My Hideous Progeny: The Lady And The Monster

It is apparent that Mary Shelley used symbolism through the monster, who is an outsider to society, to depict herself, and Mary Poovey states this analysis in her critique, “My Hideous Progeny”: The Lady and the Monster”. Shelley is an author who, just like Victor and the monster, rebels against her conformities to her humankind, simply by being a woman in an era where writing a book, like Frankenstein, was thought to be wrong of her to do. Rebelliously, Shelley formed this novel that challenged romanticism, and Frankenstein portrays Shelley’s reflections and thoughts about her society’s shame of women. In Anne K. Mellor’s critique, “Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein”, she states that Shelley’s work “specifically portrayed the consequences of a social construction of gender that values the male above the female”, and that the males inhabited the “public” sphere, while as the females inhabited the “private” sphere of the …show more content…
This is obviously deceptive in Frankenstein, for there is little to no female importance, and the novel portrays only but characters of men. An example of this is Victor being a scientist, and Clerval being a merchant, while as Elizabeth has no life outside of her home. Shelley disregards the importance of women in this novel, to portray and show the unfair depiction of genders in her period of age. Her novel also portrays a man’s assurance of the ability to create, but not the ability to control, with the prime suspect being Victor, who plays God by producing another human, but then loses control of his own creation. By writing this novel, Shelley is able to remove herself out of the conformity that seems to be placed on the women in her era, and she proves this through

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