Trope In Frankenstein

Throughout most of literature and history, the notion of ‘the woman’ has been little more than a caricature of the actual female identity. Most works of literature rely on only a handful of tropes for their female characters and often use women to prop up the male characters: female characters are sacrificed for plot development. It may be that the author actually sacrifices a female character by killing her off, like Mary Shelly did in Frankenstein in order to get Victor Frankenstein to confront the monster he had created, or by reducing a character to just a childish girl who only fulfills a trope, as Oscar Wilde did with Cecily and Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest. Using female characters in order to further the male characters’

As in the case of Mary Shelley and Oscar Wilde, it is the social attitudes of the time at which the works are written, rather than the author’s personal viewpoints on gender and representation, that shape the female forms of the works. Both Mary Shelley and Oscar Wilde had experiences that shaped how they viewed the gender, sexuality, and the popular social response to these subjects; however, neither Frankenstein’s or The Importance of Being Earnest’s female characters reflect the personal beliefs of the authors in terms of gender and sexuality. The relationship between perceived gender stereotypes and the age in which a work is written is something that can never be severed as literature is inherently the product of the cultural attitudes of the time that it was produced. As different the author’s personal viewpoints are, there is always the pushback of the ‘traditional social attitudes’ against personal beliefs. Mary Shelley and Oscar Wilde were not exempt from the prejudices of their time periods, the Romanticism Era and the Victorian Age respectively, and had to alter their viewpoints in order to be accepted as

When one considers the role that gender, sexuality, and their roles in societal expectations, the result shows how the fragile character of Victor Frankenstein who runs away from his creation and shows no social responsibility to his actions is still considered a ‘fine man’. Shelley highlights the ever obvious reality of her time that men were valued over women; moreover, it shows that men not man were seemingly meant to inherent the Earth and to become its God. Additionally, Shelley’s personal life and the male figures that shaped it offer additional evidence to the ideology of the fragile masculine identity (Gordon) and how Shelley subtly shows the lack of equilibrium that existed within literature and, by extension, reality. It is the underlying notion of the nineteenth century romantic literature that women are meant to hold only an aesthetic or pleasing purpose and value in life whereas men are capable of looking further past the ‘superficial’ and see the truth even when they’re young; Victor says, “While my companion [Elizabeth] contemplated with a serious and satisfied spirit the magnificent appearances of things, I delighted in investigating their causes,” (p. 38) suggesting that women are inherently shallow creatures unable to perceive deeper