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Example research essay topic: Frankenstein Shelley Use Of And Feminine Roles - 1,016 words

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... semblance of her own gentleness. By contrast, the creature unfailingly enrages Victor, causing him to lose self-control and become violent. Whilst the feminine roles are flat and manipulated to affect the character and actions of the male roles, the latter are considerably more defined. As Elizabeth Fay writes, Shelley shows the realistic weaknesses and frailties of men in the novel. Walton is presented as sexist and selfish, mocking his sisters fears for his safety in his opening sentence: You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.

Margaret is an unsatisfactory audience, as he desires a companion whose eyes would reply to [his]. This companion must necessarily be male, for how could a female possibly communicate adequately with him? However, despite this wish for male companionship, Walton possesses certain feminine characteristics, such as his distaste for violence: ... my best years [having been] spent under your gentle and feminine fosterage, has so refined the groundwork of my character that I cannot overcome an intense distaste to the usual brutality exercised on board ship. He writes adoringly of the strangers conciliating and gentle manners, unparalleled eloquence, nobility and cultivated mind. Waltons ambition to discover uncharted territories is arrogant, as he desires to acquire dominion...

over the elemental foes of our race. He craves idolatry and power. Shelley introduces this here so that Waltons later failure towards the close of the novel is celebrated by the reader, who has understood that Victors arrogance has caused devastation, whereas Walton has paid little heed and is bitter in his failure. Shelley is commenting on the stupidity of male hubris, which she sensed in the scientific ambitions of Romantics such as her husband, as the critic James W. Maerten has suggested. Maerten writes also of Anthony East hope, who has drawn: a circular fortress as a model of the...

masculine ego. Ego... is entrapped in its own defences, unable to escape the barriers it has raised against a universe [which is] an enemy... The most praised... in our civilisation are those who can contain and control the most monstrous powers: biological pathogens, nuclear fission, toxic waste, vast armies. Such Promethean desires are ultimately the illusions of Icarus.

Victors ego causes him to desire a new species which would bless [him] as its creator and source. He cannot control the monster that he creates, thereby losing his essential masculinity. His attempt to defy Nature and steal Gods power for himself is as fatal as Icarus stupidity in trying to do what man cannot. This male arrogance is introduced by Alphonse, who assumes the care of Caroline and renders her submissive in gratitude.

The blatancy of the strong male and weak female roles here has been condemned by some, who suggest that the imposition of a male role on Victor is a form of filicide. This is responsible for his insecurity which in turn leads to his overreaching ego inflation. A critic has argued that: Victor Frankenstein is compulsively self-destructive, driven by forces he cannot recognise to create a son by his own efforts and without the troublesome involvement of a woman... [upon which] he is horrified... and rejects the creature totally, thereby turning the son into the very monster whose existence he has always denied in himself.

It is possible to corroborate this view to some extent, as Victors feminine qualities conflict with his identity as a man. Shelley was concerned with the issue of gender, as in her novel The Last Man she created an essentially genderless character, Lionel Verney, and discussed how he only acknowledged his gender when he viewed himself in a mirror. His reflection told him that he was an English gentleman, but without this empirical perception he had no such identity. Elizabeth Fay writes of him that he is a feminist ideal, combining masculine and feminine traits in such a way as to confute traditional notions of gender. Robert W. Anderson writes that: Frankenstein's creature embodies gender transgression on two levels...

the first being [his] status as being a surgically constructed male, the second being Victors non-gender transgression in co-opting the female trait of reproduction, transforming his laboratory into a virtual womb. The creature has no real gender, despite being created physically as a male. He is denied male dominance over females by Victor, who has made him too ugly to be accepted into human society and then destroys the female mate that he had partially made for him. The creature, like Victor, has feminine characteristics, being profoundly affected by literature and nature, and being sensitive to emotion. He is made male only so that there can be no sexual overtones in the relationship between himself and Victor, and the battle between them can be physical and violent as well as rhetorical. The absence of femininity in the making of the creature is its integral flaw.

Despite all of Victors efforts to make the creature perfect, it will ultimately be ugly, because it is unnatural for a male alone to reproduce. Beauty cannot result of only masculinity. Shelley is condemning a single father in this. The death of her mother left her to the care of her father, whom she adored. He often neglected her, leaving her feeling unwanted. The lack of grief on the part of her husband as their babies died augmented this conviction in mens inability to care for children alone.

This reinforces her message throughout the novel of the necessity for women in society. Shelley was forced to ask her husband to claim to be the author of the novel, as women were not accepted as writers at the time. Men alone in science and education are fallible, as she suggested in making Frankenstein's experiment so disastrous. Therefore the oppression of women at the time was irrational and arrogant. Frankenstein represents flawed masculinity, as an example of a society without women. Shelley manipulated masculine and feminine gender identities in her novel to try and persuade her audience that men alone cannot create, whether it be children or art.


Free research essays on topics related to: victor, creature, feminine, masculine and feminine, shelley

Research essay sample on Frankenstein Shelley Use Of And Feminine Roles

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