Impossible Roots: Mary Shelley’s Demonic Mathematical Ontology in Frankenstein

¹ Highline College.

Abstract

Based on an examination of Benjamin Banneker’s published letter to Thomas Jefferson and his 1792 almanac, the present article examines competing, historically specific frameworks for thinking about the mathematics of Black being in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (1818). As Banneker, a Black American mathematician makes explicit, the problem of the period is the contested ontological status of Black being, which, according to a white, liberal, humanist, Euclidean conceptual framework, is regarded as less than one, and in history, may be reduced to a non-event or nothing, buried under a white history of human consciousness. Mary Shelley challenges this dominant ontology through the Creation, a figure of an enslaved Black person in rebellion. Because the Creation is postulated into the living present from an inaccessible past, I argue, Shelley recasts the Creation as a “complex character,” the literary analogue of a “complex number,” both real and imaginary. This formalization of Black being disrupts the determinacy and consistency of a Euclidean conceptual framework and thereby serves as an intervention in the realism of the subject. Accordingly, this article makes clear that an adequate realism with mathematical foundations requires a far more open number system to accommodate the human subject, with innumerable past lives and violent catastrophes embedded within the larger architectonic.