The Rhetoric of Enslavement:

Humanity, Gender, and Recognition in Frankenstein

Abstract

Mary Shelley put pen to paper to write Frankenstein (1818) at the height of the British

Abolitionist Movement, after the end of the slave trade, but before the abolition of slavery.1 From

her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), she

inherited her feminist legacy and her education. To quote Wollstonecraft, Shelley learned:

Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience;

but as blind obedience is ever sought for by power, tyrants and sensualists are in the right

when they endeavor to keep women in the dark, because the former only wants slaves,

and the latter play things.2

The language of enslavement and empire is laced throughout Wollstonecraft's essays on female

rights as she condemns society that relegates women to the position of slaves. Thus Frankenstein

emerges—a joint abolitionist and feminist outcry against societal degradation. But since its

publication, several disappointing adaptations have come into being that, rather than doing

justice to Shelley's acute social critique, erase it. However, Nick Dear's 2012 stage adaptation

seeks to undo nearly a century of lacking adaptations that erase the Creature as an intelligent

1
The British slave trade was abolished with the passage of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. Slavery itself was not
outlawed until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.
2
Wollstonecraft, M. (2014) A Vindication on the Rights of Woman. (United States: Yale University Press), 51.
being and revives Shelley's feminist and abolitionist rhetorical throughline. In this paper, I posit

that Nick Dear's adaptation of Frankenstein intentionally exacerbates the male-female binary,

and inextricably links feminist and post-colonial readings of Mary Shelley's original novel

through the corruption of G.W.F. Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic. The play examines the source

and implications of the Creature's desire to be acknowledged as not only a being, but as Victor

Frankenstein's example of a man— a "male mother" and a conqueror.

Intro to the Hegelian Master-Slave Dialectic

In the 19th century essay The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), German Philosopher

G.W.F Hegel articulates his concept of the master-slave dialectic. According to Hegel,

self-consciousness, or the status of being exists only through outside recognition and

acknowledgement.3 Hegel separates the master-slave dialectic into three phases: thesis,

antithesis, and synthesis, or confrontation, recognition, and acceptance.4 In the confrontation

(thesis) phase, two individuals, or consciousnesses, struggle to define their power against the

other. The winner of this struggle becomes the master, while the loser becomes his slave.

However, in establishing this relationship, the master becomes reliant on the slave to validate his

position as master, and the slave, though physically subjugated, has intellectually surpassed the

master and achieved self-consciousness. The slave now understands that he is not the only being

in the world. The master, whose world-view remains unshaken, still believes himself to be the

master. This power has been transferred to the slave on whom his mastership depends, thus

completing the recognition (or antithesis) phase.5 Finally, in the acceptance phase (synthesis), the
3
Feilmeyer, J.D. (1992) Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic: the Search for Self-Consciousness. Central College Writing
Anthology. Accessed March 4, 2023.
https://central.edu/writing-anthology/2019/07/08/hegels-master-slave-dialectic-the-search-for-self-consciousness/.
4
Marziyeh Farivar, et al. (2013) From Consciousness Toward Self-Consciousness: The Byronic Hero as the
Hegelian Slave. Review of European Studies 5, no. 4. https://doi.org/10.5539/res.v5n4p61, 62.
5
Feilmeyer, "Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic: the Search for Self-Consciousness."
master recognizes that the power dynamic has been reversed, and he too achieves

self-consciousness. Both master and slave recognize that the other is a being.

Hegel in Frankenstein

Upon the Creature's animation, we enter the thesis phase of the Master-Slave Dialectic, as

both Shelley and Dear emphasize Frankenstein's dehumanization of the Creature in order to

establish the master-slave relationship. Victor Frankenstein, by virtue of his social class, is

already recognized by his society as a being. When he animates the Creature, he imagines that "a

new species would bless me as its creator."6 Frankenstein elevates himself to the position of

master and reduces the Creature to the position of a slave. His conception of the Creature as a

new species animalizes the life-form that he “births,” denying the Creature recognition as a

being. The Creature is born, abandoned by Frankenstein, rejected by society with no one to teach

him or to acknowledge him as an intelligent being.7 Unlike Mary Shelley's novel, the play begins

not with Frankenstein's journey, but with the Creature's birth, abandonment, and discovery of the

world. However, this narrative shift only serves to emphasize the Creature's innocence as Victor

and society spurn a newborn because of his terrifying exterior, generating the pseudo-blackness

that surrounds the Creature, and further coding him as the animalized slave. The creature is left

alone and afraid. Thus the thesis phase is complete—Victor is the creator, the master, the

Creature, a non-being and slave.

