SOURCE: "Bearing Demons: Frankenstein's Circumvention of the Maternal," in Bearing the Word, University of Chicago Press, 1986, pp. 100-19.

In the following chapter from her Bearing the Word, Homans uses the tools of feminist psychoanalytic theory to study Frankenstein as a parallel between writing and mothering. In this view, Shelley becomes a champion of maternal nurturing, and the novel an indictment of the male desire to reject or excise the maternal role altogether.

Married to one romantic poet and living near another, Mary Shelley at the time she was writing Frankenstein experienced with great intensity the self-contradictory demand that daughters embody both the mother whose death makes language possible by making it necessary and the figurative substitutes for that mother who constitute the prototype of the signifying chain. At the same time, as a mother herself, she experienced with far greater intensity . . . a proto-Victorian ideology of motherhood, as Mary...