Monday seminar paper

Matthew Savage

26:350:503: Introduction to Graduate Literary Study

Prof. Larry Lyons

November 20, 2010

Difference and Essentialism

Barbra Christian and Henry Louis Gates Jr. are both engaged with Black and Ethnic studies through what appear to be their exclusive notions of theory. In opposition to predominantly White and Western formulations, Christian and Gates both attempt to advance the roles of the Black critics and the Black authors through divergent notions of theory. Gates’s “Talking Black: Critical Signs of the Times” views literary criticism and theory as potentially valuable and advancing, while Christian’s “The Race for Theory” is a personally inflected call for the abandonment of entrenched critical methods and what is generally understood as literary theory. Though Gates and Christian may espouse different opinions of literary theory and criticism, they converge on many points that further inscribe the essential paradigms of racial difference and distinction. In its own fashion, each theorist’s essay fails to destabilize the socially ascribed oppositions and divisions responsible for the racial binaries and inequalities that they both realize to deride and de-value Black literatures and criticism; instead, they enforce and affirm racial dualism and racial essentialism.

Shelley’s Frankenstein can be used to arrive at a better understanding of the dangers of essentialism even though it does not specifically deal with the literatures and identities concerning Christian and Gates. During Safie’s reeducation, Felix explains and separates races based on what he understands to be essential of their characters. With “slothful Asiatics” he reduces an entire continent of peoples to an erroneously ascribed characteristic (Shelley 80). Also limiting and negatively generalizing are the personal reflections that litter the Monster’s narrative. These personally inflected remarks are totalizing; they are employed by the Monster in the creation of an identity. Reactionary and oppositional, this identity is limited by the Monster’s belief, both imposed and self-ascribed, in its fundamental or essential difference – “I was not even of the same nature as man” (Shelley 80).

Christian’s critique of Western theory latently functions to further inscribe racial essentialism and difference. After identifying current literary theory as an academic, esoteric and exclusionary commodity that is either pandered or protected by predominantly White and Western producers, Christian presents a contrasting portrayal of Black criticism and theory (Christian 2128). Invoking a racially essential character culturally or biologically derived, Christian appropriates what she deems to be distinct of ‘Blackness’ in the production of a perspective that escapes the appellation of ‘theory’ only in distancing itself from all that is deplored of White and Western theory. This differentiation is self-defeating in that racial binaries are affirmed or re-inscribed. In proclaiming that “people of color have always theorized – but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract language”, Christian instantiates inherent racial differences that limit and further entrench parties on both sides of a racial distinction (2129).

Opposed to Western literary theory, Christian explains that “My folk […] have always been a race for theory – though more in the form of the hieroglyph, a written figure which is both sensual and abstract, both beautiful and communicative” (2129). While she identifies the stultifying foundations and exclusive nature of what has become accepted as literary theory in the West, Christian instantiates a racially dualistic, racially essential and reactionary approach to theory; ‘Black theorizing’ is distanced, reduced and mystified. In her language describing ‘Black theorization’, Christian’s use of “the hieroglyph” – the ancient written language of Egyptians in Africa - is suggestive of her agenda to establish and promote that which is distinctly Black, but this distinction further fuels the binary opposition out of which arose the racial inequalities and injustices she observes and intends to remedy. Speaking of the new hegemonic critical theory, Christian condemns “the language it creates as one which mystified rather than clarifies our conditions, making it possible for a few people who know that particular language to control the critical scene” (2131). It is easy to see that a similar system is enacted here with the hieroglyphs. Subverting her call to limit or abandon institutionalizing and exclusionary theory, Christian fails to depart from the underlying system of racial essentialism and exclusion that prompted that institution. For all of the emphasis on the “multiplicity of experience” in Christian’s “The Race for Theory”, where she does incorporate the concerns of different classes and racial identities, the essay reads as a-historical and exclusive; the “mechanical man” is appropriated (or created) and reduced as a counterpoint to enact racial essentialisms (Christian 2130).

