The Life of the Author
Mary Shelley, originally Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, was born on the 30th of August, 1797 in London to, in her own words, “two persons of distinguished literary celebrity” –Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Their influence persisted in Mary’s childhood and later writings, even though her mother died merely 11 days after her birth, and she was not formally educated. She lived with her stepsister Fanny Imlay (who later committed suicide), her father, and eventually her father’s new wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, with her daughter Jane (later Claire). Mary’s relationship with both was strained, and she found herself living away from home multiple times, spending many periods from 1812 to 1814 in Scotland. It was when she returned from Scotland that her relationship with her stepsister improved and she later eloped with Percy Shelley, a poet and frequent visitor to her father’s household.
Shelley was still married at the time but had separated from his wife, Harriet, and eventually traveled around Europe with Mary, where they struggled financially and lost their first child, a daughter, mere weeks after she was born in February of 1815. Mary’s father disapproved of the match, denounced his daughter and refused to see her when the party returned to England because of financial issues. In 1816 Mary gave birth to William, and in May of that year she, Percy, the baby, and Claire traveled to Switzerland to join Lord Byron, whom Claire was pursuing. While there, the novel Frankenstein was born from a ghost story contest suggested by Lord Byron, which was later published anonymously in January, 1818. In December of 1816 Percy’s wife committed suicide and Mary and Percy married shortly after. In 1819 William died and Mary gave birth to Percy Florence, the only of Mary’s children to survive into adulthood. Unfortunately, Percy Shelley drowned after a boating accident in 1822, and Mary was left a widow at 24. Her later years were characterized by frequent battles with depression, the love and then rejection of close female friends, and literary commitments to her own work and her husband’s. She died of a brain tumor in London on February 1st, 1851 and was buried at St. Peter’s Church in Bournemouth.
Critical Discourse Surrounding the Work
Allen, Graham. “Language, Form, and Style.” Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, pp. 16-34, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cofc/detail.action?docID=766037.
In this chapter, Allen argues that Frankenstein isn’t a mere Gothic novel, but a Godwinian novel. He asserts that the novel’s beginnings as a “ghost story” and Shelley’s use of intensified language and emphasis on the psychological, positions it within Gothic fiction. Allen extends this argument by stating it is a Godwinian novel that uses “features of the well-established Gothic novel and turn[s] them on their head” (21). According to Godwin, a rational world is one where the irrational and rational can be easily separated, like those in Gothic novels. The Godwinian novel blends the romance and realist forms together to represent “things as they are.” Godwin realizes that this makes the Gothic novel a perfect “vehicle” to represent a world that is increasingly complex and irrational, something Shelley later portrays in Frankenstein (Allen 25). The Godwinian novel doesn’t present blanket “good’ or “bad” characters, but ambivalent characters that both ask for sympathy and challenge rationality (Allen 27). Victor Frankenstein is an example of this, as the reader cannot categorize him or his creature as purely good or evil, but morally flawed characters with “radical ambiguities” that are explored through the novel. Rather than providing a “right” answer, Frankenstein has no purely “good” character to show the reader right and wrong. This ambiguity is especially shown through the frame narrative Shelley uses with Walton and Victor, stopping the reader from a simple interpretation. In combining the real and the Gothic, the regular order of things are brought into question, and the reader is left uncertain of humanity and rationality—are humans themselves as rational as they believe? Can we face our inner monsters? According to Allen, Frankenstein suggests that “we can only improve our individual and social worlds if we ask ourselves these profound and disturbing questions” (33).
Bernatchez, Josh. “Monstrosity, Suffering, Subjectivity, and Sympathetic Community in Frankenstein and ‘The Structure of Torture.’” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 36, no. 2, 2009, pp. 205–216. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40649956. Accessed 10 Feb. 2021.
