The Female in Frankenstein: Man’s Attempt to Abort Femininity
Introduction
When compiling classic works of feminist literature, Mary Shelley’s (1797–1851) Frankenstein rarely makes the list. Despite being written by the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), Shelley’s magnum opus lacks the traditional conventions of a feminist novel and the presence of dynamic female characters altogether. This may come as a surprise to those who expected her to follow in her mother’s proto-feminist footsteps, but perhaps the lack of clear feminist themes was Shelley’s intention for Frankenstein. Originally conceived as a part of a ghost story writing contest between Shelley and friends, Frankenstein tells the story of a monstrous being that is brought to life by a naive scientist, Victor Frankenstein. The novel details the complicated relationship between the hateful creator and his grotesque, unwanted creation, as the relationship impels repeated tragedies. Upon taking a closer look into the society Shelley inhabited, alongside the narrative world that she created, the thematic conflict addressed in Frankenstein parallels the struggles Shelley faced as a woman living in nineteenth-century England. Along with the cultural pressures that shaped women’s lives during this period, Shelley also had personal traumas surrounding motherhood, childbirth, and loss that saturated many layers of her complex life. The context of Shelley’s tragic relationship with birth and parenthood supports Frankenstein as the byproduct of her trauma and reveals the implicit argument for the right to bodily autonomy present in the novel. Through male-centered dialogue, Shelley paradoxically introduces silent yet pervasive themes of feminine creation to depict the fears of pregnancy and childbirth in the patriarchal model of society.
Frontispiece to Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, published by Colburn and Bentley, London, 1831. Steel engraving in book.
A Woman Writer in a Man’s World
Although Frankenstein speaks exclusively through the voices of men, feminist ideas persist through the characters’ conflicts with each other as the novel unfolds. The prime example is Frankenstein’s protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, whose main conflict manifests between himself and his creation. This relationship parallels the emotionally complex experiences of women through the journey of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood. Shelley uses Victor, to introduce issues of birth and creation without disrupting the status quo of male-dominated narratives popular at the time she was publishing. Shelley effectively creates a monster, both literal and metaphorical, that induces the same fears of getting pregnant and giving birth that women encounter in a society that already restricts and controls most aspects of their lives.
Despite the thematic focus on creation, Frankenstein caters to the masculine reader’s expectations. The presence of female characters within the novel is scarce, and when they do appear, they adhere to the strictly domestic lives typical of women during and prior to the nineteenth century. Why would Shelley write a work of female resistance to the standards of patriarchal society by incorporating those same standards within the world of her novel? Radical declarations of women’s rights were not something unfamiliar to Shelley. Her mother was acclaimed writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a book-length essay that argues for a woman’s right to education and to a life beyond the domestic sphere. Wollstonecraft died shortly after giving birth to Shelley, leaving her without a matriarchal figure in her life. However, one of the few connections she was able to have with her late mother was through reading the works she left behind. Vindication gathered criticism due to the text’s radical proto-feminist ideals after Wollstonecraft’s death when her memoir, authored by Godwin, revealed she had children out of wedlock.[1]This may have inspired Shelley to intertwine her feminist messages about birth discreetly through a male character for fear of the dismissal of her work. She wrote Frankenstein as a layered work through which the reader can engage with the thematic elements as much or as little as they like. Scholar Devon Hodges explains this tactic as Shelley’s “ability to subvert patriarchal narrative conventions” that ultimately enable her to make subtle criticisms of the patriarchy.[2] According to Hodges, Shelley uses patriarchal subversion in her novel as a way of subtly introducing her feminine authorial voice without disrupting the status quo of the male-dominated enterprising prey to the harsh scrutiny of gendered arguments.[3] For Shelley to successfully deploy her critiques of patriarchal society to an audience living within it, she had to incorporate subtle undertones and allegories in the narrative structure itself to voice her concerns discreetly, making the feminism inside the novel something that must be sought for rather than readily presented.[4] Therefore, the use of male characters to actualize Frankenstein’s thematic emphasis on creation as trauma enables the presence of controversial topics in the narrative without the dominant patriarchal majority detecting the subtle acts of feminine resistance.
John Coleman Burroughs, Front cover of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014. .
