frankenstein and feminism essay

The Female Gender and Its Significance in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

In this essay, Wayne Tan explores critical issues of gender identity set within a parable of humanity’s confrontation and breaching of the limits of nature. Conventionally regarded as a conformist text to patriarchal themes, Tan offers new insights into Frankenstein’s construction of gendered roles. Here, Shelley rears contemporary gender doctrine on its head – far from the caregiving and child-rearing roles of women thus limiting them to the sidelines of society, it is precisely their indispensability that situates them center-stage. In “The Female Gender and Its Significance”, Tan elucidates women’s elevation to parity with men’s social roles, successfully setting the stage for the New Woman to break out of her socially-imposed limiting confines.

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , issues of gender identity are explored through the creation of an unnatural monster set in an otherwise idyllic society. With its central characters that exemplify the idealized gender roles of the time, the creation of Frankenstein’s monster poses critical questions dealing with the social make-up of nineteenth-century British society. Particularly, the unusual nature of the monster’s birth as well as his subsequent experiences serve as counterpoint to foreground the significance of female gender roles in British society, and ultimately suggest that far from being merely companions to men, women instead play a central role in contributing to the stability of the prevailing social order.

From the outset, the presentation of the male gender in Frankenstein is marked by strong similarities with traditional male archetypes. Male characters display a detachment from domestic matters and in its place, possess an obsessive single-mindedness in the pursuit of their goals. As a “calm and philosophical” man who “delighted in investigating the facts relative to the actual world” (66), Victor Frankenstein epitomizes masculine attributes with his logical and composed nature, as well as a strong scientific bent well-suited for the male-centric field of natural philosophy. Indeed, Frankenstein’s “days and nights in vaults and charnel houses” where he “lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit” (78) attest to a focused, driven nature which borders on fanaticism. Throughout Frankenstein’s research, he also displays a careless neglect of his domestic and social obligations, and his confession of how he “knew [his] silence disquieted them” (81) underscores a certain selfishness through his constant indifference to those closest to him. Frankenstein’s monster similarly parallels his master’s obsessive nature through his own insular fixation on acquiring a mate and subsequently, on revenge. The lines, “I will work at your destruction, nor finish until I desolate your heart” (156), clearly denote the monster’s prodigious determination and the depth of his devotion to this aim, which he lives up to with the subsequent consecration of his life to the lifelong torment of Frankenstein. The monster as “a slave to these impulses” (218) thus counterparts Frankenstein’s zealous devotion to his work in the sense that both male characters’ impulses and passions inexorably spiral out of their control.  In this way, the presentation of the central male characters in Frankenstein typifies the male sex as exceedingly self-absorbed and single-minded, or in other words, as the embodiment of Victorian traits in their unreserved neglect of the domestic sphere.

By contrast, the female gender in Frankenstein is portrayed in a more sympathetic light and corresponds closely to Victorian ideals of women as familial care-givers. Elizabeth Lavenza is described as “docile and good tempered” (66), yet “gay and playful” (66); these seemingly paradoxical qualities underscore Elizabeth’s role as that of the model Victorian woman whose sole duty concerns tending to her husband and family. Throughout the novel, Elizabeth’s selfless nature is also evinced through how she “continually [endeavors] to contribute to the happiness of others, entirely forgetful of herself” (73) – the use of “entirely” here underscores the female gender’s complete relegation to the background of the Victorian social milieu. In addition, the phrase “gentle and affectionate disposition” further identifies Elizabeth with maternal qualities and entrenches her role as the primary care-giver for the family. This sense of altruistic benevolence is shared by Safie De Lacey; save for “some jewels and a small sum of money” (141) which provide for her escape, she renounces great luxury to reunite with her lover, Felix De Lacey. During the journey, Safie even nurses her attendant “with the utmost affection” (141); this reversal of the lord-servant relationship stresses Safie’s motherly compassion, which transcends both rank and station. The repetition of “affection” further calls attention to the common thread of a warm and tender disposition which is ubiquitous among the female characters in Frankenstein . In both description and action, Frankenstein ’s female characters thus uniformly exhibit self-sacrificing, maternal traits that conform closely to the role of the Angel in the House, whose life is characterized by complete dedication to the needs of her household.

