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 humiliation. 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... and by various means contrived to earn a pittance scarcely sufficient to support life" (Shelly 32). She not only cares for him during his pathetic free fall from life, but she also actively procured work and single-handedly supported herself and her father. It is obvious that has Caroline possesses the skills and tenacity to support not only herself, but her father as well. However, when her father...