Frankenstein projects the issues of childbirth and maternal health onto the masculine protagonists in her novel to amplify the unspoken issues of reproductive health that affect predominantly women. To do so, Shelley subverts the traditional female role of motherhood through Frankenstein’s character, while simultaneously addressing the concept of “male womb envy,” or the feverish desire of a man to manipulate the advancement of mankind through controlling the means of creation: pregnancy.[5] The concept of womb envy was coined in 1924 by Karen Horney and acknowledges the inherent power and terror of the female ability to procreate and potential male yearning for control over this essential process.[6] Frankenstein may be a story surrounding predominantly masculine characters, but upon closer inspection, the genre-bending character dynamics and unappealing characterizations of masculine characters hint at an underlying discontent with masculinity. Shelley’s novel, ironically, uses the central male characters as a vehicle to amplify the issues of pregnancy and creation, concerns unique to the female sex, in a time when discussions of such topics were rare, and the dialogue consisted solely of masculine voices. The main conflicts in Frankenstein create a dialogue surrounding birth, parenthood, and creation initiated by a woman, potentially the first of its kind.
Although Shelley offers an early feminist perspective on the process of childbearing, she does not introduce the discourse using members of her sex. Frankenstein is narrated from three different masculine perspectives; Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and the monster, all of whom are isolated from the influences of society, even farther from the traditional spheres women traditionally resided in during the period. The multiple narrators, all in possession of unchecked power in some capacity, allow for unreliability in the storytelling while simultaneously emphasizing the overwhelming masculinity shared between the three central characters. Shelley’s isolation of the three narrators in her novel resembles a case study, where readers watch the effects of prolonged solitude, reckless passion, and unchallenged confidence of the men grow into perilous journeys abroad, dangerous experiments, and murderous rampages, which all ultimately result in destruction. Writing exclusively through male characters also allows Shelley to create a paradox that allows the shortcomings of their characters to emerge, consequently allowing the absence of feminine voices to be emphasized. Without the presence of female characters, the audience is more likely to recognize the consequences of a masculine world. Hodges makes a similar point, asserting that Shelley “demonstrat[es] the inadequacy of the paternal narrative by opening it up to what it excludes” which leads to an appreciation for women’s source of stability and reason in society by acknowledging what their absences entail.[7]
Themes of unchecked power and manipulation in addition to the dismissal of female narratives reveal to the reader the toxic masculinity exhibited in obstinate men like Victor and Robert, but also the entanglement such toxicity has with the building blocks of society. Robert’s doomed expedition appears to only affect himself and his crew however the counter with Victor and his monster and the letters to his sister illustrate that his foolish voyage impacted people beyond those who initially boarded the ship. The result of Victor’s hubris creates the horrific monster, a creation whose existence proves to cause immense harm to not just Victor and the creature themselves, but the entire community that surrounds him. Shelley animates the toxic concentration of masculinity generated by Victor into a hyperbolized and vengeful monster seeking to destroy lives and manifest misery to warn against the flawed model of the patriarchal system.
The Female Gothic: Creation as Terror
Shelley does more with her male protagonists than merely using them as a concentration of masculinity. Part of the brilliance of Victor’s character is the use of his masculine characterization as a vehicle for detailing issues faced predominantly by women. According to scholar Ellen Moers, Frankenstein falls under the classification of “female Gothic,” a genre made up of works by women that explore the female bodily processes grounded in scientific fact, like birth, through a fantastical lens rather than a realistic one.[8] Examining Shelley’s novel as a female Gothic makes a point about the complex relationship women have with the process of pregnancy and childbirth through Victor and the monster he creates. The focus on creation in Frankenstein was revolutionary for its time, not only for the fantastical approach to discussing processes grounded in science but also for Shelley’s metaphorical narrative surrounding childbirth was among the first of its time to be written by a woman. In Shelley’s England, the fear of confinement to the sphere of domesticity, or worse, doomed to pariahdom after marriage and childbirth, was by no means irrational. Otherworldly horrors did existed in these spaces; Gothic scholar Carol Margaret Davison argues that the reason for “seemingly exaggerated themes and threats of incarceration, violation, and death” in women’s literature during Shelley’s time was not unrealistic considering that “the domestic sphere was where most [women]... spent the majority of their lives…also the site where many died in childbirth.”[9]
It does not come as a surprise that Shelley wrote so prolifically about creation, as her relationship with childbirth was a complex one. Feminist literary critic Sandra M. Gilbert argues that Shelley wrote Frankenstein during “her own experience of awakening sexuality” and therefore infused her novel’s characters with fears of her own emerging reproductive capabilities and their consequences in the context of her lingering birth trauma.[10] Shelley’s eminent mother died due to complications with childbirth, something that deeply troubled Shelley throughout her life. Fertility and sexuality were even more relevant to Shelley when she conceived her novel. In 1816, while Shelley wrote Frankenstein, she was simultaneously mothering an infant, grieving the loss of her first premature child, and navigating her relationship with the child’s father, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), all before the age of 20. This loss for Shelley was deeply psychological, resulting in her writing in her diary “[I had a] dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived.”[11]
In June of the next year, the same month the infamous ghost story writing contest took place between Shelley and a group of her contemporaries, she had a “waking dream” in which a figure attempted to bring a corpse to life, only to be awoken by “the horrid thing” he had been trying to reanimate standing above him.[12] The man and his creation in Shelley’s subconscious daydream would become the essence of Mary’s ghost story, Frankenstein.