Bernatchez believes that individual identity is contingent on sympathetic social interaction, which is unavailable to the Creature throughout the novel. Adam Smith argued that the “greatest hindrance to being a ‘good’ person is any withdrawal of sympathy by the human community.” Bernatchez continues that because human consciousness is a product of civilization and the rejection from community is destructive to individual identity, torture reverses the formation of identity by re-coding community and civilization as sources of pain. The Creature approaches civilization with hope but is met by exclusion, which is his torture, so he has no reason to conform to the conventions of civilization. Bernatchez claims that the narrative trajectory of the Creature can be interpreted as a response to the question “what are you?” There is a “verbal component of torture” present in the language used by Victor and the Creature, essentially a naming contest. The Creature won’t call himself a monster, but Victor refers to him exclusively in negative terms, such as a devil or a daemon or a monster. In this way, Victor represents the human community and the Creature represents the search for identity and social acceptance. The Creature eventually must confess or, in Bernatchez’s words, betray himself, by recognizing himself out loud as a monster.
Baumann, Rebecca. Frankenstein 200: The Birth, Life, and Resurrection of Mary Shelley’sMonster, Indiana University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cofc/detail.action?docID=5345520
In this article, Baumann discusses how Shelley changed the Gothic novel format through Frankenstein. Baumann describes the Gothic as novels set in the past in ruins, castles, and dark forests in faraway countries, with plots revolving around incest, family crimes, and ancestry. They contain scary creatures like ghosts, skeletons, and demons, with narratives that terrify the heroines of the novel. Baumann states that Frankenstein is a part of this tradition, as both Victor and his monster are “given to woeful speeches about being ‘blasted’ and tortured beyond words” (Baumann 65). In the first edition of the novel, Victor and Elizabeth are blood related, making their relationship incestuous rather than pseudo-incestuous. The Gothic traits of the novel are further shown through Victor’s dream of holding and kissing Elizabeth as she turned into his dead mother, a scene with a “knot of psycho-sexual energy” which, according to Baumann, becomes even more complex if the reader considers Mary Shelly and the “complex ways in which she herself became a substitute/replacement for the mother she killed at birth” (66). Baumann goes on to explain Gothic fiction as a result of publishing changes that arose after the shift in the consumer market for books. Baumann argues that Shelley makes important changes to the Gothic genres in Frankenstein: the Gothic castle becomes a Gothic laboratory, the supernatural is replaced with science, and the monster isn’t a scary ghost, but flesh and blood made by man.
Corbett, Robert. Romanticism and Science Fictions – A Special Issue of Romanticism on the Net. Erudit, 10 August 2009. https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/ron/2001-n21-ron433/005970ar/. Accessed 11 Feb. 2021.
This article discusses Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a link between science fiction and romanticism. Corbett discusses the ways in which Frankenstein subverts the male dominated literary scene. Frankenstein is often looked at as a critique of Romantic fiction, the male romantic vision, and the male visionary imagination. The article also talks about how the novel paved the way for Romanticism to be critiqued in new ways, as it was written in prose and allowed for consistency in the story, a characteristic that was not usually seen at this time when stories were categorized as either “high” or “low.” Shelley brought romantic ideas, generally reserved for the esteemed poetic genre, into the novel, a form deemed unsophisticated.
Crimmins, Jonathan. “Mediation’s Sleight of Hand: The Two Vectors of the Gothic in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 52, no. 4, Winter 2013, p. 561. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=brb&AN=95768276&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Crimmins argues that Frankenstein is characterized by thematic opposition. Elation and passion are juxtaposed with terror and despair, often paradoxically inspired by the same subject. Similarly, the novel argues against romantic egoism in the godlike ambition of Victor Frankenstein, while simultaneously critiquing sentimental judgements. Crimmins argues that this theme of opposing vectors, or value systems, is a trademark of the Gothic seen in the tension between the material and the ideological, which paradoxically refute and rely on each other. Both systems rely on and collapse mediation. By existing as a medium, each system attempts to embody the totality of meaning. However, in Frankenstein, no mediation exists. The monster represents the material and Victor Frankenstein the ideological, and no medium or compromise can be found between the two—they are both fallen from opposing value systems. These two systems can also be characterized by the psychological versus the social, the psychological basing many of its ideas in Freud and Lacan. The tension between the two characterizes gothic tensions and the fracturing of the self. Though these vectors cannot acknowledge each other, their duality is critical.
