Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - Kate Ellis (essay date 1979)


Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - Kate Ellis (essay date 1979)

Kate Ellis (essay date 1979)

SOURCE: "Monsters in the Garden: Mary Shelley and the Bourgeois Family," in The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel, edited by George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher, University of California Press, 1979, pp. 123-42.

[In the essay that follows, Ellis reads Frankenstein alongside the paradigms of the bourgeois family—its idealized structure, its separation of public and private, and its division of social roles according to gender difference.]

Nature has wisely attached affections to duties, to sweeten toil, and to give that vigour to the exertions of reason which only the heart can give. But, the affection which is put on merely because it is the appropriate insignia of a certain character, when its duties are not fulfilled, is one of the empty compliments which vice and folly are obliged to pay...

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