Fear of Female Sexuality

• The power of and fear of female sexuality has been at the heart of many aspects of human culture, social structures and laws
• For example, the institution of marriage and the cult of virginity may be seen as manifestations of male anxiety over their lack of control over female sexuality
• In part this may be a symptom of a perceived male desire to dominate and assert ownership
• Marriage and the cult of virginity may also be a way of ensuring stable transfer of ownership down family lines, as it is crucial that the paternity of children is known
• In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood extends dramatically such codifying of the control of female sexuality in Gilead’s theocracy
• Moira operates in part as an example of female asserting ownership of their sexuality in the pre-Gilead regime (e.g. the ‘underwhore’ parties)
• In creating the monster and usurping the role of women, we could argue that Victor is rejecting human sexuality.
• Victor's terrible nightmare after the creation of the monster seems to support the idea that Victor is repelled by his sexuality.
• When Victor attempts to kiss Elizabeth, she turns into a corpse, the corpse of Victor’s mother, perhaps indicating that Victor is frightened by incestuous desires.
• Victor's Actions can be characterised as proto-Freudian.
• Victor's responds to his father’s suggestion that he marry with horror and dismay, and while he explains that this is because the threat of the monster still hangs over him, other readings are certainly possible.
• The same may be said of Victor's words to Elizabeth on their wedding night: ‘Oh! Peace, peace, my love,’ he tells her, ‘this night, and all will be safe: but this night is dreadful, very dreadful.’ Perhaps there is a fear here of consummation of the marriage.
• It is also difficult to imagine how Victor could possibly misinterpret the monster’s threat: ‘I shall be with you on your wedding night’. Since this is uttered soon after Victor destroys the female companion, to the reader it seems quite clear that the threat is to Elizabeth, and yet Victor interprets it as a threat against him
• The notion of the doppelganger may help with one possible interpretation of this. Might we see the ugliness of the monster as an externalisation – an alterisation – of Victor’s destructive sexual impulses. The monster assures Victor that he will be with him on his wedding night, the time when Victor can no longer avoid confronting his own sexuality.
• He leaves Elizabeth alone, but the part of him he rejects, his sexuality, does not disappear. Instead, it turns destructive and he unleashes upon her this ugly violent thing: the embodiment of his twisted sexual impulses.
• Victor’s dream: ‘as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death.’
• Victor considering marriage: ‘Alas! To me the idea of an immediate union with my Elizabeth was one of horror and dismay.’
• Donna Heiland argues that Gothic plots are not merely plots of transgression, but also plots of gender anxiety:

  ‘The transgressive acts at the heart of gothic fiction generally focus on corruption in, or resistance to, the patriarchal structures that shaped the country’s political life and its family life, and gender roles within these structures come in for particular scrutiny.’
• Anne K. Mellor has also written on the male fear of female sexuality in Mary Shelley’s work.