The Elimination of the 'Female' in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

In her most famous work of literature, Mary Shelley exposes many contemporary societal issues, whether it be through the cautionary tale she allegorically includes surrounding the dangers of moving towards 'Enlightenment' through scientific galvanism and electric machinations. Yet, in this essay I will be explicating an area which is perhaps more nuanced and more heavily buried in the root of her work and life, and that is the elimination of the 'female' role. My argument is this: the eliminations that run through the novel are not incidental to the plot, they are the logical consequence of Victor's central transgression, which is not the harvesting of life itself, but the harvesting of life without a woman. Once creation is severed from the female body, the text seems compelled to remove the female body from everywhere else too.

One should note that in her own life, Shelley learnt to associate maternal and female roles and acts with death and loss. This comes through the loss of Shelley's own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died of complications shortly after childbirth. Mary potentially grew up with repressed guilt, perhaps blaming herself for her own mother's death, as if her own birth had cost her mother's life. Shelley also suffered during childbirth herself, as her own child died just days after being born. It is with these collective experiences that Mary Shelley may have come to associate natural maternal functions such as childbirth, with death, loss and grief, and it is this private association that the novel seems to enact on a public, narrative scale.

In Shelley's text there is the obvious elimination of the females. The maternal sacrifice that Wollstonecraft died from is mirrored in Shelley's text. Caroline, the mother of Victor Frankenstein, contracts scarlet fever and dies after nursing Elizabeth back to health. Justine Moritz is executed for a crime that she did not commit, and Elizabeth is murdered on her wedding night. These are all female characters dead, for the sake of the narrative. Yet there is something more interesting in how Shelley toys with the idea of the 'female', something that goes beyond simply killing women off one by one.

Shelley's text is largely about the danger of 'playing god', and transgressing past natural laws. As critic David Punter notes, 'Victor is an overreacher and transgressor'. The unnatural way that life is harnessed at a man's will makes one focus on the subtitle for Shelley's 1818 novel, 'The Modern Prometheus'. In Greek mythology, Prometheus is a mortal who stole fire from the gods, and is subsequently punished, his liver eaten alive, for his overreaching, as humans were not supposed to harness such a creation. Alike Prometheus, Victor is punished by his own creation, as the 'wretch' destroys all those Victor loves and drives Victor to his own untimely death. Yet in the midst of this transgression against natural law, Shelley explicates that perhaps the most unnatural law Victor transgresses is not the ability to harvest life itself, but the act of creating life without a female involved.

Victor's 'solitary chamber or rather cell' can be seen as a mirror for the female womb. Victor, locked in his workshop for 'months' (evoking the length of a pregnancy), produces a child of his own creation, the 'Monster'. Shelley, with this view in mind, shows what follows when the act of creation happens without a female, and it ends in death and despair for almost every character involved. The unnaturalness of the creature does not stop at his conception. Without a maternal figure in his life, the creature is left to form his only attachment through Victor alone, and that attachment curdles into something closer to a warped Oedipal structure than a normal one. In the conventional Freudian triangle, the child loves the mother and envies the father who possesses her. The creature has no mother to love and so nothing to envy Victor for on those terms, but he is left with only one figure to direct any of that need towards. Victor becomes, by default, both the object of the creature's love and the object of his resentment, a role no single figure, least of all an absent and horrified father, was ever built to hold. The result is a psyche with nowhere stable to place its earliest attachment, and the creature is left in a kind of psychological limbo, caught between wanting Victor's love and hating him for withholding it.

Victor's rejection of the female is not limited to his own act of creation, it extends to his treatment of the female creature he begins to build for the 'wretch'. Having agreed, under pressure, to construct a companion for his first creation, Victor tears the half-finished female apart before she can be given life at all. His reasoning is telling: he fears she might refuse the terms he and the creature have set for her, that she might have desires, a will, a capacity to say no. As the critic Anne Mellor observes, Victor's project all along has been an attempt to 'usurp the function of the female in the reproductive cycle', and the destruction of the female creature is simply the most literal enactment of that usurpation. Where every other woman in the novel is eliminated after she has already served her narrative function, the female creature is eliminated before she can have one at all, purely on the suspicion that she might act for herself. This is, I think, the clearest evidence for my thesis in the entire text. It is not enough for Victor to create without a woman, he must also ensure that no woman capable of independent agency is allowed to exist alongside what he has made.

