In Literary Women: The Great Writers (New York: Doubleday, 1976; rpt. Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 90-98; reprinted in The Endurance of "Frankenstein": Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel, ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoeflmacher (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Univ. of California Press, 1979), pp. 77-87
MAIN POINTS IN ELLEN MOERS ESSAY
On the Gothic
1. Gothic is a genre that produces physiological reactions - blood freezing, hair standing up, nerves tingling, etc. - thereby physically effecting the body. This is in opposition to the effect of tragedy, which touches the soul and help purge it through pity and catharsis.
2. Gothic helped people of the 18th century to deal with the slow dissappearance of religious fear. This created an anxiety for the modern. The extreme sensations of fear and horror produced by the Gothic acted as a therapy in dealing with this anxiety
3. The Female Gothic - as best exemplified in the works of Ann Radcliffe - "a novel in which the central figure is a young woman who is simultaneously persecuted victim and courageous heroine."
4. Frankenstein written by a woman, but women characters extremely unimportant - How do we make sense of this
5. We need to see that Frankenstein is actually about a very feminine issue - the issue of Birth
6. Ellen Moers argues that Frankenstein is a Birth Myth.
7. Reasons she gives for it being a Birth Myth 1. Mary Shelly is a mother 2. She had a famous/notorious mother
8. Most important reason - "Frankenstein, the scientist, runs away and abandons the newborn monster, who is and remains nameless. Here, I think, is where Mary Shelley's book is most interesting, most powerful, and most feminine: in the motif of revulsion against newborn life, and the drama of guilt, dread, and flight surrounding birth and its consequences. Most of the novel, roughly two of its three volumes, can be said to deal with the retribution visited upon monster and creator for deficient infant care. Frankenstein seems to be distinctly a woman's myth making on the subject of birth precisely because its emphasis is not upon what precedes birth, not upon birth itself, but upon what follows birth: the trauma of the afterbirth."
9. Why this problematic relationship with birth? Such a relationship of fear and anxiety about the newborn is common to women - Fear and guilt, depression and anxiety are commonplace reactions to the birth of a baby, and well within the normal range of experience.
10. BUT culture and literature only shows the happy maternal reactions: the ecstasy, the sense of fulfillment, and the rush of nourishing love which sweep over the new mother when she first holds her baby in her arms.
11. Mary Shelley had a problematic relationship with birth - Before she wrote Frankenstein her own daughter had died days after birth. Her lover's wife also was pregnant then. Her own mother died giving birth to Mary Shelly. She was pregnant with another child while writing. She was an unwed mother. She did not have financial and social security. All of this must have added to her anxiety about birth. This is what comes through in the novel
The importance of Soer's critique is that she for the first time introduced the gender perspective into the reading of Frankenstein
Till then the story of the creation of the monster had been read in terms of overreaching and also in terms of the limits of science. However, Soers' reading brought a whole new dimensIon to the analysis of Frankenstein.
READ ESSAY HERE
2. ANOTHER GOOD ESSAY
Usurping the Female, Anne K. Mellor
Chapter 6 of Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Methuen, 1988), pp. 115-26
- Victor Frankenstein participates in a gendered construction of the universe whose negative ramifications are everywhere apparent in the novel.
- Mary Shelley, doubtless inspired by her mother's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, specifically portrays the consequences of a social construction of gender which values men over women.
- As a consequence of this sexual division of labor, masculine work is segregated from the domestic realm. Hence intellectual activity is divorced from emotional activity. Victor Frankenstein cannot do scientific research and think lovingly of Elizabeth and his family at the same time.
- Mary Shelley underlines the mutual deprivation inherent in a family and social structure based on rigid and hierarchical gender-divisions by portraying an alternative social organization in the novel: the De Lacey family.
- Horrified by this image of uninhibited female sexuality, Victor Frankenstein violently reasserts a male control over the female body, penetrating and mutilating the female creature at his feet in an image which suggests a violent rape: "trembling with passion, [I] tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged"
- And more..