Devon, Anderson. Frankenstein: Creation, frustration, Fragmentation, abomination. The Victorian Web, 25 April 2010. http://www.victorianweb.org/previctorian/mshelley/anderson.html
This article talks about the line between master and slave. Shelley intentionally blurs the divide between master and creation to emphasize the fact that not all creations turn out for the better. I found it interesting that the more I researched and the more times I reread passages of the book, something new jumped out at me. I was surprised to realize that not only can a physical creation turn out to be a monster but ideas and theories created out of the goodness of someone’s heart and mind, the plan can backfire. The expression, “You’ve created a Frankenstein’s monster” was never really clear until this article shed some light on the subject. The article goes on to discuss how the monster is both the embodiment of chaos but also the symptom of a man’s ambitions, ego and the physical representation of the turmoil between a man’s inside and outside. The article asks the question, does the creator become his monster? Not strictly in the context of the book but in a general sense.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. “Horror’s Twin: Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve.” The Madwoman in the Attic : The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Yale University Press, 1980, pp. 213-247. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cofc/detail.action?docID=3421136.
Through studies of women writers following Milton’s traditions (effectively known as “Milton’s Daughters), the authors of this chapter “Horror’s Twin: Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve” see Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a rewrite of “the male culture myth of Paradise Lost” to highlight the meaning it holds for women. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that Shelley’s highly literary upbringing influenced how she expressed and resolved the anxieties of life, and the fragmented structure of her novel reflects the voyeuristic ways she viewed her parents through the study of their literary works. Frankenstein, in Gilbert and Gubar’s reading, is a retelling of the Fall in Paradise Lost, and may reflect Shelley’s anxieties of falling short of her literary heritage. Gilbert and Gubar state that Frankenstein “is ultimately a mock Paradise Lost” in which there is no Eve-specific role throughout the novel, but rather Victor “begins to metamorphose from Adam to Satan” in his obsession with science, while his defining act of creation then characterizes him as Eve, the fallen woman who is able to procreate. The monster himself is also seen to enact the role of both Adam and Satan, a fact the monster himself puzzles over, and yet ultimately, the authors argue, is truly most compatible with the Eve role, just as Victor is. Gilbert and Gubar also point out that the crimes the monster commits only occur after he is defined by society as “monstrous” and a “filthy creation” which ultimately reinforces his connection, and the connections throughout the novel, with Sin, Satan, and Death.
Homans, Margaret. “Bearing Demons: Frankenstein’s Circumvention of the Maternal.” Bearing the Word: Language and the Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing, University of Chicago Press, 1986, pp. 100-119.
This is an essay by Margaret Homans written in 1986 that seeks to explore the ways in which Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is truly about the son’s search for an object of desire in the absence of a mother figure. Homans discusses how dead mothers abound in Dr. Frankenstein’s life, and this leads him to violate nature’s laws and attempt procreation by himself, effectively destroying the need for a mother in creation. Homans asserts that by doing this, Victor has essentially killed Elizabeth, the likely mother of his child who eventually is killed by his creation. Homans then concludes that the demon Victor has created reflects neither Adam or Lucifer, but rather Eve, as he is a “creation of a son’s imaginative desire,” as Eve was of Adam’s. Homans discusses the monster as an embodiment of feminine attributes, as it is unable to have it’s own desires (a companion), and yet it is made in the male image to reflect masculine illusions that females aren’t required for public and private life. The novel also reflects, in Homans’ opinion, a woman’s anxieties about bearing children, as not only was Mary Shelley’s life full of problematic births, but she was also very aware of the inability to control a child or one’s creation, evidenced by Victor’s inability to control his monster.
