WOMEN WRITING MONSTERS—Shelley as an origin for the feminist transformation of sf, with a parallel rise in her academic reputation; intersection/conflation of writing/women/monsters.
Frankenstein is notably a story about men written by a woman who is the daughter of “the” outspoken early feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft. So, a double reading of Shelley’s text suggests itself: Frankenstein is a story of men in conflict, but also about men’s actions and lives from the perspective of a woman who knows the consequences of male lives on the women around them; in short, the women of the novel are mere pawns in the intense relationship between the men not through the author’s inattention, but with an awareness of patriarchy. To go further: Mary Shelley herself is a model for the Creature; she is in monstrous “drag”—in a literary mimic of the performance women must enact if they are to matter in a world controlled by men, revealing another, powerful dimension to the Creature’s anger. According to contemporary reviews, Shelley, a teenage young woman, should not have written her horror book at all—she is a monster to have done it. Like her creature, she desires more, and achieved more, than she is allowed. This reading has been influential and inspirational to other writers, especially women writers of sf.
Frankenstein has had an effect on sf from 19th century vivisection and scientific breakthrough stories to early 20th century pulp magazine mad scientists, but an influx of women writers into genre sf from the 1970s forward increased the seriousness with which readers approached Shelley’s ideas, and brought the feminist reading of her text into focus. Feminism’s crucial expansion and transformation of sf itself in a larger sense placed Mary Shelley in a key position as an important “foremother” of the whole sf enterprise. This promoted serious, ongoing academic critical work on Frankenstein, opening its study beyond its status as a horror tale and a “curiosity” in the study of Percy Shelley or Byron to a work of sf and of literary value in general. Mary Shelley’s novel offered an originary precursor for sf very different from the male-dominated tradition of early 20th-century American “Golden Age” sf.
“Women Writing Monsters” is a phrase that attempts to get at the complexity of Shelley’s influence. The phrase has the double meaning of referring to writing by women about monsters, especially gendered creatures, but also to writing women as monsters—from female monsters like sirens or medusas, to femme fatales or vaginas dentatas, to what it means to be considered monstrous simply for being a woman writer. Any writer’s relationship to writing might be figured as “monstrous,” but Mary Shelley’s calling her text her “hideous progeny,” directly paralleling her creation to Victor’s Creature, suggests a poignant feminist comment about women and motherhood when she calls for her monster to “go forth and prosper.” What does it mean to love the monsters we make with a mother’s love? Frankenstein has a sometimes thorny but powerful feminist legacy in stories written in many genres of the fantastic, often by women writing of gender and monsters…or about the fear of motherhood…or of monstrous sexuality (of various kinds).
See QUEER FRANKENSTEIN for a discussion of gender focused on the homosocial and homosexual relationships between men in Frankenstein.