Lesbian Honesty: Reading Between the Lines

In Ellen Moers’ critical essay Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother (1974) on Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, she argues that Mary Shelley’s story is greatly influenced by her experience of motherhood. This essay uses the historical approach, biographical, and formalist approach at point. Moers references the cultural context of the novel, Mary Shelley’s experience as a woman and mother and how that influenced her writing, and focuses on the genre of the novel quite a bit.

Frankenstein, a novel first published in the year 1818, stands as the most talked about work of Mary Shelley’s literary career. She was just nineteen years old when she penned this novel, and throughout her lifetime she could not produce any other work that surpasses this novel in terms of creativity and vision. In this novel, Shelley found an outlet for her own intense sense of victimization, and her desperate struggle for love. Traumatized by her failed childbirth incidents, troubled childhood, and scandalous courtship, many of Shelley’s life experiences can be seen reflected in the novel. When discussing the character and development of the monster, Shelley launches an extensive discussion on the

Homosexuality is a topic in heated debate over whether it stems from genes or early childhood. The sexuality of Victor Frankenstein is first explored when Victor’s mother adopts a beautiful little peasant girl from Italy. Victor’s mother expresses a profound desire to have a girl and when she is able only to have boys she decides to adopt one. It is therefore very disturbing to find out that Victor’s mother intends to marry he and this newly adopted girl named Elizabeth. “‘I have a pretty present for my Victor— to- morrow he shall have it.’ And

Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein primarily focuses on Victor and his monster, but women also play a part. There are three major female figures in the novel; the housekeeper for the Frankenstein family: Justine, Victor’s “adopted cousin” and later wife: Elizabeth, and the never completed female monster. To both Victor and the monster woman are desired objects that offer comfort and companionship, but as the novel goes on, women become targets for revenge. This goes to show that the women in Frankenstein prove to be both powerless and powerful when it comes to dealing with the men that surround them.

The novel “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley, and the article “Of the Pernicious Effects” by Mary Wollstonecraft, both have relations when regarding the importance of feminism during their time periods. Throughout Shelley’s novel feminism is addressed because she uses female characters to further her plot and display her viewpoints. If Wollstonecraft evaluated the female characters in Shelley’s novel, she would realize that Elizabeth, Justine, and Safie all show an importance to the flow of the novel and the purpose of equality that Shelley is sending about feminism through these characters.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is a gothic novel that was wrote during the 1800s, or other known as the enlightenment era. During this era, the ideas of discovering the natural law of the universe and the thirst for scientific knowledge were being spread all across Europe. Mary Shelley incorporates these ideas with Victor Frankenstein's thirst for dangerous knowledge, and through allusions of Prometheus and the Genesis story. Shelley not only incorporates other supplementary readings into Frankenstein, but uses feminist literary theory as a way to put to life the idea of women’s inferiority to men.

Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein seems to focus on the characterization of men yet what is ironic is the fact that she is a woman. After the birth of Shelley, her mother Mary Wollstonecraft who was one of the first and most important feminist advocates had died, leaving Shelley to continue in her footsteps (“Feminism & Women in Frankenstein”). Growing up, she was exposed to the work done by her mother and this led her to become exposed to feminist ideals at a very early age (“Feminism & Women in Frankenstein”). In Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, it is controversial of why she chose to characterize both sexes in the way she did and this controversy on women’s roles held of one the central themes in the text. Some critics argue that

Because Caroline knows she will no longer be there to make those sacrifices anymore, she passes the torch to Elizabeth by telling her, “Elizabeth, my love, you must supply my place to my younger children” (Shelley 38). This in turn sets up another generation of confined women in the Frankenstein household. Caroline’s sacrifice and Elizabeth’s adoption of the homemaker role subtly represent the struggle of women in this time period to go against the grain of gender roles in society (Brackett). Not only are women confined to limited caretaker roles in Frankenstein, they are continuously and unreasonably vanquished by larger male roles as well. For example, Justine becomes a pawn ensnared in a masculine game of cat and mouse between two irresponsible male roles, Victor and the Creature. Although she truly took no place in the murder of William, nobody believed her and she is executed because of Victors silence (Brackett). The unwarranted wronging of females occurs once again when the creature shows a complete disregard for women by brutally murdering Elizabeth. The monster leaves her “lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair” (Shelley 173). This brash, unadulterated act of savagery towards a woman by a male lead brightly highlights the underlying disposition of men to women, not only in the book, but in Mary Shelley’s era (Brackett). Overall, women in Mary Shelley’s

Throughout the entire novel of Frankenstein, the women featured in the story were viewed to be typical stereotypes of females in 1800s society. From their acclaimed weak personas to the jobs of taking care of the men in their lives, Mary Shelley purposefully portrayed women this way to fit the bill of the 1800s expectation of women. In the era of which this book was written, women were expected to follow the rules placed on them and succumb to the power of men by obeying their wishes. This was made crystal clear in the novel when Victor Frankenstein claims his sister and soon to be wife as a possession, “I...look upon Elizabeth as mine” (Shelley 27-28). This theme of female ownership is relevant throughout the novel as it demonstrates how women were treated like property in that time. Women were seen as incapable of work and unequal to men because at the time only men were expected to provide for their families. The idea of feminism was not relevant or respected at this time because of the social norms placed on 1800s society.

