Frankissstein

The novel begins with a debate among Mary Shelley’s intellectual friends about the meaning of gender and the rights of women. Living in the early 19th century, Shelley is ridiculed for being a woman, must listen to sexist rhetoric from Byron and Polidori, and even has the authorship of her novel questioned because of the misogynistic belief that a woman cannot be a great author. Two hundred years later, Ry faces discrimination and sexual violence because he is transgender. Friends like Ron and Victor misunderstand and fetishize him, and strangers sometimes physically threaten him, such as the drunk man who attempts to sexually assault Ry at the diner. For both Mary Shelley and Ry—whose name derives from his birth name, Mary—gender prejudice impacts daily life.

At Lake Geneva, Mary fights a constant uphill battle against Byron and Polidori, with only periodic assistance from Percy. Byron, for example, laments that he has a daughter instead of a son. A young man can hope for a brilliant career, he complains, while the most a young woman can hope for is to marry well. Without considering the structural barriers that prevent women from pursuing careers, Byron disparages women as caring for nothing beyond romance and domesticity: “For a man, love is of his life, a thing apart. For a woman, it is her whole existence” (8). Mary Shelley herself stands as a clear rebuke to this sexist idea: Mary’s marriage to Percy does not define her, and in Frankenstein she creates a story that defines its era and long outlasts it. Beyond that, Mary lives a long and full life after Percy’s death, and Ada, the daughter Byron laments, succeeds as a mathematician. Nonetheless, Ada and Mary are notable exceptions to the “rule” Byron points to, while Claire Clairmont lives up to the expectations of men like Byron and Polidori. The issue, which Mary notes, is that men set up expectations for women that then serve to limit women’s perceptions of themselves and others, therein restricting their choices in life.

As a transgender man, Ry faces persistent gender discrimination in the 21st century. Ron, for example, tells Ry: “OK, no dick. So you’re not a bloke really. So what blokes want—well, it’s not about you, is it?” (85). Ron deliberately misgenders Ry, defining masculinity as entirely dependent on genitalia. In the process, he argues that Ry has no right to an opinion about how men experience desire. Notably, no one asks Ron about his genitals before allowing him to give any testimony on masculinity. Victor similarly claims the prerogative to define Ry’s identity for him, saying: “Now male, now not quite, now quite clearly a woman who will slip inside a boy’s body” (298). Ry himself has made clear that he never felt comfortable as a woman, and that his masculine identity is his true one. Victor’s unwillingness to believe what Ry says about himself stems in part from his own anxiety about his sexuality. Victor insists repeatedly that he is not gay, as if he fears that his relationship with Ry calls his sexuality into question. At the same time, he fetishizes Ry’s transgender body, calling him a “hybrid”—a label that many trans people reject and consider degrading. Winterson uses the split timeline of her novel—with one cast of characters living in the early 19th century and another in the early 21st—to show how misogyny and anti-trans bias limit the way women and transgender people are allowed to interact with the world around them. Both Mary and Ry are considered less than cisgender men and their access to move through the world as fully respected individuals is limited by this gender hierarchy.