A symposium on Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and women in sf

Women's Studies, 2018

The creature of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) may have led a solitary life ostracized and unloved, but these days he has plenty of friends in the countless imitations, adaptations, and interpretations he has provoked. The present study by Eileen Hunt Botting adds to the growing body of political readings sustained by the novel in recent years, including the work of Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and disability scholars, to a name a few prominent types. Devoted exclusively to Frankenstein and written by a political theorist, Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child attests to the novel's ongoing salience. Seeking to convince her colleagues in political science of literature's evidentiary value, Botting makes the sort of grand case for fiction that we literary scholars are no longer much used to making: "The novel form allows for this sort of big and open-ended philosophical question to be entertained by readers from a variety of temporal contexts, cultural backgrounds, and political perspectives" (8). With this philosophizing remit, Botting presents Frankenstein as a mental laboratory for running a series of "thought experiments" about children and the rights they are due. Literature, in this view, seems a good way to experiment on humans without having to obtain IRB approval. Botting asks that we "see the Creature for who he really was: a stateless orphan, abandoned by family, abused by society and ignored by the law" (xi). By casting the creature as "a giant baby" (13), his tale can be read as a parable on the perils that lie in the abandonment and abuse of children. Dismissing the Gothic apparatus that surrounds this archetypal "monster," Bot-Modern Philology, volume 116, number 3.

2013

My thesis in this paper addresses the feminist side in the 1818 version of Frankenstein and the way Mary Shelley draws the attention to women"s sufferings and weaknesses by actually creating weak female characters that die one by one throughout the development of the novel. I will portray the nature of those characters and their importance in depicting Mary Shelley"s message in the light of several critiques of the novel and Mary Shelley"s life. Shelley"s novel lacks any strong and active female characters. Her characters spend the whole time suffering from the mistreatment they get from their society and the men they love, and they spend their lives within only the domestic sphere. They are all described as being beautiful, fair, selfless, weak, and submissive to man"s will no matter how unjust it might be, and they never try to change their fate.

Bulletin of Nagoya University of Foreign Studies, 2023

Frankenstein; or The modern Prometheus is one of the most thoroughly researched and read books from the 19th century. The novel is complex, and it has been noted to be “four stories in one: an allegory, a fable, an epistolary novel, and an autobiography” (Lepore, 2018). Mary Shelley, the author, has been considered the mother of science fiction in how she depicts Victor Frankenstein using technology to create his “monster.” In real life, Mary Shelley was also a mother. This was unusual for women writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Motherhood certainly affected her in the writing of her novel. Here, two questions are explored. The first: Is Shelley’s novel feminist? Several critics, such as Joanna Russ, have disagreed. This paper will give a short discussion in support of Shelley’s novel as a feminist work. The second question: Does Shelley’s novel support the idea that motherhood is slavery? This paper explores telling details in Shelley’s book that shed light on what the author may have thought about motherhood: It leads to misery, isolation, and death.

Published in Nineteenth-Century Contexts.

This paper was written as an assignment for a Theory and Criticism class. it explores just a few examples of Mary Wollstonecraft's influence on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and the relatively small influence of Jean-Jaques Rousseau.

2019

A trend to historicize the field of Disability Studies has emerged in recent years. However, little research has been done to place different societies and generations in conversation with one another. This thesis will utilize various adaptations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in order to explore shifting anxieties concerning non-normative embodiment through the vessel of the Creature. I examine the Creature's changing physical form next to scientific and medical literature of the period to explore connotations of disability and otherness within that society. I consider the manifestation of anxieties towards non-normative embodiment through Mary Shelley's 1831 Frankenstein, James Whale's 1931 film Frankenstein, and Victor LaValle's 2018 graphic novel Destroyer; the frequent reworking of Frankenstein's Creature allows for an examination of shifting and persistent anxieties concerning non-normative embodiment over time.

2018

Conference: “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 1818-2018: Circuits and Circulation”, 19-21 September 2018, Bologna.

Perspectives on Politics

Journal of Law and Society, 2021

This article explores how Mary Shelley's Frankenstein engages with notions relating to mens rea. It addresses the lack of engagement with the text in legal scholarship by constructing a reading of the creature as Victor's double, and therefore a manifestation of his mind. Utilising interdisciplinary literary-legal methods, the article employs the central relationship in Frankenstein as a means of illuminating and critiquing the ways in which criminal law reproduces and perpetuates gendered notions of behaviour in relation to what is deemed a justified emotional response in the partial defences of provocation and loss of control. It concludes that Frankenstein helps expose these gaps in legal discourse and ultimately destabilises binaries of gendered criminality. This is a pre-print of an article accepted for publication in the Journal of Law and Society's November 2021 issue.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus-conceived by the author in Geneva in June 1816 in a literary contest also involving P.B. Shelley, Lord Byron and John Polidori, and published in 1818 ̶ was celebrated in 2018 by many conferences and seminars as an incomparable work of gothic, dystopian, feminist and science-fiction imagination. My paper, moving from an overview of the critical reception of the novel, aims to contribute to these celebrations by paying particular attention to Mary Shelley's reconceptualization of the body, with regard to its meaning in the societal structure of the time and, more generally, in power relationships.