With its hyper-idealized portrayals of the female gender, Shelley goes further to explicate the significant influence of such maternal figures. Frankenstein himself professes that “no creature could have more tender parents than [he did]” (65), which suggests a childhood replete with parental care and attention; in contrast, his monster’s first experiences are characterized by his being “poor, helpless and miserable”, which conveys a marked poverty of maternal nourishment and nurture.  Tellingly, though the monster gains consciousness while physically mature, the lines “feeling pain invade me on all sides, I sat down and wept” (121) highlight the monster’s delayed recognition of his own powerlessness and a deferred grief which echoes an infant’s wailing and vulnerability upon emerging from the womb. Crucially, the perceived significance of a female nurturing presence is alluded to in the monster’s cry of how “no Eve soothed [his] sorrows, or shared [his] thoughts; [he] was alone” (145), which emphasizes not just the prolonged isolation of the monster from birth, but also specifically how “Eve”, or a necessarily female companion, will provide the affection which he desires. Because of the congruence of feminine gender roles with care-giving and affection, the monster’s declaration of how he is “malicious because [he is] miserable” (pg.156) and his bitter cry of “Shall each man… find a wife for his bosom… and I be alone” further undergird his actions as reactive responses indicative of an underlying desperation at the dearth of female tenderness and maternal figures in his life. The monster’s specific requests of female companionship for “the interchange of those sympathies” (156) when thus contextualized therefore stresses the patent importance of the female gender in its domestic roles of mother and nurturer. By contrast, there is a plethora of female characters that pervade Frankenstein’s supportive environment – though Frankenstein himself suffers great tragedy throughout the novel, Elizabeth constantly attempts to “chase away the fiend that lurked in [his] heart” (114), which encapsulates the prevalence of female companionship and its ameliorative effects on his life. Instead, the creature does not share the same luxuries. Though of course his cruelty cannot easily be reduced to a singular cause, the paucity of female presence nonetheless occludes all redemptive potential for the monster and in this way, cleaves a dichotomy between the narrative trajectories of him and his creator. Within the polarized gender dynamics that operate in the diegetic world of Frankenstein, the idea of nurture itself necessarily assumes a feminine dimension – from this perspective, his creature hence serves as a foil that suggests how the consequences of a poverty of female influence and maternal nurture are inadvertently the figurative molding and shaping of monsters.

While Frankenstein elucidates the marked importance of women as guiding, maternal figures in the family, the novel also explores the centrality of female gender roles as bulwarks of the social order. As alluded to earlier, one central question which features in the novel is whether it is the unnatural circumstances of the monster’s creation or his ensuing abandonment by Frankenstein which factors more for his monstrosity; however, if nature is understood to be an ideal state conducing to the optimal, in Frankenstein the importance of feminine care in ensuring societal stability thus underscores a false dichotomy between nature and nurture because of the contingence of social stability on contemporary female gender-roles. The creation of Frankenstein’s monster upends nature entirely through its circumvention of natural birth; indeed, Frankenstein’s pursuit of nature to “her hiding places” (81) emphasizes his unravelling of natural laws which were concealed for a reason. On an organic level, the artificial nature of the monster’s creation renders moot the biological imperative of the female gender; this theme is actualized through the monster’s systematic elimination of feminized characters in the novel, including biological males such as Henry Clerval whose spending of an entire winter “consumed in [Frankenstein’s] sick room” nonetheless recalls the maternal selflessness. During Frankenstein’s dream on the night of the creature’s creation, his vision of Elizabeth’s metamorphosis into “the corpse of [his] dead mother” (84) similarly constitutes a vivid metaphor for how the monster’s unnatural birth at once heralds both the physical and metaphysical deaths of the fairer sex. Yet, this seeming superfluity of the female sex is suggested to be ill-founded, for Frankenstein details the implicit consequences of such an alternate reality. Where once Elizabeth’s “gentle voice would soothe [Frankenstein] when transported by passion” (194), the scarcity of such feminine characters at the end of his life directly signifies the absence of mediating influences to temper his inhuman fury. Alongside the dearth of female nurturing and affection in the monster’s psyche, this thematic paucity of female influences culminates in a barren wasteland, with two masculine figures consumed in an endless game of cat-and-mouse, devoid of feminine influence and consequently simply the “prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched” (220). The juxtaposition and framing of this icy apocalyptic vision within Walton’s frequent correspondence with his sister further underscores the disparity between this speculative male-centric dystopia and the stable nineteenth-century society, with all its prevailing gender roles, to which Walton belongs. Hence, insofar as the monster’s creation may have sounded the death knell for the female sex on some level, Frankenstein ’s ending illustrates the devastating inadequacy of this hypothetical new normal. The novel suggests that even without the biological imperative of the female sex, their social gender-roles as maternal nurturers are enshrined into the natural societal equilibrium, or nature itself, and in this way, on equal footing with the gendered roles of men.

At its core, Frankenstein is a parable which explores the manifest possibilities and consequences when humanity confronts and breaches the limits of nature. However, through imbuing its characters with conventionally gender-specific traits, Frankenstein illustrates that the female gender roles of nineteenth-century British society are not simply accessory to that of men; insofar as women are instrumental to the nurturing of children and loved ones, Shelley does not simply foreground their maternal significance but elevates its importance to parity with men’s social roles. Almost certainly, Frankenstein will not pass for a “feminist” text by today’s standards; yet, in presenting “the truth of the elementary principles of human nature” (49), Shelley goes so far as to surface the patchwork intricacies of female gender roles which had not yet been embedded in the public consciousness of the era. More crucially, Shelley rears contemporary gender doctrine on its head – far from the caregiving and child-rearing roles of women thus limiting them to the sidelines of society, it is precisely their indispensability that situates them center-stage. Through this recuperation of the female gender and its social significance, Shelley strongly echoes the thought of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who famously advocated for widespread women’s education in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , on largely similar grounds. While markedly essentialist, Shelley nonetheless critiques the ostensibly marginal contributions of women to the social order and paints an incisive reflection of the conditions of human nature and society more progressive than espoused at the time of its publication. The creation of Frankenstein’s monster and its inability to nullify female gender roles attests to the latter’s kaleidoscopic significance in both the domestic and social spheres – and ultimately pave the way for the New Woman to break out of these very limiting confines.

Works Cited

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Ed. D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. Broadview Press, 2012. Print.

