Orientalism as a Regulatory Episteme in William Beckford’s Vathek and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Abstract: The Orientalist engagement of William Beckford’s Vathek and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has already been considered within the same theoretical framework proposed by Edward Said. However, this study aims at deconstructing the epistemic foundation of Orientalism in both works. The creation of Vathek is not simply a conceptualization of a stereotypical figure that replicates typical Orientalized characters. He is rather the product of a fantastic quest that is epistemologically conditioned by overreaching disastrous knowledge. Vathek’s weird world is engineered within an epistemic framework whose discursive foundation can be tracked down in Orientalism. Likewise, the subjection of Victor Frankenstein to Orientalist practices whets his appetite for the type of experimentation whose ambiance is conjured up from the spirit of Orientalized tales like the Nights. Orientalism functions thus as an episteme filtering any ‘dispirited’ scientific objectives and transforming them into distorted fantasies. All in all, the realization of such fantasies and deviant epistemic quests, in both novels, eventually ends up in crafting a deformed artefact that echoes Orientalism itself in the sense that they are both deviant praxis drawn upon eccentric discourse and assumptions. Keywords:William Beckford, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Vathek, Orientalism