Shaunyell Bobbitt
Cline
English 102
14 October 2011
Frankenstein: a Look at the Strength of Women, and the Weakness of Men
I personally have never been a big fan of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I think that there were much better classic science fiction/horror books written, but one thing that does stand out in Shelley’s chilling tale is her imagination. When I read Frankenstein for the first time, I was captivated with her ideas about medical science, and the moral repercussions of an issue very close to the cloning issues we face today. As I read Frankenstein again for this essay, I began to ask myself why in the world a woman of the 1800’s would write a tale of such dark and sinister content. It is not like women back then had the same luxury of being able to speak their mind freely like women can now. That is when it hit me, Shelley was not simply writing about medical horrors and the effects of playing God. She was in fact writing about the issues regarding how women were perceived to be the weaker sex back in the 1800’s. In my opinion she even goes a step further in her description of the men in her macabre tale. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a tale of the oppression women felt in her generation, always having to be weaker in comparison to men, and she goes as far as to show that men in general are weaker when compared to the lives women traditionally live.
“The Women of Frankenstein,” was an article written by William Veeder. In Mr. Veeder’s article he states that Shelley had felt weak as a woman, and due to her weakness, she became defensive, and portrayed the men in her book Frankenstein as weaker than the female characters. Veeder goes on to say that the character Justine had first appeared to be weak in nature, but had showed much more strength when she had been in the courtroom (Veeder 271). One thing that he did not state was how the male characters exuded any weakness.
In Shelley’s book, I find that the character of Victor shows a lot of weakness, especially when it comes to his monstrous creation. In the fourth chapter of volume one Victor describes how he had intended his creation to be beautiful. What he saw in reality was the complete opposite. Victor describes the monster as such:
His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with the watery eyes, that seemed almost the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips (Shelley 34).
I find that this passage shows how weak Victor is in comparison to the average woman. Here Victor has given life to his creation, and in a way can be compared to the birth of a child. Instead of looking at his child with love and admiration, he is fixated on the deformities of his child. Though it is true that there are women that lament when they see that their child has been born with a deformity, not many women would do what Victor Frankenstein does next:
He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped, and hushed down stairs. I took refuge in the court-yard belonging to the house which I inhabited; where I remained during the rest of the night, catching and fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the demonical corpse to which I had so miserably given life (Shelley 35).
Here his monster reaches out to him much like a newborn would reach out to its mother. But being a man, Victor cannot feel warmth for this demon, and he runs out of the room like a coward, and as he holes up in the courtyard of the building, he jumps and startles at any little sound. The thing that I do not understand is why he suspected a created person made up of corpses was going to be a sight considered beautiful. After all this was his creation, and I am pretty sure he saw what this thing looked like on a regular basis, there is no sense in being scared when life is bestowed upon his child. Another Author that saw the dynamic of female and male strength differences was Anne K. Mellor.
In Mellor’s article “Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein”, Mellor describes the male/female role division from the eyes of Victor, “Victor Frankenstein’s nineteenth century Genevan society is founded on a rigid division of sex roles: the male inhabits the public sphere, the female is relegated to the private or domestic sphere” (Mellor 274-275). This clearly shows that in the case of Victor’s character, he had the same gender ideals that the majority of people had in the nineteenth century. This is the same ideal that Shelley was trying to disprove in her book “Frankenstein”. Further into her writing Mellor describes the scene where Victor decides to go against his own word, and not make a female for his creation, and she questions why he came to this decision.
First he is afraid of an independent female will, afraid that his female creature will have desires and opinions that cannot be controlled by his male creature. Like Rousseau’s natural man, she might refuse to comply with a social contract made before her birth by another person; she might assert her own integrity and the revolutionary right to determine her own existence (Mellor 279).
When this excerpt is analyzed, it is easy to see that Victor feels threated by the thought of any woman being truly independent. Mellor clearly states that Victor worries that his “male” creation might not be able to control his “female” creation. Only a man that feared losing his own authority over the female sex would even consider an atrocious idea like men controlling women. In knowing Victors fears, one has to ask why he would be fearful of a woman with a mind of her own. The only clear explanation there is, is that Victor fears females in general. If he did not fear them, then why worry if this potential female creature could be uncontrollable. It is as if he thinks that if a female were (God forbid) allowed to think for herself, to make her own opinions, and to think differently than her male peers, then all hell might break loose in society. This may have been the opinion Mellor, but not every critic thought like she did.
In the article “Female Gothic: The Monsters Mother”, written by Ellen Moers the Idea that Shelly wrote Frankenstein to show the world that women are stronger than men is not there. Moers likens Shelley’s story to the tragedies of motherhood, specifically the tragedies of Shelley’s real life experiences of motherhood. Moers describes the real life experiences of Shelley as a mother as one of pain
According to Moers, “Pregnant at sixteen, and almost constantly pregnant throughout the following five years; yet not a secure mother, for she lost most of her babies soon after they were born; and not a lawful mother, for she was not married-not at least when, at the age of eighteen, Mary Goodwin began to write Frankenstein. So are monsters born (Moers 216-217)
All this shows is that Shelley had a difficult life when it came to child rearing, and by no means does this show that she wrote Frankenstein as a metaphor for her life’s pains. If one was to compare Shelley to Victor, and her children to Victor’s creation, things do not match up. Shelley never abandoned any of her children, unlike Victor with his creation. Shelley also did not show fear of creating and giving birth to more children, because she repeatedly tried to have more. This also goes against what Victor felt as the creator of his monster. It is not like shelly was feeling guilt for the birth of her children, she simply felt grief over the deaths of the ones that passed away.
Finally, Mary Shelley tells a story of horror, and paints a scene that is both breathtaking, and chilling. Since the publishing of “Frankenstein” many critics have tried to quantify the meaning of Shelley’s tale. As to what she truly intended we can only speculate. But when one takes into account the social and moral boundaries that women had to adhere to in the nineteenth century, and how it was a man’s place to guide and control a woman’s thoughts and actions, it is easy to see that Shelley would be angry about these unwritten female laws. Shelley knew from experience that women are strong both mentally and emotionally, why else would she continue on trying to have children even after so many of her own had tragically died. Can a man go through the same and come out mentally and emotionally stable. That is not to say that a man would not grieve the loss of his child, but could the same man handle it if he had given birth to it? Victor could not even handle the sight of his creation, and if his monster died, than he would no doubt rejoice in its death. Shelley intended to show the world the inner strength of a woman, and to show that men in general are not the stoic rocks they portray themselves to be.
Works Cited
Mellor, Anne. Comp. Frankenstein Norton Critical Edition. 1st. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company Inc. 1996. Print.
Moers, Ellen. Comp. Frankenstein Norton Critical Edition. 1st. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company Inc. 1996. Print.
Shelley, Mary. Comp. Frankenstein Norton Critical Edition. 1st. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company Inc. 1996. Print.
Veeder, William. Comp. Frankenstein Norton Critical Edition. 1st. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company Inc. 1996. Print.
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