NOTES- SD

gendered construction of the universe

● In constituting nature as female -- "I pursued nature to her hiding places" (49) -- Victor
Frankenstein participates in a gendered construction of the universe
● patriarchal encoding of the female - NATURE as passive and possessable
● MALE- scientific, technological and exploitative
● The destruction of the female is Implicit in Frankenstein's project:
No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first
enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break
through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its
creator and source, many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father
could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve their’s. Pursuing these
reflections, I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of
time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the
body to corruption.
● By stealing the female's control over reproduction, Frankenstein has eliminated the
female's primary biological function and source of cultural power.
● THIS IS symbolically portrayed in his nightmare following the animation of his creature,
in which his bride-to-be is transformed in his arms into the corpse of his dead mother --
"a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the
flannel" (53).

intellectual activity is divorced from emotional activity- Mellor argues that “It is this separation
of masculine work from the domestic affections that causes Frankenstein's downfall.”

SOCIAL CONTEXT:
Victor Frankenstein's nineteenth-century Genevan society is founded on a rigid division of
sex-roles: the man inhabits the public sphere, the woman is relegated to the private or domestic
sphere.The men in Frankenstein's world all work outside the home
○ as public servants -syndic- Alphonse Frankenstein
○ as scientists - Victor
○ as merchants -Clerval and his father
○ or as explorers -Walton.
The women are confined to the home.
○ Elizabeth is not permitted to travel with Victor and "regretted that she had not the
same opportunities of enlarging her experience and cultivating her
understanding" (151).
○ Inside the home, women are either kept as a kind of pet (Victor "loved to tend" on
Elizabeth "as I should on a favorite animal" [30])
○ or they work as housewives, child-care providers, and nurses - Caroline Beaufort
Frankenstein, Elizabeth Lavenza
○ or servants - Justine Moritz.

● 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. His obsession with his experiment has caused him "to forget those
friends who were so many miles absent, and whom I had not seen for so long a time"
(50).
● Utilitarian approach: Because Frankenstein cannot work and love at the same time, he fails
to feel empathy for the creature he is constructing, callously making him eight feet tall
simply because "the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed" (49).
He then fails to love or feel any parental responsibility.

destruction of many of the women in the novel

 ● Caroline Beaufort dies unnecessarily because she cannot restrain herself from attending her
favorite Elizabeth before she has fully recovered from smallpox. She thus incarnates a
patriarchal ideal of female devotion and self-sacrifice. She is a woman who is devoted to
her father in wealth and in poverty, who nurses him until his death, and then marries her
father's best friend to whom she is equally devoted.
● The division of public man from private woman also means that women cannot function
effectively in the public realm. Despite her innocence of the crime for which she is
accused, Justine Moritz is executed for the murder of William Frankenstein. And
Elizabeth, fully convinced of Justine's innocence, is unable to save her. The defense she
gives of Justine does nothing - "on whom the public indignation was turned with renewed
violence, charging her with the blackest ingratitude" (80).
● Elizabeth Lavenza's plea for mercy for Justine, based on her intuitively correct
knowledge of Justine's character, As Elizabeth exclaims:

how I hate [the] shews and mockeries [of this world]! when one creature is
murdered, another is immediately deprived of life in a slow torturing manner; then
the executioners, their hands yet reeking with the blood of innocence, believe that
they have done a great deed. They call this retribution. Hateful name! when that
word is pronounced, I know greater and more horrid punishments are going to be
inflicted than the gloomiest tyrant has ever invented to satiate his utmost revenge.
(83)
● Elizabeth’s death on her wedding night.: As several critics have noted, the scene of her
death is based on a painting Mary Shelley knew well, Henry Fuseli's famous "The
Nightmare" (Plate VIII, bottom). The corpse of Elizabeth lies in the very attitude in
which Fuseli placed his succubus-ridden woman:

"She was there, lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and her
pale and distorted features half covered by her hair" (193).
Fuseli's woman is an image of female erotic desire, both lusting for and frightened of the incubus
(the night marra, or spirit) that rides upon her, brought to her bed-chamber by the stallion that
leers at her from the foot of her bed. Both the presence of this incubus and the woman's posture
of open sexual acceptance leave Fuseli's intentions in no doubt.

Returning to the body of the murdered Elizabeth, Victor "embraced her with ardour; but the
deathly languor and coldness of the limbs told me, that what I now held in my arms had ceased
to be the Elizabeth whom I had loved and cherished" (193).

One can argue: that invoking this image, Mary Shelley alerts us to Victor's most ardent desires
for his bride when he knows she is dead. Similar to his dream after the creation of the monster.

