Alice Lan Zhang

In “Infection in the Sentence — The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship,” Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan D. Gubar explore the anxiety of authorship for women in a patriarchal society under the influence of patriarchal literary authority. They explore women’s position in literature in the male-dominant area, both as writers and as characters in writing that represent the female figure. In the literary history written by men, where the act of writing is defined as against women’s nature, the writing process is destructive and revisionary for women. It is destructive because, during the instinctive search for a model to inherit from, women writers discover that there are no female precursors for them; the forefathers of literature that she was taught to look up to deny her “creativity, subjectivity, autonomy, (Gilbert and Gubar 668)” and authority altogether as a writer; to write, she must first destroy the identity that was given to her by the patriarchal narrative, even though she had already internalized the debilitating effects of patriarchal socialization, even though writing in itself destroys her femininity. She must peel herself off from her traditional socialization to claw a new path to become her own “foremother” and for the ones who come after her. The act of writing, for women, is thus an act of rebellion against the paternal literary authority, against the father figure, against whoever wrote her history. It is the painful process of recognizing her own infected, sick image that has been inferiorized by the male-centric narration and of rejecting her own creator.

Mary Shelley, undoubtedly one of the most famous foremothers of female writers, depicts the psychology of both processes — destruction and revision/rebellion — in her great work Frankenstein. Even though the protagonist Victor Frankenstein’s hysterics and infatuations, rebellion against tradition, sickness and recoveries, and possessive love for his sister are all deeply interwoven with Mary Shelley’s psychology as a woman writer, Gilbert and Gubar’s theory is better embodied by the antagonist—the ultimate object—the nameless creature. The supernatural creation of the horrifying creature parallels the jarring existence of female writers in male-centric literary history; the sickening and sickened appearance and inhuman strength of the creature reflect the “deformed,” sick image of women in patriarchal socialization. As Gilbert and Gubar argue, “patriarchal socialization literally makes women sick, both physically and mentally” (671). The self-hatred and self-exile of the monster reflect the psychology of women rejecting the self-image that has been pushed on them and seeking liberation; finally, when the creature revolts against Frankenstein, the act symbolizes women’s anger and rebellion towards their literary forefathers.

The patriarchal literary culture gives women contradictory and flattening images and defines them as such. The conflict between Victor Frankenstein’s expectation for the creature and its true self echoes that contradiction. Gilbert and Gubar point out that the “vexed and vexing polarities of angel and monster, sweet dumb Snow White and fierce mad Queen” (666) are the major images literary tradition offers women. While creating his creature, Frankenstein also created an image in his mind, expecting him to be beautiful. However, meeting with the creature’s eyes led to his disillusionment. It caused Frankenstein’s definition of the creature to shift from one angelic image to another monster-like image: “His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God!…but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes… I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” (Shelly 38). Although polarizing, the two images share the same traits: stereotypical, debasing, and are made out of assumptions without knowing the creature as a conscious, intelligent being — just like the images that are forced upon women by the literary culture.

