Feminists and Frankensteins

Written by Olivia Cai

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“...behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes."

Mary Shelley’s 1818 gothic novel Frankenstein is a staple of pop-culture. It twists and

questions the meaning of soul, and juxtaposes introspection with monstrosity. Today, most

people know the classic story. Victor Frankenstein, a bright young man, is a little too ambitious and ends up creating an inchoate human: a creature made from dismembered body parts.

Frankenstein’s creature is immediately shunned by his creator for being grotesque. After verbally and physically abusing the monster and abandoning it in nearly every way possible, the monster begs Victor for a female companion to ease its loneliness. Victor almost makes it a female companion... and then destroys her when he considers the possibilities of two monsters and their potential offspring. The creature, who has only known rejection and isolation, transforms from an innocent, vulnerable soul into a vindictive, vengeful powerhouse of blackmail and murder. The creature stalks Victor and kills off his loved ones, eventually killing Elizabeth, Victor’s beloved betrothed on their wedding night. Victor chases the creature into the Arctic Circle and the story ends with both of them eventually dying.

Such a poignant novel was the birth of a horror story competition between young Mary

Shelley and her friends. It was a rainy summer, and they were simply finding ways to pass the

time.

Just as the novel is interesting and complex, so is Mary Shelley’s life: born in 1979, in London, UK, Mary Shelley was a female writer and intellectual in a male-dominated field. She contemplated the roles of ‘upstanding women’, wives, and daughters. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was the author of the radical feminist book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and had died soon after Mary Shelley’s birth. Her father, William Godwin, was a highly appraised political philosopher and journalist. The daughter and father were close, but their relationship was punctuated with Mary Shelley vying for her father’s approval and affection. Later, when Godwin strongly disapproved of Mary Shelley’s marriage to Percy Shelley, the father-daughter relationship turmoiled even further.

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Many feminist texts star a strong, deviant woman. But in Frankenstein, female

characters are constantly put in powerless positions. It’s interesting to examine how Mary

Shelley—who initially published the book anonymously to a crowd who assumed the author was a man—intentionally subordinated female characters as a commentary on the current social state of women. Let’s consider these female characters:

Elizabeth, Percy’s fiance. Victor’s mother, before introducing the two, tells Victor, “I have

a pretty present for my Victor—to-morrow he shall have it.” Victor takes this idea of Elizabeth

being a possession a little too seriously: “all praises bestowed on her, [Victor] received as made to a possession of [his] own” (23). Throughout the novel, Elizabeth is the ideal woman:

submissive, patient, and gracious. And Victor? Victor is pompous, selfish, and lusts for

appraisal. He knows that his creation is a major threat to his loved ones, and fails to take proper measures in dealing with the creature. As a result, his carelessness gets Elizabeth killed. Elizabeth’s life and death was dictated by Victor.

Justine is another female character whose life is cut short due to Victor’s mistakes. She

is accused of a murder that the creature committed, and is punished by death. Even on death-row, Justine embodies the "docile" and "gentle" woman. She is calm and dies peacefully without resignation (73).

But the most poignant character that demonstrates this complex gender dynamic might be the creature itself. The creature longs for its intellectual and emotional capacity to be recognized—but because it is ‘hideous’, it is discarded, mirroring the way that women are

objectified for their beauty rather than personality and capability. The creature also lives its life as a subordinate to Victor Frankenstein. Many scholars speculate that Victor’s character was based on Mary Shelley’s husband and father: the men in her life were intellectual and ambitious, yet callous and arrogant. Because Frankenstein represents the powerful men in Mary Shelley’s life, could the creature represent Mary Shelley herself? The creature’s dreams are destroyed and its kind nature taken advantage of. It relies on Frankenstein for guidance, much like the way that Mary, without her mother, had to rely on her emotionally distant father.

Frankenstein is an excellent book, bursting with symbolism, philosophy, and Mary

Shelley’s genius. The use of female characters mirrors the subordination of women in society in a way that is still relevant today, 200 years later.

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