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Representation Of Women In Frankenstein

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Although the Gothic literature witnessed a period of stagnation at the beginning of the nineteenth-century, it persisted in inspiring literary prose. Thirsty for innovation and originality, women novelists of the second wave of the Gothic approximately came forth in 1820s, submit new staples to the “stock features” established in canonized texts of male gothic, displaying a striking deviation/shift from the early tradition (Gothic 2). The most significant innovation comes with Mary Shelly whose well-acclaimed novel Frankenstein (1818) enriches the female gothic landscape as it introduces an intriguing character, the female freak/beast. The ‘viviparous’ she-monster not only becomes a vital intertextual archetype in the works of nineteenth-century …show more content…

Depending on the mainstream thoughts, nineteenth-century male authors present women into strict binaries that delineate the boundaries between the proper and the improper, the masculine and the feminine. Women, in this respect are either victimized angels perform a subordinate role, to give herself themselves unstintingly to her family eulogizing wifehood and motherhood and to be the silent and pure subject or threatening demons who refuse to comply with cultural constructions of female nature and to conform to the social norms. While the angel is presented as “the pure gold baby” who is expected to show her “submissiveness, modesty, selflessness; reminding all women that they should be angelic” and to behave according to ““eternal feminine” virtues of modesty, gracefulness, purity, delicacy, civility, compliancy, reticence, chastity, affability, politeness-all of which are modes of mannerliness that contributed to Honoria’s angelic innocence, the she-monster is “a representative of otherness” that blurs the artificial barriers of natural/unnatural femininity and therefore, discloses what occurs when these barriers are transgressed (Gilbert and Gubar 23-28). It is worthy to note that she-monster “in literature by women is not merely, as she might be in male literature, an antagonist or foil to the heroine. Women writers project their fear, anxiety and rage into monstrous female figures whose subversive acts and deeds to the cultural and social notions of femininity subverts the patriarchal system. In this context, she is usually in some sense the author’s double, an image of her own anxiety and rage” (78). In other words, female writers “creat[e] dark doubles for themselves” that disclose their fragmented identity and discrepancy between “what they are and what they are supposed to be” (79). The monster is consistently read as his

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