Feminist Roles In Frankenstein By Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

    There are many ways to interpret a literary text, especially one as laden with ethical questions and literary allegory as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Shelley's complex family dynamic - her conflicted relationship with her father, her need to please her mentor/husband with literary success, her infants' deaths - enhances the intrigue of the novel and suggests multiple themes and layered meanings. One discernible theme in Frankenstein is illuminated by the bold line that separates male character from female: The men inevitably fail the women whom they claim to love, but the women are maddeningly passive, seemingly blind to the men's inadequacies. Here, however, this passivity is a

In “Frankenstein” penned by Mary Shelley, the author depicts the roles of Caroline, Elizabeth, and Justine as passive women by taking action only through the men around them. During the 1820s, when Elizabeth Blackwell saw the deaths of many people on ships being thrown overboard, she became inspired to become a doctor. However, during her time period, women were not allowed to get an education. Finally, Mulan, takes the place of her old father to join the Chinese army, despite her passiveness. A closer look at the roles of Caroline, Elizabeth, Justine, Mulan, and Elizabeth Blackwell reveal a time period where women were treated as objects and followers by men.

Upon further probing, there is perhaps a deeper terror rooted in Frankenstein, which subtly appears to stem his hesitancy at creating not just another monster, but specifically a female monster. Because Victor Frankenstein fears the existence of a female free of restrictions that he cannot impose, he destroys her, thus eliminating the female’s options of becoming either completely feminine through becoming a mother and mate, or totally unfeminine by opting to leave her partner and face the world alone.

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the characterization of women is based on the rigid gender division in eighteenth-century Geneva. Shelley depicts the social status of women in contemporary London by presenting the female characters as ineffective to the public sphere. Male characters in Frankenstein are categorized as scientists, politicians and explorers, leaving women confined to the home as mere companions, wives and often caregivers. By upholding women’s views of the familial, Shelley illustrates the patriarchal social system, which favor men over women. The division highlights Shelley’s portrayal of women’s passivity; hence the disposal of the female characters in the novel illustrate the sexist separation of the male and female

Can you imagine Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein, the great work of literature, without, for example, such female characters as Mrs. Margaret Saville, Elizabeth Lavenza, and Justine Moritz? In this case the novel will have no meaning. All the women help to develop the plot, and without them Frankenstein will lose its spirit. Although these heroines have a lot in common in their characters: they are all strong-willed, kind, careful, and selfless, at the same time, each of them is unique, and each plays her own role in the novel. Mrs. Margaret Saville is the woman to whom the narrator tells the story. Elizabeth Lavenza is the beloved of Victor Frankenstein. Justine Moritz is the heroine who is accused by mistake of murdering

Over the years, the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has become universally portrayed in one way: a tall, green-skinned, dumb brute with no language or reasoning abilities. Society has turned the story of Frankenstein into a mere horror story, dehumanizing the monster more than was intended in Shelley’s novel. However, the message of Frankenstein is a far cry from the freak show displayed by the media. While many people may only see Frankenstein as a grotesque story meant to thrill its audience, its purpose goes much deeper as it advocates for the equal rights of women in society.

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.

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.

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.

As well as a horrific way of creating life, Mary Shelley brought a new subject to the table in Frankenstein-- Feminism. Throughout the novel, the author characterizes each female as passive, disposable, and serving as a utilizing function for the male character. The events that happen to them are generally minor and are used to teach the male characters some sort of lesson or spark an emotion with them. During the period that Shelley wrote Frankenstein, it was very common to see women discarded, objectified, and abused. It is clear that this is reflected in her novel, given the use of her female characters.

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

Frankenstein, is a novel by English author, Mary Shelley, published in 1818. Frankenstein revolves around the titular character, Victor Frankenstein. Frankenstein, obsessed with discovering the secrets of nature, creates a grotesque creature. In an excerpt of, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters( New York: Methuen, 1988),“Usurping the Female”, Anne K. Mellor takes a cutting view against Victor Frankenstein's creation. Her essay revolves around the idea that by creating life, Victor Frankenstein was taking away power from women. Mellor argues that through Frankenstein, Shelley shows“the consequences of a social construction of gender which values men over women.”

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

     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

Being the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, a well-known feminist for her book A Vindication of the Rights of Women, it is no surprise that Mary Shelley too would become a strong advocate for equal treatment of women. Though it may be strange to think that a feminist would write a book without any strong female characters. It is the absence of women that create a feminist theme within Frankenstein. Throughout Frankenstein, Shelley showcases the importance of women in society, through the flaws and mistakes of men in the absence of women, along with criticizing the limiting role the idealized woman holds.