Frankenstein, Feminism, And The Fracturing Of Femininity
Mary Shelley gave the world a monster, but she may have done far more than she ever intended. Frankenstein is not merely a gothic novel, nor a warning about science outpacing ethics. It is a subconscious confession. A mythic parable. A shriek in prose about the mutilation of what was once glorious. And though Shelley likely had no idea, her tale is a mirror of modern womanhood. Frankenstein is feminism personified.
Shelley was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the intellectual mother of the feminist movement. Wollstonecraft fought for a woman’s right to be remade. Not redeemed—remade. The project of feminism from the beginning has been the severing of woman from her God-given design: the redefinition of strength, the rejection of submission, the relocation of honor away from the home, and the resurrection of woman as something autonomous, self-fashioned, and powerful in her own eyes. It is the promise of progress through protest. But that promise, like the lightning that animates Shelley’s creature, is a lie dressed in spectacle. What emerges is not a freer woman. It is a stitched-together monstrosity—still bleeding from the seams.
Victor Frankenstein, like the architects of feminist theory, did not create something new. He scavenged. He stole. He took what had been whole, beautiful, and useful in its original context and wrenched it apart, then attempted to reassemble life through sheer will. The result was neither man nor miracle. It was horror. So too with feminism. The feminist movement did not invent anything glorious. It pillaged biblical womanhood for parts. It ripped motherhood from nurture. It separated sexuality from covenant. It tore submission from strength, beauty from modesty, and dignity from design. Then it stitched the remains into something grotesque and paraded it as progress. The modern feminist icon is not a whole woman. She is a silhouette made of borrowed limbs—desperate to walk, but unable to rest; eager to speak, but void of truth; demanding to be loved, but unable to give herself to anyone.
The resemblance to Shelley’s monster runs deeper still. The creature groans for identity. It wants to be accepted. It wants to be seen. But its very nature makes those things impossible. It has no lineage. No home. No history it can embrace. The world that made it now recoils from it. The very man who gave it life—its supposed liberator—becomes its first deserter. The feminist movement has done the same to women. It promised liberation, only to abandon its daughters to the cold winds of meaninglessness. It told women that motherhood was slavery, that marriage was a trap, that submission was misogyny. And now, having divorced them from their design, it cannot tell them who they are. It left them unwanted, unrooted, and unloved—angry at men, alienated from children, and adrift in a culture that doesn't even know how to define the word “woman.”
The most tragic irony of Shelley’s monster is that it seeks what it cannot receive—love, order, identity, belonging. The more it demands these things, the more the world recoils. It wants communion, but its very form defies it. This is precisely what feminism has birthed: a generation of women who long for covenant love, for spiritual rest, for familial honor—but who have been taught to scorn the very virtues that make those things possible. They rage for respect while trampling modesty. They demand intimacy while despising commitment. They long for Eden while cursing everything God placed there.
Shelley, perhaps unknowingly, wrote a parable of what happens when we unmake what God has made. Frankenstein is not just a story about science gone wrong—it is a prophecy about womanhood gone wild. It is what happens when glory is rejected, design is despised, and rebellion is given a womb. Shelley’s monster was not just a man without a soul. It was a being without a place in the world. And that is precisely what feminism produces: women unfit for covenant, unready for communion, unable to rest in the roles God declared “very good.”
In the end, Frankenstein’s monster is not terrifying because of how it looks—but because of what it represents. It is the inevitable end of autonomy. It is the body without spirit. The identity without roots. The rebellion without rest. And if you want to see it, you need not open a novel. Just look around. The monster has left the page.
