Author(s): Rituparna Chakraborty

Abstract: This paper explores Mary Shelleys Frankenstein (1818) as a text deeply entangled with the ideology of empire and its attendant Satanic ambition to dominate, control, and redefine the limits of nature and humanity. Reframing Victor Frankenstein and Robert Walton within a postcolonial framework, the study argues that Shelleys novel serves as an allegory of imperial expansion and the anxieties of the colonial encounter. The creature emerges as a symbol of the colonized Other constructed, disfigured, and disowned by a creator who mirrors the exploitative arrogance of European colonial powers. Waltons Arctic quest echoes the imperial rhetoric of exploration, mirroring Victors scientific conquest of the natural and the human. Reading the novel through the lens of postcolonial theory particularly Homi K. Bhabhas concepts of mimicry and hybridity, and Edward Saids discourse of Orientalism reveals that Frankenstein critiques the epistemic violence embedded in Enlightenment rationality and the imperial project. The Satanic ambition of creation and conquest, therefore, is not merely a moral fall but a colonial fall: the hubris of mans desire to master and possess what he defines as alien.

DOI: 10.22271/27891607.2025.v5.i2e.356

Pages: 395-397 | Views: 153 | Downloads: 66

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