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I am alone, and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species, and have the same defects. This being you must create.
-Shelley 111
So speaks the monster to his creator in Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, which subsequently depicts the inner turmoil of Victor Frankenstein as he removes himself to the desolate Orkney Isles and sets about building his monster a "mate." When the process is nearly complete Victor's doubts consume him, and upon seeing the male monster leering at him in the window he is incensed enough to tear the incomplete body to pieces. Later he returns to the scene of the crime: "The remains of the half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being" (130). Placing the remains in a basket, Victor rows them out to sea in the dark of night and casts them into the depths.
This is undoubtedly one of the darkest and most violent moments in Shelley's novel. Her account of the female monster's creation offers a powerful rumination on both the horrors of (aborted) birth and the misguided scientific desire to render the human body a workable and disposable thing. At the same time, this section of the novel prompts the question: what could she have been? What sort of monster-wnat sort of woman-would this creature have been? What would she have looked like? What would she have thought of herself, her creator, and her betrothed? In the centuries since the publication of Frankenstein these questions have been asked by many adapting authors, screenwriters, and makers of popular culture. In the process, tne female monster has become a cultural icon: readable, mythic, and imbued with meaning.
This article takes her as its subject and seeks to unpack some of these meanings. Prolonged cultural fascination with the Frankenstein tale has been well documented (see Levine and Knoepflmacher; Freedman; Clayton; Lavalley) and it is easy to see why Shelley's story about monster-making has resonance in an age of digital ana biotechnological reproducibility. But what meanings underpin our female Frankenstein monster...