William Powell Frith, The Lover’s Seat: Shelley And Mary Godwin in Old St. Pancras Churchyard, 1877
Incompetent Fathers and Illegitimacy
After the summer of 1816, Shelley began to extend her short story into the three-volume novel she published in 1818. The period in which Shelley crafted her first novel was an unhappy one marked by two tragedies, both rooted in the issue of illegitimacy. In late 1816, Shelley lost her half-sister, Fanny Imlay to suicide after Imlay discovered her biological father was not William Godwin, but instead Gilbert Imlay, an American man with whom the girls’ mother had an affair.[13] In Imlay’s final note, she wrote “the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate,” and claimed that those who loved her would “soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed,” referring to her existence as an illegitimate child.[14] Imlay was only 22 when she died. At this same moment in time, Shelley was 19, and in the process of writing her story surrounding an illegitimate creation: Frankenstein.
Imlay’s death was not the only tragedy that struck Shelley in late 1816, nor the only death close to her that involved the issue of a child’s legitimacy. Harriet Westbrook, the first wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and with whom he was married when he began seeing Shelley, died by suicide while pregnant with what was likely another man’s child. At the time of Westbrook’s pregnancy, Percy Bysshe Shelley had abandoned her for Shelley, who had been pregnant by him multiple times over. Pregnant by another man and abandoned by her husband, Westbrook’s advancing pregnancy would have effectively cast her out from society if her condition had been revealed and was presumably what prompted her to take her own life late in 1816.[15] Upon hearing about the death of Westbrook, Shelley reportedly held “depressive guilt over becoming pregnant by Percy just when his wife was about 6 months pregnant” while additionally feeling guilty for “winning him over from [Westbrook].”[16] Shelley detailed the guilt she felt in her diary, stating “Poor Harriet, to whose sad fate I attribute so many of my heavy sorrows.”[17] The deaths of both Imlay and Westbrook in late 1816, although unrelated, resulted from fears of illegitimacy in a society where marriage and children determined the extent of a woman’s worth. Imlay’s shame surrounding her parentage, and Westbrook’s shame of her abandonment by Percy in addition to her advancing pregnancy, likely by another man, are both prime examples of the societal pressure to be a legitimate force, driving women who are unable to fit into the mold to take their own lives.[18] Shelley explicitly details the heavy burdens of both women’s deaths in her letters and diary entries, and implicitly she captures the pain of illegitimacy in her novelistic creation.[19]
Westbrook’s failed relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley, only further emphasized by the child she carried, parallels the relationship Victor had with his creation: a constant regret from which a creator is unable to distance themselves. The influence Westbrook’s death had on Shelley is displayed in both the monster and Victor himself, one who deals with the burden of being born illegitimate, and the other struggles to come to terms with the monster he created, but no longer desires. She projects her emotions surrounding her pregnancy by Percy Bysshe Shelley on the character of Victor who feels immense guilt for creating his monster and the deaths that his creation subsequently caused. After the death of Westbrook, Shelley wrote that her “heavy sorrows” were “atonement claimed by fate for [Westbrook’s] death.”[20] The similar circumstances of Westbrook’s death resulting from Shelley’s adulterous relationship reflect Victor’s act of creation, which ultimately leads to the deaths of his family and friends in the novel. The parallels between the harm to Westbrook caused by the act of creation in Shelley’s life, and the death of Victor’s family and friends resulting from the immoral creation of his monster display the delicate ties between Shelley’s real-life turmoil and the genesis of her novel. Through Victor’s nightmarish experiments, Shelley explores the metaphorical monster that looms over its creator: the creature who stands over him and the universal fear of fertility and childbearing haunting women.