WAYNE TAN  graduated from UCLA and currently studies at the University of Oxford. He recently wrote essays on Thomas Hardy and Henry James back-to-back just to make the two arch-rivals turn in their graves.

Photo credit: Joanne Loo

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• Entertainment

Poor Things and the Profoundly Feminist Origins of Frankenstein

I n Yorgos Lanthimos ' new film Poor Things , Emma Stone stars as Bella Baxter, a curious Victorian creature with an unorthodox past. Though she appears as a full-grown adult, Bella is a child-woman, the product of an experiment in which her creator and father figure, Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe)—"God" for short—took her corpse and reanimated it, replacing her brain with that of the unborn fetus she was carrying at the time. This made her both her own mother and child, while not quite either. If this sounds like a twisted, gender-swapped retelling of Frankenstein , that's because its source material, Alasdair Gray's 1992 novel also called Poor Things , is a clever retelling of Mary Shelley 's seminal work, with the winsome Bella replacing the feared creature.

Read more: Emma Stone Works Twisted Fairytale Magic in Poor Things

In Lanthimos' big-screen adaptation, Bella embodies a feminist fever dream. Her intellectual and sexual awakening spurs an international voyage that helps her fearlessly forge a path to her own future. It's a humorous but clear-eyed commentary on the ways in which women are often limited and controlled both systemically and interpersonally, a tension that Lanthimos had been fascinated by since he read Poor Things 12 years ago.

"Power is the story of a woman," he told TIME, noting that he and screenwriter Tony McNamara felt it was important in their adaptation to make the film about Bella and from her perspective, as opposed to the book, which tells her story through other characters. "Bella goes through her life without shame, discovering what she feels she needs intuitively, which is heroic in a world where you're constantly told how to be or what's right. It is an act of bravery to make your own path."

While Lanthimos and McNamara told TIME that their modern adaptation wasn't heavily inspired by Frankenstein beyond that book's influence on Gray's novel, it's clear that Poor Things owes much to both Shelley and Frankenstein . For Anne K. Mellor, professor of English and women's studies at UCLA and the author of Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters , both Bella's origin story and her essence follow in Shelley's complex feminist legacy.

" Frankenstein is essentially about power and how it leads us astray," Mellor told TIME. "Victor Frankenstein is trying to take over the ability create life itself, from Mother Nature and from women. What results is a model of what happens when a woman is erased, which is what patriarchy, in effect, tries to do."

Read more: The Real Science That Created Frankenstein's Monster

The Frankenstein references in Poor Things track back to some of the most formative moments in Shelley's life, events that indelibly shaped her feminist sensibility. Dr. Godwin Baxter is named, in a Freudian nod, for Shelley's writer and anarchist philosopher father, William Godwin, who served as the partial inspiration for Victor Frankenstein . Shelley had a complicated and intense relationship with her father , who was her primary caretaker after her mother died giving birth to her. Like Dr. Baxter, Godwin was responsible for Shelley's education, nurturing her intellectually. Their close bond was altered after he remarried and later sent her to live in Scotland, choices she viewed as acts of abandonment ; when she later ran away and married the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Godwin disowned her, adding to Shelley's feeling of rejection from her father. Their relationship is reflected in both the creature's obsessive longing for his creator, and in Frankenstein's rejection of him in the novel.

For McNamara, the central questions that surround Victor Frankenstein also remained important as he thought about the character of Dr. Baxter.

"Why does he need to create someone? What was driving him to do it and what does he get out of it? When you think about what his relationship to her was, as a daughter and as an experiment, it informed a lot of his character and what his evolution with her relationship would be."

Meanwhile, Bella's world tour in the film parallels the travels of both Shelley and her mother, writer and noted women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women , and who, like Bella, also struck out on her own at a young age. Bella's sexual liberation can be read as a reference to both Shelley and Wollstonecraft's unconventional sexual relationships outside of marriage or the free love values of Shelley's husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. And Bella's intellectual awakening, which leads to her embrace of socialism, is a reflection of the class struggle inherent in Frankenstein , a theme that was inspired by Shelley's tour of France in the wake of the French Revolution, where she bore witness to poverty and suffering.

However, the most outsize example of Shelley's feminist influence in Poor Things may lie within the parallels between Bella and Safie, a minor character in Frankenstein , who was inspired by Wollstonecraft. In Shelley's novel, Safie is a Christian woman fleeing patriarchal oppression in Turkey. She's engaged to Felix De Lacey, whose family is unwittingly housing the creature. Through Safie, the creature gets an education; as she learns French and the history and politics of Europe, so does he. Her journey as well as her desire to learn are reflected in Bella's own odyssey and her coming of age.

Read more : Did a Real-Life Alchemist Inspire Frankenstein ?

"Here's a woman, free, wandering from Europe on her own independence," Mellor said of the similarities between Wollstonecraft, Safie, and Bella. "Seeking love but also seeking knowledge."

While Frankenstein is an undeniably feminist text, just as Shelley is an undeniably feminist writer, Mellor notes that Shelley was no crusader for the cause. Her mother's work was foundational to the burgeoning women's rights movement, but Shelley did not join it during her lifetime. In many respects, though, the life she led and the work she produced was a reflection of its values.

"Mary Shelley had a complicated relationship to feminism," Mellor said. "She made a living supporting herself and her son by writing, which was not common, especially for a single woman."

