Possessing Nature The Female Frankenstein Anne K Mellor Analysis

The novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelly was published in 1818. Her parent had undoubtedly influenced her ways of writing. Her father, William Godwin is famous with his piece “An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice while her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” is two prominent radical writers who call for reform during French Revolution. Bringing both feminism and radical views from her parents, Shelley critiques women’s weak, docile and uneducated character. She also shows how women are often degraded and treated unjustly. The reason she brought the issues forward is to make women realize that they should improve their position and women should not conform to the dogma that they are always weak.

The notion of what it means to be human is heavily addressed in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as Victor Frankenstein, the eponymous character, produces a creature that resembles a human in both an internal and external sense. Despite the creature’s obvious human-like qualities, society rejects him continuously. To some extent, this blatant disregard resembles the difficulties that accompanied the feminist movement. Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women, which is now recognized as one of the earliest feminist works. This work famously compared the plight of females to that of slavery, writing that women are bound to “slavish obedience” (Wollstonecraft 158). Wollstonecraft explains “it is vain to expect virtue from women till they are, in some degree, independent of men” (149). In other words, Wollstonecraft argues that women are only spiteful when they feel they are marginalized. Just like women in the eighteenth century, the creature in Frankenstein struggles to maintain his rights, as Victor constantly deems him inhuman. The creature displays human-like qualities through his abilities to communicate, understand emotion, and self-reflect. The aggression he shows throughout the novel is merely a consequence of his untimely abandonment by his creator. As indicated throughout the novel, humaneness does not lie in external appearances, but in an ability to feel compassion and have rational thoughts. The creature’s capacity to

While reading the novel “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelly and the excerpt “Problems of Perception” by Anne K. Mellor, I came quick to notice that most of characters in the novel judge the creature by his outward appearance and never gave him a chance to show himself good. As we all know, the creature turns out to be a vicious killer of the ones that are dear to his creator. I believe the creature is this way because he is always criticized and rejected by everyone and has never been accepted in mainstream society.

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.

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.

From the start, the presentation of the boy kind in Frankenstein marks compelling similarities in which things are like with traditional evil archetypes. Victor precedence took these two greater misogynous actions to the bloodcurdling relation of Frankenstein. Throughout Frankenstein investigates, he also exhibits careless neglect of his domesticated and friendly obligations and his acknowledgment of how he “knew muteness disquieted them” underline a certain egoism through his invariable apathy to those closest to him. Frankenstein's adoptive sister and later fiancée, Elizabeth, was similarly discovered as an orphan, in penury, by Frankenstein's father” (Homans 2). Also, where there is a poverty of a maternal horoscope, such as King Lear,

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.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein underlines and defines the repression of women, as well as criticizes the patriarchal and dominating role

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.

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein the critical essay “Lesbian Panic and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” (“Lesbian Panic”) by Frann Michel approaches Frankenstein from a gender perspective and applies Adrienne Rich’s lesbian continuum, the “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” where female relationships, mother-daughter/sisters/female friendships which all fall under the umbrella of lesbian relations, to the relationships that are present in Frankenstein. Frann Michel clarifies through her essay that any work of literature that takes a critical point of view of heterosexual relationships is, in fact, a lesbian text. Michel states that in Frankenstein the motion of lesbian panic is prevalent because lesbian desire is avoided at all costs – during the 1800’s society was rampant with panic, or phobia, amongst those who were afraid of potential sexual desires with one another. Lesbians were considered “Sapphic monstrosities” (Michel 351). In placing female characteristics on all characters in the novel Michel argues, in “Reading Mothers and Lovers”, that Victor Frankenstein’s “maternal anxiety” and his creature’s unfulfilled desire for a female is a doubling of them reflecting with their female counterparts under the lesbian continuum (Michel 355). In “Difference and Desire” Michel claims that Justine and Elizabeth’s tender moments at the end of Justine’s life comes to an end as a result of her unjust confinement and murder. The creature created by Victor is henceforth 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.

In Anne Mellor’s article “Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein,” she focuses on the role that women play in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Mellor explores the patriarchal society by providing evidence for the claim that Frankenstein is a feminist work. Mellor argues that Victor Frankenstein’s downfall is due to his fear of femininity and his need to become the creator of a human being. She begins the article with the argument that the division of spheres (public and private) within the book caused the destruction of many women. Mellor then explored the spheres that men and women occupied. Men would “work outside of the home” while women were “confined to the home”. This division of spheres had negative consequences as much for men as they did for

     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’s exemplification of various characters in Frankenstein is a reflection of social norms of the time. This is ever so evident through the character of the creature, as society’s disgust with him reflects society’s aspiration in customs. This rejection of the creature also reflects Shelley’s own society as they start rejecting the Enlightenment’s pursuit of knowledge after the age of Romanticism