While grieving the loss of Imlay, and then Westbrook, Shelley continued the process of creating her novel, where the conflict with legitimacy in creation lingers in her characters. Similar to Imlay, the monster created by Victor has an untraceable lineage and lacks a basic understanding of his conception. When the creature recognizes his glaring irregularity while comparing himself to the De Lacey family he has admired from afar, he laments: “When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me” and then questions the nature of his existence, asking “Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled … ?”[21] The self-loathing that the monster, Westbrook, and Imlay experience emerges from the same place, a pariahdom enforced by societal norms. This makes the illegitimate individuals in their lives detest their unseemly existences in a realm that equates legitimacy to personal worth. Shelley depicts the inability of individuals to control the circumstances of their creation, or in Westbrook’s case the creation of her child, to display how illogical these expectations are. This is seen in Victor’s monster, a creature whose troubled creation brings about a miserable existence that precipitates death alongside life. Through her novel, Shelley links the paradoxical connection between the births of undesired creations to the cause of their deaths.
Due to this correlation, Shelley’s grotesque description of the monster’s conception alongside the tormented account of his existence serves as a medium for questioning the rhetoric of creation as an inherent positive. Shelley supplies evidence of this notion in the scene where Victor reacts to seeing his monster come alive. His words are tinged with hatred as he proclaims “the tortures of hell are too mild a vengeance for thy crimes. Wretched devil! You reproach me with your creation.”[22] Despite his indisputable role in the creation of the monster, Victor places the blame on his creature rather than himself, mirroring the real-life tendency for male creators to distance themselves from their offspring via the placement of blame on the female carrying the child, despite their crucial role in the conception of the fetus.[23] In reality, men are able to walk away from the children they father due to a cruel mix of anatomical differences and the minimal societal judgment surrounding creation that is afforded to fathers alone. In Frankenstein however, Shelley complicates the pattern of male abandonment through the creation of the monster, a being who holds his sole creator, a man, accountable for the consequences of his hubris.
Shelley has Victor fulfill his paternal duties in the same way her sole surviving parent, William Godwin, fulfilled his role of father: rejection. Following the death of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin remarried another woman who viewed his daughter with disdain. In her childhood, Shelley felt a deep adoration for her father and was deeply frustrated by his widely divided attention.[24] Shelley, who already felt second to her sister in her father’s eyes, was further distanced from Godwin by her stepmother, who supposedly was the reason Shelley was sent to Scotland for two years at age 12. Shelley was further distanced from Godwin at 17 when he refused to accept her elopement with Percy Bysshe Shelley and refused contact with her even after the birth of her first child.[25] The relationship between Victor in his monster bears a similar resemblance to the incompetence of Godwin as a father to Shelley. The monster, upon meeting his maker, immediately calls attention to Victor’s inadequacies, stating “you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, of whom thous art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us.”[26] Shelley speaks to the challenges of familial relationships and the untraditional leaves on the family tree. Like the bonds of family, Shelley inextricably links her father to her novel about unaccepting fathers, by “respectfully inscrib[ing]” her book “To William Godwin,” noting him as “author of ... Caleb Williams,” a novel he wrote which also features an incompetent father figure.[27] The dedication to Godwin is not the only thematic nod to creation doing harm before the narrative begins. Shelley also includes another reference to creation, a quote from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, as an epigraph. The quote takes place when a fallen Adam ragefully asks his creator, God “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man? Did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?”[28] From the first pages of her novel, Shelley introduces an example of a flawed creator-creation relationship as a result of a turbulent act of creation. By comparing Adam and God’s dynamic in Paradise Lost, to the relationship between Victor and his monster in Frankenstein, Shelley once again pokes holes in the idea of conception as an inherent positive. The inclusion of the dedication to Godwin and the epigraph from Paradise Lost before the start of the novel’s contents serve to plant the theme of incompetent fathers subconsciously into the reader’s mind before the narrative begins.