Mellor points to Shelley's simultaneous admiration of and resentment for the famous mother she never knew—as well as her complex relationship with her father, whose approval and affection she hungered for throughout her life—as part of why Shelley may have been wary of the women's rights movement. She also considers Shelley's tumultuous marriage with Percy, which was strained by multiple miscarriages and Percy's many affairs, including one with her stepsister, an influential factor in Shelley's disillusionment with feminism. According to Mellor, even after Percy's death, Shelley's life was still affected by her late husband; their son inherited his title and along with it, the social mores expected of nobility. As Shelley fought for her son's inheritance, she was hyperaware of the respectability politics that would affect his acceptance into the aristocracy, which largely restricted her ability to overtly challenge gender or class conventions.

Read more: The Eerie Gravestone Where Frankenstein's Story Began

However, these nuances paint a richer and more complex portrait of a woman who, like Bella Baxter, unapologetically lived life on her own terms. For Mellor, Shelley's pessimistic longing for a liberated and equitable future are seen with the characters of Safie and Felix, whose names mean wisdom and happiness, respectively. Their relationship, in which they view each other as equals and mutually care for and respect one another, presents an ideal to aspire to. But hopes for a bright future are dashed when the creature sets fire to their cottage as retribution for their fearful response to him.

"There's an unrealized possibility in the novel for the future," Mellor said. "It just wasn't one that Mary Shelley at this point in her life could actually embrace."

For Lanthimos, Shelley's Frankenstein represents a launchpad for Bella's story, one that ultimately has the liberating ending Shelley may have longed for.

"It's the foundation to build and explore this very different story of this woman that goes out into the world and experiences it on her own terms."

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Write to Cady Lang at [email protected]

Frankenstein : A Feminist Critique of Science (1987)

Anne k. mellor, in one culture: essays in science and literature , ed. george levine and alan rauch (madison: univ. of wisconsin press, 1987), pp. 287-312.

Some accident prevented my attending these lectures until the course was nearly finished. The lecture being therefore one of the last was entirely incomprehensible to me. The professor discoursed with the greatest fluency of potassium and boron, of sulphates and oxyds, terms to which I could affix no idea. ( F , p. 36 )

The ancient teachers of this science . . . promised impossibilities, and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and shew how she works in her hiding places. They ascend into the heavens; {290} they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows. ( F , p. 42 )

How dependent, in fact, upon chemical processes are the nourishment and growth of organized beings; their various alterations of form, their constant production of new substances; and, finally, their death and decomposition, in which nature seems to take unto herself those {{93}} elements and constituent principles which, for a while, she had lent to a superior agent as the organs and instruments of the spirit of life! ( Discourse , no. 8 )

has given to him an acquaintance with the different relations of the parts of the external world; and more than that, it has bestowed upon him powers which may be almost called creative; which have enabled him to modify and change the beings surrounding him, and by his experiments to interrogate nature with power, not simply as a scholar, passive and seeking only to understand her operations, but rather as a master, active with his own instruments. ( Discourse no. 16 )

for who would not be ambitious of becoming acquainted with the most profound secrets of nature; of ascertaining her hidden operations; and of exhibiting to men that system of knowledge which relates so intimately to their own physical and moral constitution? ( Discourse , no. 17 )

if the connexion of chemistry with physiology has given rise to some visionary and seductive theories; yet even this circumstance has been useful to the public mind in exciting it by doubt, and in leading it to new investigations. A reproach, to a certain degree just, has been thrown upon those doctrines known by the name of the chemical physiology; for in the applications of them speculative philosophers have been guided rather by the analogies of words than of facts. Instead of slowly endeavouring to lift up the veil concealing the wonderful phenomena of living nature; full of ardent imaginations, they have vainly and presumptuously attempted to tear it asunder. ( Discourse , no. 9 )

various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated. They talked of the experi- {293} ments of Dr. Darwin (I speak not of what the doctor really did or said that he did, but, as more to my purpose, of what was then spoken of as having been done by him), who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. ( F , p. 227 )

After islands or continents were raised above the primeval ocean, great numbers of the most simple animals would attempt to seek food at the edges or shores of the new land, and might thence gradually become amphibious; as is now seen in the frog, who changes from an aquatic animal to an amphibious one, and in the gnat, which changes from a natant to a volant one. At the same time new microscopic animalcules would immediately commence wherever there was warmth and moisture, and some organic matter, that might induce putridity. Those situated on dry land, and immersed in dry air, may gradually acquire new powers to preserve their existence; and by innumerable successive reproductions for some thousands, or perhaps millions of ages, may at length have produced many of the vegetable and animal inhabitants which now people the earth. As innumerable shell-fish must have existed a long time beneath the ocean, before the calcareous mountains were produced and elevated; it is also probable, that many of the insect tribes, or less complicate animals, existed long before the quadrupeds or more complicate ones. 12

{295} {{97}} Perhaps all the productions of nature are in their progress to greater perfection! an idea countenanced by modern discoveries and deductions concerning the progressive formation of the solid parts of the terraqueous globe, and consonant to the dignity of the Creator of all things. ( Temple of Nature , p. 54 )

