“There are only two types of women— goddesses and doormats.” Pablo Picasso used this quote to describe how he saw the woman of his era, and for the most part, this interesting quote is somewhat correct when looking at the role of women in literature over the years. The woman either goes above and beyond for others without thinking of herself, or she stands firm in her beliefs and is respected for her actions and looks. In sum, the woman is either overlooked or is adored and cherished. There are still many people who continue to belittle and degrade the woman’s role in the twentieth century. Over the many different periods in time and the several eras, the roles of women in literature have changed in the eyes of numerous authors. However, …show more content…
The women often just stayed at home and were simple caretakers of their children and husbands. It was unheard and shocking for them to complain or act as if their lives were not perfect and pleasurable just the way they were. They had to accept and commit their lives to caring for those around them before themselves. It is seen toward the start of the novel that Victor deeply loves Elizabeth. They have been best friends and companions since childhood, but when he leaves for the University of Ingolstadt where he obsesses and constructs his creature, he completely cuts off contact with her. He writes few letters to the point where she believes he has fallen in love with someone else. Elizabeth has no say in when Victor should return home, when they should marry, or even what they would do after marriage. Victor makes all the decisions because he is seen as the superior figure. It is depicted in Shader’s article that Frankenstein admits that “he looked upon Elizabeth as his own," which showed that in his eyes, she is the property and he is the owner of her. In the case dealing with Justine, she never had the chance to explain her side of the story or even the rights to a fair trial with evidence to back up her conviction. She was immediately seen as guilty, which resulted in her death.
As humans we understand that in order to make ‘man’ you need both a male and female, but in this book the wretch is the creation of only male. Victor finds the parts and sews them together to create this monster. The female is left out of the equation even though that is one of the female most important roles in life, being able to reproduce. In fact, the main role of women in the story is for the sake of making males learn a lesson from what happens to the women or just to make the story move along. A few prime examples of this are Elizabeth, Justine, and Margaret. From the beginning when Frankenstein is introduced to Elizabeth he thinks of her as a possession that is all his own. He says "I looked upon Elizabeth as mine-mine to protect, love and cherish. All praises bestowed on her I received as made to a possession of my own" (21). He wants to protect her and watch over her like he is a big brother. Another good example of a role of a woman in this story is with Justine. Justine is a servant for the Frankenstein’s. She is a very nice girl and is more of a sister to Victor than a servant. Her stay eventually ends when she is accu...
Victor who explains, “...confessed a lie. I confessed that I might obtain absolution” (Shelley), contributes to the image that in the presence of law, society regards men of more innocence and importance. Justine is unfairly accused of murdering William through this "wretched mockery of justice" (Shelley). There is nothing that she can do to defend herself from the horrid accusation, so she is forced to accept to be unfairly executed. Society holds the notion that men tend to have the control and dominance over women in the object of law. In Frankenstein, Justine is put on trial for the murder she did not commit, but because a servant “had discovered in her pocket the picture of my mother” (Shelley), it is decided that she “should suffer as guilty” (Shelley). Justine, as a woman, knows that she will not be believed to be anything other than guilty, which is why she tells the lie that she did commit the murder of William. Shelley creates an acquiescent female character to show that the truth confession of a women for William’s death would have made little impact to the people who were convicting her
Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelley and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, held the firm belief that women were equal to men. As such, it is hard to imagine that the daughter of a prominent women’s right advocate would only portray passive and disposable women in her novel, Frankenstein. Despite this, the story only includes women such as Justine Moritz and Elizabeth Lavenza, “each of whom relies upon male intervention and agency to save them” (Cadwell). While it can be argued that these women were used to show the flaws of misogyny, on the surface they each provide nothing more than character development for the male leads or a means by which to further the plot.
position as a female writer... it seems that Shelley was trying to reveal the weak status of
The domestic circle that the Frankenstein family represents might be more shocking to some feminists than Victor’s own hideous progeny itself. This is truly a novel of oppressive gender extremes. Sexuality is repressed and ambiguous. The women are cheerfully subordinate; the men blindly egotistical. A good feminist interpretation of this novel should be a required supplement to any first reading of the text because gender/sexual tension can be found at the heart of every major issue in this novel.
The fight for domination amongst the sexes is a battle as old as civilization, where the ideas of gender hierarchies first began. These conflicts often manifest themselves unwittingly through literature, showing subtle signs of deeper tension that has ensued for centuries. The struggle between masculine and feminine becomes apparent through Frankenstein, a battle that results in the death of the potentially most powerful figure in the book. Frankenstein yields characters motivated by complicated thinking, specifically the title character, Victor Frankenstein. Victor is a brilliant 19th century Swiss scientist who succeeds in generating life with electricity, creating a creature that eventually turns on his master and begins a reign of terror wherever he roams. Understanding Victor in relation to feminist studies is possible through examining his actions regarding the monster’s request of Frankenstein to fashion him a partner. Unable to win the love of his maker, Frankenstein, or his makeshift step brother, man, the monster believes the only being capable of loving him would be a creature equally horrifying as himself. Frankenstein initially refuses to comply with the demand because of guilt he already feels for the evil his monster has done. Eventually moved to pity, Frankenstein agrees to design a female on the grounds that she and her mate will "quit the neighbourhood of man" and never be seen again (Shelley 144). Victor partially completes the project before he "[tears] the thing to pieces," reasoning that he cannot have any part of making another creature who, like her mate, could become a "curse upon mankind" (Shelley 144-145). His decision seems noble to the reader, as we...
