ggratton 's Profile

For Gilbert and Gubar, the Miltonic creation epic is central to the
meaning of Frankenstein; indeed, they maintain that Mary Shelley's
novel is a nineteenth-century, Romantic, and Feminist reading of Paradise
Lost:

Like Victor Frankenstein, his author and superficially better
self, the monster enacts in turn the roles of Adam and Satan, and even
eventually hints at a sort of digression into the role of God. Like Adam, he
recalls a time of primordial innocence, his days and nights in "the forest
near Ingolstadt," where he ate berries, learned about heat and cold, and
perceived "the boundaries of the radiant roof of light which canopied me"
(88, ch. 11). Almost too quickly, however, he metamorphoses into an outcast
and Satanic figure, hiding in a shepherd's hut which seems to him "as
exquisite . . . a retreat as Pandemonium . . . after . . . the lake of fire"
(90, chap. 11). . . . . Eventually, burning the cottage and murdering
William in demonic rage, he seems to become entirely Satanic: "I, like the
arch-fiend, bore a hell within me" (121, chap. 16) . . . . At the same time,
in his assertion of power over his "author," his mental conception of
another creature (a female monster), and his implicit dream of founding a
new, vegetarian race somewhere in "the vast wilds of South America,"
(131, chap. 17), he temporarily enacts the part of a God, a creator, a
master, albeit a failed one. [Gilbert and Gubar,
235-36]

Mothers in Frankenstein are categorically dead because
their biological function is primordially defiled. . . . . Mary Shelley's
own life as child and mother bore ample witness to this paradox [that life
lives upon death]. It has become almost obligatory for critics of
Frankenstein to cite the long list of deaths that dogged the early
life of its author: her mother Mary Wollstonecraft expiring eleven days
after Mary's birth; her half-sister Fanny Imlay poisoning herself and
referring obliquely in her suicide note to her illegitimacy; Percy's first
wife Harriet Westbrook dying pregnant by another at the time of her suicide;
and finally, Mary's first daughter passing quietly two weeks after her
premature birth. All of these deaths implicate the mother by exaggerating
the proximity of life's origin and end. (351)

The monster, however, is not a fully formed individual, but an
"abortion," a defilement of the human form, and so deeply repulsive to all
(including himself) who see him. "The monster is an ugly botch because he
incarnates a male fantasy of creative autonomy" (347). The fault is not the
monster's but his creator's; the monster is a sympathetic consciousness
trapped in a repulsive form that even Victor, his mother-and-father,
detests. The creature's appearance immediately makes manifest his creator's
violation of social norms, for the monster's ugliness exemplifies his
impurity; his very form contradicts Wollstencraft's liberal feminism for it
"demonstrates openly the implied imperatives of corporeal life: there can be
no transcendence of sex, no rationalist utopia oblivious to the body"
(