Safie

• Daughter of Turkish merchant and Christian Arab slave
• Given refuge by De Lacey's when her father plans to take her to Turkey
• Safie is dark-haired and can be seen as forming a contrast to, and foil to, Elizabeth, who is "fairer than a garden rose among dark-leaved brambles"
• Through Safie, Shelley may be critiquing the idealisation and spiritualisation of women in literature and in society, and contrasting her with Elizabeth is one way of doing this
• Like Caroline Safie's mother is rescued by a man; in her case, however, it is more obviously an exchange of one form of slavery for another and she rejects both
• Safie mother fosters rebellion by teaching her to aspire to "higher powers of intellect and an independence of spirit"
• Safie is unhappy with the idea of being locked away in a harem, "allowed only to occupy herself with infantile amusements"
• This description seems a quite pointed reference to the kind of role women were generally expected to perform at the time. It also sounds like the kind of thing that Elizabeth writes to Victor about in her letters.
• While Safie possesses feminine qualities of gentleness and affection, unlike Elizabeth she combines these with masculine qualities of independence and action.
• Not content to wait for rescue, she defies parental and social tyranny and makes the trip to Germany on her own. 
• In doing so she defies the trope of Gothic literature in which women are often helpless ‘damsels in distress’.
• The portrayal of Safie suggests Shelley does not consider the passivity and helplessness of Elizabeth as either positive or inevitable.
• Joyce Zonona is one of a number of critics who have connected Safie to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) in which, like in Safie’s story, “references to the harem, to ‘Mahometanism’ [become a symbol of] an error she finds central to Western culture: the refusal to grant women full membership as rational beings in the human race”.
• In her refusal to be sent to a harem and her attempts at gaining agency and self-determination, it might be possible to make connections between Safie and Moira