Satire In Frankenstein

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'Such a degree of equality should be established between the sexes as would shut out gallantry and coquetry.” (Mary Wollstonecraft). In this essay I aim to discuss the way in which Alexander Pope's mock epic The Rape of The Lock and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein conform to modern and contemporary expectations of gender and sexuality. Pope uses women as the main subject of his satire within The Rape of the Lock to pass remark on society and the rampant and religious fervour 18th century society had towards consumerism, and in so doing, affirms the accepted norms of sexuality. Shelley, on the other hand, rather unconventionally targets men in order to tackle contemporary issues within society, as well as using her presentation of the role of women within her novel Frankenstein to…show more content…
...without a separate Satan-figure to mediate between her creator and creature, Mary Shelley gives a gnostic twist to her creation myth: in her version her creation becomes identified with the fall. Frankenstein does God's work, creating a man, but he has the devil's motives: pride and the will to power. He himself is a rebel, rejecting divine prohibitions and, like Satan, aspiring to become a god himself. But Victor's act of rebellion is to create a man, and what he seeks out of creation is the glory of ruling over a new race of beings. Mary Shelley thus achieves a daring compression of Milton's story. Frankenstein retells Paradise Lost as if the being who fell from heaven and the being who created man were one and the same. In Frankenstein one can no longer speak of an original divine plan of creation which is perverted by a demonic being; the plans of Mary Shelley's creator-figure are both divine and demonic from the beginning. (Cantor,

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