SOURCE: "Thoughts on the Aggression of Daughters," in The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays in Mary Shelley's Novel, edited by George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher, University of California Press, 1979, pp. 88-119.

In the essay that follows, Knoepflmacher contends that "Frankenstein is a novel of omnipresent fathers and absent mothers," a situation he relates explicitly to Shelley's own family history and the repressed anger at her father that appears to surface in the novel.

Parental affection, indeed, in many minds, is but a pretext to tyrannize where it can be done with impunity.

—Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

I will keep a good look out—William is all alive—and my appearance no longer doubtful—you, I daresay, will perceive the difference. What a fine thing it is to be a man!

—Mary Wollstonecraft to William Godwin, 10 June 1797

There never can be perfect equality between...