A Male Attempt to Abort
What happens when there is no female figure to blame for having a child out of wedlock, or out of the human species for that matter? Themes of birth and creation in Frankenstein also play into Shelley’s subversion of the traditional masculine narrative by projecting Victor as not just a father, but also a mother, or mother equivalent, to the monster. According to scholar Steven Lehman, “the monster is the technologically developed child of Victor Frankenstein” making him the monster’s “only parent.” This is the reason why the name “Frankenstein” and the monster are synonymous in pop culture today.[29] Victor appearing as the sole creator of the creature places him in both the parental roles for the monster, giving him no escape from his parental duties.
Victor resembles a mother in more than just one. In addition to his role as creator, he is also forced to make sacrifices. To create the monster, Victor allows his physical and mental health to deteriorate during the frenzied creation process, but after Victor’s blind passion turns to bewilderment and his creation comes to life, he no longer wishes for a child, let alone a monster, to be responsible for. The all-consuming aspect of creation that Victor parallels women’s struggle to maintain dignity and order in their lives after an unwanted pregnancy or a dangerous childbirth. Victor’s predicament may mimic the lives and struggles of women, but because of his ability to physically detach from his work, he bears a lesser burden than a female creator, who carries their child in the womb. Another benefit Victor quietly reaps as the sole creator is the freedom to exist and create without encountering the judgments and expectations of being a woman. Although Victor does not face the same bodily struggles as a female mother, by depicting an anatomical male as a mother figure, Shelley effectively eliminates the misogynistic obsession society has with blaming mothers for having unintentional children. By placing Victor in the maternal role, Shelley alters the way her novel’s protagonist is received, emphasizing pity for the main character rather than blame.
Shelley subverts the blame on women for unplanned pregnancies by placing Victor in the maternal role, which changes the reception of the narrative from one of blame to pity. Davison writes about the role of women in society during the period in which female Gothic literature was written, describing that “women’s autonomy and identity were being entirely denied, leaving them at the mercy of their husbands. While companionate marriage, the new middle-class ideal, was based in theory on affection, mutual concerns, and sympathy, the wife remained subordinate to her husband under law.”[30] Shelley wrote in a society where men are always in control and superior to women. By having a masculine narrator who struggles with issues of femininity, the audience receiving Victor is inclined to have more sympathy for the individual burdened with unwanted offspring. If Shelley opted not to subvert the role of Victor, and instead have a feminine creator, the patriarchal forces of society could shift the reception of the narrative she creates, opening it up to misogynistic critiques. The values for which Victor is praised, like his relentless passion and curiosity, would morph into harmful gendered stereotypes of obsession and madness if Victor were cast as a woman.
Therefore, when Victor’s life begins to deteriorate before his eyes after his creature destroys his closest familial relationships, friendships, and mental well-being, he is not afraid to denounce his creature and the circumstances leading up to its creation. Upon first meeting his monster, Victor’s solution to the problem of his unwanted child is evident when he cries “you reproach me with your creation; come … that I may extinguish the spark which I so negligently bestowed.”[31] Rather than live with a creation he was incapable of caring for, who destroys his relationships and his sanity, Victor would rather abort his monster than live a life riddled with the complexities of having an unwanted child. He decides to abort his creation to prevent the future suffering of both him and his creation.
Rothwell, Richard. Mary Shelley, 1831–1840. Oil on canvas, 29 in x 23 in.