Through his education, the Creature learns of his own humanity, reversing the

master-slave power dynamic in the antithesis phase of Hegel's master-slave dialectic. The

Creature learns language from the De Lacey family. With his new literacy, he now recognizes

6
Shelley, M. W. (2018) Frankenstein: The 1818 Text. (New York: Penguin Book, 42.
7
Shishido, D. C. (2011) Apotheosis Now: A Hegelian Dialectical Analysis of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Berkeley Undergraduate Journal 24:3
https://escholarship.org/content/qt5pg2n9f8/qt5pg2n9f8.pdf?t=my3j8m, 113-114.
himself as a being, but he is compelled to seek recognition from Victor Frankenstein because

self-consciousness "exists in being acknowledged."8 Victor, meanwhile, has become a slave to

his emotions. His health and well-being deteriorate as Victor, grappling with his guilt, shuts

himself off from the outside world.9 When their separate worlds crash together in chiasmic

fashion once more, the Creature becomes the master. Though isolated, he is sure of his own

self-hood, while Victor has lost his surety of self. In commanding Frankenstein to build him a

female companion, the Creature overthrows Victor as the master of their relationship. Even as he

appeals to him as his "creator," he strips the word of its power, framing himself as "the author of

[Frankenstein's] own speedy ruin"10 The Creature's education enables him to achieve self-hood

and free himself from Frankenstein's power.

However, this new freedom is limited by Frankenstein's refusal to accept him as a being,

resulting in a cycle of dehumanization that degrades both the Creature and Frankenstein anew.

Frankenstein's destruction of the female creature is a failed attempt to re-establish his own power

that cements the Creature's status as a non-being in Frankenstein's mind. Frightened by the

potential of a "race of devils,"11 Frankenstein destroys the female creature in an erotically coded

murder/rape scene. Frankenstein slashes the female creature to pieces from behind the fleshy,

membranous womb. He penetrates the female anatomy represented on stage in the process of

murdering her.12 Outraged, the Creature adopts the language of dehumanization used by

Frankenstein, crying, "Slave, I before reasoned with you, but you have proved yourself unworthy

of my condescension . . . You are my creator, but I am your master"13 Engaging in this dialogue

8
Farivar et al. “From Consciousness Toward Self-Consciousness: The Byronic Hero as the Hegelian Slave,” 62.
9
Shishido, "Apotheosis Now: A Hegelian Dialectical Analysis of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," 115.
10
Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, 92.
11
Ibid 160.
12
Dear, N., et al. (2019) Frankenstein: Benedict Cumberbatch (National Theatre). Unabridged. London: Bloomsbury
Publishing.
13
Ibid 162.
re-enslaves the Creature because he no longer recognizes Victor as a being. Victor's refusal to

recognize the Creature and vice versa leaves them trapped in the antithesis phase, unable to move

on to synthesis. Their joint war of dehumanization makes each wholly dependent on the other for

their self-conceived position as master.

In Mary Shelley's novel, synthesis, the final stage of the Hegelian dialectic, is realized

through Robert Walton. However, in the absence of Walton in Nick Dear's play, neither the

Creature or Frankenstein can achieve true self-consciousness. Scholar David Shishido argues that

it is only after Frankenstein's death that the synthesis phase is completed by a Frankenstein

proxy, Robert Walton. He argues that "Walton's request that the daemon 'stay' and his reference

to the daemon as a 'being' constitute Walton's recognition of the daemon in the Hegelian sense."14

While Victor Frankenstein never achieves synthesis, the Creature does. As a consequence of

Walton's elimination from the play, Hegelian fulfillment never occurs for either character. Rather,

Frankenstein and the Creature become jointly enslaved to each other as the Creature leads

Frankenstein deeper into the arctic, feeding a nearly dead Frankenstein to keep him alive. Dear's

Creature declares, "The son becomes the father, the master the slave . . . but we have a compact

we must keep: he lives for my destruction, I live to lead him on."15 In Dear's depiction of

Frankenstein, the Creature and Frankenstein are inextricably linked by their inability to

acknowledge the other's humanity, leaving them stranded in the antithesis phase of the

master-slave dialectic.

The Female as a "Non-Being"

In the remainder of this paper, I will argue that this unfinished Hegelian dialectic in

Dear's play emerges from the Creature's desire to be considered as not only a "being," but as a

14
Shishido, Apotheosis Now: A Hegelian Dialectical Analysis of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, 120.
15
Dear, Frankenstein, 75.
"man." This desire stems from the societal treatment of the non-male, or non-normative male,

figures in the play, specifically Frankenstein's fiancé, Elizabeth Lavenza; the female creature;

and De Lacey, the benevolent professor in exile who teaches the Creature to read.

