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Frankenstein: A Critique of Education Mary Shelly's Frankenstein focuses on human nature and on the possibility of controlling experience in order to shape character and cultural values. Specifically, it focuses on the influence of education and experience in effecting behavior. In general, the characters are divided in to three groups by education and experience: passive rescued women, ambitious bourgeoisie men, and the self-taught lonesome creature. Through the female character group, Mary Shelly illustrates how the combination of education and experience shape attitudes and behaviors of women to be passive objects, which leads to their demise. Mary Shelly spends the least time describing the education of women, repeating one version of female upbringing. The lack of time devoted to female characters in general is not a blatant disregard of women; rather, it is testimony to the limited role women exercised in public sphere of society. Caroline Beaufort is the model of virtuous femininity rescued from poverty to bourgeois passivity. Caroline, the daughter of a proud, failed businessman, follows her father into self-imposed exile to avoid the humiliation of failure where he falls into a terrible sickness of humi
There is nothing to note any changes in the attitude or actions of Caroline to warrant such a change. Thus, she was entirely acted upon and had absolutely no agency or freedom from a man ever in her life. Completely dedicated to her father, Caroline "attended him with the greatest tenderness; but she saw with despair that their little fund was rapidly decreasing" (Shelly 32) Luckily Caroline "possessed a mind of uncommon mould; and her courage rose to support her in her adversity. Elizabeth, like Justine, lacks the ability to effectively argue against Justine being the murderer. Elizabeth was severely ill due to a case of scarlet fever. Although she initially refrained from helping, Caroline attended Elizabeth who "was saved, but the consequences of this imprudence were fatal to her preserver" (Shelly 42). This is another, though extreme, example of women being completely acted upon. Once introduced to the bourgeois Frankenstein family Justine trained to be a servant. Fully educated in the female bourgeois ideal of a passive female, she neither is unable to nor even effectively attempts to prove her innocence. The death of Elizabeth is the final example of the implication of passivity leading to the death of a female. Even though women had the ability to act as free agents in society, their description, status was invariably tied to a male. Thus, like her foster mother, she is the perfect domestic woman: daughter, sister, friend, and wife-to-be. Caroline died because of her selfless dedication to others.
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Acceptance Essays
