ou can teach an old metaphor new tricks. In the Frankenstein story, first introduced in the novel by Mary Shelley in 1818 and made famous on film by James Whale in 1931
What is the Main argument and points?
Summarize it in a political metaphor view.
You can teach an old metaphor new tricks. In the Frankenstein story, first introduced in the novel by Mary Shelley in 1818 and made famous on film by James Whale in 1931, a monster, assembled from corpses and reanimated, rebels violently against his creator. The Frankenstein story has a long history of being used as a political metaphor, and at the start of the twenty-first century, it continues to shape political debate. Consider, for example, critiques of U.S.
foreign policy in the wake of 9/11. In “We Finally Got Our Frankenstein,” filmmaker Michael Moore compares Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to the Frankenstein monster:
“We had a virtual love fest with this Frankenstein whom we (in part) created. And, just
like the mythical Frankenstein, Saddam eventually spun out of control. He would no longer do what he was told by his master. Saddam had to be caught.” Moore considers Hussein one of many monsters created by the U.S. government, including Osama bin Laden- “Our other Frankenstein”. and a roster of right-wing dictators: “We liked playing Dr. Frankenstein. We created a lot of monsters–the Shah of Iran, Somoza of Nicaragua, Pinochet of Chile and then we expressed ignorance or shock when they ran amok and massacred people”.
Moore uses the Frankenstein metaphor to condemn the U.S. government for “playing Dr. Frankenstein,” conducting a scientific experiment that is also a “love fest” gone wrong. Novelist Carlos Fuentes offers a similar cautionary tale but links the monster to a familial metaphor: “Saddam Hussein was Saddam Hussein because the United States gave him all possible support. The United States is extraordinarily gifted in creating monsters like Frankenstein. Then
one fine day they discover that these Frankensteins are dreadful. However, for twenty years they were the spoilt children, their proteges, and the babies of the United States.”2 Journalist Maureen
Dowd invokes the idea of religious overreaching when she condemns Vice President Dick Cheney “and his crazy-eyed Igors at the Pentagon [for] their hunger to remake the Middle East. It’s often seen in scary movies: you play God to create something in your own
image, and the monster you make ends up coming after you.” She renames the vice president “Dr. Cheneystein.” Even when the metaphor is not directly named, Frankenstein informs contemporary critiques of U.S. foreign policy. “Blowback” is the term popularized by
Chalmers Johnson tO describe contemporary violence against the United States that results from its foreign policy: “The most direct and obvious form of blowback often occurs when the victims fight back after a secret American bombing, or a U.S.-sponsored campaign of state terrorism, or a CIA- engineered overthrow of a foreign political leader.” With its plot of boomerang violence, Frankenstein is the embodiment of blowback. or as another commentator summarizes the theory,
“Now the monster has turned on its creator.”5 In Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004), Antonio Hardt and Michael Negri extract a different political lesson from Frankenstein. They open the volume, the sequel to their influential Empire (2000), with a
discussion of the Frankenstein monster and the golem, another fictional monster who rebels against his creator. Writing “under the cloud of war . War,” between September 11, 2001, and the 2003 Iraq Hardt and Negri suggest that both monster and golem are “whispering to us secretly under the din of our global battlefield. lesson about the monstrosity of war and our possible redemption through love.” Later in the volume, Hardt and Negri use the Frankenstein monster as the affirmative symbol of the “multitude, their model of a global demo cratic proletariat. Since “Frankenstein is now a member of the family,” they assert, “the new world of monsters is where humanity has to grasp its future.”7 Hardt and Negri are vague on the details of this vision, but they are clearly faithful to Mary Shelley’s own depiction of the monster as a sympathetic figure. The “love fest” of Moore’s”We Finally Got Our Frankenstein” has become the “redemption through love” prompted by monsters. These are disparate examples, varying in tone, sophistication, and target. My interest is in the metaphoric figure they employ as
much as the political ground they occupy-or rather, in the way the figure shapes the ground. metaphors matter to culture and thought, and these examples all suggest the continuing vitality of the Frankenstein metaphor for shaping contemporary political critique and, in particular, for voicing dissent against elites whose policies are seen as misguided in intention and disastrous in effect. Critiques of U.S. power are one inheritance of the Frankenstein story in a post- 9/11 world; expressions of sympathy for the monstrous violence that defines that world are another. What we might call the “blowback” and “sympathy” themes of the Frankenstein story extract different but complementary meanings from it, using it to criticize monster-makers and to explain monstrous violence, if not to defend monsters-themselves.