Similarly to Christian, Gates identifies the cultural, and potentially political, power that is housed in the language and concerns of literary theory and criticism and observes how that power is monopolized and exerted by primarily White and Western literary theorists and critics. While Christian reverts to racial essentialism in distancing ‘Black theory’ from dominant (White Western) theory, Gates calls for the critic of Black literature “not to shy away from white power – that is, literary theory – but to translate it into the black idiom” (2435). While embracing racial dualism in literary theory that is disallowed by Christian, Gates still affirms fundamental and essential racial differences when he calls for the synthesis of “critical principles peculiar to the black literary traditions” (2435). Despite his understanding that “race is a text (an array of discursive practices), not an essence”, Gates continuously reverts to (or insists on) the promulgation of this racialized text (2434). Gates may deconstruct this ‘text’, but he does not abandon it and the insubstantial ‘text’ that informs race is shown in Gates essay to become an identifying essence.

The problematic and limiting racial essentialism interwoven in Gates’s and Christian’s concerns with theory may be investigated further through Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Gates asks, “Can we derive a valid, integral “black” text or criticism or ideology from borrowed or appropriated forms?” (2437). Supplementing the identifier “black” with “female”, this question may have been considered by Mary Shelley in her writing of Frankenstein, but as an author and a text produced from within a Western tradition, Gates and Christian implicitly deny Shelley space in their conversation. According to Gates “doubleness, alienation, equivocality […] have been recurrent tropes for the black tradition”, but these tropes and the frustrations they convey can be traced in other works, like Frankenstein – especially depicted in the Monster’s narrative (2434).

Reduced to the hegemonic White Maleness that Christian distances from and Gates aims to translate, works and critics that may share in and illuminate the concerns of the Black writer and literary critic may be unduly excluded; this is the danger of essentialism. The racial essentialism of Christian and Gates may be intended towards advancement and liberation, but it inevitably becomes limiting and totalizing.

Works Cited

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Ed J. Paul Hunter. New York: Norton, 1996. Print.

Christian, Barbara. “The Race for Theory”. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Eds. Vincent B. Leitch et al. New York: Norton, 2010. 2128-2137. Print.

Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “Talking Black: Critical Signs of the Times”. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Eds. Vincent B. Leitch et al. New York: Norton, 2010. 2430-2438. Print.

Gender Retribution and the Chase

Frankenstein’s marriage to Elizabeth is not a ceremony of desire—we see Victor’s ambivalence in multiple scenes, and the emotional effect that his fickle interest has on Elizabeth—but what Butler would call a “performance” meant to solidify the groom’s gender. The actual ceremony of marriage and the ensuing physical appropriation of the female body, the consummation of the marriage, are “ritual social dramas” that are reenacted and experienced to reproduce “a set of meanings already socially established” (Butler 2552). This “ritual” is an inevitable social experience that Victor must complete in order to fulfill the ‘male’ identity he was endowed with at birth. Elizabeth’s tears may not actually be rooted in grief over Victor’s tenuous love for her, but could be caused by the fear that she will forever be kept from fulfilling her own gender expectations: she needs to wear the costume of the bride in order to reach what society has deemed a pinnacle of femininity.
These are the stakes when the creature threatens to intervene on the couple’s wedding night. The creature’s promise is not vengeance for stealing a loved one—the creature’s revenge after Frankenstein destroyed a female ‘monster’—it is retribution for denying the creature’s role in the gender performance. While watching the cottagers exist within the confines of a culture that was still altogether alien(ating), the creature became a spectator to the gender performance: the scene is a textual embodiment of what Butler deems a “a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief” (2552). In the absence of an actress, the creature will forever be a spectator—ungendered and incapable of accessing the social power that society has made inherent within masculinity.
By murdering Elizabeth, the creature is able to engage with Frankenstein at the “polluted” (2545) margins of social normatives. Both are denied their female actresses, denied the ultimate performance of masculinity, and denied a role in the hegemonic heterosexual value system (2544-5). Two males engaged with only one another have to exist literally at world’s edge, chasing one another across a landscape in hopes of a climactic encounter that does not occur—and perhaps the possibility for another meeting was never possible, for there is no script for such an act to follow, no performance that these two can knowingly duplicate. All that exists is their chase.
My question is this: what kind of performance does their chase produce? The creature’s reaction to Victor’s death is not what you’d expect of a victorious rival—was this chase a quest for an impossible love? Or was it two beings deprived of their gender roles engaged in a battle out of sympathetic frustration?

