Feminine Gender Role In John Milton's Paradise Lost

In the novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley introduces a feminine gender role within the character, The Wretch. Although he was physically created male, he represents feminine characters outside the text. Shelley implicates this role relating to John Milton’s biblical characters, Eve and Satan, from his “patriarchal” epic, Paradise Lost. From this epic and the novel, Eve, Satan, and The Wretch are represented as “fallen angels”, who are the characters that have sinned against their Creator and releasing a hell upon their world. Eve being feminine and representing a “fallen angel” then signifies that all “fallen angels” related to Eve are feminine and are below a patriarchy world. In Paradise Lost, John Milton constructs a patriarchal setting …show more content…
Although, the female version of The Wretch was never fully created, this idea that monsters roaming the world freely can cause chaos and creating a curse onto the world is what ceased the second creation from happening: “Sympathies for which the demon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon earth” (Shelley 119). Frankenstein knows that by creating a female monster, their procreation of a demon race will bring hell on earth, suggesting that procreating is a sin. The Wretch, just like Eve, try to procreate knowing that it is wrong to do so. According to Peter Brooks in “What Is a Monster?”, this sin is what connects The Wretch with Eve: “Like Eve, disobey the paternal injunction, which in this case stipulates exile from the inhabited parts of the globe” (Brooks 380). Eve ate from the Forbidden Tree that Satan had persuaded her to do so, by doing this Adam and Eve had sex and this was the very first sin. This caused Eve and Adam to leave the Garden of Eden (their world), therefore proving that Eve is a “fallen angel” just like The Wretch was when he wanted a female version of him to procreate