Anne Mellor "Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein"

• Explain:  "By stealing the female's control over reproduction Frankenstein has eliminated the female's primary biological function and source of cultural power" (1).
• What evidence does Mellor provide to support her claim that "Frankenstein's implicit goal" is "creating a society for men only" (1)?

• In what ways, according to Mellor, is it true that Caroline Beaufort "incarnates a patriarchal ideal of female self-sacrifice" (3)?
• How, according to Mellor, is it true that "women cannot function effectively in the public realm" (3)?

4:

• How, according to Mellor, is the De Lacey family "an alternative social organization" (4)?  How are they "a social group based on justice, equality, and mutual affection" (4-5)?
• How, according to Mellor, is Frankenstein "Mary Shelley's political critique of a society founded on the unequal distribution of power and possessions" (4)?
• How does this critique contain "the suggestion that the separation from the public realm of feminine affections and compassion has caused much of this social evil" (4)?

• According to Mellor, what causes Victor to end creation of the female?

• What, according to Mellor, is Victor's "most profound erotic desire" (8)? How is this different from what she considers Victor's "most potent desire" (10)?

• Explain:  "Mary Shelley envisions Nature as a sacred life-force in which human beings ought to participate in conscious harmony" (12).

• Explain:  "As a  consequence of this sexual division of labor, masculine work is kept outside of the domestic realm;  hence intellectual activity is segregated from emotional activity" (3).
• What are the consequences of this division?

• How, according to Mellor, does Safie represent Mary Wollstonecraft? How does she represent Mary Shelley herself?

• How, according to Mellor, is his destruction of the female creature a "violent rape" (7)?
• Explain:  "Uninhibited female sexual experience threatens the very foundation of patriarchal power" (7).

7-8:

• Explain the reference to  Fuseli's "The Nightmare" (See image above).

• Explain:  "In place of a normal heterosexual  attachment to Elizabeth, Victor Frankenstein has substituted a homosexual obsession with his creature" (9).

10:

• How, according to Mellor, does Nature "resist" and "revenge" herself upon Victor's attempts to "rape" her?

11:

• How, according to Mellor, does Nature use electricity to secure this revenge?

• Explain:  "As an ecological system of interdependent organisms, Nature requires the submission of the individual ego to the welfare of the family and the larger community" (13).
• Explain:  "Where men have tended to identify moral laws as abstract principles that clearly differentiated right from wrong, women have tended to see moral choice as imbedded in an ongoing shared life" (13).

14:

• How, according to Mellor, are the De Laceys "an archetype of the egalitarian, benevolent, and mutually loving nuclear family" (14)?

• Explain:  "Frankenstein's failure to maintain keeping, to preserve 'a calm and peaceful mind' (p. 51), is thus in Mary Shelley's eyes both a moral and an aesthetic failure, resulting directly in the creation of a  hideous monster" (15).