READ ESSAY HERE
3. Mark Rubenstein's "'My Accursed Origin': The Search for the Mother in Frankenstein,"
Mark Rubenstein mainly argues that Frankenstein is actually about Mary Shelley's search for a mother. Rubenstein establishes this by interpreting the Creature's digression from his main narrative to refer to Safie's mother as a proof of Shelley's attempt to insert her own mother into the narrative.
Precisely like the patient in psychoanalysis whose flow of associations is suddenly disturbed by a self-conscious awareness of the listening analyst, the monster dramatically turns to the silent {169} Frankenstein who, until that moment, has seemed to merge passively with the reader. Referring to some letters which Safie had written to her fiancé, the monster says, "I have copies of these letters. . . . Before I depart I will give them to you; they will prove the truth of my tale". Since Safie's adventures could not have the remotest interest for Frankenstein, the monster's seizing upon her letters to prove the authenticity of his story strikes us as peculiar and unnecessary.
What is developing beneath the surface is made clear in the very next paragraph which takes us to the emotional, not to say the geographic, center of the novel. We read:
Safie related that her mother was a Christian Arab, seized and made a slave by the Turks; recommended by her beauty, she had won the heart of the father of Safie, who married her. The young girl spoke in high and enthusiastic terms of her mother, who, born in freedom spurned the bondage to which she was now reduced. She instructed her daughter in the tenets of her religion and taught her to aspire to higher powers of intellect, and an independence of spirit forbidden to the female followers of Mahomet. This lady died; but her lessons were indelibly impressed on the mind of Safie. . . .This is surely a cartoon, distorted but recognizable, of the author's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. Safie's mother, though dead, has "taught her to aspire to higher powers of intellect and independence of spirit forbidden the female." She is, for all practical purposes, the author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Women."
Read Mark Rubenstein's essay HERE
Other feminist critics
4. From Emile to Frankenstein: The Education of Monsters, Alan Richardson
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) presents an especially complex and elaborate version of the critique of female education implicit in the female Gothic as instituted by Radcliffe and at once parodied and extended by Austen.
READ ESSAY HERE
5. Horror's Twin: Mary Shelley's Monstrous Eve, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
Chapter 7 of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), 213-47
We shall argue here that the first alternative is the one Mary Shelley chooses in Frankenstein: to take the male culture myth of Paradise Lost at its full value -- on its own terms, including all the analogies and parallels it implies -- and rewrite it so as to clarify its meaning.
READ ESSAY HERE
6. "My Hideous Progeny: The Lady and the Monster", Mary Poovey
Although in an important sense, objectifying Frankenstein's imagination in the symbolic form of the monster delimits the range of connotations the imagination can have (it eliminates, for example, the possibilities of transcendent power or beneficence), this narrative strategy allows Shelley to express her ambivalence toward the creative act because a symbol is able to accommodate different, even contradictory, meanings.
READ ESSAY HERE
7. "They Will Prove the Truth of My Tale": Safie's Letters as the Feminist Core of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Joyce Zonana ( CAN USE THIS FOR CHARACTER SKETCH ON SAFIE TOO)
In her deployment of the harem inmate as the type of a particular form of sensual/sexual oppression, Wollstonecraft extends and solidifies what was already a well-established figure in Enlightenment meditations on despotism, the status of women, and the nature of "rational" society. And in her creation of Safie as a central figure within her own text, Mary Shelley gives imaginative life to her mother's philosophical critique. Safie, a woman who narrowly escapes being "immured" in a harem under her father's "Mahometan" law, is a woman escaped from patriarchy as it had been specifically defined and figured in the Vindication. Safie is a woman who insists on her own possession of a soul, rejecting "puerile amusements" and devoting herself to a "noble emulation for virtue." Safie's echoing of Mary Wollstonecraft's ideas (and words) identifies her, not as Mary Wollstonecraft herself, but as an exemplar of a woman claiming her rights as a rational being. The story inscribed in her letters, and made plain through the monster's account of them, is a story about individuals who insist on their status as souls, as rational beings worthy of full participation as free adults in an egalitarian, non-hierarchical social world.
READ ESSAY HERE
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