[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_54

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, 1818

"Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful. It is a phrase engraved on a heart-shaped brooch that a friend gave to me. The package said that it was part of a collection of pins with quotes taken from women's literature. I wondered: Which female character could have said it? And I couldn't think of any from the Great Classics. I had assumed that the quote was from a woman, but instead, it belonged to Frankenstein, the monstrous character from Mary Shelley's novel.

I remember very well when, in high school, we studied the birth of science fiction and the plot of Frankenstein: our Italian English Literature teacher focused on it for several lessons. She forgot, however, to go to the trouble of telling us that the author was a woman. Her name was pointed: M. Shelley. I wonder if hers was a deliberate choice because perhaps she didn't want to open up "boring" discussions on the women's issue, or if maybe she didn't know, taking it for granted that M. stood for any Morris, Martin, or Melvin.

I discovered that a woman was hiding behind that mysterious capital letter only a few years ago when reading Mary Wollstonecraft's "The Vindication of the Right of Women" and becoming passionate about her story; I found that her daughter was the writer of Frankenstein.

I felt incredibly deceived and betrayed. How much would it have changed the perception of me and my classmates at that time to discover that the inventor of science fiction was a woman? That a horror novel, without saccharine love scenes, had come from the pen of a girl, one of our peers (Shelley was 19 when she wrote it)? And that same girl hadn't gone to school but wrote well because she loved reading? It would have changed our perception so much: it would have been a hope and a source of inspiration.

When I received the pin and discovered that the quote was hers, I immediately looked in the book for the passage in which it was reported. When I read the entire paragraph to the friend who had given me the pin, she was disappointed: “The meaning changes completely!” she protested, “It is no longer a feminist slogan of self-empowerment: it is the delirium of a sadist.”

The passage is this: "Your hours will pass in dread and misery, and soon the bolt will fall which must ravish your happiness forever. Are you to be happy while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness? You can blast my other passions, but revenge remains--revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food! I may die, but first, you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery and, therefore, powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake that I may sting with its venom. Man, you shall repent of the injuries you inflict."

I'm afraid I have to disagree with my friend.

There is something genuinely unmonstrous in Frankenstein's speech; I find his thirst for revenge very human. Behind the monster, is someone else speaking and asking for revenge - or justice? - in front of a man – or all men? Someone telling a male master: “I'm not your little toy, and I'm not afraid of you. I'm stronger than you because you don't scare me anymore”.

Very feminist.