Such expectations from patriarchal authorities for women to fit in the polarities cause women writers to experience their gender identity as a “painful obstacle, or even a debilitating inadequacy” (Gilbert and Gubar 669). Later, the creature’s struggle to meet such expectations and the resulting self-hatred and confusion align with the women writers’ self-conflict. “[The precursors] attempt to enclose her in definitions of her person and her potential which, by reducing her to extreme stereotypes (angel, monster) drastically conflict with her own sense of her self” (Gilbert and Gubar 668). Since birth, its creator’s disappointment of the creature not being beautiful enough has defined his reality. His beauty was just the creator’s arbitrary expectation, a “dream,” even. He became an outcast, an abandoned child when he failed to fit the image in his creator’s head. From that moment on, his lifelong goal was to seek his creator — his father’s approval. Gilbert and Gubar point out the failure of the male precursors, as the authority, defining the ways women writers experience their own identity: “At first glance, [a woman writer] seems to be anomalous, indefinable, alienated, a freakish outsider” (671). Being denied by his creator — therefore the authority — the creature’s suffering mirrors that of the women writers. Like women in their patriarchal socialization, the creature was doomed to be chained to the road of “learning to become a beautiful object” (Gilbert and Gubar 669); his life was forever shrouded by the defect of not being beautiful enough. Through this process, both he and the women writers learn “anxiety about — perhaps even loathing of — her own flesh” (Gilbert and Gubar 668). The creature’s agony, in part, was brought by his physical body, the same as that of a woman’s. In Gilbert and Gubar’s theory, women are literary and metaphorically sickened by patriarchal socialization because of how their physiology is viewed. They bring in Aristotle’s notion that “femaleness was in and of itself a deformity” (671) to show how women are viewed as inherently sick solely because of their bodies. The relationship between Victor Frankenstein and the creature is an analogy of that of women writers’ male precursors and women writers themselves.

Women writers are not inherently self-aware of their “inadequacy”; instead, they learn about it through their surroundings, the patriarchal socialization. “Most patriarchally conditioned women … [are] victimized by ‘the inferiorized and alternative (second sex) psychology of women under patriarchy.’” (Gilbert and Gubar 669). Like women, the creature was unaware of his difference right after he was born — his surroundings’ reactions informed him of his deformity, and his socialization constructed his sickness. Both he and the women did not hate their bodies instinctively; instead, they learned to do so. When the creature first experienced nature without human interaction, he was delighted: “Soon a gentle light stole over the heavens, and gave me a sensation of pleasure.” (Shelley 75). The creature’s contentment with his reality was soon disturbed by his first encounter with a human: “[An Old man] turned in hearing a noise, and perceiving me, shrieked loudly…and his flight somewhat surprised me.” (Shelley 76). Even then, the creature was still busy being “enchanted by the appearance of the hut.” (Shelley 77). It was not until his second encounter with human beings that he was made aware of the abnormality of his own body: “…I had hardly placed my foot within the door before the children shrieked, and one of the women fainted. The whole village was roused; some fled, some attacked me, until, grievously bruised by stones and many other kinds of missile weapons, I escaped to the open country and fearfully took refuge in a low hovel.” (Shelley 77). The creature’s appearance was not ugly to him but was made ugly by social standards, mimicking how male dominance and female exclusion in literary history are socially constructed. The creature learned about his deformity from the reactions he got in society; he learned to be “fearful.” The acquired fear of the creature echoes the anxiety of women writers; they are both learned behaviors due to the rejection they get from the authority.

Picking up the pen in the male-dominant literary world, the woman writer could not find any precursors of her kind. Her socialization rejecting her sense of self causes her “‘anxiety of authorship’ — a radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a ‘precursor,’ the act of writing will isolate or destroy her.” (Gilbert and Gubar 668). Being one of a kind, the first and only member of his species, the creature’s loneliness and anxiety again mirrors that of women writers. The creature was rejected by his socialization the moment he was born. His identity was constructed around the abhorrence he received from everyone around him. Like every woman writer, the creature fell into the inevitable path of following his forefathers and failing; when he found out that the norms written by his forefathers contradicted his nature, the anxiety kicked in: “I had admired the perfect forms of my cottagers — their grace, beauty, and delicate complexions; but how was I terrified when I viewed myself in a transparent pool!” (Shelley 83). Not being able to see himself among the images of his precursors brought about the ultimate fear inside the creature’s heart — the fear of “isolation and destruction.”

