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" The Racist Discourses in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein "
Rammahi, Reyam Kareem Maarij
Bailey, Quentin
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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1057018
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| Doc. No
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TL56135
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| Main Entry
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Rammahi, Reyam Kareem Maarij
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| Title & Author
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The Racist Discourses in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein\ Rammahi, Reyam Kareem MaarijBailey, Quentin
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| College
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San Diego State University
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| Date
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2020
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| Degree
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M.A.
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| student score
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2020
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| Note
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80 p.
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| Abstract
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Considered as the first science fiction, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein preserves its position among the widely taught and adapted novels. It retains this position due to its engagement with themes of monstrosity, the danger of knowledge, and creation, among others. Although the brief story of the Turkish-Arabian Safie received scholarly attention, nothing has been said about the connection between this fictional character and a real Turkish Sultana who ruled the Ottoman Empire during the period (1550 – 1619). Although it occupies almost a dozen pages, this brief episode is packed with a mixture of biographical and historical information not only related to Mary Shelley’s personal life but to that of the Turkish Sultana. One of the fascinating links is the inclusion of letters that the fictional Safie exchanges with her French lover, Felix. These letters are a hint that Shelley knew about the actual correspondence between Sultana Safiye and Queen Elizabeth I that had a major impact on the politics of both Empires. Overall, Frankenstein is an Orientalist text that follows the Romantic practice of using images from the Eastern and Muslim harem to warn against different issues in Western society. Shelley’s text highlights the status of women in the East and how they are treated according to Islamic law and relies heavily on earlier philosophical and literary works that were equally invested in similar tropes, among which is Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Lord Byron’s Orientalist poetry among many others. In portraying the monster as a rejected creature, Mary Shelley depicts Safie with somehow similar social deprivation. Though ignorant of languages other than her mother tongue, Safie shows much of what the monster is able to articulate. Denied the warmth of a family, cast into a strange world, having a different skin, both Safie and the monster suffer during their journey at the foreign West.
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British Irish literature
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Ethnic studies
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Literature
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Bailey, Quentin
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San Diego State University
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