Throughout the play, Elizabeth "[sinks] below the standard of rational being"16 as she is

deprived of her autonomy, education, and dignity. The Frankenstein family adopts Elizabeth at

an early age as a playmate for Victor and from childhood, she is raised to be Victor's wife, his

accessory. However, Elizabeth only exists when it is convenient for Victor. After Victor agrees to

create a female Creature, he postpones his wedding: "Elizabeth will wait. I was in Ingolstadt six

years. A little longer won't make much difference."17 He not only postpones their wedding, he

does so without consulting her. Furthermore, in the six years Victor was in Ingolstadt, he was

receiving an education denied to Elizabeth—an education she ardently desired. Without an

education, she is relegated to what Mary Wollstonecraft viewed as female enslavement. It is of

note that in the National Theatre's production of Frankenstein, Elizabeth is played by Naomi

Harris, a black woman, in a predominantly white cast.18 This underscores Wollstonecraft's female

enslavement narrative with the historical enslavement of people of color. While these two

unfreedoms are not equal in scale or severity, Dear plays with these varying registers of

enslavement through the performance. Dear's version of Elizabeth is dually unfree, as a woman

and a person of color. Although Elizabeth does speak her mind throughout the play, decisions are

never made in her presence. Instead, she is consistently informed of her fate and relegated to

non-being status by the male figures of the play.

Although Elizabeth embodies the "perfect wife" archetype through her passivity, the

female creature provides a more extreme version. She/it is created solely to provide

16
Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, 61.
17
Dear, Frankenstein, 46.
18
Dear et al. Frankenstein: Benedict Cumberbatch (National Theatre).
companionship for the Creature, and her animation poses a threat to Frankenstein's patriarchal

mindset. In Dear's play, Frankenstein partially animates her. The stage directions read, "She has

minimal animation but apparently no mental function."19 Of her, Frankenstein remarks, "She is

perfect. A perfect wife."20 The female creature is the literal embodiment of a non-being; this is

Frankenstein’s conception of a "perfect wife," a body without a soul, a woman without a mind.

His ideal borrows from Mary Wollstonecraft, who condemns a society that believes "passive and

indolent women make the best wives,"21 that female excellence only need "restore the rib, and

make one moral being of man and woman; not forgetting to give her all the "submissive

charms,""22 a Biblical allusion to Eve's creation from Adam's rib bone. Victor refuses to complete

her animation and destroys her, fearing that she, once made a being, will not consent to having

decisions made for her. He fears female free-will for its potential to usurp male authority or

complete the creature and grant him the servile companionship of a "perfect wife."

De Lacey, while not himself a female character, is a non-traditional "patriarch" whose

authority is ultimately taken from him. De Lacey's existence between the gender binaries created

in the play mirrors the Creature's. His usurpation leads to the Creature's patriarchal desire to be

considered a man. Much like the Creature's exterior appearance limits his ability to engage with

society, De Lacey's blindness prevents him from operating outside of the home. He is trapped in

the private sphere and unable to provide for his family. In the play, De Lacey teaches the

Creature language while his son Felix and daughter-in-law Agatha work the land. He offers to

take the Creature in as a part of their family, but the Creature is rejected by Agatha and Felix,

who feel obligated to protect their blind father and do not listen to DeLacey's protestations:

19
Dear, Frankenstein, 58.
20
Ibid.
21
Wollstonecraft, M. (2014) A Vindication on the Rights of Woman. (United States: Yale University Press), 60.
22
Ibid 59.
 De Lacey No! Felix! He's —

Agatha Thrash it! Thrash it! Kill it!

Creature (to De Lacey) You promised!23

De Lacey's usurpation emasculates him and undermines his authority. Similarly, the Creature is

also feminized. Stephanie Smith argues that Nick Dear's play mirrors the female captivity

narrative.24 As the protagonist, or the narrator figure of the play, the Creature becomes a male

coded as a female. As a result, the threat to De Lacey's status as a being is also a threat to the

Creature's newfound self awareness, achieved through education.

The people who are kind to the Creature don't matter to society. His desire to be

perceived as a man stems from a desire to be respected, perceived as an equal. All three of these

figures are blatantly disregarded by society. Ironically, through their kindness, Elizabeth and

DeLacey teach the Creature that kindness is effeminate, and by extension, weak. Throughout the

play, the Creature learns to associate the feminine with non-being status. Therefore, on his quest

to become a being, he must be recognized as a man.

The "Male Mother"

On his quest for Hegelian acknowledgement and recognition, the Creature comes to

associate masculinity with being status. He shifts his goal of "being-hood" to that of "man-hood"

and begins to model himself upon the best example of masculinity that he can find: his creator,

23
Dear, Frankenstein, 20.
24
The female captivity narrative is derived from the Puritan Conversion narrative, and later evolves into slave
narratives. Prominent examples include Mary Rowlandson (female captivity), Harriet Jacobs (slave narrative), and
Frederick Douglass (slave narrative). These stories had primarily female authors, coding captivity as a feminine
state. Male authors, like Douglass, emphasize being deprived of their masculinity in captivity. See:

Smith, S. A. (2016) "'An Empire O’er the Disentangled Doom’ Captivity and the Re-Staging of Prometheus in the
Twenty-First Century.” Science Fiction Film and Television 9, no. 1 https://doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2016.3,
57.
Victor Frankenstein. However, in doing so, he aspires to become part of the system that

oppresses him, and he is made complicit in his own degradation.

