The Women of Frankenstein

                                    By William Veeder

     Mary Shelley's very sense of the weakness in herself and womanhood makes her defensive in Frankenstein. After
admitting that women are no more immune than men to weakness, she insists self-justifyingly that women are less weak. What
destroys them is not effeminacy but a world impossibly strong. Thus as we explore Mary's demonstrations of weakness in
Frankenstein, we must be more attuned than most criticism has been to the careful controls which prevent readers from
responding to women in the severe and even derisive way we did to Victor the anxious bridegroom. We must be particularly
careful because extreme weakness is the very thing which critics charge Mary's women with. Justine, Caroline, and Elizabeth all
act in ways which leave them open to criticism; none exhibits the perfection conventional with the good women melodrama. In
defining their weaknesses, however, we must avoid melodramatic simplifications.

     With Justine the question is not whether she is weak but whether Mary Shelley sees that weakness as Justine's critics do,
as symptomatic of the inadequacies of true womanhood. "Justine and Elizabeth have learned well the lessons of submissiveness
and devotion.... Their model behavior similarly lowers their resistance to the forces that kill them"(Ellis). The lumping together of
two characters as different as Justine and Elizabeth calls Elise's criticism into doubt, and our experience of the text confirms that
doubt. Before we learn of Justine's incriminating behavior, we are made to feel the weight of evidence against her. "This
picture...was doubtless the temptation which urged the murderer to the deed....even now Elizabeth will not be convinced [of
Justine's guilt], notwithstanding all the evidence....several circumstances came out, that have almost force conviction upon us"
(67-68,74). My point is not that we, who already know of Justine's excellence, are persuaded of her guilt, but that the Geneses
are. The cards seem stacked formidably against Justine from the start.

     Then, the courtroom scene minimizes her weakness.

     The appearance of Justine was calm....she appeared confident in innocence, and did not tremble, although gazed
     on and execrated by thousands.... She was tranquil, yet her tranquillity was evidently constrained; and as her
     confusion had before been adduced as a proof of her quilt, she worked up her mind to and appearance of
     courage.... A tear seemed to dim her eye when she saw us; but she quickly recovered herself, and a look of
     sorrowful affection seemed to attest to her utter guiltlessness.... Justine was called on for defense. As the trial had
     proceeded, her countenance had altered. Sometime she struggled with her tears; but when she was desired to
     plead, she collected her powers, and spoke in an audible although variable voice. (Shelley 77, 78)

Besides bearing up well under considerable pressure, Justine explains part of what seemed weak in her previous conduct. Her
initial bewilderment "was not surprising, since she had passed a sleepless night, and the fate of poor William was yet uncertain"
(78-79).

     Our primary experience in the courtroom is not of Justine as weak, but of Justine as victim. Arrayed against her are five
formidable forces. Besides the populace incensed by "the enormity she was supposed to have committed" (77) and the
"timorous" friends who "supposed her guilty" (79), there are the plot of the novel, the power of the church, and the machinery of
the law.

     "I know....how heavily and fatally this one circumstance [the miniature] weighs against me, but I have expressed my utter
ignorance, I am only left to conjecture concerning the probabilities by which it might have been placed in my pocket. But here
also I am checked" (79). Justine proves incapable of saving herself, but the cause of her failure affects our response to it. Her
bafflement confirms less her analytical weakness than the weakness of analysis itself. Justine has been victimized by the very
plot of the novel. How could she imagine that an eight-foot-tall, man-made monster had sneaked up and slipped the miniature
into her pocket? Mary's structuring of the action is also a factor when we reach Justine's weakest moment. That she might have
shown spunk enough to refuse to confess, is true; but Mary would have made Justine's fate dependent upon her giving in.
Instead the young woman holds out as long as acquittal remains a possibility.

     Moreover, Justine's giving in seems less weak when we learn of the other forces arrayed against her. "My confessor has
besieged me; he threatened...excommunication and hell fire in my last moments" (82). Focus shifts away from the nature of true
woman and onto that conventional target of gothic opprobrium, the Romish clergy. (How far Mary is going out of her way to
invoke conventional anti-Catholic responses is shown by the illogic of events here: the last thing we would expect to encounter
in Geneva, the bastion of John Calvin, is Catholic coerciveness.) Justine seems doubly beset because the clerical Father is
carrying on the browbeating practiced by her fanatical mother. That sympathy is, moreover, augmented by Mary's implication
of another force which her audience traditionally distrusts, the judiciary.

     "When once creature is murdered [says Elizabeth], another is immediately deprived of life in a slow torturing manner;
then the executioners, their hands yet reeking with the blood of innocence, believe that they have done a great deed. They call it
retribution. Hateful name! When that word is pronounced, I know greater and more horrid punishments are going to be
inflicted than the gloomiest tyrant has ever invented to satiate his utmost revenge." (83)

Set off against state and church and venal individuals, true woman is presented not as debilitatingly weak but as touchingly
vulnerable. Justine sounds like Mary Shelley herself when she cries out, "I had none to support me" (82).

     While recognizing the force of external coercion we must, however, be careful of simplification. Justine's confession is not
superfluous. By making it indispensable to the young woman's sentencing ("none of our judges like to condemn a criminal upon
circumstantial evidence" [81]), Mary Shelley reveals in true woman not a "feminine" weakness which destroys her but a radical
purposiveness which releases her. Woman in the spirit of Eros spites and flees what Justine calls in 1831 "a sad and bitter
world" (246). Rather than finding with Moers that Justine "accepts guilt with docility" (99), I agree with Knoepflmacher that
Justine's "passive death become...a retaliation" (11).

     There is thus in true womanhood an inevitable mix to which our response has been carefully controlled. Justine does not
seem self-destructive in any simple, petulant sense; she is only self-victimized enough to be understandably human. Confronted
with a plot as perfect in its criminal as in its novelistic aspect, Justine is a sympathetic sacrifice to forces inhumanly powerful.
When she asks "what could I do?" (82), Mary Shelley has made sure that we can only answer, Not enough, poor thing.

Criticism taken from Mary Shelley and Frankenstein: The Fate of Androgyny.
Ellis, Kate. "Monsters in the Garden: Mary Shelley and the Bourgeois Family" in George Levine and U.C. Knoepflmacher, The
Endurance of Frankenstein. Berkeley: U of California P, 1982), 123-42.

         Literary Criticism