Feminism in Frankenstein

Name:- Parmar Milankumar.L

Batch year:- 2014-15

Class:- M.A. Semester 2

Enrollment no.:- 14101026

Course name:- Romantic Literature

Assignment topic:- Feminism in Frankenstein 

submitted:-    Department of English

                        M K Bhavnagar uni

Index

I.                   Introduction of feminism

II.                 Introduction of the author

III.              Feminism in Frankenstein

IV.              Social condition of 19thcentury

V.                 Gender and sex

VI.              Females in Frankenstein

VII.            Psychological reading

VIII.         Feminist critic’s comments

IX.               Conclusion

 Introduction to feminism:- 

Before we discuss the feminist approach in Merry Shelly’s Frankenstein, first I would like to provide some information about Feminism.

What is Feminism?

Feminism can be defined as political, cultural, pedagogic and theoretical response to the patriarchal structure of power that seeks to subordinate women’s lives, interest, bodies and sexualities. It argues that these structures create and enforce all relationship between men and women.  The feminist took various issues for the gender debate science, politics, economics, culture, and epistemology. In the literary arts the feminist critics exposed the patriarchal ideology that informed the construction of the ‘English Literary’ in the first place, and which made male–centered writing possible. During the 1970s feminist theory emerged with works such as

·        Kate Millet’s ‘Sexual Politics’

·        Shulamith Firestone’s ‘The Dialectic of sex’

·        Simon de Beauvoir’s ‘second sex’  “women are not born but  made” "

              

              Feminism is a collection of movements and ideologies that share a common goal: to define, establish, and achieve equal political, economic, cultural, personal, and social rights for women. This includes seeking to establish equal opportunities for women in education and employment. A feminist generally self-defines as advocating for or supporting the rights and equality of women (Wikipedia)

           All women or men writer who wrote about the problems of the women in the society can be termed as feminist writer in. In broader sense feminism not only applies to women but also to the other males and other marginalized group of society. Feminists have worked to protect women and girls from domestic violence, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. Feminists have also advocated for workplace rights, including receiving the right to paid work, paid maternity leave, and eradicating all forms of discrimination against women.

Gynocriticism:-   is the historical study of women writers as a distinct literary tradition. Elaine Showalter coined this term in her essay "Toward a Feminist Poetics."  It refers to a criticism that constructs

"a female framework for the analysis of women's literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt male models and theories".

 The work of gynocriticism has been criticized by recent feminists for being essentialist, following too closely along the lines of Sigmund Freud and New Criticism, and leaving out lesbians and women of color.

Gynocriticism is the study of feminist literature written by female writers inclusive of the interrogation of female authorship, images, the feminine experience and ideology, and the history and development of the female literary tradition During the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds respectively, Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir began to review and evaluate the female image and sexism in the works of male writers. During the nineteen sixties the feminist movement saw a reaction and opposition to the male oriented discourse of previous years. Most thoroughly developed during the late seventies and early eighties, gynocriticism was a result of the interrogative critiques utilized in post-structuralism and psychoanalysis.

Introduction of the author of the novel :-

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on 30 August 1797, was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist. She was best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet P.B. Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin, and her mother was also the philosopher. She was died on 1 February 1851.

In her 1831 introduction to the novel Shelley writes of her husband’s anxiety that she should prove herself worthy of parentage- her parents being of literary fame. Whilst holiday with her future husband and poet Lord Byron in Geneva in 1816, Byron decided they should write a ghost story. Motivated by this conversation between Byron and Shelley, and also by the scientific works of scientists such as Galvani, Erasmus, Darwinan  Humphrey, marry begun Frankenstein. All ideas Shelley had for the novel came from her acquaintances or from her studies, either way, her influence were predominantly male and greatly affected the outcome of the novel. One would perhaps assume a female author would write to try to advance the position of women in era where they virtually unheard of in a field such as science –the subject of the novel

Works of Marry Shelley

Ø  History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817)

