SOURCE: "Frankenstein and the Feminine Subversion of the Novel," in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall, 1983, pp. 155-64.

In the following essay, Hodges focuses on the literary originality of Frankenstein, arguing that, in opposition to the conventions set by a powerful lineage of male authors, Shelley uses the novel form "to change structures of narrative as well as to introduce new topics of discussion."

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has long been labelled a "woman's book." Ellen Moers describes Frankenstein as a female "birth myth" which depicts Shelley's ambivalence about motherhood;¹ Kate Ellis interprets Frankenstein as a critique of the bourgeois family and the separation of male and female spheres;² Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar write that the book describes a "woman's helpless alienation in a male society,"³ and Mary Poovey calls it a "myth of female powerlessness" which justifies the female writer's uncontrollable desire for self-expression.⁴ All...