Don't read this!

This is a little piece of tonight's pie of feminist and queer theory.

Get ready for an awesome class.

Elizabeth the Archetypical Woman

After reading Shelley’s Frankenstein, many often wonder why the daughter of early feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft did not include any strong feminine roles in her novel. As to the most important female role in the novel, that can be argued, as I am sure Victor Frankenstein’s mother is of more importance to the story than her brief introductory anecdote and appearance in his dream makes her out to be; however, it is Victor’s playfellow and future wife Elizabeth Lavenza that receives the most attention throughout. Elizabeth is positioned opposite Victor as his love-interest and future wife, though she does not play a significant role in her actions or voice. Instead, Shelley portrays Elizabeth as what Beauvoir calls the “living enigma,” a myth from the male perspective. Elizabeth is not a strong and independent woman, rather a simple, bland character easy to overlook. It is obvious that Shelley means for Elizabeth to be this archetypical female character for readers to easily understand her role in the novel as that of Victor’s romantic “other.” Shelley does this on purpose, as to not only use Elizabeth as a motivation and prize for Victor’s actions- vengeful or otherwise- but also as a means to not distract readers from the important relationship in the novel- Frankenstein and his creation. Elizabeth must remain transparent in order to make room for Victor, and she must remain in the background of the novel- sometimes years- for him to finish his complicated duties. In this essay, I will be discussing how Shelley formulates Elizabeth for exactly this purpose.

Elizabeth’s formulation starts in the first chapter of the first volume, as a character in Victor’s history. He begins with her inclusion to the Frankenstein family after Victor’s aunt passes away, leaving Elizabeth Lavenza to Herr Frankenstein’s care. The language surrounding Elizabeth is riddled with an outside opinion on Elizabeth, that of Victor’s mother. Although Elizabeth is the subject, she is pushed to the side by Victor’s mother, the more important point of view according to Victor. Victor “often heard” his “mother say, that she was at that time the most beautiful child she had ever seen, and shewed signs even then of a gentle and affectionate dispostion” (19). It was “these indications, and a desire to bind as closely as possible the ties of domestic love” that “determined my mother to consider Elizabeth as my future wife” (19). Even in her introduction, Elizabeth is not the central focus of the paragraph.

Next, Victor himself describes Elizabeth as “docile and good tempered, yet gay and playful,” and that “although she was lively and animated, her feelings were strong and deep, and her disposition uncommonly affectionate” (19). He is proud of her mind as her “imagination was luxuriant” and her “capability of application” was “great,” though Victor does not support it (19). Instead, he cuts in halfway through describing her to point out their differences: “I delighted in investigating the facts relative to the actual world; she busied herself in following the aerial creations of the poets. The world was to me a secret… to her…a vacancy” (20). It seems Elizabeth is lacking with this vacancy. Shelley leaves a lot of room for interpretation with Elizabeth’s character with Victor’s generalities regarding her. Readers are not meant to look at Elizabeth the character with more interest than any interest Victor gives. Rather, Elizabeth’s role in the novel is simple- that of an attractive partner for Victor.

Elizabeth does not have many functions within the novel, either, outside of personally functioning as a motivation for Victor. After Victor’s mother passes away, Elizabeth takes care of little William, though readers see little evidence of this in the text. After William is murdered, Elizabeth acts as a tie to his home through her letters. Elizabeth’s voice in her letters is typical to the meek female characters portrayed, that of the worrying, always crying damsel: “Dear, Victor, I cannot conclude without again anxiously inquiring concerning your health… I cannot bear to think of the other side of the question; my tears already flow” (41). Elizabeth is a heroine by no standards, and her function extends little past that of concerned future wife.

