By repressing the mother she too attempts a higher kind of creation than the merely biological. A fantasy of female independence from bio- <355>logical constraints thus supports her own artistic enterprise, just as it had her mother’s “liberal feminism.” A criticism that views Frankenstein as her “feminist ining its psychological investments and evasions remains blind to the a ambiguities of its ostensible polemic. For in it Shelley swerves not only away from the standard of her mother’s Vindication but also from the fate of motherhood. In this she leaves herself open to her own complaint against her mother: that the facts of the body cannot be denied. Shelley’s “feminism,” if historically it can be so called, grows uneasily out of certain fundamental idealizings, even illusions, a situation she owns up to in her 1831 introduction. Describing why she feels so strongly about her “hideous progeny” Frankenstein she points explicitly to its idealism: “I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words which found no true echo in my heart” (229). However sanguine this memory of the good old days with Percy, it suggests that, to Shelley’s mind at least, Frankenstein remains in some essential way uninformed by the fact of mortality. Not the creator but the creature knows better the facts of life — and of death: “Polluted by crimes and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?” (220). Not art but death alone resolves the tragic paradox of impure birth.
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3. Mary Shelley, The fresh Publications of Mary Shelley, 1814-1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman and you will Diana Scott-Kilvert, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) 2: 557. Continue reading However, Shelley’s usually in order to imaginative flexibility, such Frankenstein’s, dont wholly refrain the brand new taint off death