A woman’s novel: Gynocentricism

Frankenstein

The relation of the feminine to the novel:

• The femininity of the novel is not the product of "female nature nor even female culture, strictly speaking. . .but of ideology and cultural myth.” - Nancy Armstrong

• Patriarchal capitalism has muted the ‘voice’ of the woman and the desire of self-expression is uncontrollable.

• The female voice is encoded within the structure. It makes the male dominance inevitable.

• The paternal premise of the novel shows that the form of the novel is not neutral; nor is the language…

• A woman writer has to express herself within the codes of patriarchal culture; in a new language.

• If the feminine novel is the creation of a patriarchal culture, we must look, as Nancy Armstrong suggests, to disruptive effects, to "discontinuities" that work against the "novel's traditional gestures toward closure" in order to find how women writers communicate a feminine position within writing.

• A critic for Frankenstein says, “radically uneven and awkward”. Another critic notes its "lack of causal sufficiency”

• The narrative "not fully elaborated into rational, sequential art."

• Such judgments are based on the assumption that art must obey the conventions of patriarchal narrative sequence, finality, integrity.

• Shelley's text does not exist entirely within the conventional literary framework.

• In the "Author's Introduction" she writes that she is "very averse to bringing herself forward in print.“

• Much of the novel has a male voice and female characters are (appropriately described as exotic, as outsiders) to a marginal position.

• Her novel reproduces the traditional opposition of masculine and feminine, speech and silence.

• If speech is associated with masculinity, then a woman must lose her identity in order to make self- expression possible.

• But perhaps in adopting a male voice, the woman writer is given the opportunity to intervene from within, to become an alien presence that undermines the stability of the male voice.

• Three narrators of the novel, Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and the monster.

• Each of these men is an image of the others all are wandering creatures who are in some way deviant.

• None of them is the centre of the novel. Doubling and dislocation of the identity of man

• She insists that changing the shape of man can only result in the creation of monstrosity.

• In a traditional novel Shelley challenges the place of women by disrupting narrative sequence.

• Walton’s narrative is interrupted by an accidental entry of Victor whose story is insufficient since it is broken by faints, fevers, dreams, inexplicable silences that dislocate narrative sequence. Monster displaces Victor’s narrative in the middle of the novel.

• The three narrations are incomplete without each other.

• The novel is directed towards Savile- a woman, who is both inside and outside of the narrative structure.

• Fear is articulated several times in the novel. Fear of staying at home and fear of going out.

• Dream logic in the novel• Dreams allow something to speak which is not

normally present in the patriarchal course of things.• Such a bringing to the surface of a troubling

otherness, sometimes explicitly connected to the unconscious, has been described as an effect of women's writing.

• "A feminine text can't be predicted, isn't predictable, isn't knowable, and is therefore very disturbing." - Helene Cixous

• The dream form of Frankenstein, then, might be seen as a transgression of the boundaries of patriarchal order.

• Transgression occurs on the thematic level of the novel. Victor Frankenstein, the bearer of the qualities of god-like power and knowledge that characterize the masculine position in culture, discovers the limits of his mastery. He intends to create a "new species" that will flatter his ego: "No father," he imagines, "could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs" (p. 52).

• He gives his creature an especially large frame as if to insure that it will reflect him at twice his size.

• Male power and female powerlessness in a patriarchal society. “I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed; when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters, I beheld the wretch-the miserable monster whom I had created.”

• Virginia Woolf suggests that contradiction is a necessary condition of women in a patriarchal culture since that culture is an "ill-fitting form."

• It is Shelley's monster, of course, who articulates the misery of being neither fully inside nor outside culture.

• As a spectator looking on society from the outside, he discovers language and the wonderful power of communication it makes possible: "I found that these people possessed a method of communicating their experience. . . this was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to become acquainted with it“.

• She seems to share the monster's problem: for her too, language is an "ill-fitting form.“

• Deformity of monster expresses obstacles in a culture in which feminine self-expression is very much difficult.

• With her, the monster plans to build a new society in which he can be in "communication with an equal“.

• This Utopian hope is denied.• He is the figure of feminine textuality. • Shelley, then, is a woman writer who uses the

resources of fiction to transgress literary structure from within.