Of the many myths concerning women, Beauvoir’s myth involving the “feminine “mystery”” is pertinent to Elizabeth’s role in Frankenstein (Norton 1268). Substantiated for the man who “does not understand” a woman, the “feminine mystery” is a happy “substitute” to an “objective resistance for a subjective deficiency of mind; instead of admitting his ignorance, he perceives the presence of a “mystery” outside himself (1268). In this way, the man not only flatters his vanity but also excuses his laziness in learning about his partner. Furthermore, “in the company of a living enigma man remains alone- alone with his dreams, his hopes, his fears, his love, his vanity” (1268). With Elizabeth in this role, Victor is able to leave her in one country to continue his studies in another, personally absolved of any guilt. More importantly, he is alone with his experiment, therefore absolving everyone else in the novel absolved of any guilt. Elizabeth remains innocent and uninvolved.

Shelley makes Elizabeth a bland enough character for readers to forget about as often as Victor does, in order to keep the focus on the tensions between Victor and the creature. Elizabeth’s role is so simple and small that she does not become a distraction to the important story at hand. It makes sense then, that Shelley would include such a transparent and simple female character in the novel. Elizabeth’s role is none other than Victor’s future partner. Her use to the novel is congruent with her use to Victor. It seems that the most important female role of the novel may not be a female at all; rather, a character with feminine traits. Either way, Shelley plays with the rules of sex and gender. Instead of introducing strong, female characters she introduces confused male characters with both masculine and feminine traits.

Troubled Gender

According to Ian’s seminar paper “The critical moment for Victor is the destruction of the female monster before giving her life; by destroying the she-creature, Victor sets in motion the destruction of his own family and his inevitable premature death” (MacAllen). Ian also suggests that “The male creature alone presents no threat to the dominant culture Victor represents” (MacAllen). I would argue that the destruction of the she-creature is the pivotal moment in the Monster’s potential cultural indoctrination into the gender performance and that the Monster is never able to actualize, or in the sense of society legitimize, any maleness. In destroying the she-creature, Victor effectively obfuscates the Monster’s actualization of a gender and further ostracizes his creation from the acts and roles prescribed by society. I agree that Victor’s decision to destroy the creature heralds his own demise and the unraveling of his immediate society, but it turns out that the solitary creature is the greatest threat to “the dominant culture Victor represents” (MacAllen). Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble can be applied to this idea. In framing the body as a surface on which gender may be inscribed and displayed or performed, Butler concludes that “the body as the medium must be destroyed and transfigured in order for ‘culture’ to emerge” (2543). There is nothing essentially male or female inherent of the body; anything natural or inherent of the body is culturally appropriated to create and enforce an ‘Other’. In a sense, the Monster, as any other person, begins as neither male nor female, but due to its existence outside of society, the Monster is never able to receive or establish a gender. The Monster may see gender modeled by Felix and Safie, but it is never expected to satisfy nor perform gender specific acts and actions. The Monster’s uncertain identification with the different characters of gender in Paradise Lost – explored by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in “Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve” – speaks to this claim. The Monster is never indoctrinated by society, it is never persuaded to adopt a gendered identity, and in result its body is never claimed or ‘destroyed’ as in the framing by Foucault and Butler. This unclaimed space results in the Monster’s frustrated relation with its body and its image; the Monster concurrently despises and dwells on its body, while the body itself is described as incredible powerful, graceful, while otherwise indescribable. Arguably, the Monster attempts to actualize a male identity and claim its body for maleness in asking Victor to create a female mate. With the creation of an ‘Other’, a female creature, Victor may have indoctrinated his creature into maleness; he may have projected or inscribed maleness onto the Monster’s body/surface. This projection or inscription would have functioned as the transmission and repetition that “become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony” (2551). The Monster is denied this opportunity and then dangerously adopts “certain kinds of parodic repetitions [which are] effectively disruptive” to the social norms his unclaimed body and apocryphal identity traverses (2551). The Monster has no recourse once denied a gender and externalizes either his frustration or his vacant identity with humorless parodies (the pastiche) of others’ actions (2550). Violence is revisited by violence, in the way that Milton’s language is pathetically appropriated. The Monster’s wish with the desired female creature to ascribe to the patriarchal model may also be seen as pastiche or mock-performance. The solitary Monster, denied an inscribed or self-determined gender or identity, employs an unclaimed body in inimical performances to disrupt and destroy the dominant culture and society.

Enough with binary logic!

I'm enjoying the readings for this week. Judith Butler in particular really got me thinking.