In this way, Victor attempts to practice a freedom that women of Shelley’s time were denied: the right to control whether or not to have children, and the freedom to make their choice without the judgment of society. Victor’s decision to terminate his unwanted offspring appears reasonable when it is slipped between scenes where Victor mourns his past way of life, and deals with the rage of his creation, the same emotions women reckon with when they are faced with the burden of an unwanted pregnancy. However, unlike the women of the nineteenth century, Victor was never bound to the societal expectation of domestic motherhood but instead remained tied to his unwanted creation through his monster’s superior strength and vicious rage which enabled the monster to reap destruction on Victor and his community. Although the circumstances of their entrapment are different, both Victor and the women in Shelley’s life were controlled by their fear of their capability to create life, not so much as a fear of creating a life, but instead for fear of the destruction of their freedom as a byproduct. Through the female Gothic genre, Shelley communicates the challenges of creation through Victor and his monster; characters who exist outside of the societal judgment afforded to women when they have pregnancies out of wedlock or avoid the childbearing process altogether. The same monster, capable of haunting Victor by merely existing, was the personified fear held by Shelley and the women within her life, the fear that their fertility could take away the little control they retain over their lives and their bodies.
Conclusion
Through Frankenstein, Shelley tells the story of creation gone wrong as a means of shining light onto the unseen, or perhaps merely unacknowledged, forces that control women’s bodies to control their lives. Although discreet, Shelley manages to pick up the pen, the proverbial torch left behind by her mother, and continue the tradition of advocating for a woman’s agency in a patriarchal world. Shelley takes the idea of a woman’s right to life beyond the domestic sphere and adds the forever crucial amendment to her mother’s declaration: no woman can be free from the bounds of a patriarchal society if she does not possess the right to control her body.
Notes
[1] R.M. Janes, “On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft’s: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” Journal of the History of Ideas 39, no. 2 (1978): 297.
[2] Devon Hodges, “Frankenstein and the Feminine Subversion of the Novel,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 2, no. 2 (1983): 155.
[3] Hodges, “Feminine Subversion,” 156.
[4] Hodges, “Feminine Subversion,” 156.
[5] Steven Lehman, “The Motherless Child of Science Fiction: ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Moreau’ (L’Orphelin de Mère Dans La Science Fiction: ‘Frankenstein’ et ‘Moreau’),” Science Fiction Studies 19, no. 1 (1992): 49.
[6] Dominick Grundy, “Filling a Gap: Gender,” Group 35, no. 3 (2011): 188.
[7] Hodges, “Feminine Subversion,” 156.
[8] Ellen Moers, “Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother,” In Frankenstein: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2022).
[9] Carol M. Davison, “Ghosts in the Attic: Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic and the Female Gothic,” in Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic After Thirty Years, ed. Annette R. Federico (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011), 208.
[10] Sandra M. Gilbert, “Horror’s Twin: Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve,” Feminist Studies 4, no. 2 (1978): 49.
[11] Florence A. Thomas Marshall, The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Volume 1 (of 2), (Urbana: Project Gutenberg, 2011), 110.
[12] Thomas Marshall, Life and Letters of Mary, 142–43.
[13] Moers, “Female Gothic,” 84.
[14] Thomas Marshall, Lie and Letters of Mary, 168.
[15] Moers, “Female Gothic,” 84.
[16] Anthony F. Badalamenti, “Why Did Mary Shelley Write Frankenstein?” Journal of Religion and Health 45, no. 3 (2006): 424.
[17] Badalamenti, “Why Did Mary,” 425.
[18] Moers, “Female Gothic,” 84.
[19] Badalamenti, “Why Did Mary,” 424–25.
[20] Badalamenti, “Why Did Mary,” 425.
[21] Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2022), 87.
[22] Shelley, Frankenstein, 68.
[23] Keith J. Pavlischek, “Abortion Logic and Paternal Responsibilities: One More Look at Judith Thomson’s ‘A Defense of Abortion,’” Public Affair Quarterly 7, no. 4 (1993): 350.
[24] Barbara Almond, “‘Before the Beginning’: Women’s Fears of Monstrous Births”, In The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood, (University of California Press, 2010), 59.
[25] Almond, “Before the Beginning,” 59.
[26] Shelley, Frankenstein, 72.
[27] Shelley, Frankenstein, 6.
[28] John Milton, Paradise Lost (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 9.743–45.
[29] Lehman, “Motherless Child,” 52.
[30] Davison, “Ghosts,” 208.
[31] Shelley, Frankenstein, 72.
Lauren Katz
Lauren Katz is a junior studying English and Film & Media at Emory University. Her research interests are rooted in examining literary works in their historical context, particularly works by those with marginalized identities. She works at the Emory Writing Center, where she is able to explore her other interests in teaching, learning, and language.