engleski

Women in Frankenstein: Mary Shelley's Novel versus Kenneth Branagh's Film

This paper explores how Mary Shelley used the unprecedented motif of male procreation to both accurately describe and harshly criticize the unfavorable position of women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft, her mother and also one the earliest feminist writers, Shelley depicts the inevitable negative outcomes of the strict gender division in the society. This meant that the public sphere of life was regarded as the male realm, while the private or emotional sphere of life represented the female realm. Frankenstein serves as the author's protest against the general concept of female inferiority as well as against her own position as an emerging female (!) writer in a male-dominated world. Additionally, the paper presents director Kenneth Branagh's film adaptation Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and discusses how the changes he introduced bring the novel's underlying issues to the foreground.All issues discussed in this paper prove that Shelley’s Frankenstein is not just a work of fiction whose main themes have no connection to the real world its author lived in. Quite contrary, the purpose of this interpretation is to discover how Shelley’s fictional world and its norms reflect the attitudes of the society of her time.

Mary Shelley, gender roles, male dominance, female inferiority, procreation, Kenneth Branagh

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