A great want of one part of the animal world has consisted in the desire of the exclusive possession of the females; and these have acquired weapons to bombard each other for this purpose, as the very thick, shield-like, horny skin on the shoulder of the boar is a defense only against animals of his own species, who strike obliquely upwards, nor are his tusk for other purposes, except to defend himself, as he is not naturally a carnivorous animal. So the horns of the stag are not sharp to offend his adversary, but are branched for the purpose of parrying or receiving the thrusts of horns similar to his own, and have therefore been formed for the purpose of combating other stags for the exclusive possession of the females; who are observed, like the ladies in the times of chivalry, to attend the car of the victor. 13

The microscopic productions of spontaneous vitality, and the next most inferior kinds of vegetables and animals, propagate by solitary generation only; as the buds and bulbs raised immediately from seeds, the lycoperdon tuber, with probably many other fungi, and the polypus, volvox, and taenia. Those of the next order propagate both by solitary and sexual reproduction, as those buds and bulbs which produce flowers as well as other buds or bulbs; and the aphis and probably many other {296} insects. Whence it appears, that many of those vegetables and animals, which are produced by solitary generation, {{98}} gradually become more perfect, and at length produce a sexual progeny. A third order of organic nature consists of hermaphrodite vegetables and animals, as in those flowers which have anthers and stigmas in the same corol; and in many insects, as leeches, snails, and worms; and perhaps all those reptiles which have no bones. . . And, lastly, the most perfect orders of animals are propagated by sexual intercourse only. ( Temple of Nature , Additional Notes, pp. 36-37 )

I conclude, that the act of generation cannot exist without being accompanied with ideas, and that a man must have at this time either a general idea of his own mate form, or of the forms of his male organs; or an idea of the female form, or of her organs, and that this marks the sex, and the peculiar resemblances of the child to either parent. ( Zoonomia , 1794, p. 524; 1801, 2: 270)

organic matters, which . . . will by their slow solution in or near the surface of the earth supply the nutritive sap-juice to vegetables. Hence all kinds of animal and vegetable substances, which will undergo a digestive process, or spontaneous solution, as the flesh, fat, skin and bones of animals; with their secretions of bile, saliva, mucus; and their excretions of urine and ordure and also the fruit, meal, oil, leaves, wood of vegetables, when properly decomposed on or beneath the soil, supply the most nutritive food to plants. 15

proper burial grounds should be consecrated out of towns, and divided into two compartments, the earth from one of which, saturated with animal decomposition, should be taken away once in ten or twenty years, for the purposes of agriculture; and sand or clay, or less fertile soil, brought into its place. (p. 243)

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. ( F , p. 49 )

Every night I was oppressed by a slow fever, and I became nervous to a most painful degree; . . . my voice became broken, my trembling hands almost refused to accomplish their task; I became as timid as a love-sick girl, and alternate tremor and passionate ardour took the place of wholesome sensation and regulated ambition. ( F , p. 51 )

Whether matter consists of indivisible corpuscles, or physical points endowed with attraction and repulsion, still the same conclusions may be formed concerning the powers by which they act, and the quantities in which they combine; and the powers seem capable of being measured by their electrical relations, and the quantities on which they act of being expressed by numbers. (p. 57 )

it is evident that the particles of matter must have space between them; and . . . it is a probable inference that [each body's] own particles are possessed of motion; but . . . the motion, if it exist, must be a vibratory or undulatory motion, or a motion of the particles round their axes, or a motion of particles round each other. (p. 95)

Its power of exciting muscular motion in apparently dead animals, as well as of increasing the growth, invigorating the stamina, and reviving diseased vegetation, prove its relationship or affinity to the living principle . Though, Proteus-like, it eludes our grasp; plays with our curiosity; tempts enquiry by fallacious appearances and attacks our weakness under so many perplexing subtilties; yet it is impossible not to believe it the soul of the material world, and the paragon of elements! 22

Vast beams like spokes of some invisible wheel Which whirl as the orb whirls, swifter than thought, Filling the abyss with sun-like lightnings, And perpendicular now, and now transverse, Pierce the dark soil, and as they pierce and pass, Make bare the secrets of the Earth's deep heart. 24

On Maggots & Motherhood: Feminism in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

We’re very excited to be exploring feminism in  Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. If you’re new here, we’ve previously explored feminism in Jane Eyre , Hamlet ,  and the works of James Joyce , and many more .

Last August, on Eclipse Day, my son was sitting at the kitchen table, holding the pinhole camera we’d made, when he asked, “Mom, what are those?” His voice was tinged with something I could not put my finger on. Something curious but also disgusted. I looked at him, my eyes following his finger downward,where he was pointing at a trail of fat maggots inching across our kitchen floor.

There’s something that feels illicit about an eclipse—the way the moon crosses over the sun so that for a few moments, night conquers day and all is dark when it shouldn’t be. It feels briefly apocalyptic, a glimpse at the end of the world. Perhaps the appearance of maggots in my kitchen, so close to the life I made, were a result of this celestial phenomenon.

I lied to him. “They’re caterpillars, bud. And they’re confused because of the eclipse. I bet the moon is disrupting their natural navigation.”

But why are caterpillars acceptable and maggots cringeworthy? Julia Kristeva defines abjection as our repulsion to reminders of our delicate materiality. My disgust of wriggling maggots is based in my fear of death; they are a reminder of rot. (The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out.)