She brings attention to the fact that humans have a tendency toward "problematic dualisms" and we seem to have a need to order things into binary pairs. Any deviation from boundaries defined by this binary distinctions, such as homosexuality, is perceived as "untidiness" (Douglas) and "cultural unruliness and disorder "Butler, 2544). In reality, the way we order reality is not the way nature is in fact ordered:

"The construction of coherence conceals the gender discontinuities tat run rampant within heterosexual, bisexual, and gay and lesbian contexts into which gender does not necessarily follow from sex, and desire, or sexuality generally, does not seem to follow from gender - indeed, where none of these dimensions of significant corporeality express or reflect on another. When the disorganization and disaggregation of the field of the bodies disrupt the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence, it seems that the model loses its descriptive force. That the regulatory ideal is then exposed as a norm and a fiction that disguises itself as a developmental law regulating the sexual field that it purports to describe" (2548).

Brilliant. This makes me think of Deleuze & Guattari's call for the abandonment of the binary, aborescent model of knowledge. While D & G rhizomatic modell perplexes me at times, it seems obvious that the range of human sexuality (and, indeed, human experience) cannot be simplified to binary logic.

Applications to Frankenstein? Well, it got me thinking of the creature as a person existing outside of society and culture. Now, the creature identifies himself as male. We might say this is due to the fact that he is exposed to society and culture, despite not being a part of either, and his gender identity is the same repetitive performance as ours. Or we might say that the creature naturally falls into a male identity because Frankenstien is a novel that adheres to the notion that gender is connected to essence. In this case, the creature's desire for a mate may reflect the primal need to establish his existence within a binary frame.

Gonna stop there. Looking forward to reading the other posts.

Dan

The Creature Is a Girl

Hello all,

My post is on Blackboard. See you Wednesday!

Chris

Seminar Paper

Feminist Discord: Male Overtones in Shelley’s Frankenstein


Many readers of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein cannot help but notice the reticence of the female characters and the dominance of the male voice. The creation of inefficient and somewhat static female characters is in itself unusual for a woman writer who is not only unconventional, but is also the heiress of a feminist legacy inherited from her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, author of “The Vindication of the Rights of Women” published in 1792. Still, a feminist reading within Frankenstein is possible, yet I suggest examining it from the vantage point that it was written under a male nom-de-plum, as an attempt to conceal the author’s femininity, thus it makes sense that Mary Shelly would not try reveal her identity by expressing feminine sentiments. Taking Frankenstein at face value, it can be argued that it is a novel which conveys male viewpoints and values by diminishing overall female significance by confining women into stereotypes, constructing gender, imposing compulsory heterosexuality, and disrupting female camaraderie; all in spite of Mary Shelley’s feminist heirloom.

According to Gilbert and Gubar, the woman writer is culturally conditioned by patriarchal society which assigns her an inferior status and dubs her the “other” (1930). The dilemma of the creative woman in the 19th and early 20th century was in her alienation from male forerunners and apprehension of male readers; simultaneous with her yearning for a feminine tradition of writing as well as a female audience (1930-31). Rather than overcoming this “anxiety of authorship” and finding her voice among other 19th century feminist writers, Mary Shelley writes under a male standard that reinforces sexist stereotypes of women. These stereotypes tend to form in oppositions that sum up women in very minimalist terms that are not a reflection of reality but a projection of patriarchate values (Beauvoir 1266-67). A woman claimed for home (the mother, sister, wife, and daughter) occupies the myth of an angel- altruistic, benevolent, and surrounded by a delightful heavenly aura. In Frankenstein, the women of Victor’s family home are represented in such manner. Victor’s mother, to begin with, was a faithful daughter that took care of her father with “the greatest tenderness” and dedication (Shelley 18). It is this devotion that makes her a desirable wife for Victor’s father who “like a protecting spirit” takes her into his care (Shelley 19). The image of her kneeling by the coffin of her dead father, like a praying nun kneeling at the altar, very much impressed Victor’s father and transfixed in his mind, to the extent that he has it painted and hung with “an air of dignity and beauty” over the mantelpiece of his house. The beauty in this portrait lies in the fact that even after the death of the patriarch, the woman continues to uphold his values by literally not raising above her subservient and inferior position, which is represented by kneeling. For a society to identify a woman this way is to “guarantee to man the absolute rights in her devotion” (Beauvoir 1267). The nun-like daughter then becomes the saintly mother, whose benevolence and affection entreats her to attend her sick orphan niece, risking her own life in the process. Victor describes that even “on her death-bed the fortitude and benignity of this admirable woman did not desert her” as she encouraged Victor and Elisabeth’s union, and bequeaths Elisabeth her place in the family (24).