Ø  Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)

Ø  Mathilda (1819)

Ø  Valperga; or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (1823)

Ø  Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824)

Ø  The Last Man (1826)

Ø  The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830)

Ø  Lodore (1835)

Ø  Falkner (1837)

Ø  The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1839)

Feminism in Frankenstein:-   In Marry Shelley’s Frankenstein she had given more important to male characters but they just suffer from their power and knowledge, whereas to the women character she portrayed them as passive, disposable and serving, and women are useful function. This may have been caused by the time period in which she wrote: one in which females considered inferior to males. Female characters like Savile, Elizabeth, Margaret, Agatha and even Lady Monster providing nothing but a channel of action to the male characters in the novel. Events and actions happened to them, usually for the sake of teaching a male character a lesion or igniting an emotion within him. Each of the women has serves some specific role in the novel.

    

Condition of women in Nineteenth century:-

While reading Frankenstein one can understand the patriarchal nineteenth century. It was social norm where men are part of public sector and women for domestic. Deformity of Monster expresses obstacles in a culture, in which feminine self-expression is very much difficult. Shelley, writing in the first half of the 19^th century, was in a period in which a women “was conditioned to think she needed a man’s help”(one critic). Men such as Victor Frankenstein and Walton endeavor on quest in search of knowledge, happiness, personal fulfillment and experience. Men take on the role of scientist, explorer and merchant whereas women were confined to the house and kept outside of the male public sector, where the intellectual activities was abundant, in that time women were considered weak, sexless, and treated as material things.

“I looked upon Elizabeth as mine - mine to protect, love and cherish. All praises bestowed on her I received as made to a possession of my own” (21) -Victor Frankenstein

 Even in our country like India, at the present time women’s condition is no better than this.  

Gender and Sex:-  

 Gender and sex are different things from each other. Gender is what is based on the biological difference, and it is created by nature we have no control over it. Whereas the sex is men made thing and we created the difference among male and female, among girl and boy. And in this term women has been suffering from long time.

           Shelley has presented fragmented psyche of men and their external action is the subject of behavioral psychology. She has presented intangible character especially male characters, and it is what she thought about/ or has the image of male in her mind, she has presented in the novel.

“I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed; when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters, I beheld the wretch-the miserable monster whom I had created.”

           The creation of the Monster by Victor Frankenstein is very badly reflected the ugliness his mind, we can say that it is the ugliness of victors mind that comes to physical existence through the creation of Monster, what it called in scientific language the anima personality. But both either Victor or the Monster in reality created by Marry Shelley, and it is her thinking, her perspective, her point of view, how she looks at the men, as ugly, wicked, hostile, vicious. It may be said that it is the reflection of her society that she has presented in her novel. As R.J. Rees says ”literature is the mirror of the society”.

           Though the novel is written by women author she could not give enough justice to female characters in her novel because of the patriarchal structure of the society and even of language. Even she herself could not keep aloof from this structure. That’s why she had to encoded women’s voice within the structure of it. Though written by woman novelist but there is no change in the language and even in the presentation

Female characters in the novel:-

There are three main female characters in the novel they are Elizabeth, Savile and Justine. The female characters are very weak in this novel, especially Elizabeth, Victor’s cousin/fiancé. She is portrayed as the perfect women especially after the death of Victor’s mother. She takes the place of the mother figure in the household. But just like all female characters in the story, her character has little substance. Victor’s character is described in detail, as is that of the Monster, and Henry Clerval. When Henry get kill, sympathy is really felt towards Victor, because he has just lost his lifetime friend. When Elizabeth is murdered, the reader finds it hard to connect with what Frankenstein is feeling. Elizabeth the main female character and Justine and Caroline are there to reflect the male characters. Professor Smith states in her essay that “women function not in their own right but rather as signals of and channels for men’s relations with other men.” This is especially clear when the Monster kills Elizabeth on their wedding night. The Monster is upset with Victor, so instead of hurting him, he kills his wife. Elizabeth is used as sort of ruler to measure the relationship between Victor and Monster.

