This drawing is meant to loosely depict the body parts strewn across Frankenstein’s floor after he destroyed the female monster he had been creating. I wanted to focus my project on this part of “Frankenstein” given the current political climate in the U.S. regarding female reproductive rights. The possibilities of Roe v. Wade being overturned gave me a new perspective on Frankenstein’s destruction of the female monster and his view of femininity as the ability to give birth. In my creative element, I wanted to represent what Frankenstein sees as defining elements of a woman. I started by drawing a face, because Frankenstein considers beauty to be an essential feminine characteristic. Elizabeth is described as “the most beautiful child” he had seen, and after that was continuously regarded for her exterior rather than her intelligence (Shelley 20). Later, when the monster asks him to create a female partner, he tells Frankenstein to make a being with “the same defects” as himself so that she will not be able to attract any others (101). When Frankenstein starts to build this female, he is scared a woman without beauty will not satisfy the monster, or that the monster would “conceive a greater abhorrence for [his deformity] when it came before his eyes in the female form” (119). Frankenstein demonstrates his own patriarchal views as he fixates on his belief that women rely on appearance and that men will not be interested in women who are not considered beautiful. From there, I drew an eye and a brain because of Frankenstein’s worry that “she might also turn in disgust from him to the superior beauty of man” (119). Her ability to choose her own path terrifies Frankenstein. Throughout the novel, we rarely see women having much agency, especially in choosing their partners. Elizabeth is essentially bound to Frankenstein since childhood, and though she gives him the choice to leave her, the readers never see her have that sort of power in determining her marriage. Because of this, the idea that the female monster could think and see for herself and decide not to be with the male monster was deeply troubling to Frankenstein. Additionally, I drew a heart to represent Frankenstein’s concern that “she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate” (118). As we discussed in class, Frankenstein fears liberated femininity. He assumes that the female monster would become more aggressive, violent, and passionate than her mate due to the concept that women are emotional. Lastly, I drew the female reproductive system to highlight Frankenstein’s perception of womanhood as being defined by reproduction. Instead of simply creating a monster that cannot give birth, Frankenstein chooses to destroy the monster since he cannot dissociate womanhood and motherhood in order to conceptualize a female without the ability to have a child.
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