Creature, creator and criticism: Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, under the point of view of A room of one’s own, by Virginia Woolf

Abstract

This article aims to present English author Mary Shelley (1797-1851) as initiator of Science Fiction with the work Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (1818), and this as a matrix work of female authorship, to question its possible absence in the British Museum and/or the canonical values defended by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), from her notes on woman in fiction, in her essay A room of one’s own (1929). For that, the critical points pointed out by Woolf were observed and they were contrasted with the life of Mary Shelley and her work Frankenstein, in order to understand the non-reference to Shelley before the diverse authors names cited in the essay. Woolf admits that the patriarchal structure has barred women over the centuries in a life without material conditions to think and contemplate at the moment of creation. However, Shelley, even living in a nineteenth-century patriarchal Victorian society, in which women were supposed to be submissive to man, was fit enough for active fictional production, writing works such as Frankenstein, which remains present 200 years after its publication, defying all with a magnetism that crosses the field of the arts. A work that should had been incandescent on the shelves of the British Museum.