Psychological level:- The structure of the novel is very extra ordinary, that present the mind of the Marry Shelley or rather woman, and that makes a novel psychological. Within the novel we can read/ study the mind of the characters like Victor, Monster and Walton and in other way we also can read the psychology of woman author, what kind of mental condition she has that enforced her to write such work/ descriptions. In other way she had taken revenge against the male dominant society by portraying them physically defect and mentally wicked. Dreams allow something to speak which is not normally present in the patriarchal course of things. Such a bringing to the surface of a troubling otherness, sometimes explicitly connected to the unconscious, has been described as an effect of women's writing.

The novel is directed towards Savile (Walton’s sister) a woman, who is both inside and outside of the narrative structure to whom victor is telling the story of his experience. The structure of the novel allows us to read the mind of three male characters. As the story starts with Robert Walton, there after forward by Victor Frankenstein who tells half of the story, and his narrative disrupted by Monster. So reader can get chance and even the role of the female in their life. We get three stories by three different narrator and that help us to study three male characters and importance of women in their life. And through the whole structure of the novel we read the mind of Marry Shelley. In adopting a male voice, the woman writer is given the opportunity to intervene from within, to become an alien presence that undermines the stability of the male voice. Three narrators of the novel, Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and the monster, each of these men is an image of the others all are wandering creatures who are in some way deviant. Walton’s narrative was interrupted by an accidental entry of Victor whose story is insufficient since it is broken by faints, fevers, dreams, inexplicable silences that dislocate narrative sequence. Monster displaces Victor’s narrative in the middle of the novel. The three narratives are incomplete without each other. None of them is the centre of the novel. Doubling and dislocation of the identity of man, that changing the shape of man can only result in the creation of monstrosity.

Some feminist critics view on Frankenstein:

Ellen Moers:-  

“Frankenstein’s most important source is not Faustus but rather Mary Shelley’s experience as a mother and a very particular kind of mother. Out of Shelley’s experience as a mother, Moers argues, comes a “a myth of genuine originality” and one that focuses less upon “birth” than upon the “after-birth”, specifically Frankenstein’s abandonment of the Creature.

As Moers reads it, it is “a horror story of maternity” (220).

Ø  Victor > lab > Creature

     parallels

Ø  Shelley > journals (books and babies) > Frankenstein

As Moers reads the novel, Shelley’s biography provides all of the material that makes up the Gothic power of the novel; she details the way in which life forces (love-making, pregnancies, births, and marriages) and death forces ( stillborn, miscarriages, suicides, and sexual betrayal) are entwined in Mary Shelley’s lived experience as a woman).

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar:-

In the madwomen in the attic, they argue that nineteenth century women writers, socialized to act like good domestic women, manifest rage and anger when they do pick up pen to write. This they argue, results in women writing where we find counter-figures to the ideal feminine figure: Marry Shelley’s figure.   In The Madwoman in the Attic, they argue that nineteenth-century women writers, socialized to act like good “domestic” women, manifest rage and anger when they do pick up the pen to write. This, they argue, results in women’s writing where we find counter-figures to the ideal feminine figure: Mary Shelley’s Creature.

“For her developing sense of herself as a literary creature and/or creator seems to have been inseparable from her emerging self-definition as daughter, mistress, wife, and mother. Thus she cast her birth myth – her myth of origins – in precisely those cosmogenic terms to which her parents, her husband, and indeed her whole literary culture continually alluded: the terms of Paradise Lost (228).

Conclusion:-

Let me quote from Gayatri Spivaks’ “Three women’s text and critic of Imperialism” to conclude my point

“The task of the post-colonial writer, the descendant of the colonial female subject that history did in fact produce, cannot be restrained within the specular master-slave enclosure so powerfully staged in Frankenstein but must represent “the post-colonial performance of the construction of the constitutional subject of the new nation” (269).