Critical Essay On Frankenstein

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of the most famous novels of all time. It still retains a grasp over the popular imagination and has served as the inspiration for films, other fictional book and a large variety of critical research. It is believed to be one of the founding books of the science-fiction genre and its controversial subject matter, Frankenstein’s “Creature” in particular has been seen as a symbol that fits into various discourses easily.

When it was first published anonymously in 1818, according to William St Clair in his essay, “The Impact of Frankenstein”, it outsold all her husband’s books put together. Despite its popular reception, conservative publications such as British Critic felt regarding the multi-volume work that,
Essays by feminist critics like Mary Poovey, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Anne Mellor found in Frankenstein a novel that would allow for an extremely engaging exploration of gender relations. For Poovey, “Frankenstein’s particular vision of immortality and the vanity that it embodies have profound social consequences, both because Frankenstein would deny relationships (and women) any role in the conception of children and because he would reduce all domestic ties to those that center on and feed his selfish desires.” Gilbert and Guber in their essay, “Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve” trace Mary Shelley’s anxiety about her literary ability and feel that earlier feminist writing on Frankenstein didn’t take into account Mary Shelley’s “self-conscious literariness” through which she explained her sexuality. They feel that Frankenstein “as a woman’s reading it is most especially the story of hell: hell as a dark parody of heaven, hell’s creations as monstrous imitations of heaven’s creations, and hellish femaleness as a grotesque parody of heavenly maleness.” In “Frankenstein: A Feminist Critique of Science (1987)” by Anne Mellor, the author combines two very important discourses in this novel: the feminine and science. She finds that “From a feminist perspective, the most significant dimension of the relationship between literature and science is the degree to which both enterprises are grounded on the use of metaphor and image” and believes, regarding Frankenstein, “The novel thus calls into question the gendered metaphor on which much Western scientific theory and practice is founded.” Thus, a central concern for feminist criticism in this novel is the idea of birth and sexuality, two concepts that blur the line between genders in this novel. Victor Frankenstein’s taking over the role of the woman, that is, giving birth to the creature