Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro

Programa Institucional de Bolsas de Iniciação Científica (PIBIC)

Professor: Anderson Gomes
Aluna: Ester Souza

Seropédica, 2017.
SCHOR, Esther. Introduction. The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. United
States of America: Cambridge University Press, New York, 2003, p. 1-6.

 The author gives us a brief background on Mary’s life, around 17 th century, that
suggests “two images of her life: first, a lonely, widowed life of reading and writing,
isolation and anxiety; and second, a convivial life of adventurous friendship” (p.1);

 It is showed an interesting angle about Mary’s creation, which is, she is “the
daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, two visionaries of social
renovation” (p.1) and invented the “loneliest character in the English novel” (p.1);

 Mary is everywhere, “she is found between staid cloth covers, in paperback, on

the screen or in cyberspace” and also “in a multiplicity of contexts: the Enlightenment
novel of ideas; British Jacobinism; Romantic lyricism; Scott and the historical novel;
Romantic and early Victorian women writers; and the nineteenth-century struggle
between national movements and imperial powers” (p.2);

 The author shows the point of William St. Clair that thinks that the stage
adaptions of Frankenstein had a wider influence than the novel, and also argues that
“the myth of Frankenstein became […] an alarmist cliché” (p. 3);

 The Frankenstein myth, in the twentieth century, “has been just as malleable,
alternately a monitory fable, an allegory of alienation, an ontology of ‘the other’” (p.3);

 In this paragraph of page 5, the author throw us many interesting questions, such
as: “What are the limits of Shelley’s liberalism? Of her feminism? How can she be
alternately a proponent of the incursive ego and its most ferocious critic? Is she a social
visionary, like her parents, or a bitter satirist, for whom humanity is incapable of rising
above its own imperial drive for power? Why is it so difficult, finally, to capture
Frankenstein’s philosophical orientation? Is it moral? ethical? epistemological?
political? Why, having written Matilda, did she refuse to write about the incestuous
Cenci? How do we account for the mixed mode of her novels, so acutely attuned to the
realpolitik of post Napoleonic Europe, but so deeply claimed by romance? And why, if
Shelley’s skeptical historicism is so trenchant, so consistent from novel to novel, life to
life, is she still best known as a Gothic sensationalist?”, adding that we might find
varied responses for them. However, one question is the key for the developing of the
narrative and objective of the book: how will posterity encounter her?

 Closing the introduction with a golden key, the author reveal the varied times in
which Mary has been a shadow of Shelley, her husband; she has always been possessed.
And also includes the point that “All of us who write about Mary Shelley have sought to
free her from possession, both by her poet-husband and by her “hideous progeny,”
along with its ghoulish spawn of images. Yet in wanting to give her back to the public
and on to posterity, we risk possessing her anew” (p. 5-6). Here, the authors face the
fact that Mary is nobody’s; she is, finally, allowed and capable to “speak for herself” (p.
6).
MELLOR, Anne K. Making a “monster”: an introduction to Frankenstein. In: SCHOR,
Esther. The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. United States of America:
Cambridge University Press, New York, 2003, p. 9-25.

 The author argues that Frankenstein became “a trope of everyday”, for example,
the genetically modified meats and vegetable are referenced ad “Frankenfoods”; the
debates about morality, cloning or stem cell engineering “constantly invoke the
cautionary example of Frankenstein monster” (p.9);

 In the same paragraph she mention the ‘misconception’ assignment of the name
of Frankenstein, “not to the maker of the monster, but to his creature” (p.9); and this is a
very interesting subject, which the author already have a point of view about it, which
is, this ‘misconception “derives from a crucial intuition about the relationship between
them” (p. 9); the supposition that they both are the same, two sides of a coin;

 Here we have a questionable (if we can say that way) placing, when she says
that Frankenstein, besides showing the dangers of scientific research, also show the
consequences “of an uncontrolled technological exploitation of nature and the female”
(p. 9);

 Another questionable place is when she say that “, Shelley also turns a skeptical
eye on the Enlightenment celebration of science and technology and, no less critically,
on her husband, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their friend, Lord Byron
(p. 9);

 Here we have a very interesting point, but also questionable. Because the author
says that Frankenstein is “first and foremost a book about what happens when a man
tries to procreate without a woman” (p. 10). Okay, Victor is trying to (pro)create
without the help of a woman uterus, but maybe this is a way too serious limitation of the
book;

 In this paragraph we can see her tragic experience with her first baby and the
anxieties of Mary about “the process of pregnancy, giving birth and mothering” (p. 10),
with the other two, which is concretized in Victor’s total failure as a parent. Maybe
Victor suffered with the “baby blues” of parenthood.

