SOURCE: "Race, Gender, and Imperial Ideology: In the Nineteenth Century," in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring, 1989, pp. 19-32.

In the following essay, Sullivan argues that though the imperial subject was constructed in monolithic patriarchal and racist terms, the multiple discourses of imperialism disrupted this construction and provided a space for the voice of the "other," as is seen in Frankenstein.

When the Monster created by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein learns to read, his first lessons include an ordering of the world at once racist, imperialist, and sexist—an oppositional, hierarchic structure finally and ironically reenforced by his own exile away from the company of man. Looking at his first family, he learns the gendering of morality and the moral ordering of nineteenth century class, caste and nationalism: Agatha, the girl with the golden hair and "gentle demeanour" who weeps, is "unlike" common farm-house servants (102); the "strange system of human...