Frankenstein Aplication Essay (Essay Sample)

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Feminism in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Feminist issues take a considerable focus in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. The way women characters are treated and characterized depicts the position in which women have been held for a long time, such position being of being generally considered the weaker sex. In view of the concerted efforts by Shelley to build on the theme of feminism in this novel, the undertaking of this paper is to look at how Shelley explores and incorporates responses to feminist issues in the Frankenstein.
When reading the Novel Frankenstein, one cannot help but notice that female characters appear to have little substance in comparison to the male characters. This may be resulting from the time in period in which she wrote that females were seen as lesser than males. In the essay "Cooped Up”: Feminine Domesticity in Frankenstein," Johanna Smith, A University of Texas Professor discusses feminist issues in which she views female characters in the Frankenstein as being there only for the purpose of reflecting or constructing the male characters (Smith 279). The historical factors surrounding the writing of the novel come in handy; Shelly wrote the novel in the first half of the 19th century which is a period, as Smith explains, a woman was habituated to think that a man’s help and control in her life was inevitable (Smith, 275). The Frankenstein, therefore, does not represent any efforts to build a positive appearance for women, that they have capabilities that can enable them to stand for themselves. The Frankenstein, as will be seen in the subsequent paragraphs, is a tool through which Shelley, albeit may be unintentionally, continues the subjugation of women by men and the preference of men over women.
Women are explicitly and conspicuously excluded from Frankenstein and all that comes to be known about them is through the three dominant male narrators (Badalamenti 430). Female representation is excluded and it is puzzling how the male experience is solely the focus of Frankenstein. Women characters are not allowed to voice their own stories, instead, many of them die. The main male characters namely, Victor Frankenstein and Robert Walton, are described as highly egotistical, ambitious, and preferring closeness with other males over romantic involvement with women. The story’s female characters, on the other hand, strongly embody the images, perceptions, and dominant expectations regarding what a woman should be like at the time Frankenstein was written.
Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert’s work, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, discusses these socially constructed perceptions and ideas regarding the society’s distinct roles for men and women. The book describes ‘authorship anxiety’ as challenge that aspiring women writers needed to overcome (Cited in Tuchman 214). The anxiety in Shelley’s case originated from her literary upbringing, as her father was a popular writer, and whether or not, it was possible for her to live up to her literary expectations. Other women writers also experienced such anxiety from the societies they lived. This is because they had to penetrate a world that had been defined and was dominated by men. Shelley’s subjugation of women in the Frankenstein can therefore be considered to be a product of a time in which male presence in literature provided stereotyped depictions of women – that way also limiting female writers, including Shelley, in how they depict the female experiences and roles in the society.
Shelley, has also characterized women as disposable, passive, and having a mere utilitarian role. Characters such as Margaret, Agatha, and Justine are represented as nothing more than an action channel for the male characters (Maxwell & Trumpener 52). Most events that happen to them appear to be solely for the purpose of teaching a lesson to the male characters or sparking some form of emotion in them. Justine is rarely vocal and quite passive. She is thrown back and forth, not only by the Frankensteins but also her family, until she is framed for William Frankenstein’s murder. Nonetheless, she maintains her calm, declaring her innocence, "God knows how entirely I am innocent. But I do not pretend that my protestations should acquit me; I rest my innocence on a plain and simple explanation of the facts which have been adduced against me, and I hope the character I have alw...