Ps.: maybe the reason why the novel “reverberates so strongly with its readers,
especially its female readers, is that it articulates in unprecedented detail the most
powerfully felt anxieties about pregnancy and parenting” (p. 10);

 Speaking of the consequences of such parental abandonment, the author includes

the fact that “never once has Frankenstein asked himself whether such a gigantic
creature would wish to be created, or what his own responsibilities toward such a
creature might be (p. 11);
  “The abused child who becomes an abusive, battering adult and parent” (p. 11).
And is deserved to have a note that Mary modeled both in name and appearance, the
creature’s first victim, William Frankenstein, what “suggests even deeper anxieties
about herself as a mother” (p. 11);

 Here we have a very interesting angle about Mary’s anxieties surrounding birth
and parenting, not only in the maternal sense, with babies, diapers etc., but in the sense
of giving “birth to her self-as-author” (p. 11);

 Still in the same paragraph above, we see a greater detailing about Mary’s
anxiety, that is not a simple female “anxiety of authorship” (p. 11), which is “the fear of
speaking in public in a literary culture that systematically denigrated women’s writing”
(p. 11), but a production of “both Godwin’s and Percy Shelley’s expectation that she
would become a writer like her mother” (p. 11);

 There is also Mary’s fear of barrenness as much as the trauma of birth, “that
blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship” (p. 11);

 This maternal atmosphere is intensified when it is realized that “exactly nine

months enwomb the telling of the history of Frankenstein” (p. 12);

 The cycles within Frankenstein are striking, because comparing the date of the
final letter of Walton (September, 1797), coincide with Mary’s birth (August, 1797) and
the death of her mother (September, 1797). The book is always returning to the
consequences of creation, because Victor’s death, “the creature’s promised suicide, and
Wollstonecraft’s death from puerperal fever can all be seen as the consequences of the
same creation, the birth of Mary Godwin-the-author” (p. 12);

 Mary’s novel diverges in some aspects from the Gothic genre female-authored,
but is not impossible to find that “hallmark of the Gothic”: the denial of all overt
sexuality – as well as a recurring hint of incest”. (p. 12). And all the repressed
erotic/sexual desires from the Gothic, in the novel, erupt in violence (p. 13);

 The following paragraph is talking about the “homosocial relationships” (p.13)

and how the emotional relationships of Victor with males dominate the novel.

 Is really an existent “parody of Romantic love, theorized by Percy Shelley”,

consisted in the notion “that the lover imagines an idealized form of himself, then sets
out to find its “antitype” in the world”, because of the fact that Victor’s “main partner is
his own creation”? (p. 13);
  May be that Mary “suggests that the lover’s idealizations represent a deep-seated
fear of female sexual desire”, and the “most striking example of this fear lies in
Frankenstein’s brutal destruction of the female creature, a potential sexual partner for
the creature”. (p. 13). It is worth reminding that women has the power to procreate, and
if one is bad, two is a crowd;

 Intuition of Frankenstein that the “original creature is an image of his own

desires […] is very nearly fatal” (p. 13), because of the “strange identification” that he
had with the female creature and he imagining her subjectivity;

 Difference between Victor and Walton. Walton lets himself be persuaded to

return to domesticated civility, he still “remains answerable to a feminine presence”
(p.13), while Victor is impersutable. So, as we know, Frankenstein and Wanton had
very different fates.