Johnson, Barbara. “My Monster/My Self.” Diacritics, vol. 12, no. 2, 1982, pp. 2–10. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/464674. Accessed 10 Feb. 2021.
Johnson argues that Frankenstein is a story of two contrasting methods of parenting that lead to two perhaps unexpectedly parallel lives. Victor Frankenstein is the child of two doting parents and the Creature is the child of Victor, who creates and then immediately shuns and abandons him. Johnson believes that the impossibility of perfect parenting is represented in that fact that in the end both characters reach an equal degree of self-hatred and alienation. She also argues that the hiddenness of femininity in the novel is in itself a reflection of the contradictions so often avoided in the literary representation of women. By only representing two extremes of women, the perfect mother of Victor and the uncompleted monstress he tosses into the sea, Shelley represents this feminine contradiction. Johnson argues that the female ideal is largely a fantasy of the masculine imagination rather than the feminine, so Shelley’s frame of the story as a masculine autobiography is what is most telling about her own struggle.
Kakoudaki, Despina. “Unmaking People: The Politics of Negation in Frankenstein and Ex Machina.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 45, no. 2, 2018, pp. 289–307. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5621/sciefictstud.45.2.0289.
Kakoudaki claims that Shelley’s introduction to the book diverts readers’ attention from Victor’s rejection of the Creature and towards the issues of Victor’s ambition, and recommends shifting critical emphasis away from why the Creature is created to why the Creature is rejected in order to rebalance the main questions of the novel. She believes that the scenes of animation and de-animation (life and death) are allegorical conduits for withholding human rights. De-animation can be reflected in the historical legacies of slavery and disenfranchisement. The Creature is brought to life, and the world’s reaction to him makes him what he is, as Frankenstein’s Creature is subjugated to otherness. His making (being born unnaturally) is also his unmaking (people hating him because he is unnatural). Kakoudaki states that the Creature’s artificial derivation parallels the artificial derivation of racial categories, and the usage of scientific language attempts to justify political and social oppression in biological terms. Legal and social processes make and unmake people through rejection both socially and politically.
Kotze, Haidee. “Desire, Gender, Power, Language: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Literator [Online], 21.1 (2000): 53-68.
Kotze argues that while many critical analyses of Frankenstein view the text psychoanalytically, very few do so without drawing heavy comparisons to Mary Shelly’s life. In looking only at the text, Kotze argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis is applicable to Frankenstein. The monster is born into the Imaginary and must enter the Symbolic through language. In the Imaginary, he is formless, confused, and desires a mother, a pivotal piece of the Imaginary. Kotze argues that in this state, as the monster is motherless, the moon functions as the mother figure, which soothes and guides him. The monster then enters the Symbolic, a critical part of which is the dominant father figure who defines and restricts the child. Kotze points out that the monster is introduced to his father through language, in the form of the journal he finds in his clothes. Upon finding this and reading the horrible things Victor wrote about his conception, the monster wishes to return to the mother-figure of the Imaginary. However, entering the Symbolic makes the relationship with the mother forbidden and Oedipal, and therefore impossible to return to. The monster pursues this by obsessing over women like Agatha and eventually in requesting a female counterpart from Victor, though this is unattainable. Kotze claims that a desire for unity with a pre-Symbolic Imaginary mother is seen with other characters throughout the narrative. The portrait of Victor’s mother is crucial to this—when Elizabeth wears it, it symbolizes her role as substitute mother in Caroline’s absence, contributing symbolically to her role as Victor’s unattainable desire for his Imaginary mother. In addition, when it is passed from character to character in the murder of William and framing of Justine, possession of the portrait is conflated with murder and guilt, emphasizing the forbidden nature of desire for the Imaginary mother. Furthermore, the assumed evilness of the female monster connects femaleness with wrongdoing. Kotze asserts that all of the female characters in the text become symbols of the Imaginary mother, an inherently forbidden position associated with transgression. This reaffirms that women have no place in the Symbolic, thus revealing the marginalized position of women in society.
