Gender Roles and Monstrosity in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
This paper examines Mary Shelley's Frankenstein through two interconnected lenses: the construction of female gender roles and the moral responsibility of Victor Frankenstein for his creature's transformation into a monster. The first section analyzes how female characters — Justine, Agatha, Safie, Elizabeth, and Margaret — serve primarily as passive, utilitarian figures who enable the actions of male characters, while men like Victor embody obsessive, domestically detached ambition. The second section argues that Victor's abandonment of his creature, rather than any innate evil, is the true cause of the monster's violence. The paper further explores the Promethean myth underlying the novel and offers a cautionary reading of unchecked scientific ambition.
- Passive Female Characters as Instruments of Male Action: Female characters serve utilitarian, passive roles
- Masculine Obsession and Domestic Detachment: Male characters pursue goals at domestic expense
- Female Gender Roles as Bulwarks of the Social Order: Women as essential stabilizers of social peace
- The Creature's Monstrosity: A Result of Abandonment: Creature becomes monster through Victor's desertion
- Victor Frankenstein as a Modern Prometheus: Victor parallels Prometheus in overreaching ambition
- Science, Knowledge, and Human Limits: Frankenstein warns against unchecked scientific power
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What makes this paper effective
- Integrates direct textual quotations from the novel to support each analytical claim, grounding the argument in primary evidence rather than assertion alone.
- Covers multiple thematic threads — gender, responsibility, mythology, and science — and connects them through the unifying figure of Victor Frankenstein.
- The two-part structure allows the paper to examine the novel from complementary angles: feminist critique and moral philosophy, each reinforcing the other.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper consistently uses close reading to move from specific textual moments (such as Justine's courtroom speech or Frankenstein's dream of Elizabeth) to broader thematic claims about gender ideology and scientific hubris. This movement from evidence to argument is a foundational technique in literary analysis.
Structure breakdown
The paper is divided into two numbered parts. Part one addresses female gender roles through three thematic subsections: female passivity, male obsession, and women as stabilizers of social order. Part two shifts focus to Victor's moral culpability through three additional subsections: the creature's development into a monster, the Promethean parallel, and the dangers of unchecked scientific knowledge. The bibliography draws on secondary scholarship alongside the primary text.
Passive Female Characters as Instruments of Male Action
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein explores problems of gender identity through the development of a dreadful monster in a peaceful community. Considering the major characters, who embody idealized gender roles of the era, the creation of Frankenstein's monster invites thorough investigation into the societal expectations of early nineteenth-century Britain.
Female characters such as Safie, Elizabeth, Justine, Margaret, and Agatha provide little more than a channel of action for the male characters in the novel. They are on the receiving end of events and circumstances — most often because another character is trying to provoke a reaction in a male figure or make him feel a particular way. Every female character in Shelley's Frankenstein has a distinct, if largely passive, role to play (Tan).
Consider Justine, an inactive and quiet character in the novel. She is exploited by both the Frankensteins and her own family, and is ultimately framed as the culprit in William Frankenstein's murder. Quite unexpectedly, Justine remains calm and composed — a reaction unusual in someone falsely accused of manslaughter (Tan). She declares:
"God knows how entirely I am innocent. But I do not pretend that my protestations should acquit me; I rest my innocence on a plain and simple explanation of the facts . . ." (Shelley 65).
This statement, and her composed conduct despite her dire circumstances, is a display of passivity. Her framing further reveals the basis of her disposition: "But I have no power of explaining it . . . I am only left to conjecture concerning the probabilities by which it might have been placed in my pocket" (Shelley 66). Justine ultimately ends as a quiet and resigned casualty of events beyond her control.
Agatha is the next female character of note. As the daughter of the cottager, she becomes the focus of the creature's observations. Her caring and peaceful nature — expressed through compassion and virtuousness — represents the first genuine experience of affection the monster has ever encountered (Haddad). The act that most moves him is witnessing her relationship with her blind father:
"Agatha listened with respect, her eyes sometimes filled with tears, which she endeavored to wipe away unperceived" (Shelley 93).
