How Does Shelley Present The Female Characters In Frankenstein

Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein, tells the fictitious tale of young scientist Victor Frankenstein and the creature he creates as part of a scientific experiment. Throughout the novel, readers hear about the challenges that Victor, his family, the creature, and Shelley’s other characters experience. Shelley includes many female characters in her novel’s world; however, the women do not often assume a central or essential role. Although a woman wrote Frankenstein, and therefore one might assume the novel would contain strong female characters, nevertheless, Shelley does not portray her female characters this way. Women often appear weaker than men in Frankenstein’s world because Shelley frequently presents her female characters as

feeble, fragile, and passive, and her male characters as powerful, protectors, and actors.
Shelley the male as a protector and the female as delicate in Victor parents’ relationship. Near the beginning of Shelley’s novel, Victor recalls the gender dynamics between his father Alphonse Frankenstein and his mother Caroline Beaufort Frankenstein. Victor explains that his father was a powerful guardian and his mother was a fragile person that needed shielding: “He [Alphonse] came like a protecting spirit to the poor girl [Caroline], who committed herself to his care” (18); “He strove to shelter her, as a fair exotic is sheltered by the gardener, from rougher wind and to surround her with all that could tend to excite pleasurable emotion in her soft benevolent mind” (19). By describing him as protecting and sheltering Caroline, Shelley makes Alphonse seem like a strong actor. However, by rendering Caroline a fragile plant, Shelley makes her seem weak and passive. By presenting the two genders in this contrasting way, Shelley causes the men her novel’s world appear more powerful than women.
Shelley also makes her women characters’ seem weak and passive by objectifying them. In the scene in which Victor recalls his cousin Elizabeth arriving at his home, Shelley presents
Elizabeth as an object that can be given to someone. Victor explains how:
On the evening previous to her [Elizabeth] being brought to my home, my mother had said playfully, “I have a pretty present for my Victor—tomorrow he shall have it.” And when, on the morrow, she presented Elizabeth to me as her promised gift, I (…) interpreted her words literally and looked upon Elizabeth as mine—mine to protect, love, and cherish. (21)
Because Shelley characterizes Elizabeth as a possession that one can give, own, adore, and protect, she makes her female character appear passive. Contrastingly, Shelley presents the male character in this scene, Victor, as an active protector. In doing so, Shelley reiterates that women embody a weaker role than men in Frankenstein’s world.
As Frankenstein continues, Shelley continues presenting women as passive and powerless.

Near the middle of Frankenstein, the Frankenstein’s servant Justine is accused of murder, and Shelley portrays her as powerless to improve her circumstances. Justine says to the Frankensteins: “how heavily and fatally this one circumstance weighs against me, but I have no power of explaining it; and when I have expressed my ignorance, I am only left to conjecture concerning the probabilities by which it might have been placed in my pocket” (66). Justine expresses that she cannot help prove her innocence because she is incapable of explaining how the incriminating picture came into her possession. Because Shelley depicts Justine as unable to take action to save herself, she makes Justine look

passive.
In addition to describing Justine’s helplessness, Shelley also depicts Elizabeth as incapable. Shelley presents Elizabeth as unable to perform actions without a man’s help. When conversing with Victor about going to visit Justine in jail, Elizabeth says: “I will go, although she is guilty; and you, Victor, shall accompany me; I cannot go alone” (68). Elizabeth says she cannot leave her home without the accompaniment of Victor, a man. By portraying Elizabeth is unable to take action without a man’s help, Shelley reinforces that females are the weaker gender in her novel’s world.
Another way Shelley makes her female characters appear feebler than her male characters is by presenting their emotions differently.

During the scene in which the Frankenstein family visits accused murderer Justine in jail, Shelley portrays her women characters as unable to refrain from emotional outbursts. At the jail, Victor explains how Justine “threw herself at the feet of Elizabeth, weeping bitterly. My cousin [Elizabeth] wept also” (68). Shelley describes her women characters as weeping, emotional, and groveling; however, Shelley does not portray her male characters in this way. Shelley does note that Victor feels deep despair because he explains: “I had retired to the corner of the prison room, where I could conceal the horrid anguish that possessed me. Despair!” (69-70). However, unlike her presentation of Justine and Elizabeth, Shelley portrays Victor as having the power to control and conceal his emotions; Shelley does not describe Victor as falling to the feet of others in tears or visibly showing his feelings to those around him. By describing her characters’ emotions in this contrasting way, Shelley makes the women in her novel’s world appear weak and out of control and the men seem strong and in

control.
While Shelley often presents her female characters as helpless, one could argue that she also presents her male characters as inert. Victor, for example, is continuously incapable of controlling his reality or solving his problems. No matter his efforts, Victor cannot stop Justine’s execution, he fails to kill and control his created creature, and at the novel’s closure, he also dies. Therefore, Shelley does portray men as helpless as well. Shelley, however, still presents her male characters as stronger than her female ones throughout her novel. The women in Shelley’s novel need men’s protection and an escort in order to leave their house. Moreover, they weep bitterly, and they passively accept their fate. Whereas the men in Frankenstein come and go from their home without assistance, they act as protectors, they maintain their composure, and they take action to solve their challenges. Even though Shelley does portray the men in her novel as inert, she presents the women as weaker.
The way Shelley renders her female characters closely relates to the way society treated women at this time in history. Shelley wrote Frankenstein during the nineteenth-century, and in Barbara Welter’s 1966 essay, The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860, she explains that nineteenth-century society often viewed women as timorous and in need of protection:
[a] Woman understood her position [in society] if she was the right kind of a woman, a true woman. “She feels herself weak and timid. She needs a protector,” declared George Burnap, in his lectures on The Sphere and Duties of Woman. “She is a measure dependent” (…) Or put even more strongly by Mrs. Stanford: “A really sensible woman feels her dependence. She does what she can, but she is conscious of inferiority, and therefore grateful for support.” (159)
Shelley characterization of the women in her novel’s world is often quite similar to nineteenth-century women’s qualities that Welter writes of. Welter also explains how nineteenth-century society tended to view men as actors and women as passive: “men were the movers, the doers, the actors. Women were the passive, submissive responders” (159). Shelley’s novel reflects this aspect of the nineteenth-century because Shelley’s male and female characters frequently assume these gender roles.
However, women acting weak and men acting strong is not confined to the world of Shelley’s novel or the nineteenth-century. Portraying women as feeble and men as powerful as Shelley does in Frankenstein is still common and noticeable in 2018 society. Present-day popular culture and media, for instance, often presents women as emotional, weak, and passive, and contrastingly, our society typically represents men as strong and powerful. Although Frankenstein is two-hundred years old, aspects of Shelley’s novel’s world still remains in our present-day world. Shelley’s novel can teach readers that even though our society changes over time, much of the past carries over into the present because certain elements of history become engrained in our society and perception.