Ellen Moers, excerpt from Literary Women (1976)

• Moers is the first to argue that Frankenstein’s most important source is not Faustus but rather Mary Shelley’s experience as a mother and a very particular kind of mother (216-217). Out of Shelley’s experience as a mother, Moers argues, comes a “a myth of genuine originality” (217) and one that focuses less upon “birth” than upon the “after-birth” (218), specifically Frankenstein’s abandonment of the Creature. As Moer’s reads it, it is “a horror story of maternity” (220).
  
• Moer’s supports her argument by a reading of Shelley’s journals and the construction of a series of analogies between the author and the text:
  • Victor > lab > Creature
  • parallels
  • Shelley > journals (books and babies) > Frankenstein
    
• As Moers reads the novel, Shelley’s biography provides all of the material that makes up the Gothic power of the novel; she details the way in which life forces (love-making, pregnancies, births, and marriages) and death forces (stillborns, miscarriages, suicides, and sexual betrayal) are entwined in Mary Shelley’s lived experience as a woman.
  
• At the same time, Moers insistently places the novel in the context of other literature written by men and women, Radcliffe, Thackeray, Wordsworth, etc. This was a very important persuasive tactic in 1976 when feminist literary critics needed authoritative grounds from which to argue their position (218-219). The example of Thackeray is a telling one; she draws upon his representation of a “bad” mother in order to contextualize Mary Shelley’s more complex representation of maternity – so, Moers draws upon Thackeray’s canonical authority and implicitly suggests that Shelley’s own representation is more subtly done.

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, excerpt from Madwoman in the Attic (1979)

• In The Madwoman in the Attic, they argue that nineteenth-century women writers, socialized to act like good “domestic” women, manifest rage and anger when they do pick up the pen to write. This, they argue, results in women’s writing where we find counter-figures to the ideal feminine figure: Mary Shelley’s Creature, Bertha in Jane Eyre, etc.
  
• Although, they, like Moers, are interested in exploring the effect of motherhood on the author, they are interested less in her essential biological functions and more in the ways in which literature participates in the gendering of woman.
  
  • “For her developing sense of herself as a literary creature and/or creator seems to have been inseparable from her emerging self-definition as daughter, mistress, wife, and mother. Thus she cast her birth myth – her myth of origins – in precisely those cosmogenic terms to which her parents, her husband, and indeed her whole literary culture continually alluded: the terms of Paradise Lost (228).
    
  • In the excerpt you read, Gilbert and Gubar employ Frankenstein to demonstrate the ways in which a nineteenth-century novel engages with the legacy of Paradise Lost by John Milton, as well as the way in which Mary Shelley’s reading of the text contributed to her construction as a woman writer. In this way, Madwoman in the Attic, tends to engage in both gynocriticism and feminist critique at the same time.
    
• For them, Shelley’s engagement with Paradise Lost is indicative of the way in which her “anxieties about femaleness” are as much about literature as they are about physical female sexuality (226).
  
• Gilbert and Gubar want to argue against the grain in terms of the influence of Milton upon the text. Rather than arguing that Victor, the Creature, and Mary Shelley are simply doubles of Adam and Satan (as does Levine, for example), they want to argue that the novel eventually grapples with the monstrous feminine figures of Paradise Lost: Eve and Sin.
  
• For Gilbert and Gubar, Frankenstein reflects Mary Shelley’s anxious relationship to the project of authorship for a woman. Their vision of a feminine literary tradition (as expressed in 1979 in The Madwoman in the Attic) is one that is marked by an anxious and uncertain response to authorship that results in anger and the representation of the monstrous. The woman writer is (in their formulation) monstrous – or, at the very least, concerned that writing makes one monstrous because the process by which the dutiful (“silent”) daughter grasps the pen is necessarily a rebellious act (234-235).
  
• This was an incredibly powerful reading when it was offered in the late 70s but it obviously has limitations. What about women’s writing that does not contain images of the “monstrous” double? And, is it possible to conceive of a nineteenth-century woman writing from a position of authority rather than mere reaction? To what degree is Gilbert and Gubar’s thesis historically accurate – if it is true for Victorian women writers – does it really hold up for Romantic women writers, producing their work at a very different historical moment?

