Gothic literature and feminism the British Empire

Gothic operates as a genre with particular significance for women: it has a tendency towards female writers and readership, but also embodies a peculiarly patriarchal nightmare in which violence is continually enacted on the female body. The importance of Mary Shelly's identity as the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft. She was a woman living in a tradition of literary women who explicitly criticized patriarchy. The maleness of  Frankenstein  is that men are dominant, women are weak and passive playthings and possessions, or self-sacrificing mother/nurture figures. Shelly's use of the exaggerated misogyny of the genre can be seen as being in many ways subversive and critical.