 The self-censoring gesture that made Mary give to Percy her manuscript of
Frankenstein so he could edit it. (p. 14). Although he made many improvements in her
text, “on several occasions he misunderstood his wife’s intentions and distorted her
ideas” (p. 14). And the author shows some of these occasions (p. 14-15). The more
alarming thing is that she accepted all these changes… “why did she do this?” (p.16)

 By 1831, Mary had a difficult time and became “convinced that human events
are decided not by personal choice or free will but by material forces beyond the control
of human agency” (p. 16); in this same year she revised Frankenstein for republication
and introduced the powerful influence of “destiny”. Along with this, some visions were
changed in the book, especially about Victor’s “curse or evil influence” that “asserted
omnipotent sway over” (p.17) him.
Ps.: With this, with this fate or “imperial nature” that controls human’s lives,
theoretically Victor became “less responsible for his actions”, seeming almost a “tragic
hero suffering for an understandable hubris” (p. 17);

 What if the creature had been mothered by his maker, accepted into the De
Lacey family, given his female mate? Maybe he could have been “the perfect ma of
whom Victor dreamed” (p. 17);

 On page 18 the author explore the scientific influences within the book, for
example, is from the word of Luigi Galvani that she derived Victor’s experiments, as
well as Aldini’s “attempt to reanimate a human corpse with the ‘spark of being’” (p.
18);

 Still on the page 18 is mentioned the powerful critique of Mary about the early
modern scientific revolution, whose commitment is to “discover the ‘objective truth,
whatever the consequences” (p.18);
  Victor’s quest to usurp “from nature the female power of biological
reproduction, to become a male womb” (p. 19). This idea join the ideia exposed in the
beginning of the chapter, when the author says that the book is “first and foremost a
book about what happens when a man tries to procreate without a woman” (p. 10);

 Frankenstein do not care about trespassing “the laws of nature”, considering that
nature is “only matter, particles that can be rearranged at the will of the scientist” (p.
19), which is totally contrary as the Renaissance “world-view that perceived nature as a
living organism, Dame Nature or Mother Earth” (p. 19). One certain surety is that
nature always find balance, and we all know that Victor’s experiment does no
succeeded; not only “because the creature turns on him, but also because ‘Mother
Nature’ fights back” (p. 19).
Ps.: Mother Nature has a great sense of humor, because she uses his (Victor) own
trespasser of balance creation to restore de balance and uses his “spark of life” or “spark
of being” – the electricity, more especially the lightings – to remind him about the
consequences of his actions (p. 19);

 The author comer up with several deep questions, such as: for Mary, what is
nature? What is being? “Where it all began? “Who was I, Whence did I come?”; “Is the
creature innately good or innately evil?” How should the creature be perceived? When
the creature sees himself he is ““unable to believe” that what he knows (feels,
experiences) himself to be is what he sees, but then he becomes “convinced” that he is
“in reality” what he sees, a “monster.” Here Shelley follows the eighteenth-century
idealist philosopher Berkeley: to be is to be perceived” (p. 20);

 However, through a very deep and amazing philosophical discourse, we start

getting other point of view of this perceiving. The only character that listened to the
creature story and felt sympathy for him is a blind man, the same happens to Mary’s
readers, but there is Walton, our guide to the judgement, and an amazing thing is
perceived: “Walton feels anger and revulsion, but at the same time – by shutting his
eyes – he recalls the creature’s suffering, acknowledges his remorse, and tries to assess
his ‘duties’ toward both Victor and his creation. Instead of moving from perplexity to
judgment, however, Walton loses sight of him ‘in the darkness & distance,’ as Mary
Shelley originally wrote, suggesting not only that the creature is still alive but also
that his nature, his meaning, remains unfixed, ever available to new
interpretations” (p. 21, my emphasis). Mary sets him free!

 It is super significant in this part that the “creature is yellow-skinned and black-
lipped […] These features are usually read either as a marker of disease […] of his
liminal status between the living and the dead […] or of his anatomical incompleteness.
But it is also a marker of his racial otherness; as Walton observes, the creature is not
a European but a ‘savage inhabitant’ of some ‘undiscovered island’ north of the ‘wilds
of Russia and Tartary’ (F I, Letter iv I3). And to read such a member of another race
as ‘savage’ or monstrous is to participate in the cultural production of racist
stereotypes” (p. 22, my emphasis. There is nothing more left to say;
  “Mary Shelley suggests that if we concur with her characters in reading the
creature as a monster, then we write the creature as a monster and become ourselves the
authors of evil […] This identification of Victor with his creature is textually reinforced
by the repeated association of both Victor and his creature with both Milton’s Satan
[…] and his fallen Adam […] Here, the hunter becomes the hunted, the pursued the
pursuer. The creature leaves food for the pursuing Victor so that they can finally reunite.
And when each boards Walton’s ship, each articulates the same feelings of intermingled
revenge, remorse, and despair […] Victor has become his creature, his creature has
become his maker; they are each other’s double. Hence naming the creature
‘Frankenstein’ – as popular folklore would have it – uncovers a profound truth within
the novel’s narrative.” (p. 23);

