Identity of Women in Shelleys Frankenstein, Brontes Jane Eyre, and El

Identity of Women in Shelleys Frankenstein, Brontes Jane Eyre, and Eliots The Mill on the Floss George Eliot is quoted as stating A womans hopes atomic number 18 woven of sunbeams a shadow annihilates them (Miner 473). To extend this notion, Jean Giraudoux in Tiger at the Gates, states I subscribe been a woman for cubic decimetre years, and Ive never been able to discover precisely what it is I am (474). These ii statements are related to each other because they express, in large part, the predicament facing Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bront, and George Eliot as they set out to write fabricated manuscripts. Giraudoux may not be able to define womanly til now though she herself is a woman, because a shadow has annihilated the hopes she might have had in achieving completeness as a human. Her femaleness has been stifled by kitchen-gardening and history and she is left wondering who and what she is. Shelley, Bront, and Eliot each deal with the complexity of female identity in their respective texts Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, and The Mill on the Floss.All ternion novels parallel in respect to the image of mirrors, and the obvious implications of mirrors and their ability to theorise their observer. In Frankenstein, the monster looks into a pool and in relating the incident to Victor, says when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification (76). Likewise, Jane Eyre views herself in a looking-glass and sees that her animadversion is colder and darker in that visionary hollow than in reality (26). Eliots Maggie Tulliver is so humiliated of herself that she refuses to look at who she is and inverts her mirror, thus proclaiming that her reflection, as she views it with... ...f men and ignorant societal beliefs quickly take over and stifle, leaving shells that age and yet are never able to define themselves. It has been almost a century and lxxx years since Franke nstein was first published, and literature with similar themes continues to be written. I totally hope we as a society have progressed enough in our thinking so as to prevent women as defining themselves by means of men--or as monsters.Works CitedBront, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Boston St. Martins, 1996.Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. sweet York Signet, 1981.Miner, Margaret, and Hugh Rawson. The New International Dictionary of Quotations. 2nd ed. New York Signet, 1993. 473-4. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York Norton, 1996.Young, Arlene. The Monster at bottom The Alien Self in Jane Eyre and Frankenstein. Studies in the Novel 23 (1991) 325-337.