Significantly, Elizabeth would not have been killed had Victor not sent her into their
wedding-bedroom alone. Both these deaths are of course directly attributable to Victor
Frankenstein's egotistical concern for his own suffering (the creature will attack only him) and
his own reputation (people would think him mad if he told them his own monster had killed his
brother).

WHY IS UNINHIBITED FEMALE SEXUALITY A THREAT?

Uninhibited female sexual experience threatens the foundation of patriarchal power.
Rubin, in her seminal essay The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex
(1975), explores how kinship systems under patriarchy regulate female sexuality to
maintain patrilineal inheritance. She argues that women are exchanged as commodities
between men in a system where controlling women's sexual behavior is essential to ensure
legitimate heirs and preserve male property and power. Uninhibited female sexual agency
disrupts this control, threatening the economic and social order built on patrilineal
descent.

● KILLING OF THE FEMALE EVE:

I was now about to form another being, of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant;
she might became ten thousand times more malignant than her mate, and delight, for
its own sake, in murder and wretchedness. He had sworn to quit the neighborhood of
man, and hide himself in deserts; but she had not; and she, who in all probability was
to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact
made before her creation. They might even hate each other; the creature who already
lived loathed his own deformity, and might he not conceive a greater abhorrence for
it when it came before his eyes in the female form? She also might turn with disgust
from him to the superior beauty of man; she might quit him, and he be again alone,
exasperated by the fresh provocation of being deserted by one of his own species.

Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one
of the first results of those sympathies for which the dæmon thirsted would be
children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make
the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror.
Had I a right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations?
. . . I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose
selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price perhaps of the
existence of the whole human race. (163)
● Frankenstein imagines a female "ten thousand times" more evil than her mate

. ● 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, 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

. ● those uninhibited female desires might be sadistic. He fears that she will prefer to mate
with ordinary males. Implicit here is Frankenstein's horror that, given the gigantic strength of
this female, she would have the power to seize and even rape the male she might choose.
OVERTURN OF MALE -FEMALE HIERARCHY GIVEN HER SUPERIOR STRENGTH.
● Third, he fears that his female creature will be more ugly than his male creature, so much
so that even the male will turn from her in disgust.
● And finally, he is afraid of her reproductive powers, her capacity to generate an entire
race of similar creatures.
● What Victor Frankenstein truly fears is uninhibited female sexuality as such. A woman
who is sexually liberated, free to choose her own life, her own sexual partner (by force,
if necessary), and to propagate at will can appear only monstrously ugly to Victor
Frankenstein, for she defies that sexist aesthetic that insists that women “little pets” and
“favorite animals” modest, passive, and sexually pleasing -- but available only to their
lawful husbands.
● Victor Frankenstein violently reasserts a male control over the female body, 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"
(164). The morning after, when he returns to the scene, "the remains of the
half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I
almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being" (167). However
he has rationalized his decision to murder the female creature,
Frankenstein's "passion" is here revealed as a fusion of fear, lust, and hostility, a
 desire to control and even destroy female sexuality.

De Lacey family - an alternative:

● Felix willingly sacrifices his own welfare to ensure that justice is done to the Turkish
merchant.
● In the impoverished De Lacey household, all work is shared equally in an atmosphere of
rational companionship, mutual concern, and love.
● As their symbolic names suggest, Felix embodies happiness, Agatha goodness. They are
then joined by Safie (sophia or wisdom).
● Agatha and Felix perform towards their father "every little office of affection and duty
with gentleness; and he rewarded them by his benevolent smiles" (106).
● They willingly starve themselves so that their father may eat.
● Safie's arrival particularly delighted Felix but also "diffused gladness through the
cottage, dispelling their sorrow as the sun dissipates the morning mists" (112).

ALTERNATIVE - CLERVAL, ERNEST

● Mary Shelley's novel - Those characters capable of deeply feeling the beauties of nature are rewarded
with physical and mental health.
○ CLERVAL: In Clerval's company Victor becomes again "the same happy
creature who, a few years ago, loving and beloved by all, had no sorrow or care.
When happy, inanimate nature had the power of bestowing on me the most
delightful sensations. A serene sky and verdant fields filled me with ecstacy" (65).
Clerval's relationship to nature - "loved with ardour . . . the scenery of external
nature" (154). His death annihilates the possibility that Victor Frankenstein
might regain a positive relationship with nature.