 In order to end the text, the author makes some precious considerations “When
we write the unfamiliar as monstrous, we literally create the evil, the injustice, the
racism, sexism, and class prejudice that we arbitrarily imagine” (p. 23);

 Mary set the creature free, and “the survival of Frankenstein’s creature, in story,
film, myth, and literary criticism opens the way for ever new, possibly more
constructive readings of Shelley’s “monster”. (p. 24).
CLEMIT, Pamela. Frankenstein, Matilda, and the legacies of Godwin and
Wollstonecraft. In: SCHOR, Esther. The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley.
United States of America: Cambridge University Press, New York, 2003, p. 26-44.

 This chapter begins with a cropping of a letter that Mary sent to Frances Wright,
in which she tells how grateful she is about the influence that her parents, William
Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft in the construction of her as a being. Although it can
be perceive how hard were the expectations thrown at her (p. 26);

 Frankenstein first appeared anonymously, which provoked many conjectures

about the author, based on the dedication of the first edition. The opinions were
controversy, but all in a good and surprised way, with such production, for example:
“Here is one of the productions of the modern school in its highest style of caricature
and exaggeration” (p. 27);

 Ever since Mary was born, she was “indissolubly linked to her parents’
controversial writings and reputations” (p. 27).

 Mary’s parents were great figures in history, two minds ahead of their time and
countless times discriminated for their beliefs. Her father, especially, for many reasons:
the publication of Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; his
strong opposition to the use of force and further on the influence of his writings in
people’s thought and movements that swan against the government (p. 27-29);

 Godwin believed that education was the key to social change and educated his
kids at home, with “unusually wide-ranging education, in which different forms of
knowledge, scientific as well as literary, were equally available as intellectual and
literary resources” (p. 29);

 “To be something great and good was the precept given me by my father” (p.
29);

 “Frankenstein’s central, flawed aspiration to create ‘a new species,’ which

‘would bless [him] as its creator and source’ (F i iii 32), has often been read as a
specific critique of Godwin’s utopian idealism” (p. 31);

 “Mary Shelley builds on Godwin’s use of the pursuit motif to destabilize

conventional moral values: in Frankenstein, the abandoned creature returns to confront
his ‘monstrous’ father, and the pair act out a drama of enticement and threat that leads
to widespread social destruction. In her choice of a multiple narrative mode, Mary
Shelley was also influenced by Maria, in which Wollstonecraft presents several first-
person narratives telling the same, mutually reinforcing story of the social oppression of
women in different classes of society” (p. 32);

 “Frankenstein achieves a balance between psychological and social concerns,

and between personal and political allegory. The central, highly charged relationship
between creator and creature reenacts the complex bond of fear and fascination between
the aristocrat Falkland and his servant Caleb”, both characters of Godwinian novels of
1790s (p. 32);

 “The plot of St. Leon [Godwin cosmopolitan historical novel] is structured as a

series of bondings and separations. Each experience of shared domestic tranquillity is
disrupted by St. Leon’s obsessive striving for wealth, honor, and fame, which leads only
to an unbearable social isolation: ‘I possessed the gift of immortal life,’ recalls St. Leon,
‘but I looked on myself as a monster that did not deserve to exist’”. (p.32). This plot is
very much alike with some aspects of Frankenstein, which suggest the huge influence
that her father and mother had in her writings,; although, she is not “a mere imitator of
their works” (p, 26);

 “To begin with, Mary Shelley’s use of symbolic European locations highlights
the associations between Frankenstein and the autobiographical Rousseau. The novel’s
action centers on the republic of Geneva, where Rousseau was born and where the
Frankenstein family is established as a pillar of bourgeois society, celebrated for its
devotion to public affairs, in the era of the French Revolution” (p. 33);

 Under M. Waldman tutelage, Victor Frankenstein “is persuaded of the validity

of modern scientific endeavor” and “is inspired with ‘an almost supernatural
enthusiasm’ […] for scientific enquiry, culminating in his project of solitary creation”
(p. 34);

