on Inequality
• Humphry Davy, Discourse on Chemistry
• John Milton, Paradise Lost
• Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
• Erasmus Darwin’s early ideas about the development of life and natural selection