Bould
delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness.” Or that she might
lust after “the superior beauty of man” and jilt the creature, reigniting his
fury at humankind. Even worse, they might breed, propagating “a race
of devils... upon the earth” and thus making “the very existence of the
species of man a condition precarious and full of terror.”
Shelley’s novel was shaped by the violently repressed Luddite insurgency
of the 1810s. It was written while Argentine and Chilean forces were driving
the Spanish from Chile. And it appeared on January 1, 1818, the same day
soldiers of the British East India Company defeated their former puppet ruler
Baji Rao II in the Third Anglo-Maratha War. Shelley shared the anti-colonial
sympathies of her radical parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.
But she also inherited their distrust of revolution and a preference for gradual
reform—exemplified in Frankenstein by the politeness with which Walton’s
desperate yet unfailingly deferential crew mutiny against his obviously fatal
plan to push on further into the perilous Arctic seas.
It is easy then to see Victor’s terror of the daemonic mob that his
creations might spawn as the white ruling class’s terror of both the
emerging industrial proletariat and the anti-colonial rebellions that
together threaten to overthrow not only feudal remnants but also Eu-
ropean imperialism and the rising bourgeoisie. If only poor Victor knew
he was dreaming of a better world!
A similar contradiction can be found in H. G. Wells’s The War of
the Worlds (1897). Wells’s Martian invaders reek of the past. They are
vampiric monsters, their domination of an older, dying world coming
to an end (an Orientalist echo, perhaps, of the devastation of China
and India by British imperial and economic policies). But they are also
creatures of the future. More technologically advanced than the British
Empire, their massive brains, withered bodies, and hands so agile as to
have become “bunches of delicate tentacles” are modelled on the future
evolution of humans that Wells imagined in his 1893 essay “The Man