Frankenstein Modern Prometheus...

5fish

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This link I am posting is a wonkish and short( a page) comparison of Shelly Frankenstein / The Modern Prometheus to slavery in Briton and United States... Its good but your head may explode because it is deep...

http://exhibitions.nypl.org/biblion/outsiders/outsiders/essay/essaymoore

Snippets...

Shelley wrote Frankenstein just as Great Britain was ponderously transitioning from its role as a slave-trading state into the coming upheavals of empire building, the Industrial Revolution, labor unrest, and the struggles for universal suffrage and human rights. Slavery came first up on Britain’s “we shall overcome” list. With the Promethean anti-slavery position in place by 1807 with the passage of the Slave Trade Act, Poems on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, published in London two years later, anticipated Mary Shelley’s Promethean anti-hero by nearly a decade. The volume of poems opens with James Grahame’s “Prometheus Delivered”:

Here...

Globally, many philosophers, politicians, writers, and poets had long taken aim at slavery. Mary Shelley’s husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, believed that slavery was “the deepest stain upon civilized man.” And, for Shelley the poet, it was the philosophers, writers, and poets who must lead the battle against the scourge of slavery; his 1821 manifesto “A Defence of Poetry,” first published posthumously in 1840, concluded, “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Here...

As the nation marked the inauguration of President Abraham Lincoln, on March 4, 1861, a front-page editorial in the Charleston Mercury pointed to the monster at the President’s door: “He must proclaim peace or declare war. He must virtually recognize the independence of the Confederate States, or encounter them in a conflict of arms.... Like Frankenstein, they have raised a monster which they cannot quell.”

Here... a Black Thought on reconstruction...

For Du Bois, the history of the black experience in America, from slavery through Jim Crow, could be traced to that ancient archetype of struggle against tyranny. Slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow fueled and continuously refueled the struggle for human rights. In Black Reconstruction in America (1935), he warned that we must remember:

“How civil war in the South began again — indeed had never ceased; and how black Prometheus bound to the Rock of Ages by hate, hurt and humiliation, has his vitals eaten out as they grow, yet lives and fights.... Reconstruction was a determined effort to reduce black labor as nearly as possible to a condition of unlimited exploitation and build a new class of capitalists on this foundation.”


It is a deep read...

http://exhibitions.nypl.org/biblion/outsiders/outsiders/essay/essaymoore
 

5fish

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Here is this: the Shellys...

Both Mary and Percy wanted to see an end to the institution of slavery. Throughout their lives, they had read the perennial Parliamentary debates between abolitionists and planters. They learned about the horrors of the Middle Passage—of the millions who had died on slave ships—and the millions more who had been forced into grueling and dangerous labor in mines and sugar and cotton plantations in the Americas. In 1812, Percy critiqued the morally corrupt system of slavery in his poem “Queen Mab”:

[Humanity] was bartered for the fame of power,


Which, all internal impulses destroying,

Makes human an article of trade;

Or he was changed with Christians for their gold,

And dragged to distant isles, where to the sound

Of the flesh-mangling scourge, he does the work

Of all-polluting luxury and wealth . . .


Slavery and the slave trade transformed Britain. By the eighteenth century, it permeated every facet of daily life—from the ways that Britons thought about human nature to the consumer goods that they purchased. For example, as the largest market for slave-produced sugar in the world, Britons had a reminder of their culpability in the slave trade every time they took their tea. In response, some consumers boycotted sugar from the West Indies, purchasing sugar labelled as “not made by slaves.” Like some other reformers, both Mary and Percy abstained from sugar in their tea altogether, a form of protest meant to distance themselves from institution of slavery.



It like our Free Trade Coffee we have today....


1583774624703.png
 

5fish

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Mary Shelly .... had...

Despite their reformist attitudes, Mary and Percy were nevertheless products of their age. Being abolitionists did not make them immune to racial assumptions. And, in fact, Mary Shelley’s fascination with natural philosophy led her to integrate early nineteenth-century ideas about race into the text of Frankenstein. She used race as a signifier of terror, hinting that Frankenstein’s Creature was another race—powerful and revengeful—running amok and threatening the safety of Europeans.

Then the link goes to a wonkish look: https://www.jasonmkelly.com/slavery-race-frankenstin
 

Matt McKeon

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I am just reading Trelawney's account of Shelley and Lord Byron. Very interesting.
 

5fish

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Here a take from 1831 a Virginia State member.... https://www.mtholyoke.edu/media/racial-metaphor-frankenstein

There are many racial resonances of the Frankenstein story in the United States. One important early example is from 1831, just after the Nat Turner Rebellion in Virginia, in which slaves revolted and killed dozens of white people.

After that, there was a debate about slavery in the Virginia legislature, and one of the legislators invoked the imagery of the Frankenstein story to defend slavery. He argued that if slaves were freed, they would all be like Frankenstein’s monsters, revolting against their masters.

Snip... a twist...

On the other hand, you can find many more cases of people—including novelists, artists, and activists—using the Frankenstein story to argue against slavery and racial oppression. In the original novel, the monster himself is sympathetic and speaks eloquently about his enslavement. Also, in focusing on the relation between a creator and his creation, the metaphor provides a way to trace the origins of violence to an unjust relationship, and to talk about the inherent violence of oppression.

Today, the Frankenstein metaphor is still tragically relevant. The kinds of systemic violence against black men that has been so dramatically visible in the last few years is fueled by a culture in which white people continue to think of black men as monsters.

One of the most notable examples of this is in the case of Michael Brown, who was killed in Ferguson, Missouri, two summers ago. In his testimony, Darren Wilson, the white police officer who shot Brown, said Brown looked like a “demon.” That is the language of black monstrosity, seeing black men as frightening monsters who must then be subdued.
 

Wehrkraftzersetzer

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Here is this: the Shellys...

Both Mary and Percy wanted to see an end to the institution of slavery. Throughout their lives, they had read the perennial Parliamentary debates between abolitionists and planters. They learned about the horrors of the Middle Passage—of the millions who had died on slave ships—and the millions more who had been forced into grueling and dangerous labor in mines and sugar and cotton plantations in the Americas. In 1812, Percy critiqued the morally corrupt system of slavery in his poem “Queen Mab”:

[Humanity] was bartered for the fame of power,


Which, all internal impulses destroying,

Makes human an article of trade;

Or he was changed with Christians for their gold,

And dragged to distant isles, where to the sound

Of the flesh-mangling scourge, he does the work

Of all-polluting luxury and wealth . . .


Slavery and the slave trade transformed Britain. By the eighteenth century, it permeated every facet of daily life—from the ways that Britons thought about human nature to the consumer goods that they purchased. For example, as the largest market for slave-produced sugar in the world, Britons had a reminder of their culpability in the slave trade every time they took their tea. In response, some consumers boycotted sugar from the West Indies, purchasing sugar labelled as “not made by slaves.” Like some other reformers, both Mary and Percy abstained from sugar in their tea altogether, a form of protest meant to distance themselves from institution of slavery.


It like our Free Trade Coffee we have today....


View attachment 1108
this an antique / original piece?
 

5fish

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this an antique / original piece?
I think this will answer your question....


Around 1828, a handful of British publications contained a very unusual advertisement. A certain B. Henderson wanted to inform the "Friends of Africa" that her china warehouse in England was selling assorted basins for sugar. These basins came emblazoned with bright golden letters, which read "East India sugar not made by slaves."

Several such sugar bowls still exist, including the above one from the British Museum.
 
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