The question of the writer's gender, which plays a crucial role in her writing, has been widely discussed in contemporary critical debate. Feminist critics argue that society's patriarchal ideology forces male writers to "write like men", implying a certain taken-for-granted viewpoint of the author. Of course, there are exceptions; a number of ancient male writers wrote as women. The final chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses, which contains a 20,000-word sentence beginning and ending with "yes", has often been hailed as a quintessential example of women's writing. Likewise, different readers employ different perspectives to make sense of literary texts. Male readers, for example, tend to view literary texts from a male perspective. But do female readers also read the same texts from a resolutely feminine perspective? Not exactly, because, as Judith Fetterley observes, male authors assumed for centuries that their readers were all men, which could have a huge effect on female readers, and in order to "successfully" read literary works who assumed their readers were men. , female readers must unconsciously forget that they are women and read as if they were men. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original EssayIn other words, male writers invariably employ writing conventions that make their style rigidly masculine, thereby demanding a masculine point of view from their readers. Fetterley calls this the “immasculation” of female readers by male authors (Introduction, xx). But the counter-issue of female authors writing like men has always been pushed aside as something not worthy of serious critical attention. This article attempts to show how female authors also sometimes write in a style characteristic of male authors, how they address a presumed male audience and how, in their use of language and other literary conventions, they display tendencies characteristic of male authors. their male counterparts. In this, I propose to apply Fetterley's theory of defensive female reading to Mary Shelley's style in Frankenstein in order to prove how she assumed her readers to be men. The plot of Frankenstein deals with the conflict within Victor Frankenstein, who, due to his love for natural science, produces a monstrous creature. Victor himself is disgusted at the sight of his creature and rejects him. All the other humans also reject him because of his horrible appearance. The monster, frustrated and misunderstood, ends up killing the people closely connected to its creator. This is the story told by Victor to Robert Walton, a sea captain on a voyage to the North Pole. In essence, the story is simple, and the three distinct plots -- the Walton plot, the Victor plot, and the creature plot -- that flow through the novel give us three different perspectives on the story. Let's start with Walton's point of view which opens and ends the novel. Walton addresses his entire speech to his sister Mrs. Margaret Saville, a mute narrator whose complicity with Walton's narration remains implicit but never comes into the open. In a sense, it represents an inversion of the powerful narrator who determines the existence of the narrator in The Arabian Nights (Prince, 8). Interestingly, Walton is both the great storyteller and narrator: not only does he tell the story,but, more importantly, he listens to the stories told by the other narrators, Victor and the creature. Shelley, however, does not let her narrator become the narrator of her own story. Walton has even been given the power to interrupt and question the flow and validity of the narrative addressed to him: “Wretch! I said to him: "It's good that you come here to whine about the desolation you have caused... It is not pity that you feel; you only lament because the victim of your malignity is removed “from your power” (Shelley, 187). Again, as a narrator, he has considerable influence on his narrators: "I see by your eagerness, and the wonder and hope expressed in your eyes, my friend, that you expect to be informed of the secret that I know” (57), or even “your looks remind me to act” (59). On the other hand, still at reception, Mrs. Saville remains a shadow whose function is to listen without interrupting. (To tell is to hold power. See Foe by JM Coetzee, where Susan Barton, the shipwrecked white woman, sets out to tell the story of Friday, the black slave who was denied the right to speak). In Walton's narration, friendship is a dominant theme. “I have no friends,” Walton complains to his sister (31), and when they find Victor again, he is filled with brotherly affection for him: “My affection for Victor increases every day. He excites both my admiration and my pity to an astonishing degree” (37) Victor’s affection for his friend Henry is also overflowing: “I was indifferent… to my school friends in general but I m; 'united in the bonds of the closest friendship with one of them Henry Clerval was the son of a merchant from Geneva' (45). of Victor after the creation of the monster: "I grabbed his hand, and in an instant I forgot my horror and my misfortune. I suddenly felt, and for the first time in many months, a calm and serene joy"; (62). Again, it is Victor's father's friendship with Beaufort