Essay On The Role Of Women In Frankenstein

In 19th century England, the function of the woman in society was often debated. It was during this time that people began to question the traditional role of the woman in Victorian England and whether the woman had rights or an identity outside of that role. There were obviously those who believed that women up until this time had been repressed and confined too tightly within the bonds of societal expectations; the majority, however, were those who still trusted in the status quo, upholding the ideals and traditions of a society dominated by men. Cynthia Pon, in her award-winning essay on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, recalls the words of Donna Haraway when she says that Victorian women, “those who suffer[ed], who [did] not own their own …show more content…
Out of faithfulness to their purpose, the women of the novel become weak and helpless, but of course, this is the intent. The women are praised for their devotion to their duties as well as for their womanly weaknesses. They are “worshipped, reverenced for their virtues, [and] sheltered as fair exotics or garden roses” (Dickerson, 84), and yet they are still neglected by the men, and left alone, are unable to fend for themselves. In the end, their purpose is not equivalent to their basic needs for survival, and for those very weaknesses for which they are honored, they die, some rather brutally: “While these beautiful, dignified, and ethereal women float around the […] household softening and attracting, the men are governing the state, attending the universities, [and] building in laboratories monsters that end up murdering the innocent and unsuspecting women” (Dickerson, 84). This is illustrated most effectively in Shelley’s representation of Elizabeth, Frankenstein’s adopted sister and fiancé. In his pursuit of knowledge and science, he leaves his family and Elizabeth to go to school, and it is during his time at school that he becomes obsessed with the creation of life, an obsession which keeps him away from home and from the supposed love of his life for years. The implications, however, go deeper than just his unwillingness to stay at home …show more content…
Living at home and with Elizabeth is not enough for Frankenstein. He, “with all his ardour, […] [is] capable of a[n] […] intense application and [is] more deeply smitten with the thirst for knowledge” (Shelley, 22); while she, on the other hand, is “of a calmer and more concentrated disposition” (Shelley, 22). Her sweetness and support are inadequate charms; he wants and needs more. He craves knowledge and new things, aspects of which the ideal Victorian woman would have had no concept, and Elizabeth is nothing if not an ideal Victorian woman, even to the point of exaggeration. Her simple innocence and naïve ignorance are, at times, irksome to the modern reader. Even in her letters to Frankenstein, she is void of all meaning and substance; she writes only of the surface, of who is doing this and who is doing that (Shelley, 50-54). Elizabeth’s devotion to her duties as well as her station as a Victorian woman leaves her without a self, without an identity. In her essay “The Ghost of a Self: Female Identity in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Vanessa D. Dickenson calls Elizabeth, as well as the other women in the novel, the ghosts of Shelley’s ghost story. Elizabeth is “selfless, ethereal, […] [and] transparent if not invisible” (Dickerson, 80); she is “so apparently devoid of impurity, flaw and will, [she] hardly seem[s] important”