McGavran, James Holt. “‘Insurmountable Barriers to Our Union’: Homosocial Male Bonding, Homosexual Panic, and Death on the Ice in Frankenstein.” European Romantic Review, vol. 11, no. 1, Taylor & Francis Group, 2000, pp. 46–67, doi:10.1080/10509580008570098.
McGavran explores the homosocial and homoerotic male bonds in Frankenstein. McGavran argues that Victor creates in his monster an “ideal male lover” and simultaneous doubling of his own identity, liberated from heterosexual mores. He builds the monster to be beautiful and physically superior to man, and to idolize him. However, after creating the monster in a symbolic marriage, Victor reaches the threshold and peak of his masculine potency and becomes overwhelmed both with fear of being dominated and homosexual panic, causing his immediate revulsion in the monster. Victor’s mutually obsessive and passionate homoerotic relationship with the monster is juxtaposed by his acceptably homosocial relationships with Clerval and Walton, which while intimate, are not threatened by perverse sexual intent. McGavran argues that Victor’s relationship with the monster closely parallels the idea of heterosexual narcissism and homosexual self-dismissal. McGavran speculates on Mary Shelley’s opinion on and encounters with homosexual behavior in her life and shows her mixed reactions to the deeply tabooed concept. In addition, McGavran explains how Mary Shelley links the sublime with homosexuality and beauty with the heterosexual.
Mellor, Anne K. “Usurping the Female.” Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters, Methuen Publishing, 1988, pp. 115-126.
Found as chapter six in Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters, Anne Mellor’s essay entitled “Usurping the Female” explores the gender dynamics in Frankenstein and how the story’s events and characters express the masculine and feminine anxieties of the time period. Mellor asserts that one of the “deepest horrors” found in Mary Shelley’s novel is the “implicit goal of creating a society for men only,” as Dr. Frankenstein seeks to create a new life without the biological need for a woman. In Mellor’s opinion, Shelley’s novel explores the ramifications of a society existing in two separate spheres, the masculine-coded public and intellectual sphere and the feminine domestic sphere. Mellor looks to the De Lacy family as “an alternative ideology” of equality and shared labors among the family, though still lacking the mother role-model figure. Dr. Frankenstein’s destruction of his female creation, Mellor suggests, signals his fear of female independent will and sexuality, characteristic of the masculine anxieties of the time. Nature is characterized throughout the novel as female, and it is Victor’s desire to “rape Nature” that ultimately signals his downfall. Nature “is not the passive, inert, or ‘dead’ matter that Frankenstein imagines,” but rather a powerful force against his unnatural method of creation. Mellor states that Shelley’s ideal is a harmonious and balanced relationship with nature, as there should be harmony and balance among the sexes.
Moers, Ellen. “Female Gothic.” The Endurance of “Frankenstein”:Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, edited by George Levine and U.C. Knoeflmacher, University of California Press, 1979, pp. 77-87.
“Female Gothic” is a 1976 essay by Ellen Moers, in which she defines what she considers to be the Female Gothic, then discusses Frankenstein’s relevance to the genre as a “birth myth.” The Female Gothic, according to Moers, refers to the writing by women in the Gothic tradition that focuses on the physiological reactions to fear, and is credited to the Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe. Mary Shelley enters the tradition a generation later with Frankenstein. Though the main character and his creation are distinctly male, Moers concludes that “no literary work of any kind by a woman, better repays examination in light of the sex of its author.” Moers explains how Shelley’s own horrors surrounding the trials of birth contributed to her telling of Frankenstein, as unlike traditional scenes of birth and happy motherhood, Shelley focuses instead on the messy physical and emotional effects of afterbirth through Dr. Frankenstein’s horror at his own creation. It is a feminine experience even without female characters, because it has an emphasis on the trauma of afterbirth that is uniquely female. Moers also discusses how there is a “mundane side” to Frankenstein not found in most horror novels, as instead of engaging with constant dramatic scenes, Shelley is concerned with “the dilemma of a newly created being” who is already an adult male, and the emotions that come into play surrounding creation and the parent-chi1d relationship.
