Women in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

For centuries, in many different countries and in diverse ways, women writers have found or created opportunities for leadership through their literary works. Within the Anglo-American context, women writers drew on a variety of genres as they molded their leadership roles. Female polemicists such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Addams produced powerful nonfiction that engaged the burning intellectual and political issues of their times, as did journalists from Ida M. Tarbell to Katha Pollitt and Susan Faludi. Among women poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning composed fierce attacks on slavery, Gwendolyn Brooks addressed the status of African American women, and Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich reflected second-wave feminist visions and revisions. Historically, however, the genre in which Anglo-American women have most successfully exercised leadership has been the novel. (Ruddick, Sara, 45)

Mary Shelley Wollstonecraft was a British Romantic novelist, poet, travel writer, and biographer whose most popular novel Frankenstein (1818) is credited with having pioneered the science fiction genre. In addition, the novel, as well as Shelley's oeuvre as a whole, is often read as a nightmare of procreation, constellated as it is by fears of childbirth and of death of family members, especially children.

Science fiction is another popular genre in which contemporary women novelists have excelled. From the time of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), women writers found in the creation of new worlds excellent opportunities for critiquing current conditions. Early in the second-wave women's movement, Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975) used science fiction to analyze the ways that cultures construct (and constrict) gender roles and to explore alternative social configurations that could liberate women. Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos (1979-1983, 1992), a series of five science fiction novels, shows the appeal of the genre to the best contemporary women writers. Freed generically from the constraints of the present, novelists Octavia Butler, Marge Piercy, and many others have used the conventions of science fiction to lead their readers to new kinds of understandings of women and their roles in both politics and reproduction.

Shelley was born in Somers Town, London, on August 30, 1797. She was the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, two of the most famous radical writers of the era and outspoken supporters of Enlightenment rationality. Mary's birth was the first instance of the many tragedies linked to motherhood that the author would encounter in her life or re-create in her fiction. When operated on to remove the placenta that had not been completely expelled, her mother contracted puerperal fever and died 11 days later. According to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's feminist study The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Mary Wollstonecraft's “fearfully exemplary fate,” together with the readings of Milton's Paradise Lost, Coleridge's “male definition of deathly maternity” in “Christabel,” as well as Wollstonecraft's own “prophetically anxious writings” on giving birth instilled in Shelley “a keen sense of the agony of female sexuality, and specifically of the perils of motherhood.”

Shelley was educated at home and was then sent to school in Ramsgate. Her father remarried in 1801, but the relationship between Mary and her stepmother Mary Jane Clairmont was never a ...