Highlighting some contemporary political uses of the Frankenstein metaphor, these examples also suggest some ambiguities intrinsic to this metaphor. Moore employs “Frankenstein”
to signal both monster and monster-maker, whereas in Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein” refers only to the maker, who is a university student, not a doctor; Fuentes’s image of Hussein as a long-time
“spoilt baby” has no correspondence to the plot of the novel, in which the creature is abandoned from birth; Dowd’s reference to Igor, the scientist’s assistant, is to the film version of Frankenstein. Such changes themselves have a long history: the term “Frankenstein”
migrated from creator to monster as early as the 1830s, and the assistant character was added to theatrical productions in the 1820s.8 Combining different elements of the Frankenstein story,
these writers do not so much replace older versions with newer ones
as reanimate elements in place since the early nineteenth century. In these processes of recombination and reanimation, they mimic the actions of Victor Frankenstein within the story, a self-reflexivity that Mary Shelley had set in motion in her 1831 preface to the novel, in
which she aligned monster and book: “I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper.”9 The piecing-together process by which “Frankenstein” becomes “Cheneystein” is part of a longer, and
indeed prosperous, history in which commentators on Frankenstein reprise the monster-making in the novel itself. There are, of course, many other strands of Frankenstein imagery in contemporary political culture, including references to the story in discussions of stem-cell research, cloning, cosmetic surgery,
and genetically modified foods.1 These discussions draw on the
implications of the idea of “Frankenstein” as monstrous creation, an
idea embodied in the neologisms drawn from the word itself. Thus, a
judge ruling in a lawsuit against McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets
condemns this product as “a McFrankenstein creation”, opponents of
a cellphone tower designed to look like a fir tree term it
“Frankenpine.”2 Whereas these examples provide a verbal analogue
to hybrid monsters, others also make the connection to monster-
makers. For example, campaigners against “frankenfoods” attack
genetically modified foods as monstrous creations, while also
targeting the corporations that produce these foods, like Monsanto,
as both monster-makers and monsterlike agribusiness giants.3
More-over, the metaphor is used by those on the political right as
well as the left. For example, Leon Kass, former chairman of
President Bush’s Council of Bioethics, has excoriated cloning for
what he sees as its place on a slippery slope of social wrongs
including feminism, single-parenting, gay rights, sex with animals,
cannibalism, and the desecration of corpses. Counseling “the wisdom of repugnance” against cloning, Kass condemns “the Frankensteinian hubris to create human life and increasingly to
control its destiny. But if the Frankenstein metaphor is so protean that it sometimes
seems to defy categorization, it does have particularly significant
forms. I have chosen to begin with examples from left-wing
discussions of U.S. foreign policy because they highlight the vitality of the Frankenstein metaphor, in a context far removed from its
specific plot of bodily animation, as a contemporary language of
political dissent. This book investigates one prehistory of such
political critiques, tracking the Frankenstein metaphor in U.S.
literature, film, and culture of the past two centuries in relation to the
interdependent themes of race and nation. These themes converge
in the sustained, multivalent, and revelatory imagery of a black
American Frankenstein monster. Writing in 1860 on the eve of Civil War, Frederick Douglass
declared, “Slavery is everywhere the pet monster of the American
people.”S A century later, in the midst of the second Civil War launched by the civil rights movement, comedian and activist Dick Gregory specified the legacy of that “pet monster.” When he saw James Whale’s Frankenstein as a child, Gregory remembered, he
realized that “h]ere was a monster, created by a white man, turning
upon his creator. The horror movie was merely a parable of life in the
ghetto. The monstrous life of the ghetto has been created by the
white man. Only now in the city of chaos are we seeing the monster
created by oppression turn upon its creator.”6 In the “now” of 1968.
Gregory saw the African American urban uprisings of the era in
terms of the monster’s revenge against his creator. In the sphere of
domestic U.S. race relations, as in that of U.S. foreign policy,
Frankenstein was the story of blowback.
[The genealogy [runs] from Douglass to Gregory and beyond,
[indicating] the importance of the metaphor of the black Frankenstein monster in nineteenth-and
twentieth-century U.S. culture. Frankenstein and its legacy have been the subject of substantial
amounts of scholarly and popular writing, but little serious attention
has been paid to the historical specificities of its place in American
culture, and virtually none to its racial resonances in the United
States.? I take up the question of what happens to the Frankenstein
story in America, defining that story in its most basic form as having
three distinct elements: a monster is amalgamated from body parts;
a monster is reanimated from corpses; and a monster engages in
revolt against a creator. Drawn from these elements, the figure of a black Frankenstein monster
appears frequently throughout nineteenth-and twentieth-century American culture, in fiction, essays, oratory, film, painting, and other media, and in works by both whites
and African Americans. Described as yellow in the novel, painted
blue in nineteenth-century stage incarnations, and tinted green in
twentieth-century cinematic ones, the monsters color nonetheless
signifies symbolically, on the domestic American scene, as black.
In this genealogy of black Frankenstein stories, the figure of the
monster is consistently intertwined with fantasies and anxieties about
masculinity, relations between men, and the male iconography of the
American nation. Within this terrain of masculinity, the Frankenstein
metaphor is mutable in its politics. It is sometimes invoked by
political conservatives, but it has tended to serve more effectively as
a radical condemnation of those in power for making monsters or as
a defense of monsters themselves. In a racist culture that already
considered black men monstrous and contained them within
paternalist rhetoric, the Frankenstein story, with its focus on the
literal making of monsters and the unmaking of fathers, provided a
stylized rhetoric with which to turn an existing discourse of black
monstrosity against itself. Black Frankenstein stories, I argue,
effected four kinds of antiracist critique: they humanized the slave;
they explained, if not justified, his violence; they condemned the
slaveowner; and they exposed the instability of white power.
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