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Frankenstein

ANNE K. MELLOR (ESSAY DATE 1988)

SOURCE: Mellor, Anne K. “Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein.” In Romanticism and Feminism, edited by Anne K. Mellor, pp. 220-32. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

In the following essay, Mellor argues that Frankenstein is a feminist novel which depicts the consequences of a social construction of gender that places greater value on the male.

When Victor Frankenstein identifies Nature as female—“I pursued nature to her hiding places”¹—he participates in a gendered construction of the universe whose ramifications are everywhere apparent in Frankenstein. His scientific penetration and technological exploitation of female nature, which I have discussed elsewhere,² is only one dimension of a more general cultural encoding of the...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Primary Sources
   1. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Essay Date 1818)
4. General Commentary
   1. A. A. Markley (Essay Date 1997)
5. Title Commentary
   1. Frankenstein
6. Further Reading
7. Copyright

1. Feminism
2. Romanticism