The dissertation engages in a postcolonial reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It argues that Frankenstein and the education of Frankenstein's creature are both deeply rooted in colonial discourse, the nature of the colonial other and the place of this other within Western society. By charting how this discourse functions in the construction of physical alterity, this paper argues that through his exposure to language and society Frankenstein's creature becomes complicit in this process of imposition in which he is placed as the object of a discourse which construes him as other.