Miscegenation anxiety drives the refusal to create Frankenstein’s monster’s mate

Evidence

The creature is described as Elizabeth’s “racial negative; dark-haired, low-browed, with watery and yellowed eyes.” This scene’s resemblance to Othello’s murder of Desdemona is uncanny—the dark-skinned monster, the white female victim who lies in her bed, the juxtaposition of black and white, and the suggestion of rape, or, in the words of one scholar, “as murder in the lieu of rape.” The underlying anxiety about miscegenation ultimately keeps Dr. Frankenstein from producing a viable mate for his creature. Such a creation would “become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate… [because] one of the first results of those sympathies for which the demon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth who might make the very existence of man a condition precarious and full of terror.” Hundreds of years after Othello was first performed on the stage, the same anxieties surrounding racial difference remained. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 467

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s guiding question about the monster as a container for what the West cannot face in itself—here, interracial reproduction. Also resonates with the miscegenation-anxiety theme in the reader’s existing material.
• SEED: The ‘murder in the lieu of rape’ framing—the monster who cannot reproduce kills the white woman instead—is a strong angle for the reader’s thesis on how the Muslim/monster figure is fundamentally about controlling and demonizing reproduction.