I needed to get them out of my space, so I sent my son upstairs to brush his teeth, bent down with some tissues and started to squish. Halfway through my mission, my thinking changed.

These maggots, these larvae, are more than just embodiments of death. They are babies . And maybe it was the eclipse, or maybe it was the fumes from the bleach, but then I thought, maybe I am thinking about them all wrong. Maybe these helpless invaders are not only reminders of death, but also life. Something in between.

In the early pages of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , she describes Victor’s exploration into the liminal space between the living and the dead: “…I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. I paused, examining and analyzing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life…” From life, death and from death, life. How monstrous.

I went from angrily crushing them between my fingers to being tinged with tenderness. Something about the newly realized juxtaposition—death worms as fly babies—combined with the still unshakeable feeling that I had been invaded suddenly felt a whole lot like motherhood.

Pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing can seem like an invasion. And for many second-wave feminists, motherhood was seen as a scourge on our fight for equality. Yet for others, like the brilliant Adrienne Rich, motherhood was more complicated; necessary, sometimes joyous, but not what was portrayed in literature and culture. With the birth of children there are moments of breathtaking beauty, but also moments of terror, dissatisfaction, and confusion.

In the first essay of her collection Of Woman Born , “Anger and Tenderness,” Rich includes glimpses of her journal entries: “Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance…And yet at other times I am melted with the sense of their helpless, charming and quite irresistible beauty…” Rich encapsulates the flux of motherhood, of feeling monstrous in her anger and awestruck at their tiny magnificence. Because she leaves these missives in journal format, her words feel like secrets, whispered confessions.

Rich is revealing this secret: motherhood sometimes feels like a constant shifting of power, and there is no homeostasis. Like Rich, I have felt these feelings in my own mothering. Though on Eclipse Day, it wasn’t my child causing me to vacillate between feeling lovestruck and worn out. Crushing the maggots on my floor felt like a monstrous flex of power. And yet, they stirred in me a twinge of something softer. Many have described the birth and death of the woman upon motherhood, about the joy and pain of raising a child. These maggots were a representation of both. New life, old death. Suddenly those worms morphed into something new, something apart from the narrative I’d had of their existence.

The maggots-as-death trope is as old as literature itself. They are used to evoke disgust and fear in the Bible. They can be found in Chaucer (“The Monk’s Tale”) and Shakespeare ( Hamlet ). In the anonymously authored “diary” Go Ask Alice , maggots appear in the narrator’s horrific dream about her newly dead grandfather. And Toni Morrison writes maggots into scenes that encompass death and children in both Sula and God Save the Child. But my own thoughts about maggots-as-babies don’t align with these stories. A small thing, I know. But for a moment it knocked me a little off-kilter.

In “Anger and Tenderness,” Rich also questions whether her inability to cohere to literary images of motherhood made her “then abnormal, monstrous.” If maggots no longer cohere to the literary trope, who is the monster? The squisher or the squished?

Much has been written about Mary Shelley’s relationship to motherhood, how it was so fraught with death, how those experiences may have influenced her writing. Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died from complications shortly after giving birth to her, and Shelley had three children, two who died in infancy. It is plausible to read these biographical details alongside Frankenstein and gain a deeper understanding of how birth and death combine in her story. Victor’s mother dies when he is a young man, and, like Shelley’s mother, it is arguably motherhood that kills her. In addition, Victor himself is a mother-figure, a creator of life. Shelley even uses language unmistakably reproductive and maternal to describe the moment he discovers his monster is living: “The astonishment which I had at first experienced on this discovery soon gave place to delight and rapture. After so much time spent in painful labour, to arrive at once at the summit of my desires was the most gratifying consummation of my toils.” This mix of maternal language, tinged with both awe and pain, feels quite a bit like Rich’s essay.

Rich describes feeling like a monster in her selfishness. Maternal Victor is also a monster, not only because of his own feelings or because of his selfishness, but also because the life he creates is made from death. Frankenstein’s monster is a creature manifested from the corporeal evidence that death is permanent. But understanding Victor as a mother-figure means that his monster is his child. And he is a monster too, lurking in forests murdering his creator’s loved ones. And yet, his murder spree stems from loneliness. His maker has rejected him, abandoned him. Who is the monster here, the creator or the created?

Samantha Hunt, in an interview with The New Yorker , said “When I became a mom, no one ever said, ‘Hey, you made a death. You made your children’s deaths.’ Meanwhile, I could think of little else. It’s scary to think of mothers as makers of death, but it sure gives them more power and complexity than one usually finds.”

Zadie Smith, in her essay “Joy,” writes, “Occasionally the child, too, is a pleasure, though mostly she is a joy, which means in fact she gives us not much pleasure at all, but rather that strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight that I have come to recognize as joy, and now must find some way to live with daily.”

In Frankenstein , Shelley writes about a dream Victor has about his love, the woman he hopes to be the mother of his children: “I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I swathe grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel.”

What a mix of pain and pleasure, fear and elation. And though these three women writers are coming from different places, from different times, different experiences, so much is the same. Motherhood and loss, abjection and empathy. Life and death simultaneous.

My maggots, I think, can be understood as occupying the liminal space between life and death. I’ve thought about them often in the year that has passed, perhaps more than one should think about kitchen pests. But there they are, even in their deaths, still living in my thoughts. What can be made of the larvae who often feed themselves from something dead, who are considered only in relation to their connections to decay, and yet, are newly alive? Born from a mother, vilified for surviving. They, too, are Frankenstein’s monster.