Victor Frankenstein fits into the category of what Burton Hatlen considers as the "Male

Mother" archetype. He parallels the Frankenstein-Creature relationship to the God (Male)-Adam

relationship in Milton's Paradise Lost.25 While Hatlen's analysis is primarily biblical in its focus,

it is possible to extend the "Male Mother" figure into discourses of British Colonialism in the

West Indies. God has no need of Adam; his creation "seems to be motivated solely by the

creator's desire to possess an inferior being over whom he can exercise power,"26 much like

Victor Frankenstein's fantasies of a "new species to bless [him] as creator."27 Hatlen argues that

while the female archetypal mother raises their offspring as beings, the male mother creates

objects for their own glorification.28 This parent-child relationship mirrors the British conception

of their presence in the West Indies. The British West Indies were consider "manufactured

societies,"29 structured by the (male-dominated) British economy and political sphere, and later

abandoned. Like Hatlen's male mothers, "The British, who portrayed themselves as imperial

parents to their colonial children, were brutal, self-serving and negligent parents."30 Through this

analytical lens, the Frankenstein-Creature relationship becomes an allegory for enslavement in

the British West Indies, providing a historical master-slave relationship upon which the dialectic

is built.

The Creature begins to understand the world in terms of ownership and domination

because he models himself upon the male mother figure, Victor, on his quest for recognition.

25
The poem on which Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is based.
26
Schoene-Harwood, B. (2000) Mary Shelley : Frankenstein. (New York: Columbia University Press), 114.
27
Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, 42.
28
Ibid 114-115.
29
Ball, J. C. (2001) Imperial Monstrosities: Frankenstein, the West Indies, and VS Naipaul. ARIEL: A Review of
International English Literature 32, no. 3, 42.
30
Ibid 44.
Frankenstein's creation of the Creature is a posed as a "rape of nature, a violent penetration and

usurpation of the female's 'hiding places,' of the womb."31 Frankenstein, fearing female free-will

and empowerment (see "The Female as the 'Non-being'"), seeks to render the societal need for

women—reproduction—obsolete. He further strips women of what little societal power they

have in 19th century Europe. In Dear's Frankenstein, the Creature mirrors this act of sexual

violence through the rape and murder32 of Elizabeth, further objectifying her and making himself

complicit in the patriarchal and imperial society that is the very force of his own oppression.

Eternal Antithesis: A Return to Hegel

Despite his hopes to the contrary, the rape act that the Creature believes will establish him

as a man alienates him from the category of being. Elizabeth's rape is animalized in Dear's stage

directions; the act becomes the Creature "mating."33 Establishing ownership of Elizabeth through

rape strips the Creature of his self-acquired, though not yet acknowledged, being status, and

makes man into beast. After the rape, the Creature recognizes that the male mother status to

which he aspires, is degrading. He cries out, "Now I am a man. Shoot me. Go on. Kill me!

Please!"34 He cannot achieve acceptance, or synthesis, and become a recognized being by

asserting his masculinity through the dehumanization of others. Unable to reach synthesis, Victor

and the Creature are trapped in eternal antithesis in the Arctic. Each is enslaved by their desire

for vengeance and their inability to recognize individuals outside of themselves—each other,

31
Schoene-Harwood, B. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein, 99.
32
To clarify, in Mary Shelley's original novel, while this scene may have sexual overtones, it is not explicitly a rape
scene.
33
Dear. Frankenstein, 72.
34
Dear. Frankenstein, 72.
Elizabeth, slaves in the West Indies, the female sex, and people of color—as beings worthy of

acknowledgement, education, and acceptance.

Nick Dear's adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein uses the corruption of the

Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic to illustrate the means through which the rhetoric of

enslavement inextricably links patriarchal and imperial systems. These ideological systems strip

the oppressed of their being status in order to justify their subjugation. As a necessary facet of

this argument, I do feel the need to acknowledge that I by no means seek to equate the

experiences of white women in Europe with African slaves in the British West Indies, but rather

to trace the mechanization of oppression in a more general sense to better understand the rhetoric

of enslavement and its undoing. With Frankenstein, Mary Shelley enacts her feminist birthright,

taking up her mother's rallying cry:

It is time to effect a revolution in female manners—time to restore to them their

lost dignity—and make them, as a part of the human species, labor by reforming

themselves to reform the world.35

35
Wollstonecraft, A Vindication on the Rights of Woman, 71.
Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Alex Baines, current Northwestern PhD candidate, for his support and

assistance throughout this process.

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