Inuit Diasporas: Frankenstein and the Inuit in England

Inuit Diasporas:

Frankenstein and the Inuit in England

In 1818, when Mary Shelley published the first edition of Frankenstein, the Isabella and Alexander set forth from England on a journey of exploration to the North Pole, carrying a Greenlandic Inuit from Disko Island by the name of John Sackhouse. Sackhouse, who had previously stowed away on a whaler from Greenland to Scotland, would serve as the translator on this voyage, enabling communication with the Inuit people alongthe way.¹ While the Isabella and Alexander were searching for a Northwest Passage across northern America, the Dorothea and Trent headed 'across the north pole', hoping to meet the Isabella and Alexander at the Bering Strait.² At the time, it was believed that the North Pole was 'free of ice', making a meeting like this possible. Mary Shelley, an avid reader of the Quarterly Review between 1816 and 1820, followed speculations surrounding these journeys in preparation for writing Frankenstein.³ Frankenstein, in fact, could be said to capitalize on the suspense and widely popular appeal of these journeys. Perhaps not coincidentally, the release of her novel appeared to be timed to coincide with the advent of these infamous expeditions to the North. Besides being captivated by the expeditions themselves, the English public had long been fascinated by Greenlandic Inuits and Eskimos. I would argue that, in Frankenstein, the creature himself came to represent these inhabitants of the North, as well as the threat of their arrival in England if increased communication were to occur. Just as John Sackhouse had once arrived as a stowaway on British shores, so Frankenstein's creature is a stranger who must be incorporated in – or rejected from – European culture.⁴ In the novel, the 'birth' of the creature in Europe could be said to represent cultural fears of the invasion of the 'primitive' in 'civilized' society, or the arrival of the colonized, in search of revenge,on the shores of the colonizer.

Since the late sixteenth century, 'Esquimaux Indians' from Greenland to Alaska had been captured by British explorers and carried back to England, where they were generally presented as novelties to the King or Queen. In 1576, Martin Frobisher captured a Greenlandic Inuit who was later described in London as 'such a wonder unto the whole city and to the rest of the realm that heard of it' (Oswalt, 27). In 1578, Eskimos captured off Baffin Island were given permission by the Queen to hunt swans on the Thames River. In 1605, an Inuit performed before the King and Queen of Denmark, racing their traditional kayaks against a Danish boat.⁵ By the late eighteenth century, discussions of these 'Esquimaux Indians' peppered the pages of books and journals ranging from the Quarterly Review to John Pinkerton's famous collection, A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels in all Parts of the World. Central to discussions of these Arctic inhabitants was the issue of appearance; lengthy anthropological-style essays were written by explorers such as James Cook on what an 'Eskimo' looks like and what differentiates an Eskimo from other Indians or indigenous peoples. As contact with indigenous peoples from around the world increased, a physiognomic hierarchy (connected to an ethical hierarchy) began to be established in England between indigenous peoples from different parts of the world. Mary Shelley, as an avid reader of The Quarterly Review, would have been quite familiar with the almost obsessive discourse about inhabitants of the North.

What is missing from Frankenstein, then, is this very discourse about indigenous people in both the Quarterly Review and Pinkerton's Collection, both of which Mary Shelley read in preparation for writing Frankenstein. Warren Montag has commented on the strange 'absence of the proletariat' in Frankenstein, suggesting that the creature is an encapsulated representation of these missing masses in the text.⁶ I would suggest, instead, that a more glaring omission is that of the indigenous subjects of...