The book Frankenstein written by Mary Shelley takes on the impossible task of describing the roles of men and women and the fear of a changing society if something changes these roles. In the book we see the challenging of normal gender roles and we see they ploy of the monster being used in many ways to describe the challenging of those gender roles. The book creates a monster, which has been used to describe both of the main characters Victor, and Elizabeth in their own ways. They book also asks the question about why Victor reacts the way he does towards women, and why he is afraid of his own creation. In my opinion all of these questions that where asked have a relatively simple solution to them which is they where responses out of fear
The feminist perspective of looking at a work of literature includes examining how both sexes are portrayed
The significant role of women in the story so far is that they support and give advice to the main character, Victor Frankenstein. They also comfort the other male characters, like Mr. Frankenstein.
The role of women in society has continuously shifted throughout history, for centuries they have struggled to find their place in a predominantly patriarchal world. As their roles in fiction often mirror viewpoints of the society at the time, literature can be used as a looking glass to see how and why they are presented as such.
Smith begins her essay by looking at the historical factors that may have contributed to this seemingly sexist book. Shelley, writing in the first half of the 19th Century, was in a period in which a woman "was conditioned to think she needed a man's help" (Smith 275). In the novel itself, no women speak directly. The book has three basic narrators: Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and Frankenstein's monster. The female characters are very weak in this novel, especially Elizabeth, Victor's cousin/fiancé (no they aren't from Arkansas). She is portrayed as the perfect woman, especially after Victor's mother, Caroline dies. She takes the place of the mother figure in the household. But just like all the female characters in the story, her character has little substance. Victor's character is described in detail, as is that of the monster, and Henry Clerval. When Henry gets killed, sympathy is really felt toward Victor, because he has just lost his lifetime friend. When Elizabeth is murdered, the reader finds it hard to connect with what Frankenstein is feeling. Elizabeth (and the other main female characters: Justine and Caroline) are there to reflect the men characters. Professor Smith states in her essay that "women function not in their own right but rather as signals of and conduits for men's relations with other men" (283). This is especially clear when the monster kills Elizabeth on their wedding night. The monster is upset with Victor, so instead of hurting him, he kills his wife. Elizabeth is used as a sort of ruler to measure the relationship between Victor and his monster.
Furthermore, Caroline’s passivity is displayed when Caroline brings Elizabeth from the orphanage and asks her husband to make Elizabeth part of the Frankenstein family. Victor describes El...
Can you imagine Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein, the great work of literature, without, for example, such female characters as Mrs. Margaret Saville, Elizabeth Lavenza, and Justine Moritz? In this case the novel will have no meaning. All the women help to develop the plot, and without them Frankenstein will lose its spirit. Although these heroines have a lot in common in their characters: they are all strong-willed, kind, careful, and selfless, at the same time, each of them is unique, and each plays her own role in the novel. Mrs. Margaret Saville is the woman to whom the narrator tells the story. Elizabeth Lavenza is the beloved of Victor Frankenstein. Justine Moritz is the heroine who is accused by mistake of murdering William and executed instead of the fiend. There is close connection between the female and male characters, and if we break it, Frankenstein will have no sense. The author of the novel, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly, characterizes the women in the same way as the men, and shows that they are independent players. So, the female characters in Frankenstein are as important as the male ones.
Elizabeth is compliant to Victor after she is effectively gifted to him. She is treated as his possession, “All praises bestowed on her, I received as made to a possession of my own” (Shelley 44). Since the novel takes place in a patriarchal society where women were treated as the inferior gender, the women in Frankenstein are only addressed when they are needed by the men. As such, Victor expresses his desire to be with Elizabeth but then constantly leaves her, often to go spend time with his friend Henry Clerval. Victor has an intimate bond with Henry, saying “I loved him with a mixture of affection and reverence that knew no bounds” (Shelley 54). His relationship with Victor is deeper than with Elizabeth, which is wrong considering they are to be married. Henry’s death affects Victor more than Elizabeth’s. When Henry dies, Victor gets sick for two months with grief. When the monster kills Elizabeth on their wedding night, he seeks revenge immediately. The rest of the characters are deeply saddened by the news of her death while he seems angrier at the monster than sad for his dead wife. This points to the idea that he did not need time to grieve because he didn’t truly love
As a result, females were unable to have their writings to be successful under their name in the world of literature, while men have long been the ones who had their literature taken seriously. It was an obstacle for women to get recognition: “the publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood” (Woolf 367). This demonstrates that it was likely that many works written by women are either published under a man’s name or anonymously in order to have their work read and acknowledged. This displays that despite having the gift for literature, women struggled to find their writings to be given the praises they deserve. This issue is due to the fact that many men have longed believe that it was peculiar for women to have such talent as they still held many stereotypic assumptions on women and their abilities. Using Judith as a paragon, Woolf expresses the fact that women who could write were dismissed as if they “have gone crazed or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside of the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at” (Woolf 366). How is it fair that men deemed it eccentric for women to have such abilities? The reality of this situation is tremendously disappointing because ladies are as capable as men when it comes to creating fiction and poetic works. Men should not make such assumption and take away women’s voice and potential to get an audience for her literature