Shelley’s novel, perhaps born from her own connections to loss and motherhood, complicates our understandings of life and death. Victor creates new life from dead parts, and the life he creates brings death to others. But why? Because his creator abandoned him. Do we blame Victor for his monster’s violence? (Don’t we always blame the mother? Am I my son? Is he me?) Victor is both a mother and motherless. His creation is both child and monster. Shelley’s book is a story about loneliness, and isn’t that so much of what motherhood is about? When Rich writes about feeling monstrous, I think she is writing about isolation. Secrets whispered about the parts that don’t fit, like the maggots in my kitchen.

When something doesn’t quite fit the narrative we know, we bristle against it, squash it. In feminism, motherhood doesn’t quite fit. So many second-wave feminists felt motherhood was a saboteur to the movement, a setback, a succumbing to patriarchal norms. Now, third-wave feminists (re)try to pin down a motherhood narrative, a bug splayed out under glass. And yet, so often it slips from beneath the pin.

Heather Hewett responds to Rich in the book Mothering in the Third Wave. In it she asks, “Why are we still talking about feminism and motherhood in the same terms, and often in ways that are more personal and less political?” Her question is two-fold.

To answer the second part of her question, we must look backwards: Our second-wave mothers taught us that the personal is political. And so giving voice to the experience of motherhood will always be personal, because each one is different. And these stories are political because women’s bodies are still monitored and dissected by the outside world. Simply telling stories is an act of political bravery. A public confession.

To answer Hewett’s first question, we must consider faults. The language of motherhood fails us because the narrative set up is too rigid, inflexible and exclusive. It is binary, there is little space for the liminal spaces of reality. For every stance there is someone to take it down. For every step forward, someone else falls back. What words could possibly help us come to terms with an experience that leaves a woman both vilified and deified, depending on what room she enters?

The spaces in between, where we explore the grey mess of child-bearing (or choosing not to bear children, or being unable to bear children) are where the stories are. But for too long these stories were focused on the white and middle-class. Hewett’s essay also explains the importance of intersectionality in third-wave feminism and its continued examination of motherhood. She is telling us that what is missing from this conversation is the space for voices that, for too often, have been ignored. We need to change the narrative.

Perhaps we need to remove the binaries. We need to see anger, tenderness, life, death, joy, pleasure, monsters, mothers, children, and loneliness as parts of a whole. Instead of looking through a pinhole camera to catch a glimpse of what is both beautiful and terrifying, we need to look wider.

Amie Souza Reilly

Amie Souza Reilly holds an M.A. in English Literature from Fordham University. She teaches at Norwalk Community College and Sacred Heart University in Connecticut, where she lives with her husband and ten-year-old son. She has published essays in The New Engagement and Entropy, and has flash fiction forthcoming in Toasted Cheese and Pigeonholes. Her blog can be found here: https://theshapeofme.blog.

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Frankenstein is a Feminist Masterpiece

From signaling female empathy and power to a critique of male ambition, here are 7 reasons why.

Siobhan Colgan

This story was first published in Enya’s Attic

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus , published in 1818, doesn’t naturally spring to mind when we’re thinking of feminist texts.

The lack of female characters and the somewhat secondary roles of the ones that are present typically raises more criticism than praise from feminist circles.

And yet look a little deeper into the context as well as the content of Shelley’s revolutionary work, at her rejection of stereotypes and her side swipe at conventional thought, and you’ll see that Frankenstein is actually a feminist masterpiece.

Authorship and the Female Voice

Frankenstein ’s most striking feminist aspect is, of course, its authorship. At a time when women’s voices were often silenced or underestimated, Mary Shelley’s voice roared with creativity and courage, breaking through the barriers of gender expectations.

Her masterpiece proved that women could excel in the male-dominated realm of literature, inspiring generations of female writers to follow in her footsteps.

Written by Siobhan Colgan

Writing is my full-time job. It’s also my favorite hobby. I write about making money as a freelance writer, as well as women's books & history—the vital stuff.

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Gender Role and Feminism in Shelley’s Frankenstein Essay

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The novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley has different implications and studies on gothic features, parenthood, and the question of life and death. Some studies also noted the immense sense of gender roles discussed in Frankenstein. This paper will discuss the implications of gender structures in the novel and find its representation in the current gender views. The research question will be: how did Mary Shelley identify gender roles and the importance of feminism in her work Frankenstein? This paper will review the feministic representations in Frankenstein and evaluate studies based on them.

There are different gender constructions that Mary used in her work that represents the perspective on the role of man and woman. For example, Melore (2018) notes how nature is identified Mary to be female. Natural reproduction is also said to be stolen since the creation of Frankenstein reduces the role of females. To review Victor’s viewpoint of the female role, it is also essential to review his character. As Bowta & Puluhulawa (2018) noted, there is a preliminary linear narrative of Victor’s decision-making that led to the chaos of events and also changed his personality from being a positive character to having opposite selfish and cruel views.

