Velazquez 1

Laura Velazquez

Kim Freeman

CW R1A

20 September 2017

A Woman’s Influence in Frankenstein

The struggle of equality, fight against gender role stereotypes, and misogyny are no

strange topic to society today. Woman are a marginalized group with a history of different trials

and tribulations. As with any group resisting the “norm” there is strength in numbers, therefore

the more women conscious of this effort, the stronger the fight for equality will continue to grow.

As a prehistoric time period to the Women’s Suffrage Movement in 1818, a specific female

author by the name of Mary Shelley published a novel in London by the name of “Frankenstein”

was one of the few women conscious of this effort during her time. Within the novel, the female

author reflects her own perspective of society’s expectation of women at the time compared to

her own. Building off a story of a man determined to follow his dreams as a sailor to uncharted

lands, the real story begins when he encounters a male scientist by the name of Victor

Frankenstein. As he shares his tail of despair, Victor notes how his creation of artificial life

results in a tragic domino effect. Due to the influence of the woman in his own life, Victor is

inspired to also harness the same power women do and attempts to obliviously fill the unnatural

roll of creating new life in a crave of power, but fails miserably. In writing this story, Mary

Shelley wished to highlight the fact that men underestimate the power of woman until they are

faced with the hardships women face.

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Posing as an influential female figure in Victor’s life, the introduction and conclusion of

Elizabeth Lavenza in his life plays a catalyst to the unnatural role he unknowingly tries to fill.

Victor takes body parts from grave sights in order to create this new being. After going through

the long journey of awaiting the “birth” of the creature, Victor is a way lives through a

metaphorical pregnancy of the child. Of course, he cannot fully experience the physical toll as a

pregnant women would, which is why he underestimates the power of what he is actually doing.

He does not take into account at this time that this new life will have a place in society and will

behave like a child. When he finally creates the creature, he completely rejects it’s physical being

that he crafted. In rage of rejection, the monster murders members of his family. Now, having

rejected his “child”, Victor has to ironically rely on a woman for emotional support—the strength

that Elizabeth (his cousin who he has always fancied) which she embodies due to the pain she

endured as a child. When Victor’s mother passed away, Elizabeth reacted the opposite of Victor

and decided to “..renew the spirit of cheerfulness in [their] little society..her mind had acquired

new firmness and vigour. She determined to fulfill her duties with the greatest exactness…duty

of rendering her uncle and cousins happy” and of this drive, one can see how Victor would

retreat back to her strong arms after years and years of guilt and depression eating at him. When

he is grieving because he cannot contain the life he was not in the ethical boundaries to create,

she is strongly rooted. When he finally decides to marry her, he did not expect his marriage to

take on such a turning point in the story. After a failed attempt to redeem himself with the

creature face to face, Victor destroys the very thing that the creature pleads for--a female creature

to keep the creature company. Driven by revenge, the creature vows to return the favor, and does

exactly that when he murders Elizabeth on their wedding night. In devastation Victor recalls how
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“Tears had streamed from [his] eyes. The rain had ceased for a moment...Nothing is so painful to

the human mind as a great and sudden change...A fiend had snatched from me any hope of future

happiness: no creature has ever been so miserable as I was..” now seeming to be comparing

himself to the creature, completely dismissing the fact that the creature had believed in one shot

at future happiness that Victor had just destroyed (Shelley 98). One can see that Victor

underestimated what it would take to create life as a mother would, but fails to do so trying to

reach outside of his biological capability.

After having created a life of which he rejects and has left to lead a miserable one, Victor

agrees to create new life once again, but chooses the fate of the new life (death) further showing

the role of a woman when faced to take responsibility for her child or to abort the child. When

Victor runs into the creature after having attempted to find solitude in the mountains, and after

much resistance and patience, he agrees to make peace with the creature by giving him a chance

at love which Victor empathizes with due to his own experiences of losing love. The creature had

developed enough consciousness to understand that his own anger was driven by Victor’s

rejection of the creature which is the first womanly role he attempted to take. He also has learned

to communicate impressively enough that he creates an atmosphere of sympathy between the

two men as he explains his experiences and how in so many unfortunate situations, people have

looked upon him as a “hideous monster!”, “ugly wretch!”, and “ogre” (Shelley 66). The creature

then goes on to speak of his guilt, Victor’s duty to take responsibility just as a mother should for

a child-- a role he was obviously not prepared to take on in his strive to defy nature. The creation

now wishes to give Victor another chance to allow him to experience something that will reverse

the very thing about him that makes him so different from anyone else: the ability to be loved.
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He also wishes to find solitude in another just as Victor will when he claims creating a female

mate will “only benefit [to] soften [his] heart, and render [him] harmless” (Shelley 68). When

Victor agrees to create but then destroys a female version of the creature, it is a clear addition to

the fact that he tries to fulfill the role of aborting a child, ignoring the consequences of his

actions. Because he is a man and cannot take on that role due to the lack of emotional attachment

he cannot fulfill the motherly role to take on the child as his own. He would rather assume that

the monster may add more destruction and despair into the world and avoid trying to change that

by influencing morals and values within the female creature. In attempting to responsibility for

the first child he brings into the world by creating a companion for him, Victor also fails taking

on an unnatural role when he aborts the child rather choosing to take responsibility and failing

once again.

Within the adolescent state of equality among the sexes in the world at this time of the

19th century when the novel was published and the 18th century where the novel takes place,

“Frankenstein” is a clear reflection of the prejudice that women faced at the time (Hughes par 1).

As fortunate as Mary Shelley was to be educated, the young author channelled her own

ideologies of feminism through the perspective of a man telling another man a story of his

misfortune while attempting to fill the unnatural role that women bare, and failing. In Victor’s

failure to realize that creating life is an underrated role women have the privilege to bare, we see

how underrated and devalued women in society really were/are. By the end of the novel, we see

how the original man on the voyage by the name of Walton decides not to go on the voyage in

response to Victor’s story and miserable death. As a testimony of a man who attempted to fill

those shoes, but realizes he cannot, “Frankenstein” can pose as a warning to other men to not
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underestimate all that women suffer through. No man can fill the shoes of a woman and the

natural order of what our bodies are capable of.