Frankenstein and walton: The satanic ambition: A postcolonial reading

Abstract

This paper explores Mary Shelley’s 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 Shelley’s 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. Walton’s Arctic quest echoes the imperial rhetoric of exploration, mirroring Victor’s scientific conquest of the natural and the human. Reading the novel through the lens of postcolonial theory particularly Homi K. Bhabha’s concepts of mimicry and hybridity, and Edward Said’s 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 man’s desire to master and possess what he defines as alien.