Gilbert and Gubar write: “The anxiety, of course, exacerbated by her fear that not only can she not fight a male precursor on ‘his’ terms and win, she cannot ‘beget’ art upon the (female) body of the muse.” (668). In the creature’s case, the “art” he feared he could not beget was the way of expression, which is a nearly identical parallel to what women writers experience. The creature narrated: “Sometimes I wished to express my sensations in my mode, but the uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again.” (Shelley 75). This sentence perfectly embodies the anxiety women writers have been through. Both the creature and the women writers eventually find their ways of expression too discordant to exist. They are frightened into silence by the jarring difference they have against the entire world created by their forefathers. Here, the creature directly stated the trauma that was brought to him due to the lack of a precursor figure of the same kind: “But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing.” He asked the ultimate question: “What was I? The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans.” (Shelley 88).

Not being able to find resonance within his reality, the creature turned to literature to find who he was within literary figures, taking the comparison between him and the women writers to another dimension — now, reading the history of men, the creature put himself on the same level as the women writers, almost breaking the fourth wall. He, too, started looking for a model in literary texts:

As I read, however, I applied much personally to my own feelings and condition. I found myself similar yet at the same time strangely unlike to the beings concerning whom I read and to whose conversation I was a listener. I sympathized with and partly understood them, but I was unformed in mind; I was dependent on none and related to none. ‘The path of my departure was free,’ and there was none to lament my annihilation. My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them.” (Shelley 93-94).

The constant futile attempts to find his own identity through literature could easily be seen as one of the female writers’ autobiographical narrations when they read the male literary history. The inability to fully empathize with the narrators despite his understanding of the texts, the similarity and the “strange unlikeness” to the writers, and the even more compelling questions he proposed after reading—they are all women writers’ reactions to reading literature. Having read the gems in human literature and built a more comprehensive understanding of human history, the creature still could not find himself a place within said history.

The creature’s struggle to find his way of living is the same as the women writers’ struggle to find a place in the male literary history. Both of them struggle to find the same result, that is, they “do not fit in” (Gilbert and Gubar 668). Women are told to be submissive, docile, and selfless in their entire upbringing, and the act of writing is against every rule they were taught to follow, therefore against their femininity. Gilbert and Gubar’s statement that “It is debilitating to be any woman in a society where women are warned that if they do not behave like angels they must be monsters” (670) exemplifies the extreme duality of the creature: he was dreamed by Victor Frankenstein to be angelic and beautiful, and he was once a harmless, loving, berry-eating creature; however, when Frankenstein and the monster both realized that it was impossible for him to be that angel, both he and the society forged him into a monster. The final blow that turned this tragic creature into a villain was when he killed William, the brother of Frankenstein, out of his hatred toward his creator: “Cursed, cursed creator! Why did I live? Why, in that instant, did I not extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed?” (Shelley 99). The creature decided that his agony was brought about by the creator that failed him; it was an act of revenge for all the mistreatment he got from his socialization. The rebellion against his creator by spreading havoc — the same havoc society had forced on him — is such a symbolic move that, although extreme, illustrates the most profound loneliness and despair of a creature born as an outcast. Gilbert and Gubar propose that women writers seek a female model that can legitimize their own rebellious endeavors (668). The creature himself, though lacking the layer of the female gender, is the embodiment of women writers’ reality in a male-dominated literary. The creation of this creature by Mary Shelley is her rebellion against the male narrative. The creature is her way of legitimizing her own rebellious endeavors. While the creature embodies Mary Shelley’s “painful obstacle” brought by her gender, it also acts like an avatar that carries out the revenge and the pessimistic, unresolved future of a rootless creature in her fantasy.

Works Cited

Gilbert, Sandra M., Susan D. Gubar. “Infection in the Sentence—The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship”. Global Literary Theory, An Anthology, edited by Richard J.Lane, Routledge, 1979, 665-672.

Shelley, M. Frankenstein. Third edition, W. W. Norton & Company, 2021.

About the Author

Alice Zhang graduated from Smith College in 2022 with Bachelor’s degrees in World Literature and Studio Art. She is currently an operator and analyst in an angel investment fund and a hobby artist. She is interested in women’s/gender studies, East Asian culture, literature, and fine art.