Elisabeth, likewise, satisfies the myth of the angel- or the “ideal” woman that is, from early childhood, beautiful and of a “gentle and affectionate disposition” and “docile and good-tempered” (Shelley 19). Henceforth Elisabeth is completely subjected to Victor’s narration and assessment, to which he fails to see her outside of the myth. There is also something patronizing and superior in Victor’s attitude towards her. He strips a part of her humanity by describing her as “playful as an insect,” “lively as a bird’s”, “fragile creature,” whom he loved to tend on as “a favourite animal” (Shelley 19-20). The way that Victor visions Elisabeth is shallow and periphery as he further describes her “person as the image of her mind”, so transparent is she that he knows her from inside and out. Nonetheless, Beauvoir contends that it is almost impossible for men to speak of the inner self and existence of a woman, which in turn makes his sentiments shallow and imaginary (1269). Therefore, the only way to distinguish between the imaginary and real is by “behavior”, in which a man actively shows his support for a woman, by marriage, gifts, or even spending time with a woman, all which she accepts passively (1269). This contradiction between a man’s imagination and actions is seen in the way Victor neglects Elisabeth for almost six years, despite his professions of love and admiration, while she faithfully waits for him to take the initiative, and is ready to sacrifice her happiness for his. It is also seen by the way he carelessly lets her out of his sight on their wedding night, although the Creature vehemently threatened to be there, and has a history of hurting the ones around Victor, rather than Victor himself. For Victor to claim that Elisabeth’s murder was unforeseen is a feeble excuse, and one might doubt Victor’s love for his cousin who was indirectly responsible for his mother’s death. One also suspects the double meaning of Victor’s words before his wedding: “Alas! To me the idea of an immediate union with my cousin was one of horror and dismay. I was bound by a solemn promise which..[I] dared not break” (Shelley 104). Although these words directly relate to Victor’s promise of creating a mate for the Creature, they might be suggestive of Victor’s subconscious abhorrence of marrying his cousin. Nonetheless, even in her death, Elisabeth reinforces innocence, the virgin bride sacrificed for her husband’s sins.

Conversely, the Creature’s bride that Victor begins to create is rendered a mysterious monster that might even surpass the evil-doing of Victor’s original Creature. Conveying a male point of view, for Victor “the enigma is presented in its most disturbing form in woman” (Beauvoir 1268). Since he is the one shaping the female creature’s existence, he claims to know her inner self in assuming that “she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate, and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness” (Shelley 114).Victor is further horrified by the female creature’s sexuality in her having the ability to procreate, in which “a race of devils would be propagated on the earth” (Shelley 114). He is also faced with the dilemma of the ugly female, as his Creature asks for a mate that is as hideous as him. This female ugliness is associated with masculinity, therefore rendering female masculinity as “completely abject, aesthetically displeasing, and uninhabitable position” (Halberstam 2649). Victor might also harbor a fear that the female creature in her feminine masculinity would disrupt the patriarchal social order by being a lesbian. According to Halberstam, “lesbianism has long been associated with female masculinity;” this is, in turn, linked to female ugliness (2650). If it is probable for the female creature to spurn her mate when faced with “the superior beauty of man,” it is also possible for her to be attracted to women in the same homoerotic way the Creature is attracted to Victor (Shelley 114).

