Frankenstein: male-centric ego-trip or complex feminist criticism?

Gothic, a sub-genre of Romantic literature and the base genre that modern horror emerges from, has always thrived on the transgressive. I’ve written about this in issue 2, but it often relies on crossing boundaries of social convention and political ideas for centuries. It delights in the transgressive, the supernatural, and the irrational. Frankenstein (1818) is an early and incredibly influential piece of Gothic fiction, pioneering in horror by effectively inventing a new kind of monster, the Reanimant, that has its roots in science, not folklore. In fact, many consider Frankenstein to be the first work of science fiction ever, and it was dreamed up and written by an 18-year-old woman, Mary Shelley. While the novel has very few female characters, and even fewer that survive until the end of the novel, I thoroughly believe that Shelley effectively wove feminist perspectives and themes through the novel through her deeply flawed protagonist, Frankenstein himself, and his unfortunate creature.  

Anne Mellor’s lecture “Mothering Monsters: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” was delivered almost 200 years after the original 1818 novel was published. It draws from decades of Mellor’s study into Romantic literature, including the life and work of Mary Shelley, and I’ll be referencing it heavily for this article for its feminist reading of Frankenstein (it’s a fantastic bit of academia, you should check it out). Mellor states that this novel is all about what happens when a man tries to have a baby without a woman, and succinctly sums up that, “Clearly, it all goes wrong.” Mellor provides significant historical sociocultural context for the publication of the novel, which illuminates Shelley’s transgressive commentary on the position of women in society at the time of publication. Frankenstein is an unconventional birth narrative. This quote underpins much of Mellor’s remaining lecture as she reads Frankenstein through a feminist lens, illuminating the transgressive commentary the novel makes on the position of women in society at the time of publication.  

The way that Shelley portrayed nature and transgressions against it pushed boundaries of gendered expectations. Frankenstein is often read as a cautionary tale about science going too far, or a man playing God. Frankenstein is motivated by power, seeking to master nature and transgress her natural order to restore life to lifeless matter and create a new species. In return, he is persecuted, Mother Nature fights back. He is stricken by illness, weather, and misfortune wherever he goes. His wife is killed, and eventually dies himself of natural causes at a young age. It is clear by the treatment of the creature that to Shelley, transgressing nature is not the issue, it is doing so without compassion, which is coded as a feminine trait by both Shelley in the novel and Mellor in her lecture. Frankenstein has no compassion for his creature, as Mellor says, “never once during the nine months in which he’s been putting it together has he ever stopped to ask himself, ‘would this thing want to be created? Would it want to be born?’” In creating new life, he has taken the role of mother, but without any of the associated nurturing qualities. When the nurturing love of a mother is absent, “that’s when monsters get made” (Mellor). The women of Frankenstein are overlooked in the plot of the novel, but in their absence their importance to the family unit is felt.  

Mellor argues that Shelley is also pushing the boundaries of gender that were prevalent in her contemporary society by presenting male-coded ways of knowing as inherently problematic. Shelley, she explains, was highly informed on the cutting-edge science of her day, including the work of Sir Humphrey Davey. His 1802 publication of a pamphlet on the newly created field of chemical physiology, which Shelley had read, follows delineated boundaries of sex. The scientist is presented as masculine and nature, dominated by science, is presented as feminine. Mellor uses Davey’s text to describe two kinds of science; ‘interventionist’ science, the active, which seeks to change nature; and ‘descriptive’ science, the passive, which only seeks to analyse how nature works. Frankenstein, like Davey, is a firm interventionist scientist, which is coded as masculine, and his experiment fails spectacularly. A similar dichotomy is presented in the critical framework of Peter Brooks in his 1993 article “What is a Monster? (According to Frankenstein)”. In this interpretation, different ways of knowing are also gendered- knowing by seeing, which can be interpreted as analogous to the scientific method, being masculine, and knowing by speaking and hearing as feminine (241). Shelley leans into this sexual politics of science, as Frankenstein’s highly gendered way of knowing fails him.  

Peter Brooks’ work is relevant yet again when he defines a monster as potentially being “that which eludes gender definition” (241). Crossing these boundaries of gender, invisible social standards, is affecting within the gothic, and would have been even more so under the stricter social settings of the regency period, when the novel was written. Susan Stryker’s 1994 publication, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage”, is an emotive reading of Frankenstein as a transgender narrative. Stryker posits that transgenderism is threatening because of its potential to destabilise the foundational fixed gender binary, arguing that crossing gender boundaries threatens a base component of social order, no matter the century in question. This could be in Shelley’s day, when strict gender definitions made the suggestion of the inherent importance of women to society or the inherent problems of male-coded ways of knowing a threat to social order. Or, this could be in Stryker’s day, eluding and radically challenging gender definition altogether. 

Both Shelley, according to Mellor, and Stryker embrace this upset in social order to some degree, but Stryker revels in it, taking it to its extremes and embracing the unnaturalness of her means of embodiment. While Shelley suggests modifications to her patriarchal systems, Stryker says she defies them entirely by her “refusal to abide by its original decree of my gender”. Her work is foundational to the field of trans studies, and Stryker and Mellor’s work together presents a transfeminist view that highlights the ways women have been challenging gender for centuries, as well as the importance of continuing to do so for the betterment of society. Both Mellor and Stryker explore expectations and definitions of ‘woman’, both at the time the novel was written and almost 200 years later, highlighting the complex feminist themes hidden within Frankenstein, waiting for you to look a little deeper.