 “Frankenstein’s rejection of his creature makes him guilty of a crime that made
Rousseau notorious: parental abandonment” (p. 34);

 “Instead of acknowledging the creature’s independent rights and needs,

Frankenstein depicts him as a projection of his own worst qualities, adapting images of
monstrosity drawn from anti-Jacobin propaganda” (p. 34);

 “Such parallels with Rousseau’s life story establish Frankenstein as another

disappointed egotist in the manner of St. Leon and Fleetwood, whose self-justifying
confessional narrative collapses into unwitting self-condemnation” (p. 34);

 “Mary Shelley’s most powerful critique of Frankenstein occurs when she allows
the creature to tell his own story” (p. 34);
  “Yet to read Matilda merely as an expression of psychic crisis is to overlook her
self-consciousness as a literary artist. The exploitation of autobiographical material and
the use of a self-dramatizing, histrionic narrator are established generic features of the
Godwinian novel: Maria, St. Leon, and Frankenstein, for example, all contain extreme,
displaced renderings of the author’s personal experience” (p. 37);

 “Yet Mathilda’s plea for unrestricted frankness and sincerity leads to disaster.
Like those other flawed, historically premature revolutionaries, Caleb and Frankenstein,
Mathilda starts out with benevolent intentions but ends up unleashing forces beyond her
control” (p. 39);

 “Mary Shelley’s appropriation of this dark vision in Matilda reveals that she
continued to extend, modify, and develop her parents’ imaginative concerns beyond
Frankenstein, and prepares for her further transmutations of their multiform, ambivalent
legacies in her subsequent novels”. (p. 41).
HOEVELER, Diane Long. Frankenstein, feminism, and literary theory. In: SCHOR,
Esther. The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. United States of America:
Cambridge University Press, New York, 2003, p. 45-62.

 “Frankenstein has figured more importantly in the development of feminist

literary theory than perhaps any other novel, with the possible exception of Charlotte
Brontë’s Jane Eyre.” (p. 45). Although “feminist criticism has never been monolithic”
(p. 48);

 There are “three major strands in feminist literary criticism: American, French,
and British. American feminist literary critics understand ‘women’s experiences’ to be
the basis of the differences in women’s writings. American feminist critics of the 1970s
and 1980s tended to discuss recurring patterns of themes (i.e., the valorization of the
quotidian value of domestic life, human community and relationships) or imagery (i.e.,
houses, claustrophobia, food and eating disorders, insanity, fetishizing of clothing, body
image, etc.) in works by women. Led by the pioneering work of Elaine Showalter, such
critics also took pains to rediscover ‘lost’ women writers and to demonstrate the
continuities of a women’s literary tradition.” (p. 45);

 “By contrast, French feminist critics of this period […] were concerned with the
way the masculine-dominated system of language produces meanings that tend to
objectify or erase women’s voices. In such a linguistic situation, women can rebel either
through the strategic use of silence or by using l’ecriture feminine, a specifically
feminine form of language that is based on female subjectivity and the physiology and
bodily instincts of women. […] Such writing seeks to resist the patriarchal system by
which man has sought to objectify and dominate the external world by reclaiming the
voice of the mother and the prelinguistic potentiality of the unconscious.” (p. 46);

 “British feminists [...] have criticized both the American and French approaches
as essentialist, that is, for understanding ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ as essential
categories rather than as qualities shaped by social class and economics. British
feminists of the 1970s and 1980s maintained that no woman can write outside of the
constraints and oppressions that dominate the social and economic systems she inhabits.
Influenced by Marxian literary criticism, British feminists are concerned with the
material conditions under which literature is produced, while at the same time viewing
literature largely as a manifestation of the dominant cultural ideologies operating
invisibly in the society.” (p. 46);
  “Moers’s emphasis on the heroine’s body is significant, for it signals a new
theme in feminist criticism, a reading of literature not as a purely cerebral activity, but
as one based in the pleasures and pains of the body. Moers was one of the first critics
to recognize that Frankenstein evolved out of Shelley’s own tragic experience as a
young, unwed mother of a baby who would live only a few weeks. For Moers,
Frankenstein is a ‘birth myth’ that reveals the ‘revulsion against newborn life, and the
drama of guilt, dread, and flight surrounding birth and its consequences.’” (p. 46, my
emphasis);