Anne Mellor, excerpt from a 1988 essay entitled, "Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein.” It was later published as a chapter in a book length study of Mary Shelley.

• Mellor deploys a somewhat similar reading to that of Moers but focuses almost entirely upon the text rather than upon biography. She sees the novel as one that traces out the dangerous consequences of attempting to either possess or dismiss the "female.”
  
• She also traces out the novel’s representation of a rigid gendered division between the public and the private; the intellectual and the emotional; work and love (275). The consequences of such divisions effect both men in their realm and women in theirs. Mellor wants to read the De Lacey family as an ideal alternative familial structure (276). She sees it as a "vision of a social group based on justice, equality, and mutual affection" (277).
  
• Mellor reads the novel as critiquing male attitudes towards female sexuality. She supports this through close-readings of several key scenes, including: Victor Frankenstein’s violent destruction of the female creature and his various justifications for that act (279) and the murder of Elizabeth Lavenza (280). [Show image from Wolfson edition].
  
• She also suggests that there is a homoerotic edge to the novel, which supports rather than resists the rigid gendering of the separate spheres.
  
• But Mellor wants to argue that Nature resists Victor's attempts to destroy her and here is where she is very different than Gilbert and Gubar. Mellor attempts to recuperate a powerful feminine agency: Nature isn't "passive, inert, or 'dead' matter" after all: “Nature both resists and revenges herself upon his attempts” (282). Mellor sees Shelley as celebrating Nature as "a sacred life-force in which human beings ought to participate in conscious harmony" (284).
  
• “Mary Shelley endorsed a traditional mimetic aesthetic that exhorted literature to imitate ideal Nature and defined the role of the writer as a moral educator. Her novel purposely identifies moral virtue, based on self-sacrifice, moderation, and domestic affection, with aesthetic beauty” (286).
  
• Mellor sees the novel as celebrating moderation in all things: moral, familial, political, and intellectual.

Gayatri Spivak, excerpt from “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985)

• Moers, Gilbert, Gubar, and Mellor all (to a greater and lesser extent) celebrate the individual and specifically the individual’s access to agency. This is not to say that they don’t see agency as constrained by social forces, but ultimately they want to argue for the significance of the “individual” over the forces of ideology.
  
• Gayatri Spivak, working as a post-colonialist feminist, sees in the Anglo-American exaltation of individuality and agency a dangerous corollary in imperialist ideology. She reads Frankenstein as a text that contests the very notion of a unified subjectivity and, hence, the underpinnings of imperialist ideology. She does not, however, say that the novel is free from “incidental imperialist sentiment” (263).
  
• The Creature – as Spivak reads him – is evidence of the impossibility of marrying theoretical reason, practical reason, and aesthetic appreciation. Spivak takes her terms from Emmanuel Kant in Critique of Judgment and reads it as a representative text of western culture.
  
• Spivak notes that she is not interested in exonerating the author, Mary Shelley, from either racism or imperialist ideology: the author is not important to her. Spivak is interested in readings the novel “in a politically useful way” (265).
  
• Spivak’s analysis depends upon reading the novel as radically inconclusive: “We do not see the conflagration of his funeral pile – the self-immolation is not consummated in the text: he too cannot be contained in the text. In terms of narrative logic, he is ‘lost in darkness and distance’ (211) – these are the last words of the novel – into an existential temporality . . The very relationship between sexual reproduction and social subject-production – the dynamic nineteenth-century topos of feminism in imperialism – remains problematic within the limits of Shelley’s text and, paradoxically, constitutes its strength” (267).
  
• Spivak ends by asserting that: “The task of the post-colonial writer, the descendant of the colonial female subject that history did in fact produce, cannot be restrained within the specular master-slave enclosure so powerfully staged in Frankenstein but must represent “the post-colonial performance of the construction of the constitutional subject of the new nation” (269).
  
  • In other words, Shelley’s text is exemplary in that it does not represent the interpellation of destruction of the rebellious “slave” figure but it doesn’t go far enough in imagining the “Other” as capable of its own subjectivity separate from that of the Master.