Feminism in Frankenstein Introduction

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley claims that the Publishers of Standard Novels specifically requested that she "furnish them with some account of the origin of the story," (16). However, the Publishers of Standard Novels did not simply want to know how the author had considered the main premise, plot, and theme of the Frankenstein story but that the story -- and its female authorship -- seemed contrary to prevailing gender norms.

According to Shelley, the publishers wondered, "how I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?" (16). If young girls were supposed to be sugar, spice, and everything nice, then a story about a monstrous creation would seem antithetical to the 19th century feminine ideal.

Not only that, Mary Shelley intuited the publishers' surprise with the author's gender, for no sooner does Shelley launch into a carefully crafted response to their query, she does so in a subtly condescending tone that explains what no male author would deign to do: justify her choice of career.

Whereas the publishers might have sought input into the genesis of the gothic tale, Shelley opts to mock and humor them with an overly detailed explication of how she, just a "girl," came to birth anything so sophisticated as a novel like Frankenstein. Also in the introduction to Frankenstein, Shelley does eventually describe her romantic longings for otherworldliness, fantasy, and the supernatural through encounters with nature and the darker side of human nature too.

Therefore, the introduction to the 1831 edition of the novel Frankenstein promotes the novel as a whole by prompting the reader to pay attention to its autobiographical symbolism and feminist discourse within a Romantic framework. The 1831 introduction shows that Shelley's Frankenstein is a novel that covertly addresses gender identity and explores the pitfalls of patriarchy.

For one, the sardonic introduction lambastes the publishers' persistent questions about the origins of the novel, almost as if the publishers had been pestering Shelley because they did not believe that she was capable of writing the story herself.

O'Rourke points out that in the 1831 edition in which the introduction appears, Shelley also amended and edited substantive elements of story itself, much to the chagrin of critics, who said that it was "a deliberate attempt on Mary Shelley's part to make a disturbing book more palatable for a conventional readership," (366). If this was the case, it was indeed her publishers pressuring Shelley for these changes, a career author made a ruthless yet strategic decision in so doing.

The introduction justifies those changes, placing Shelley simultaneously in control of her literary legacy while also showing how the publishing industry demands a certain amount of pandering to social codes and conventions. As O'Rourke also notices, Shelley does mention in the introduction that the publishers had been pestering her for a period of exactly thirteen years, suggesting "both the persistence of the questioners and the relative disinterest, if not active resistance," of Shelley herself (367).

Her resistance to their questions and her ironic response are in fact feminist approaches to taking back ownership of her own intellectual property. A second reason why the 1831 introduction to Frankenstein is Shelley's attempt to highlight the feminist underpinnings of the novel is that she states outright how the story calls into question male and female gender roles. Women play supportive roles at best in the novel, as if deliberately drawing attention to their lack of political power or status.

Shelley herself states of her origins as a writer, "I was not confined to my own identity," (16). By this, Shelley means that she refused to conform to gender codes and stereotypes, partly because she had long been a part of progressive literary circles and views herself -- outright affirms herself -- as an equal of Percy and Lord Byron in the introduction.

The introduction to the 1831 edition can in fact be read as "an obsequious concession to the social codes that distinguish the proper lady from the woman writer," who is, essentially, a subversive figure (O'Rourke 365). She coyly remarks that she was a "devout but nearly silent listener" and yet not only did she share her tale of horror, grotesque, and the "modern Prometheus, but hers was the only tale to emerge from the chalet as a published success (Shelley 17).

Shelley's story about how she, her husband Percy, and Lord Byron were telling each other ghost stories in a Swiss mountain cabin situates the author among two of the most prominent male figures in British literature, making her a self-affirmed equal and eschewing the derisive and misogynistic questions posed by the Publishers of Standard Novels. The subversion of gender roles in the introduction to Frankenstein does not end with Shelley's powerful role as author.

In fact, a careful investigation of the chronology and facts of the introductory anecdote, in which she claims that she came to be enamored with ghost stories "translated from the German into the French," as inspiration for the novel, reveals inconsistencies that only careful literary criticism can reveal (17). For example, Shelley's story tacitly refers to Polidori's work and also to Jean Baptiste Benoit Eyries's Fantasmagoriana, but Rieger explains how her entire story about the genesis of Frankenstein "quickly falls to the ground," (466).

The Shelley narrative offers a quaint and ironically obsequious concession while cloaking the genuinely autobiographical elements the author did in fact embed in the novel and which are illustrated in an analysis of its feminist symbolism. The introduction to Frankenstein diverts attention away from the fact that the novel is at least semi-autobiographical. The book was written a year after the death of her first child, and Frankenstein is actually about the birth of a dead "child." The "fiendish loneliness" that Dr.

Frankenstein feels parallels the feelings of Shelley, who can convey her grief and loss by using Romantic tropes (Johnson 3). Shelley may have referred to the "grim terrors of her waking dream" in the introduction but those terrors could have been linked to her desire to bring back her dead infant (19). In the introduction Shelley herself claims, "I did not make myself the heroine of my tales" because doing so might reach too close to the truth (16).

Furthermore, Knoepflmacher points out that the novel harshly critiques the gender roles of male and female parents, as the author depicts a male parent as being completely irresponsible, emotionally distant, abusive, cruel, and disinterested in taking responsibility for his children. Shelley "overemphasizes her passivity," living vicariously through Dr. Frankenstein (Knoepflmacher 97). The contradiction between her active role as author-creator-mother and her passive role as female-subordinate-bereaved is why O'Rourke calls the 1831 introduction a "gateway into the paradoxes of the original novel," (367).

Its exaggerated self-deprecation and her pandering to the publishers point to the fact that Shelley used the 1831 introduction as a.