 “Moers reads Shelley’s novel as a sublimated afterbirth, in which the author

expels her own guilt both for havingcaused her mother’s death and for havingfailed to
produce a healthy son and heir for Percy (as his legal wife Harriet had done three
months earlier).” (p. 46);

 “For Moers, the novel’s strength was to present the ‘abnormal, or monstrous,
manifestations of the child–parent tie’ and in so doing, ‘to transform the standard
Romantic matter of incest, infanticide, and patricide into a phantasmagoria of the
nursery.” (p. 46-47, my emphasis);

 Knoepflmacher’s sees the novel “as essentially a ‘war within the mind’ of the
central character, in this case Victor functioning as a stand-in for Mary Shelley herself”.
(p. 47). We can also add the figure of the Creature, which also can offer a stand in for
Mary;

 “Gilbert and Gubar interpret Frankenstein as a “Romantic ‘reading’ of Paradise

Lost,” with Victor alternately playing the roles of Adam, Satan, and Eve”. They “coin
the term ‘bibliogenesis’ to capture their sense of Shelley’s […] that she brought herself
to birth not through a human mother, but through the reading and consumption of books
which “functioned as her surrogate parents.” (p. 47);

 According to Mary Poovey “[T]he narrative strategy of Frankenstein, like the

symbolic presentation of the monster, enables Shelley to express and efface herself at
the same time and thus, at least partially, to satisfy her conflicting desires for self-
assertion and social acceptance.” (p. 48);

 “Deconstruction further empowered feminists who had already undertaken to

denounce Western culture’s crucial binary oppositions – culture/nature; male/female –
and embrace the belief that there are no determinate bounds to a text or a gender.” (p.
48);

 “Feminists who have adapted Foucault’s theories have studied literary genres as
species of ‘discourse systems’ that control and dominate how women function in a
society that prescribes how they appear and behave. Hence, feminists and critics
working in cultural studies have been interested in Frankenstein as […] a manifestation
of conflicted ideologies, working sometimes in league with its society’s repressive
attitudes towards women and sometimes arguing against society’s negative stereotypes
about the proper roles of mothers, daughters, servants, and friends.” (p. 49);

 “Barbara Johnson adopts a self-conscious and self-reflexive literary approach to

the novel by analyzing it as an autobiographical record of the ‘struggle for feminine
authorship’: ‘Frankenstein can be read as the story of the experience of writing
Frankenstein.’” (p. 49);

 A variety of psychoanalytical approaches to the novel increasingly came to

dominate the feminist criticism of the 1980s. Mary Jacobus’s [...] offers one of the most
influential observations made on the novel: ‘A curious thread in the plot focuses not on
the image of the hostile father (Frankenstein/God) but on that of the dead mother who
comes to symbolize to the monster his loveless state. Literally unmothered, he
fantasizes acceptance by a series of women but founders in imagined rebuffs and
ends in violence.’” (p. 49, my emphasis);

 “Devon Hodge, in her 1983 essay ‘Frankenstein and the Feminine Subversion of
the Novel,’ adapts French feminist theoretical positions to explain the use of three male
narrators in the text: ‘But perhaps in adopting a male voice, the woman writer is given
the opportunity to intervene from within, to become an alien presence that undermines
the stability of the male voice.’” (p. 50);

 “Lacan saw the so-called symbolic realm of language as the realm of the law of
the father, in which the ‘phallus’ (the symbol of the father’s power) was the ‘privileged
signifier’ for all discourse.” (p. 50). This “law of the father” would be “the patriarchal
system that keeps women in a marginal status.” (p. 51);

 “’What is a Monster? (According to Frankenstein)’ relies on Lacan’s theory of

the “mirror stage,” during which individual subjectivity is formed when the child sees
itself reflected in the mother’s eyes. According to Brooks, the motherless creature can
only find what he thinks is human identity through the acquisition of language and the
mastery of texts in the De Lacey household.” (p. 50);