Through her gentle and caring nature, Agatha exposes the creature to the workings of love and the positive dimensions of human interaction.
After Agatha, the creature learns from another female character: Safie. Having traveled from Arabia to join the cottagers, Safie needs to be taught English (Haddad). As the creature covertly observes the household, he follows her lessons, making her the inadvertent instrument of his first formal education:
"My days were spent in close attention . . . and I may boast that I improved more rapidly than the Arabian . . . I could imitate almost every word that was spoken . . . I also learned the science of letters" (Shelley 99).
Thus, through an entirely passive female character, the creature undergoes his first scholastic development.
Masculine Obsession and Domestic Detachment
Male characters in the novel display a marked detachment from domestic life, and in its place possess an obsessive single-mindedness in the pursuit of their goals. The unnatural manner of the creature's creation and his subsequent experiences point to the fundamental role that females play in British society — not only as partners to men but as essential forces in maintaining social order and peace (Haddad).
As a "calm and philosophical" man who "delighted in investigating the facts relative to the actual world" (Shelley 66), Victor Frankenstein embodies a masculine ideal: composed, intellectually driven, and deeply engaged with natural philosophy. Yet it is clear from his "days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses" — during which he "lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit" (Shelley 78) — that he had crossed into fanaticism. Throughout his research, his social and domestic duties were entirely neglected. His own admission that he "knew [his] silence disquieted them" (Shelley 81) reveals a troubling self-centeredness in his treatment of those closest to him.
Female Gender Roles as Bulwarks of the Social Order
A central question posed by the novel is whether it was the unnatural process of the creature's creation, or Frankenstein's subsequent abandonment of him, that turned the creature into the violent being he became. If we understand nature as an optimal system, then the importance of female care in maintaining social peace suggests a meaningful division between nature and nurture — one in which social harmony depends heavily on the roles traditionally assigned to women (Tan).
At the most basic level, the artificial process by which the creature is created negates the biological role of females altogether. This theme resonates in the creature's murder of several female characters and even of male figures like Henry Clerval, who — by spending an entire season "consumed in [Frankenstein's] sick room" (Shelley) — exhibits the selfless caregiving associated with mothers. On the night of the creature's birth, Frankenstein dreams of Elizabeth transforming into "the corpse of [his] dead mother" (Shelley 84), a vivid symbol of how the monster's unnatural birth presages the literal and figurative death of women in the narrative. Nevertheless, this displacement of the feminine is subtly shown to be self-defeating, as Frankenstein himself testifies to the entirely negative consequences of the world he has brought into being.
The Creature's Monstrosity: A Result of Abandonment
Victor Frankenstein would never have turned his creature into a monster had he known how to love and accept responsibility for what he brought into the world.
The creature strikes back at his creator for being deserted and left alone to face a hostile world that denies him the simple privileges of companionship and love. It is clear that the creature was not a monster from the outset, but became one after Victor abandoned him — failing to understand that he bore lifelong responsibility for his creation. The creature encountered the harshness of the world from the very moment of its birth. Newly created, it sought out the one who had made it, hoping for recognition and care. Instead, it found that the world offered nothing (Pellet).
Victor had deeply desired to create a living being, yet when he succeeded, "the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled [his] heart . . ." (Shelley 57). His own creation filled him with dread, and he fled — leaving behind only loneliness and suffering. Victor Frankenstein was, therefore, the primary cause of the creature's transformation into a monster, through abandonment and a failure to welcome his creation into the human world.
Bibliography
Haddad, Stephanie S. "Women as the Submissive Sex in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." Inquiries Journal (2010): 1.
Pellet, Jean-Philippe. Literary Essay on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. 21 May 2001. 11 June 2017.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein. 1818.
Tan, Wayne. The Female Gender and Its Significance in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. 01 April 2017. 11 June 2017.
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