But Shelley’s commonly in order to imaginative self-reliance, like Frankenstein’s, don’t completely refrain the taint of death

By repressing the mother she too attempts a higher kind of creation than the merely biological. A fantasy of female independence from bio- <355>logical constraints thus supports her own artistic enterprise, just as it had her mother’s “liberal feminism.” A criticism that views Frankenstein as her “feminist ining its psychological investments and evasions remains blind to the a ambiguities of its ostensible polemic. For in it Shelley swerves not only away from the standard of her mother’s Vindication but also from the fate of motherhood. In this she leaves herself open to her own complaint against her mother: that the facts of the body cannot be denied. Shelley’s “feminism,” if historically it can be so called, grows uneasily out of certain fundamental idealizings, even illusions, a situation she owns up to in her 1831 introduction. Describing why she feels so strongly about her “hideous progeny” Frankenstein she points explicitly to its idealism: “I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words which found no true echo in my heart” (229). However sanguine this memory of the good old days with Percy, it suggests that, to Shelley’s mind at least, Frankenstein remains in some essential way uninformed by the fact of mortality. Continue Reading