That Not Impossible She: A critical study of gender and individualism in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Maurice Hindle famously described Mary Shelley’s first novel as “the most radical critique of the ‘Enlightenment project’ available in modern literature.” This work builds on previous studies of Shelley’s novel, by highlighting the instability of the male narratives which dominated her own time. A close reading of her novel, what might cautiously be termed a deconstruction, reveals how Shelley places John Locke’s ‘possessive’ individual in a state of war with himself. It demonstrates how, through the emblem of Frankenstein’s Creature, Shelley’s text exposes the contradictions in modern thought regarding the fixity of stability of the human subject, and most crucially, the implications of gendering that subject.