Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - U. C. Knoepflmacher (essay date 1979)


Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - U. C. Knoepflmacher (essay date 1979)

U. C. Knoepflmacher (essay date 1979)

SOURCE: "Thoughts on the Aggression of Daughters," in The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays in Mary Shelley's Novel, edited by George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher, University of California Press, 1979, pp. 88-119.

[In the essay that follows, Knoepflmacher contends that "Frankenstein is a novel of omnipresent fathers and absent mothers," a situation he relates explicitly to Shelley's own family history and the repressed anger at her father that appears to surface in the novel.]

Parental affection, indeed, in many minds, is but a pretext to tyrannize where it can be done with impunity.

—Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

I will keep a good look out—William is all...

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