Mary Shelley envisions nature as a sacred life-force in which human beings ought to
 participate in conscious harmony. of all the members of Frankenstein's family, only Ernest
survives. Elizabeth Lavenza gives voice to this ideal in her choice of profession for Ernest
Frankenstein:

I . . . proposed that he should be a farmer . . . A farmer's is a very healthy happy

life; and the least hurtful, or rather the most beneficial profession of any. My uncle
[wanted him] educated as an advocate . . . but . . . it is certainly more creditable to
cultivate the earth for the sustenance of man, than to be the confidant, and
sometimes the accomplice, of his vices. (59)
How is Frankenstein a Romantic Novel?

1) IN TERMS OF THEMES: Like many other Romantic artists, Shelley focuses on the CERTAIN
REPEATED THEMES:
● Lockean psychology; young Victor is a tabula rasa whose character is formed by circumstantial
influences. The son of loving, protective parents, the companion of affectionate friends,
Frankenstein soon finds the harmony of his childhood violated by what he calls a "predilection" for
natural philosophy. Yet Frankenstein locates the origin of this inclination not in his innate
disposition but in a single childhood accident-the chance discovery of a volume of Cornelius
Agrippa's occult speculations. The "fatal impulse" this volume sparks is then kindled into
passionate enthusiasm by other accidents: Victor's father neglects to explain Agrippa's
obsolescence, a discussion provoked by a bolt of lightning explodes Victor's belief in the occult,
and "some accident" prevents Frankenstein from attending lectures on natural philosophy. Left
with a craving for knowledge but no reliable guide to direct it, he is able to keep his curiosity
within bounds only through the "mutual love”.
● PROMETHIAN DESIRE: Appropriately enough: as a young man, to see a tree struck by lightning
had been sufficient to change "the current" of Frankenstein's ideas (p. 40), but by the novel's
concluding section Frankenstein has, significantly, "departed from land" (p. 206) on his fanatical
quest for the monster's destruction. Once determined, no earthly voices can deter him from his
mind's resolution. He is, in other words, a Prometheus who, setting out to free himself from
 enslavement to the mind's ideas, becomes bound to the rock of his own mind's ideas. WALTON
AND FRANKENSTEIN’S QUEST IS THE SAME BECAUCE: A might actually be Ζ (that
instead of real bounds, life and death might be only "ideal bounds," as Frankenstein puts it [p. 54],
or that the Pole might actually be delight rather than desolation, as Walton thinks), then the mind
can act upon that notion and try to find out. It can leave the realm of traditional beliefs and shared
opinion and try to enter the realm of certain knowledge.

● ENLIGHTENMENT AS A KNOWLEDGE OF ONE’S UNFREEDOM -: The narrative of his

attempt to deal with the monster chronicles the erosion of the mind's grounds for knowing things.
First, Frankenstein flees from a horrible sensory experience; but the monster's eloquent argument
creates doubt, suggesting to him that a horrible appearance may not indicate a horrible essential
nature. Then in turn Frankenstein realizes that eloquent argument may not indicate an honest
nature. Further, he comes to realize that what a thing is or seems to be at the present moment may
not indicate what it will become in the future: Frankenstein himself experiences an abrupt and
unexpected inversion of behavior from controlled purposefulness to helpless terror at the moment
the monster first opens its eyes; and the monster insists .
● HIS LAST LINES: NO MORAL TALE "' Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition, even
if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet
why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed"' (p. 206).

2) ROLE OF NATURE:

● nature is not the passive, inert, or "dead" matter that Frankenstein imagines. nature both
resists and revenges herself upon his attempts.
● During his research, nature denies to Victor Frankenstein both mental and physical health:
"my enthusiasm was checked by my anxiety, and I appeared rather like one doomed by
slavery to toil in the mines, or any other unwholesome trade, than an artist occupied by
his favourite employment. Every night I was oppressed by a slow fever, and I became
nervous to a most painful degree" (51). Having abandoned any principles of aesthetics
 (by making his creature gigantic), he doesn’t get to feel like an artist.
● When his experiment is completed, Victor has a fit that renders him "lifeless" for "a long,
long time" and that marks the onset of a "nervous fever" that confines him for many
months (57). Victor continues to be tormented by anxiety attacks, bouts of delirium,
periods of distraction, and madness.
● As soon as he decides to blaspheme against nature a second time, by creating a female
human being, nature again punishes him: "the eternal twinkling of the stars weighed upon
me, and . . . I listened to every blast of wind, as if it were a dull ugly siroc on its way to
consume me" (145). His mental illness returns: "Every thought that was devoted to it was
an extreme anguish, and every word that I spoke in allusion to it caused my lips to quiver
and my heart to palpitate" (156); "my spirits became unequal; I grew restless and
nervous" (162).
● Moreover, nature pursues Victor Frankenstein with the very electricity he has stolen.
Lightning, thunder, and rain rage around him. The November night on which he steals the
"spark of being" [1.4.1] from nature is dreary, dismal, and wet: "the rain . . . poured from
a black and comfortless sky" (54). He next glimpses his creature during a flash of
lightning as a violent storm plays over his head at Plainpalais (71).

