Stereotyping Female Characters In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

In Erin Hawley’s article “The Bride and Her Afterlife: Female Frankenstein Monster on Page and Screen” she makes the main point of the sexism that is within “The Bride of Frankenstein”. She supports this argument with the main point that since the bride is not able to talk stands for women’s silence itself. She also uses other points to make this such as the fact that she only in the movie for a short period of time and that she were just created for looks. While this could be a strong argument, she seems to be trying too hard to make these connections in the movie; she sees these points as sexism, but they all have reasonable explanations.

Frankenstein is a story about the creation of an unknown evil by one man, Victor Frankenstein. The unusual nature of the monster’s birth in addition to his humane experiences serve as a counterpoint to describe the importance of the roles of women in British society. Along with being companions of men, women play a central role in contributing to the stability of the prevailing social order. In Mary Shelley’s gothic fiction, Frankenstein, the motif of gender roles and identities of women are explored through the creation of an unnatural monster set in an otherwise idyllic society to depict the envisioned position that men hold over women in the views of society.

One such aspect of Shelley’s life portrayed in the novel was the role of women in society. In general, the predominant contenders in literature in the Romantic era were men. Mary Shelley, who was tutored by her father, had to publish her novel anonymously because it would not have been accepted otherwise. In Romantic literature, women were depicted as passive with a sense for nature and intuition. This can be seen in Frankenstein during Victor’s description of Elizabeth Lavenza: “While I admired...pretension” (Volume I, Chapter I, p 39). This quote can be viewed as an oppression of women due to the patriarchal structure of the language, as well as an emphasis on the nature of women. Mary Shelley also criticizes this oppression, but does not criticize overtly. This may be due to the fact that Shelley read her mother’s works as a child, and was influenced by the pro-feminist ideals that her mother advocated for. In addition, Frankenstein, at its core, is an expression of Shelley’s political viewpoints. The years 1811 to 1817 were ones of severe deprivation and hardship for the new working class created by the Industrial

For centauries, women have been forced to live life in the outskirts of a male dominated society. During the 1800’s, the opportunities for women were extremely limited and Mary Shelly does an excellent job in portraying this in her gothic novel, Frankenstein. Furthermore, in this novel, Mary Shelly shows how society considers women to be possessions rather than independent human beings. In addition, the female characters rely heavily on men for support and survival, thus proving their inability to do it on their own. Lastly, the female characters in this novel are in many ways victimized by the male characters. In conclusion, in Mary Shelly’s novel Frankenstein, the female characters always fulfill the limited and archetypical roles that

Throughout the book, Frankenstein, the reader can see that there is a prominent gender bias throughout the entire text. Although this doesn’t jump out to all, it is easy to see when conducting an analysis of the text. The reader can see this through the creation of life without a female partner, and the fact that Victor fails to protect his spouse on the night of their wedding as well as the fact that Victor ends up destroying the female partner that he has created for the creature.

     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

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, all of the female characters are unassertive. Their personalities are one-dimensional, and they never try to take control of their own situations. This characterization seems antithetical to how Mary Shelley, the daughter of a renowned feminist, and an active feminist herself, usually portrayed females in her works. I will argue that by portraying all of her female characters as weak, Shelley is actually criticizing the gender norms of her society, which exalted the meek and timid housewife. She implies that if women do not play an active control in the lives of their family, conflict, within one’s self and against others, will become a lot more common.

In Frankenstein, a man arrogantly takes on the responsibility of giving birth, and the female characters pay for his arrogance. How far and in what ways do you agree with this view? It is true that Frankenstein is arrogant – his passion and desire to play god lead him towards creating a being, which he has only made for the creation itself, as the creature has immediately been abandoned afterwards. He does not take on the responsibility of ‘giving birth’ - his lack of judgment on how the creature will finally turn out to look resulted in hatred for himself, which soon turned to be hatred towards the creature. The characters pay with their own death for this throughout the whole novel, as Frankenstein’s disowning of his own creation caused

The time period which the book is written, many perceptions in between men and women as a utilitarian society arise. Mary Shelley expresses the unequal, yet made to seem inertial distribution of power and ranking solely into the hands of men in Frankenstein. Frankenstein was published in 1818 and really shows the power struggles between genders. The power, and lack of between men and women in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein serves as the truth in identifying the trends of women being placed under a stereotypes, which makes most female characters unable to properly demonstrate their inner selves. There have been many scenarios in which the female characters of the novel are viewed in lesser light than men.

The fight for domination amongst the sexes is a battle as old as civilization, where the ideas of gender hierarchies first began. These conflicts often manifest themselves unwittingly through literature, showing subtle signs of deeper tension that has ensued for centuries. The struggle between masculine and feminine becomes apparent through Frankenstein, a battle that results in the death of the potentially most powerful figure in the book. Frankenstein yields characters motivated by complicated thinking, specifically the title character, Victor Frankenstein. Victor is a brilliant 19th century Swiss scientist who succeeds in generating life with electricity, creating a creature that

Whether an author is conscious of the fact or not, a fictional work cannot avoid reflecting the political, social, economic, and religious background of the author. Therefore, regardless of Frankenstein's categorization being that of science fiction, Mary Shelley reveals her own fears and thoughts, and, as a result, reveals a great deal about the time and place in which she wrote. She mentions specific geographical locations throughout Europe, she raises ethical questions concerning the synthesis of life, and she writes in the context of popular contemporary philosophy and the importance of environment vs. experiences. Most importantly to this essay, however, is the

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.

The female characters in Frankenstein represent the treatment of women in the early 1800’s. Women who are deprived of their female roles and are enclosed in a feminine sphere of domesticity. In the novel, Frankenstein, the women characters are treated as property and have little privileges in relationship to the male characters, the women suffer and are eventually destroyed showing how unimportant they are in the book’s society, and when it comes to reproduction of human’s, man thinks it pointless to have women play that role. These attacks on the innocent prove that women are second-rate in the novel.

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.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein demonstrates a variety of women from distinct backgrounds where the majority faces a doomed fate due to the patriarchal society. Furthermore, the overall representation of women in Frankenstein is passiveness and submissiveness towards the decision and actions of men; they are portrayed as absent due to their minor roles. The “absence” of women could have been the very reason why there are so many downfalls throughout the novel. The death of Victor’s mother due to scarlet fever, the innocent Justine executed, Elizabeth (the beautiful wife) killed by the creature, proves the powerlessness and the passive nature of women that led to their unfortunate death even though, the only woman, Safie broke the chains of the