Marie Meixnerová
May 7, 2008
The Lack Of Parental Love And Its Feminine Aspects Towards The Monster In Mary Shelleys Frankenstein
This essay will explore how important are feminine elements (that means either share some features connected primarily with women behavior or have been influenced by these elements from outside) for life. Not only for human beings, but for every creature, especially for such an artificial creature (or let's say thing) as Frankenstein's Monster, because in cases like this, the consequences of lack of feminine in nurturing are most evident.
It is obvious, that Mary Shelly uses her novel to reflect and criticize the position of women in the society she lived in. It is perfectly natural. The society in her historical period was the one defined along gender lines. It was the time full of gender stereotypes against which the feminist movement has fought since than. On the beginning of this movement stood Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley's famous mother, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792).
So Mary in her Frankenstein created world, where the dangers of a repression of the feminine gender, not even embodied in the female but also its natural dimensions in the male are directly derived from the real world she lived in.
Stereotypes
During the eighteen century, in the time of the Enlightenment, social relations in Europe were based on the Judeo-Christian tradition of previous centuries. Only monogamy was acceptable, giving birth to children outside marriage was strictly banned and to get divorced was almost impossible. The majority of people have no power to control or produce economic wealth; the basic means were obtained through heritage. And this process worked within a family upon a male line as another feature of patriarchal and hierarchical society. Along with the sexual division of labor, where masculine work was segregated from the domestic realm (according to gender stereotypes, public affairs are...