     Romantic writer Mary Shelley’s gothic novel Frankenstein does indeed do a lot more than simply tell story, and in this case, horrify and frighten the reader. Through her careful and deliberate construction of characters as representations of certain dominant beliefs, Shelley supports a value system and way of life that challenges those that prevailed in the late eighteenth century during the ‘Age of Reason’. Thus the novel can be said to be challenging prevailant ideologies, of which the dominant society was constructed, and endorsing many of the alternative views and thoughts of the society. Shelley can be said to be influenced by her mothers early feminist views, her father’s

Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, had been raised by strong women’s rights advocates, which makes her characterization of the women in her story a wildly controversial discussion topic even all these years later. Mary Shelley’s philosopher father paid for her high education, and her mother wrote several works about equality for women. She lived a substantially progressive lifestyle, considering the time period in which she lived. This has raised many questions regarding the weak female characters in her story, due to her own very contrasting beliefs.

In “Insurmountable barriers to our union’: Homosocial male bonding, homosexual panic, and death on the ice in Frankenstein” James Holt McGavran makes a compelling argument about the nature of Frankenstein’s creature in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” He argues that the creature represents his creators repressed sexuality and that Victor’s rejection of the creature stems from “homosexual panic.” The revulsion Victor feels is due to being faced with a physical manifestation of his sexuality and being forced to confront it. McGavran claims that the mutual obsession with one another that the creature and Victor share is due to attraction, and that the creature represents an ideal lover for Victor. He goes on to offer proof of both Shelley’s

Unequivocally within the ground-breaking gothic novel Frankenstein Mary Shelley calls upon her reader to feel a strong sense of sympathy for the creature dubbed a ‘monster’. Through depicting the creature as innately human through his desire for relationship and the challenges he faces at the hands of the prejudged enlightenment society he is brought into Shelley elicits sympathy from his situation. Ultimately however, the audience’s sympathies lie with neither Frankenstein nor his creation but rather it is those silenced within society, that Shelley depicts through the notable absence of the female gender that are portrayed as being most deserving of sympathy.

The horror classic novel Frankenstein has gathered a great deal of critical and commercial attention since first being introduced in 1818, and naturally there has been many academics who have analyzed many of the novel’s biggest themes, symbols, and motifs. This also includes in analyzing the author herself, Mary Shelley. Marcia Aldrich, who has her Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington, is one of the academics to underline the role of being a female writer in the 19th century and what importance this plays on the novel Frankenstein. In her article, co-written by Richard Isomaki, “The Woman Writer as Frankenstein” analyzes the significance of Mary Shelley being the daughter of a writer and how this contributed to her writing Frankenstein, which they speculate as her, Mary Shelley, envisioning herself as the Monster. Aldrich and Isomaki’s “The Woman Writer as Frankenstein” makes valid and persuasive points, which effectively argues that the novel is semi-autobiographical in the sense that Mary Shelley pictured her as the Frankenstein Monster, for many of the concerns that the authors bring up in their article highlight the insecurities, doubts, and inexorable frustrations of a young woman writing in the 19th century.

In the novel Frankenstein, the author Mary Shelley reinforced the role of female nature in a book that is predominantly male-oriented. The female character is an underlying feature throughout the whole novel. For example, when Victor Frankenstein created his Monster from dead body parts, he disregarded the laws of female reproduction. Both Anne K. Mellor and Jonathon Bate argue that Victor defiled the feminine nature when he created his Monster from unnatural means. Mellor argued in her essay, “Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein,” that Victor eliminated the necessity to have females at all (355). There will not be a need for females if new beings are created in a laboratory. The disruption of mother nature is one of the novel’s original sins (479). In Bate’s essay, “Frankenstein and the State of Nature,” he argued that Victor Frankenstein broke the balance between female principles of maternity and mother nature (477). Frankenstein broke nature and undermined the role of females. The argument of Mellor was more persuasive than the discussion of Bate because she was able to provide more evidence that Victor Frankenstein dishonored the role of female nature.