Gender In Tam O Shanter And Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

In both Robert Burns’s Tam O’Shanter and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, A Modern Prometheus, the authors use gender as an underlying theme throughout the narrative, a common thread present in the characters’ goals and motivations. In the case of Tam O’Shanter, Tam’s midnight adventure is against the advice of his wife and nearly ends with his death due to his inability to control himself when faced with a sultry witch. Frankenstein, though less blatant in its gendered imagery, follows the monster as he searches for a woman to play the role of his mother, wife, or daughter, demonstrating his need for female companionship in the light of Victor’s failure to be a father to him. The gender role that Victor himself plays is also debated, as he

The closing lines of the poem, too, contain this inclusive language, warning the “ilk man and mother’s son” to “take heed / Whene’er to drink [they] are inclin’d / Or cutty-sarks run in [their] mind.” This suggests that the author believes all men to be similar to the titular Tam, making the story a microcosm of typical male-female relations. The end result, therefore, can be viewed as either a display of the strength of femininity or as a triumph of male debauchery. Tam successfully escapes the witches, but only thanks to the speed of his mare, Meg, who “left behind her ain gray tail,” now reduced to “scarce a stump.” It was a woman who saved Tam from other women, reducing the male lead to a pitiful figure in the eyes of Burns’s contemporary audience, as the hero has been saved by the passive, lesser female sex. In regards to Meg the mare, Burns also blurs the line between masculinity and femininity: While Meg is female, the removal of her tail could also represent the castration of Tam as the result of his emasculating experience with the witches. His horse is an extension of himself, rather than a completely separate entity, making Tam simultaneously masculine and feminine, which fits with his role as the atypical male “hero.” Frankenstein uses its male characters as conduits through which to address the matter of

The tale of Tam O’Shanter revolves around maleness versus femaleness, addressing both the nagging women and the reckless men as it recounts Tam’s ghostly misadventures. It is less a celebration of masculinity, taking into account Tam’s failure to play the part of a hero and his saviour being his female horse, and more of a friendly scolding of it, using the example of Tam as an exaggerated version of what wives may fear when their husbands stay out until the early hours of the morning. Gender in Tam o’Shanter drives the narrative; the distinctions between men and women are the essential cause of the root conflict. In Frankenstein, on the other hand, gender acts as a tool to help establish the characters. Major personality aspects of the men are caused, emphasised, or altered because of the women in their lives (or the women not in their lives, as is the case with the monster’s desire for an Eve). The female characters, in this regard, are little more than plot devices, though femininity itself is a powerful force throughout the novel. Victor Frankenstein often falls into the role of a female Victorian hero, as he suffers from fits of emotion and frailty, though ultimately he fails to be the proper Victorian mother as his mother had been, driving the monster to seek out female guardians wherever he may find them. Gender in Frankenstein colours the narrative, though it does not control it. In both