著者

渡部 充

出版者

神戸女学院大学

雑誌

女性学評論 (ISSN:09136630)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.7, pp.63-82, 1993-03

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The female characters of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein play essentially the same role of a subservient <Domestic Angel> and fall so vulnerably and innocently into the hands of the nameless creature,`Monster.'Such feminist critics as Moers,Poovey,Gilbert and Gubar,and Johnson, however, have shown that the male-dominance of the narrative and the monstrosity of the solitary heroes indicate that the consideration of relationship between<Woman Writer> and her text is very important to understand this seminal modern horror fully. This paper, drawing on the implicit metaphors of <Womb> on two levels of story-telling and of story-told, offers a new reading of Frankenstein. The monstrosity of the Monster, Victor, and Mary will respectively be shown as a head-on collision of the direct but ambiguous opposites, such as Creator/ Creature,Father/ Son,Culture/ Nature,(Woman)Writer/(Her) Text, and others. By acting out into the story her deep-felt antagonism between being forced to be a <Domestic Angel> and trying to be a <Woman Writer=Monster>,Mary, like Frankenstein himself, became a progenitor of herself, the author of Frankenstein. Her Monster,in its widest sense, represents the transgression of Frankenstein. Her Monster, in its widest sense,represents the transgression of the boundary between the level of human genealogy/ of story-told and the meta-level of super-human genealogy/ of story-telling. Thus, ati the end of the novel,the Monster is relieved from Mary's threefold narrative frame,to be her"hideous progeny"and"go forth and prosper" in this world of "Waking Dreams"