The same can be said for the social deconstruction, as while the author assumes to have specific gender roles, it also criticizes the patriarchal structure of society. Aalto (2020) defines three main aspects that are criticized in Frankenstein, which are women’s marginalization, their exclusion from social functions, and the egoism of the patriarchal system. This paper will analyze how the author represents flaws of patriarchal society from the viewpoint of a female in a male-centered world. It will also focus on these three aspects by comparing them with the text citations. The male-dominated society is also described through the character of Victor, who stands as the main point of narration and brings horrible and cruel actions but refuses to take responsibility for them (Mellor, 2019). The paper will examine the necessity of reconstruction of feminism in the patriarchal society and the critics of gender roles in the work. The article’s central thesis will stand by the following: Frankenstein embodies the main criticism led by feminism and evaluates society from the perspective of a male-centered system and female exclusion. As Frankenstein correlated the connection between females and nature, it can also be connected from the perspective of ecofeminism, the explain nature from the standpoint of its relation to human beings (Cheng, 2021). Through the perspective of the connection of nature and females, its expulsion and marginalization in male-centered society, as well as revealing gender roles, Mary Shelley creates a detailed depiction of the natural world society that fails to recognize its flaws and correct them.

Works Cited

Aldiss, Brian W. Frankenstein Unbound, Random House, 1973.

Aalto, Linda. Marginal Women and Absent Mothers in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , 2020, 20 p.

Bloom, Clive. Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers . 2nd ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Bowta, Femilia, & Puluhulawa, Yulan. “Deconstructive Analysis of Main Character in Frankenstein Novel by Mary Shelley.” British Journal Bahasa dan Sastra Inggris, vol. 7, no. 1, 2018, pp. 60-71.

Cambra-Badii, Irene et al. “ Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus: a Classic Novel to Stimulate the Analysis of Complex Contemporary Issues in Biomedical Sciences .” BMC Med Ethics , vol. 22, no. 17, 2021. Web.

Cambra-Badii, Irene et al. “ The Ethical Interest of Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus: A Literature Review 200 Years After Its Publication ”. Sci Eng Ethics, no. 26, pp 2791–2808, 2020. Web.

Cheng, Jiaming. “An Analysis of Ecofeminism in Frankenstein”. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Language, Art and Cultural Exchange, 2021.

Gigante, Denise. “ Facing the Ugly: The Case of ‘Frankenstein.’ ” ELH , vol. 67, no. 2, 2000, pp. 565–87. JSTOR, Web.

Kate Bomford. “Critical or Creative? The Creature Writes to Victor Frankenstein”. Changing English , vol. 29, no. 4, 2022, pp. 421-439.

Martin, Kristen. “In Want of Keeping: Painting and the Sympathetic Imagination of Frankenstein”. Eighteenth Century Fiction, vol. 32, no. 4, 2020, pp. 599-618.

Mellor, Anne K. Frankenstein, Gender, and Mother Nature . Frankenbook, 2018. Web.

Miles, Robert. Gothic Writing, 1750-1820: A Genealogy . 2nd ed., Manchester University Press, 2002.

Morris, David B. The Culture of Pain. [Pbk. rpt. ed., 1993]., University of California Press, 1993.

Rauch, Alan. “The Monstrous Body of Knowledge in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 34, no. 2, 1995, pp. 227–53. Web.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus. The original 1818 text. 3rd ed. Edited by Kathleen Scherf, and David Macdonald. Broadview Press, 2012.

Sherwin, Paul. “Frankenstein: Creation as Catastrophe.” PMLA , vol. 96, no. 5, 1981, pp. 883-903. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2024, February 25). Gender Role and Feminism in Shelley's Frankenstein. https://ivypanda.com/essays/gender-role-and-feminism-in-shelleys-frankenstein/

"Gender Role and Feminism in Shelley's Frankenstein." IvyPanda , 25 Feb. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/gender-role-and-feminism-in-shelleys-frankenstein/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'Gender Role and Feminism in Shelley's Frankenstein'. 25 February.

IvyPanda . 2024. "Gender Role and Feminism in Shelley's Frankenstein." February 25, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/gender-role-and-feminism-in-shelleys-frankenstein/.

1. IvyPanda . "Gender Role and Feminism in Shelley's Frankenstein." February 25, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/gender-role-and-feminism-in-shelleys-frankenstein/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Gender Role and Feminism in Shelley's Frankenstein." February 25, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/gender-role-and-feminism-in-shelleys-frankenstein/.

• Corpus ID: 165161967

Possessing Nature : The Female in Frankenstein ”

• Published 2013

21 Citations

“my own vampire” : the fate of those let loose from the grave, perfecting monstrosity: frankenstein and the enlightenment debate on perfectibility, illusion and reality in mary shelley’s frankenstein, lessons from frankenstein: narrative myth as ethical model, why is sharikov dead the fate of “the soviet frankenstein” in bulgakov’s a dog’s heart, frankenstein: a feminist birth myth of morbid conception.

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“A Thousand Minute Circumstances”: Frankenstein, Westworld and Feminist Revolution

The mortality of maternity : a defense for victor frankenstein, beyond the picturesque and the sublime : mary shelley’s approach to nature in the novels frankenstein and lodore, born this way: reading frankenstein with disability, 2 references, the reproduction of mothering: psychoanalysis and the sociology of gender, my mother/my self: the daughter's search for identity, related papers.

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Analysing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in Terms of Sexism and Feminism

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Published: Jun 29, 2018

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