There is one notable exception to this pattern, and she is worth dwelling on precisely because she survives. Safie, the Arabian woman who flees her father to join Felix De Lacey, is given a history, a will of her own, and a refusal to accept the fate her father intends for her. She is also, tellingly, the only major female figure in the novel to live to the end. Mellor herself points to this contrast, noting that Safie's escape from patriarchal control offers the novel's 'only alternative to a rigidly patriarchal construction of gender and the family', and that her disappearance from the later plot, once she has served this contrastive purpose, mirrors the fate of the feminist alternative Shelley herself was denied after her mother's death. Safie is not punished with death, but she is quietly written out all the same, absorbed into the De Lacey household and given no further voice. Even the one woman who acts for herself is not permitted to remain visible for long. This does not undermine the thesis so much as sharpen it: the novel does not need to kill every woman, it only needs to ensure that female agency is never allowed to stay in view.

The horror Victor feels upon animating his creature is also worth reading through this lens. He does not describe triumph, he describes revulsion, flight, an inability to remain in the room with what he has made. It is a reaction that sits oddly close to what we might now call postnatal distress, except relocated onto a man who has no framework, medical or emotional, for what he is experiencing, because the entire event has been engineered to happen without the body or the language that would normally accompany it. Victor gives birth, in every structural sense, and then abandons the child immediately, not from cruelty exactly, but because he has no model for what comes after creation once the maternal role that would ordinarily hold that moment has been removed from the process entirely.

Even the novel's outer frame reproduces the same pattern. Robert Walton writes the entire story down in letters addressed to his sister, Margaret Saville, who never once speaks. She exists only as a name at the top of a page, a silent recipient built to receive a story she has no part in shaping. The structure of the novel itself, before Victor has said a single word, is already a man narrating to an absent woman.

Yet why would Shelley want to warn readers of the removal of the female. There is no definite answer, but there are convincing interpretations, and I think the most resonant one is contingent on Shelley's contemporary societal beliefs. In Regency Britain, married women held almost no independent legal existence. Under the common-law doctrine of coverture, a woman's property, earnings and legal identity were absorbed into her husband's upon marriage, and women had no vote and very little autonomy outside the household. The quality of their lives was heavily reliant on their husbands. Shelley perhaps warns readers of a world without women, as in her own, they were becoming increasingly reduced to a single function, their worth measured almost entirely by their capacity for procreation. This view is further mirrored in the novel, as female characters such as Elizabeth are described as 'a shrine-dedicated lamp that lights up our home'. A lamp is a piece of furniture, it lights up and illuminates the area it is placed in, but it has no will of its own, no direction it can turn towards except the one it is set in. Just as Elizabeth's only role in the work is to be secondary to Victor's ambition, she has no choices or purpose of her own, only to serve as a bride, and she is ultimately killed and mangled over her own wedding bed, the very site where her sole narrative function was meant to be fulfilled.

Taken together, these three readings are not really separate arguments, they are the same transgression seen from three different distances. Read through myth, Victor is Prometheus, punished for reaching past the boundary set for mortals. Read through psychology, that same reaching produces a creature with no stable place to put his earliest attachments, because the boundary Victor crossed was also the boundary that would have given the creature a mother. Read through history, Shelley's own society had already begun to hollow women out into a single function long before Victor ever entered his workshop, so his experiment does not invent the elimination of the female, it only makes literal what was already happening around her. The novel does not ask whether life can be created without a woman. It answers that question, repeatedly, by showing what has to be destroyed for the answer to be yes.