Introduction

Introduction You can teach an old metaphor new tricks. In the Franken- stein story, fi rst introduced in the novel by Mary Shelley in 1818 and made famous on fi lm by James Whale in 1931, a monster, assembled from corpses and reanimated, rebels violently against his creator. Th e Franken- stein story has a long history of being used as a political metaphor, and at the start of the twenty-fi rst century, it continues to shape political de- bate. Consider, for example, critiques of U.S. foreign policy in the wake of 9/11. In “We Finally Got Our Frankenstein,” fi lmmaker 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.”1 Moore uses the Frankenstein metaphor to condemn the U.S. government for “playing Dr. Frankenstein,” conducting a scientifi c experiment that is also a “love fest” gone wrong. Novelist Carlos Fuentes off ers a simi- lar cautionary tale but links the monster to a familial metaphor: “Saddam Hussein was Saddam Hussein because the United States gave him all possible support. Th e United States is extraordinarily gift ed in creating monsters like Frankenstein. Th en one fi ne 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 Journal- ist 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 oft en seen in 1 YYoung_pp001-067.inddoung_pp001-067.indd 1 55/27/08/27/08 33:22:14:22:14 PMPM 2 Introduction scary movies: you play God to create something in your own image, and the monster you make ends up coming aft er you.” She renames the vice president “Dr. Cheneystein.”3 Even when the metaphor is not directly named, Frankenstein informs contemporary critiques of U.S. foreign policy. “Blowback” is the term pop- ularized by Chalmers Johnson to describe contemporary violence against the United States that results from its foreign policy: “Th e most direct and obvious form of blowback oft en occurs when the victims fi ght back aft er a secret American bombing, or a U.S.-sponsored campaign of state terror- ism, or a CIA-engineered overthrow of a foreign political leader.”4 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 diff erent political lesson from Frankenstein. Th ey open the volume, the sequel to their infl uential Empire (2000), with a discussion of the Frankenstein monster and the golem, another fi ctional monster who rebels against his creator. Writing “under the cloud of war . between September 11, 2001, and the 2003 Iraq War,” Hardt and Negri suggest that both monster and golem are “whispering to us secretly under the din of our global battlefi eld . a lesson about the monstrosity of war and our possible redemption through love.”6 Later in the volume, Hardt and Negri use the Frankenstein monster as the affi rmative symbol of the “multitude,” their model of a global democratic proletariat. Since “Frankenstein is now a member of the fam- ily,” they assert, “[t]he 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 fi gure. Th e “love fest” of Moore’s “We Finally Got Our Frankenstein” has become the “redemption through love” prompted by monsters. Th ese are disparate examples, varying in tone, sophistication, and tar- get. My interest is in the metaphoric fi gure they employ as much as the political ground they occupy — or rather, in the way the fi gure shapes the ground. Metaphors matter to culture and thought, and these examples all suggest the continuing vitality of the Frankenstein metaphor for shap- ing contemporary political critique and, in particular, for voicing dissent against elites whose policies are seen as misguided in intention and disastrous in eff ect. Critiques of U.S. power are one inheritance of the Frankenstein story in a post-9/11 world; expressions of sympathy for the YYoung_pp001-067.inddoung_pp001-067.indd 2 55/27/08/27/08 33:22:15:22:15 PMPM Introduction 3 monstrous violence that defi nes that world are another. What we might call the “blowback” and “sympathy” themes of the Frankenstein story extract diff erent but complementary meanings from it, using it to criti- cize 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 refer- ence to Igor, the scientist’s assistant, is to the fi lm 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 diff erent 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-refl exivity 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 Th e piecing-together process by which “Frankenstein” becomes “Cheneystein” is part of a longer, and in- deed prosperous, history in which commentators on Frankenstein reprise the monster-making in the novel itself. Th ere 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 modifi ed foods.10 Th ese discussions draw on the implications of the idea of “Frankenstein” as monstrous creation, an idea embodied in the neo logisms drawn from the word itself. Th us, a judge ruling in a law- suit against McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets condemns this product as “a McFrank enstein creation”; opponents of a cellphone tower designed to look like a fi r tree term it “Frankenpine.”11 Whereas these examples provide a verbal analogue to hybrid monsters, others also make the con- nection to monster-makers. For example, campaigners against “franken- foods” attack genetically modifi ed foods as monstrous creations, while also targeting the corporations that produce these foods, like Monsanto, YYoung_pp001-067.inddoung_pp001-067.indd 3 55/27/08/27/08 33:22:15:22:15 PMPM 4 Introduction as both monster-makers and monsterlike agribusiness giants.12 Moreover, 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 Bio- ethics, 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. Counsel- ing “the wisdom of repugnance” against cloning, Kass condemns “the Frankensteinian hubris to create human life and increasingly to control its destiny.”13 But if the Frankenstein metaphor is so protean that it sometimes seems to defy categorization, it does have particularly signifi cant 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 specifi c plot of bodily animation, as a contemporary language of political dissent. Th is book investigates one prehistory of such political critiques, tracking the Frankenstein metaphor in U.S. literature, fi lm, and culture of the past two centuries in relation to the interdependent themes of race and nation. Th ese 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.”14 A century later, in the midst of the second Civil War launched by the civil rights movement, comedian and activist Dick Gregory specifi ed 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.

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