Purinton, Marjean D. “Ideological Revision: Cross-Gender Characterization in Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein.’” CEA Critic, vol. 56, no. 1, 1993, pp. 53–64. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26393693.
Purinton argues that, in Frankenstein, Mary Shelley writes complex and aggressive male characters and flat, meek female characters in order to destabilize culturally constructed notions of gender by intending her male characters to represent femininity. This cross-gendering allows Shelley to explore female homoerotic desire. Purinton argues that both Robert Walton and Victor display many feminine traits like increased passion, sensitivity to emotion, and desire for love. Walton uses feminized language concerning Victor’s appearance. Purinton argues that many of the heterosexual relationships failing to be consummated allow Shelley to safely explore socially unacceptable gendered behavior. Like a woman, Victor must read to learn about the natural philosophies and is largely self-taught. Victor consistently bonds very deeply with other men and seems to dread his union with Elizabeth. His laboratory is seen as feminine and womb-like, and his destruction of the female monster is done out of fear of a hysterical and violent female will. Purinton claims that the threatening female is hidden in the grotesque male monster and that the destruction of the female monster mirrors the lack of liberation and agency women experienced in the nineteenth century.
Randel, Fred V. “‘Frankenstein’, Feminism, and the Intertextuality of Mountains.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 23, no. 4, 1984, pp. 515–532. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25600514. Accessed 9 Feb. 2021.
Fred V. Randel’s essay “Frankenstein, Feminism, and the Intertextuality of Mountains” explores Mary Shelley’s place in the scholarly interpretation of mountains as predominantly masculine or feminine. The symbolism of mountains, Randel explains, was “already a conspicuous and highly conventionalized part of [the] literary environment” Shelley was engaging with at the time of writing her novel. Yet she chooses to echo the historical tradition of mountains as locations for “an encounter with divinity,” instead. The mountains in Shelley’s novel, Randel explains, serve as the meeting point of man and the supernatural, and echo the powerlessness of Victor Frankenstein, and men in general, to the assertions of nature. Randel discusses the “mountaintop experience,” the meeting of his monster, that held “potential for enabling Frankenstein to grow up,” as he journeys to a mountaintop alone and yet is quickly acquainted with “the wretch” he had created through playing God. The creature is interacting with his creator on a mountaintop, as humans once believed mountains could connect them with their creator. Randel also discusses how Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory is depicted as “filthy and loathsome precisely because it is not a female space,” and yet the shape and significance of the laboratory, as well as the narrative structure of the novel, are similar to the walls and functions of a uterus. Randel concludes that this blend of the feminine and masculine is also reminiscent of the female imagination working in a male literary tradition.
Rubenstein, Marc A. “‘My Accursed Origin’: The Search for the Mother in Frankenstein.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 15, no. 2, Apr. 1976, pp. 165–194.
Rubenstein claims that Frankenstein is a reflection of Shelley’s fascination with her own conception. The Creature refers to reading Victor’s letters detailing the process of making the Creature, which is a parallel to the love letters written between Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin during the beginning of their relationship. Rubenstein claims that these letters “could not help but stir a young girl’s erotic fantasies” and that Shelley’s reaction likely corresponds with the Creature’s reaction to discovering “the journal of the four months which proceeded [his] creation.” The dreary day of November which describes the Creature’s birth night may allude to Shelley’s own conception. Shelley did not like her stepmother, so Rubenstein argues that Shelley’s obsession with her own conception may be tied to narcissistic injury because her father remarried, and her earliest sexual curiosity may have coincided with a period of jealousy and vulnerability. In writing this novel as an ode to her mother and her own birth, Shelley in a roundabout way found herself because she herself conceives something that becomes her own “hideous progeny.” Rubenstein also argues that the novel itself is a womb. Each circle of narrative, with the participant of one story becoming the listener of the next, becomes a womb-like setting in which the next story is developed. Story-telling becomes pregnancy. Rubenstein argues that the author’s introduction is Shelley’s attempt at drawing a picture of her imagination as a passive womb, “inseminated by those titans of romantic poetry, Byron and Shelley.” She repeated many times that her coming up with the story was a passive process, which Rubenstein believes reflects Shelley’s guilt at taking an active role in the creation process, both in writing and in birth. He describes the book as “a nightmare of sexual guilt.”