 “Since language acquisition, the body of the mother, and the assault on the father
are all central themes in Frankenstein, we can see why her influence continues to figure
importantly. [...] For Mulvey-Roberts, the creature represents the ‘spectre of the
maternal body as well as Frankenstein’s monstrous child.’” (p.50). Further on the
narrative, the conception arounf the body of the mother developed: “Victor’s rejection
of his creature has been seen as one manifestation of the child’s sense of abandonment
and betrayal by the dead mother. He blames Elizabeth for spreadingthe disease that
killed his mother, at the same time he blamed his younger brother and Justine for
stealinghis mother’s affections from him, the first child and rightful love object of the
mother. In creatingthe monster, Victor attempts to undo the death of his mother. The
monster is, so to speak, the first run on an experiment that Victor intends to eventually
undertake on his dead mother’s corpse.” (p. 52);

 According to Margaret Homan’s “’'[T]he novel is simultaneously about the

death and obviation of the mother and about the son’s quest for a substitute object of
desire.’ (p. 50);

 “And all of this suggests that the writingof literature was, for Shelley as for so
many others, one way of denyingthe power of death.” (p. 52);

 “The fact that Victor constructs the body and then, when contemplatingthe
realities of sexuality, desire, and reproduction, rips that body apart, suggests that the
female body is for Victor infinitely more threateningand ‘monstrous’ than was the
creature’s male body [...] But Victor’s inability to allow the female creature to live is,
for feminist critics, more than narcissism; it is another instance of the misogyny and fear
of female sexuality that Shelley exposes and condemns.” (p. 52);

 “For Veeder, Mary’s real rage in her life was toward her distant and emotionally
unavailable father, and so the victims of the creature move inexorably back through the
alphabet of names to ‘Alphonse,’ the father, the Alpha of the Universe.” (p. 53);

 “Paul Youngquist’s [...] argues that it is not the father who was the target of
Mary’s critique in the novel, but the mother – specifically, Mary Wollstonecraft’s
rationalist, almost bodiless, form of feminism” (p. 53);

 ”Readingthe novel through one critical approach can only lead, according to
Botting, to a recognition of the ‘monstrous differences of the text . . . Frankenstein
seems to foreground the contradictions and conflicts of and between positions.’” (p. 54);

 “So what is the difference that gender makes? continues to be the dominant
question in feminist, psychoanalytical, and materialist readings of the novel.” (p. 54);

 “By examiningwhat has traditionally been considered ‘low’ cultural artifacts,

feminists have opened up and made available many works written by women and
neglected by the literary establishment” (p. 56);

 The author “differ from Moers in seeing the true woman in the text as ‘Victor,’ a
Gothic feminist who manipulates others to do ‘his’ bidding, all the way washing ‘his’
hands of responsibility for the elimination of his family – rivals for the lost mother’s
love.” (p. 57);

 “Anne K. Mellor argues that Shelley criticizes the scientific discoveries and
increasing technological advancements that were taking place in her own day,
advocating instead a more humane, sympathetic, and nurturing use of science to
improve human life. For Mellor, the novel charts how Nature, a specifically feminine
power, avenges herself on Victor’s benighted – rational, objective, Enlightenment –
masculinity.” (p. 57);

 “Jonathan Dollimore [...] offers a suggestive theory of the ‘perverse’ [...]

Accordingto this approach, Victor enters the realm of the perverse when he begins to
create his monster, knowingthat by so doing, he is rupturinghis society’s normative
codes of behavior and binary structures (male/female; God/man).” (p. 58);

 “The ‘otherness’ of the creature, founded in its physical appearance and size, is
yet another manifestation of disability, a permanent physical condition that the subject
can never alter.” (p. 60);

 “So is it valid to claim, as Bottinghas, that Frankenstein is a ‘product of

criticism, not a work of literature’? Clearly, one has to wonder what status and
reputation Frankenstein would have now if feminist literary critics had not
‘rediscovered’ the book with such passion and imagination in the 1970s. The fact that
the novel proved to be such fertile ground for so many different critical schools has no
doubt led to its installation as the most frequently taught canonical novel written by a
woman in the early nineteenth century.” (p. 60);

 “It is the ‘mother-lode,’ of feminist criticism, as well as the text on which many
literary critics have tested their assumptions and theories. It continues to entrance,
irritate, and puzzle readers and critics alike because it speaks at once – in so many
different contradictory voices – to so many issues that are central to what we make of
being ’human.’” (p. 60).