that prompts him to seek out his friend, which ultimately leads to his marriage to Caroline Beaufort despite their age differences. Friendship, male friendship, therefore has a beneficial influence on the characters of the novel. Victor is a father figure, and the word “father” and references to the Creation myth abound in the novel: “No. my father could claim his child's gratitude as fully as I deserved theirs” (58), “I knew that my silence worried them; and I have well remembered the words of my father” (59), “Remember that I am your creature; I should be your Adam" (93), "the appearance of my father was to me like that of my good angel" (157). The kind and wise figure of the patriarch of old De Lacey fills the creature with admiration and respect but the young De Lacey fills it with hatred and disgust for humanity. In contrast, the mother plays a marginal role in the development of the story, and Caroline and Elizabeth are presented as sacrificial figures to atone for the. Victor's Promethean adventure, a stereotype of the good mother for whom happiness means the happiness of her children. It is she who adopts little Elizabeth as a gift for Victor, and she sacrifices her own life to save Elizabeth's: Durant. her illness, many arguments were invoked to convince my mother to refrain from taking care of her. She initially gave in to our entreaties, but when she learned that her favorite's life was threatened. she could no longer control her anxiety. She took care of her sickbed, Elizabeth was saved. , but the consequences of this imprudence were fatal to his savior. (49) On her deathbed Caroline joins the hands of Victor and Elisabeth and confers onElizabeth her maternal vocation: “Elizabeth, my love, you must provide my place for my youngest children” (49). Now, Elizabeth becomes the mother, and the incest between Elizabeth and Victor takes on a new meaning. It is the Oedipal bond of the son with the mother. But in this case, the mother must die for the son to be saved. Victor survives several years of desperate pursuits and tribulations; Elizabeth dies on her wedding night. Obviously, biology is destiny. Yet Elizabeth is as much a savior figure as Caroline. For Victor to survive without the burdens of marriage and family, while keeping his vision of himself as a heroic victim of cosmic antagonism intact, Elizabeth must die. The death of the innocent Justine, accused of William's murder, is equally revealing: Shelley presents her female characters as vulnerable to the forces of nature; their pure goodness, but their marginal influence on the order of things, recalls the images of women that populate much of 19th-century men's writing. It can therefore be argued that in Frankenstein the question of power and survivability is obscured by the structure of romantic love and by the constant invocation of the malevolent creature whose goal is to destroy the good and the beautiful. The central theme of Frankenstein is the conflict of the father with the son. The creature asks Victor to make him a companion “of the same species and with the same defects” (128). Victor refuses: the father's sexual jealousy turns the son into an Oedipal kidnapper. The creature's almost sexual fascination with Caroline's portrait is symbolic of its vengeance against its creator: “For a few moments I gazed with delight into her dark eyes, rimmed with deep lashes, and her beautiful lips; but soon my rage returned: I remembered that I was forever deprived of the delights that such beautiful creatures could provide” (127). Once again, the creature takes its final revenge on its creator by depriving Victor of sexual consummation with his wife. Likewise, the creature's justification of William's murder is an indictment of Justine: "the murder I committed because I am forever stripped of everything she could give me, she will atone for." The crime had its source in her: her punishment was hers.” " (127). Women therefore suffer the conflict between father and son. Shelley does not allow her protagonist to create a woman because her conception of woman (beautiful but weak) cannot accept the creature's request for a companion (hideous and strong): "I was now about to form another being of whom I was equally ignorant...and she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to conform to a pact made before its creation” (144) Victor’s fear is therefore both unconscious and ideological. Thus, in Frankenstein, Shelley implicitly defends a predominantly masculine discourse. her relationship with her father has something to do with it (she even dedicated her book to her father). Recent criticism has gone so far as to claim incest in Shelley's relationship with her father. of the novel – a ghost story competition with two other established male poets, “a tale from the pen of one of them would be far more acceptable to the public than anything I could ever hope to produce” (Preface , 27) -- may have influenced Shelley to address a male audience and follow male writing conventions. Similarly, if we consider Shelley to be an early practitioner of science fiction (in Shelley's time, science was primarily a male field of endeavor), then Shelley's employment of a distinctly masculine style to address, 2000.