Smith, Lloyd Allen. “‘This Thing of Darkness’: Racial Discourse in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Gothic Studies 6.2. (2004), 2004, pp. 208-222.
Smith explores the ways in which Mary Shelley depicts race and slavery in Frankenstein. Smith argues that Shelley’s youth coincided with strong British antislavery sentiments that ultimately culminated in the emancipation of slaves in 1833. Shelley’s cultural exposure to this can be seen in an abundance of language relating to slavery throughout the novel. In addition, the description of the monster is similar to that of a racial other. Grotesque descriptions of the monster’s body parallel the way people of color were often described in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Smith argues that the monster’s subjugation in society on the basis of his appearance, without basis in his intellect or character, mirrors the racial realities of people of color at the time, including African slaves and Indians under the rule of Britain. Smith argues that the monster’s bodily composition of many dead parts, rather than the reanimation of a single dead body, reflects anxieties relating to cross-racial identities. The monster must learn to read and write by secretly watching the De Lacey family, much like slaves were barred from literacy and education. Smith claims that the monster’s story is very similar in narrative structure to a slave narrative. Frankenstein’s monster is barred from sexual activity, much like the slave whose family is broken up and sold off, and that the monster’s fatal encounters with the women in Victor Frankenstein’s life reflect fear of violence from black men against white women. Finally, Smith discusses the possible connection between the monster’s violent revenge and the violent uprisings in Latin America.
Wright, Angela. “Female Gothic.” The Cambridge Companion to ‘Frankenstein’, by Andrew Smith, Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 101–115.
Wright argues that the Female Gothic as a genre began using tropes that “spoke to anxieties about female authorship” (102). She discusses both Ann Mellor and Ellen Moers’ arguments that Frankenstein is a “birth myth,” and the “reluctant inclusion” of the novel in the Female Gothic genre is important because it speaks to a “broader anxiety” of how to talk about the novel in a “gendered account of Gothic literature” (103). She argues that Mary Wollstonecraft “haunts” the novel thematically as Victor Frankenstein attempts to replace his own mother, philosophically with her feminist theory, and through “incarnation” in Safie (107). Gothic literature often contains silence, imprisonment, forced marriage, and death—all tropes that are found within female characters in Frankenstein. In a Female Gothic reading, Safie’s letters in the 1818 version create “a clear articulation of a proto-feminist message that pulses to the surface of this complexly structured novel” (Wright, 108). Safie also follows the traditional female heroine in the Gothic who challenges the patriarchy and marriage, fleeing from them in search of her own desires. Frankenstein is Female Gothic because of what the novel doesn’t show: readers are forced to “make the connections between male solitude, and the disposability of the female and the novel’s very repression of sexual desire” (Wright 109). Wright argues that Shelley’s 1831 Introduction “capitalizes” on terror rather than horror— an illusion to Ann Radcliffe’s theory that terror “annihilates” the soul rather than merely expanding it like horror does (110). Wright discusses the Introduction as “skillful” and “aligns it far more closely with the aims of the female Gothic” by discussing in such detail the minute circumstances of the story’s curation. Changes made in the novel push the novel to better align with the female Gothic. Elizabeth’s story is similar to that of a Gothic heroine: an orphan who is adopted, an object of possession for a man, and a character who enjoys the sublime. These changes show Shelley’s movement from anxieties about her mother in the 1818 edition, to embracing the terror of female Gothic literature in 1831.