Furthermore, the Creature meant to make the female creature his equal, his companion, and not a subservient “other” or inferior. That would change the male attitude toward the female, in a way empowering her that was usually powerless. Victor could not handle the idea that he would be the one to subvert the patriarchal system by the race he created. For a true woman to be feminine, she must make herself the “other” in male-female relationships (Beauvoir 1272). In being isolated from human society, forming a league of their own, the Creature and his female mate are not likely to abide by the patriarchal norms that determine the male-female relationship. For Victor this female creature is two times the “other”, the first being that she is an abnormal agglomeration of deceased bodies’ constituting a deformed race, the second being that she is a female. Nonetheless, Butler argues that gender is a fabrication inscribed upon the surface of bodies. Therefore, the second creature Victor is working on is essentially genderless; still she is to be created as an imitation of a woman, precisely like a drag. For Butler, drag is a performative act that inverts the appearance of the socially constructed gender (2549-50). Thus, the existence female creature might upset the established notion of femininity, in which women are delicate,beautiful, and small. According to Butler, “all social systems are vulnerable at their margins, and that all margins are accordingly considered dangerous” (2545). Hence, Victor feels that it is his duty to mankind to destroy the female creature and deprive her existence.

Another issue that affects femininity in Frankenstein, regardless of the angel/monster opposition, is that both the Elisabeth and the female creature are subjected to patriarchal norms that enforce what Rich calls “compulsory heterosexuality,” which is manifested in arranged marriages and the breaking up of the “lesbian continuum” (1594-95, 1604). Both Elisabeth and the female creature are destined to unions for which they practically do not have a say in. From her early childhood, Victor’s parents have already decided that Elisabeth be the future wife of their son. Victor also realizes that the female creature “might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation” (Shelley114). It is as if the existence of the female is solely for the benefit of her male counterpart. According to Rich, imposing female heterosexuality establishes men’s right to emotional, physical, and economical access to women (1602). Hence, patriarchal society is suspicious of female companionship or the lesbian continuum, and will go through efforts to dissolve it. For instance, Elisabeth more than once admits to Victor that she loves Justine tenderly, the latter being pretty, affectionate, and kind, much like Elisabeth herself. Elisabeth even expresses her desire to die with Justine to escape “from a world which is hateful to [her] and the visages of men which [she] abhor[s]” (Shelley 56). During their emotionally charged ( perhaps sexually) farewell, Victor’s heart is filled with “horrid anguish”, allegedly for being responsible for the death of an innocent person, yet he passively lets Justine die when he is the only one who can save her by incriminating the Creature he made. It is likely that Victor was threatened by the relationship and intimacy between Elisabeth and Justine, therefore he permits Justine to die.

To conclude, one cannot consider it outrageous that Frankenstein at one time was thought to be a work of a man rather than a woman, although for an altogether different reason. One might also question how much an influence Percy Shelley, Mary’s husband, had in influencing her work. The male-centric attitudes in the novel deem it a construct of patriarchal society in the way it encourages female stereotyping of the angel or monster. Furthermore, the female acts only as an object that satisfies the various needs of the male. The female is also forced into a heterosexual way of life, to the extent that female relationships are discontinued. Thus, femininity in the novel occupies an insignificant space within male-dominated outlooks, manners, and mindsets.


Works Cited:

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed Leitch, Vincent B.; Cain, William E.; Finke, Laurie; Johnson, Barbara; McGowan, John; Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean; Williams, Jeffrey J. New York: Norton, 2010. 2540 – 2553.

De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed Leitch, Vincent B.; Cain, William E.; Finke, Laurie; Johnson, Barbara; McGowan, John; Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean; Williams, Jeffrey J. New York: Norton, 2010. 1423 – 1437.

Gilbert, Sandra M., Gubar, Susan. “The Madwoman in the Attic.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed Leitch, Vincent B.; Cain, William E.; Finke, Laurie; Johnson, Barbara; McGowan, John; Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean; Williams, Jeffrey J. New York: Norton, 2010. 1926 – 1938.

Halberstam, Judith. “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Men, Women, and Masculinity.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed Leitch, Vincent B.; Cain, William E.; Finke, Laurie; Johnson, Barbara; McGowan, John; Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean; Williams, Jeffrey J. New York: Norton, 2010. 2638 – 2653.

Rich, Adrienne. Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed Leitch, Vincent B.; Cain, William E.; Finke, Laurie; Johnson, Barbara; McGowan, John; Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean; Williams, Jeffrey J. New York: Norton, 2010. 1591 – 1609.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Ed J. Paul Hunter. New York: Norton, 1996.