Frankenstein: Feminist Criticism

In the early 1960's the feminist literary criticism became a theoretical issue with the appearance of the new women's movement (Feminist Literary Criticism). Actually, feminist criticism started as part of the international women's liberation movement. In the 1950s women had gone back to the house, abandoning their work to men who came back from the war to claim their positions, and a feminine was created in the media making the housewife and mother; the ideal models for all women. Promoting this ideal of women "reality" reduced the identity of women to sexual and social passivity. According to Critical Approaches: Feminist Criticism has become a powerful force of literary studies in the late 1970s. Since the early 1980s, feminist literary criticism has developed and spread in number of ways and is now criticized by a global perspective. "Feminist critique," through examining how women characters are shown, expose classics which demonstrates attitudes and traditions reinforcing masculine dominance. Another group practiced what came to be called "gynocriticism," studying writings by women and examining the female literary tradition to find out how women writers across the ages have perceived themselves and imagined reality. Later on it gradually became customary to refer to an Anglo-American tradition of feminist criticism. Feminist theory aims to understand the nature of inequality and focuses on gender politics, power relations and sexuality. While generally providing a critique of social relations, much of feminist theory also focuses on analyzing gender inequality and the promotion of women's rights, interests, and issues. Themes explored in feminism include art history and contemporary art, aesthetics, discrimination, stereotyping, objectification (especially sexual objectification), oppression, and patriarchy. The prior “woman’s movement” was primarily about woman as a universal entity, whereas it transformed itself into one primarily concerned with social differentiation, attentive to individuality and diverse.

In the novel, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley uses the character, Caroline Beaufort, as a well represented criticized feminist. Caroline, being a woman that had to take care of her ill father, had been through many other unfortunate situations that proves the reader that she has been a victim of a “female gender” role in society. Unfortunately, “several months passed in this manner. Her father grew worse; and her time was more entirely occupied in attending him; her means of subsistence decreased; and in the tenth month her father died in her arms, leaving her an orphan and a beggar” (18). Therefore as a female, Caroline had lost her father and was not able to provide for herself independently as present/modern people have done already. In Caroline case she did not have the opportunity to become independent for herself and had to face in becoming a beggar because she had become so poor. However, in our society now women are highly capable to work independently without being dependent to a man. It provides more rights and strength to the woman. Typically, the whole image of women’s job back then was to stay home, cook, clean the house, take care of children, but overall please the husband. It seems society saw woman as less intelligent because they were always dependent to their husbands and did not have the opportunity to get an education. At times men feel confident about themselves and always felt the need to have power and take control of situations which set woman as their own property; “all praises bestowed on her I received as made to a possession of my own” (21). Referring to this quote, woman would not be able to have a respectable position in society with the consent of the husbands demands and showed that woman were not taken into consideration for their contributions in society as well. Mary Shelley strictly shows the suppression of woman in society through her female character, Caroline Beaufort, as an example of woman that have been forced to set an image of innocence, fragility, and obedience, but never demonstrate to society how knowledgeable, powerful, and determined they could really be.