● the almighty Alps, and in particular Mont Blanc, are represented in this novel as female.
● Setting sail from the Orkney island where he has destroyed his female
creature in order to throw her mangled remains into the sea, Frankenstein wakes to find his
skiff threatened by a fierce wind and high waves which portend his own death: "I might be
driven into the wide Atlantic, and feel all the tortures of starvation, or be swallowed up in the
immeasurable waters that roared and buffeted around me. I . . . felt the torment of a burning
thirst; . . . I looked upon the sea, it was to be my grave" (169). ● Frankenstein ends his life
and his pursuit of the monster he has made in the arctic regions, surrounded by the aurora
borealis, the electromagnetic field of the North Pole. The atmospheric effects of the novel
manifest the power of nature to punish those who transgress her boundaries. The elemental
forces that Victor has released pursue him to his hiding places, raging round him like
 avenging Furies.
● Finally, nature prevents Frankenstein from constructing a normal human being. His unnatural
method of reproduction produces an unnatural being.
● His bride is killed on his wedding night, cutting off his chance to engender his own children. ●
Frankenstein's obsession with destroying his creature finally exposes him to such mental and physical
fatigue that he dies at the age of twenty-five.

3) IN TERMS OF NARRATIVE STRUCTURE:

a) REJECTS omniscient narrator in favor of what approaches a series of interlocked dramatic
monologues: Walton's in the letters to his sister and his journal, Frankenstein's to Walton,
and the monster's to Frankenstein-might be described as a box within a box within a box or
as a series of concentric circles- . That structure-which employs three separate internal
narrations, each of the narrators confronts events from a particular vantage point and a
limited perspective; each tries to force the listener into participation in his vision
● immediate , SUBJECTIVE experience is primary and certain, whereas the analytic reflection that
follows is secondary - "Tintern Abbey- The meaning of the poem is in all that has accrued since the
original vision, in the gain in perception. But the gain is rather in the intensity of understanding
than in what is understood. . . .
● The monster's explanation does not clear up the mystery of his actions: FAR FROM settling any
moral questions, the monster's narrative complicates Frankenstein's own moral dilemma as well as
our task as readers
● stress the reader's participation in Romantic poetry; the same participation is necessary in
Frankenstein
● The effect created by the tension between sympathy and judgment. What is the creature is lying,
that conflict is never resoved by the end of the novel:
● Creature’s unverified claims: It says it helped some cottagers and that it made unsuccessful
attempts to be benevolentoward other human beings. It says that its horrible appearance is not the
outward manifestation of a horrible inner nature and a fiendish plan but merely a function of man's
 peculiarly human means of sensing: "the human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union"
(p. 145)
● like Blake's Tyger, Wordsworth's Idiot Boy, Coleridge's Mariner
● only passion, power, strength of will and intellect - both Frankenstein and the monster possess
these virtues, and both do, with which character are we to sympathize? It cannot be both, since to
sympathize with Frankenstein is to disbelieve, as he does, the sincerity of the monster's promise to
exile himself with a newly-made bride far from human society, while to have sympathy for the
monster is to brand Frankenstein heartless and cruel for his skeptical treatment of him
“I created a rational creature and was bound towards him to assure, as far as was in my power, his
happiness and well-being. This was my duty, but there was another still paramount to that. My duties
towards the beings of my own species had greater claims to my attention because they included a greater
proportion of happiness or misery." (pp. 205-206)

● for all practical purposes Frankenstein has failed his second duty as well as his first: once the
monster has eliminated all of the people Frankenstein held dear he is no longer a threat to "beings
of [Frankenstein's] own species." The monster chooses from the very beginning to wreak revenge
on his creator, not humankind at large. Frankenstein's real duty was to William and Clerval and
Elizabeth, not to his "species" in general. Moreover, it is astonishing that Frankenstein finds his
past conduct
● Mary Shelley presents Frankenstein's monster as an unknown quantity. Significantly, it has no
name; it is called conflicting things in the course of the novel. Arguing with Frankenstein, the
monster calls itself simply a "creature"; according to its tale, cottagers it once aided called it a
"good spirit." Frankenstein himself calls it, among other things, "Abhorred monster! fiend that thou
art!
● sIt insists to Frankenstein, "I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy,
and I shall again be virtuous" (p. 100); or, "My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I
abhor; and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal" (p. 147).