The question of the writer's gender playing a crucial role in her writing has been much discussed in contemporary critical debate. Feminist critics argue that society's patriarchal ideology makes it imperative for male writers to "write like men", which implies a certain author's point of view is taken for granted. Of course there are exceptions; a number of male writers of the past wrote like women. The final chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses, which contains a 20,000-word sentence that begins and ends with "yes," has often been hailed as a quintessential example of women's writing. Likewise, different readers use different perspectives to make sense of literary texts. Male readers, for example, tend to view literary texts from a male perspective. But do readers also read the same texts from a decidedly female perspective? Not exactly, because, as Judith Fetterley observes, male authors have assumed for centuries that their readers were all male and this could have an enormous effect on female readers, and to "successfully" read literary works that assumed their readers were male, readers must unconsciously forget that they are women and read as if they were men. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In other words, male writers invariably employ writing conventions that make their style rigidly masculine, which requires a masculine point of view from their readers. Fetterley calls this "immasculation" of female readers by male authors (Introduction, xx). But the counter-issue that female authors write like men has always been set aside as something not worthy of serious critical attention. The present article is an attempt to show how female authors also sometimes write in a style characteristic of male authors, how they address a presumably male audience, and how in their use of language and other literary conventions they display tendencies characteristic of their male counterparts. In this I propose to apply Fetterley's theory of defensive female reading to Mary Shelley's style in Frankenstein to demonstrate how she assumed her readers to be male. The plot of Frankenstein deals with the conflict within Victor Frankenstein, who, due to his love of natural science, produces a monstrous creature. Victor himself is disgusted at the sight of his creation and rejects it. Likewise all other human beings reject him because of his hideous appearance. The monster, frustrated and misunderstood, eventually kills those closely related to its creator. This is the story told by Victor to Robert Walton, a sea captain traveling to the North Pole. In essence the story is simple, and the three separate plots are the Walton plot, the Victor plot, and the creature plot -- which circulate throughout the novel giving us three different perspectives on the story. Let's start with Walton's perspective that opens and concludes the novel. Walton addresses his entire speech to his sister, Mrs. Margaret Saville, a silent narrator whose complicity with Walton's narration remains implicit but never comes to light. In a certain sense it represents an inversion of the powerful narration that determines the existence of the narrator in Arabian Nights (Prince, 8). Interestingly, Walton is both the great narrator and the narrator: he not only tells the story but, more importantly, listens to the stories told by the other narrators, Victor and the creature. Shelley, however, does not let his narration become the narrator of his own story. Walton iswas even invested with the power to interrupt and question the flow and validity of the narrative addressed to him: "Wretch!" I said: "it is good that you come here to complain of the desolation you have made... It is not pity that you feel; you only complain because the victim of your malignity withdraws 'from your power'" (Shelley, 187). Again once, as a narrator he has considerable influence on his narrators: "I see by your enthusiasm, and by the wonder and hope that your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be told the secret that I know" (57), or "your gaze reminds me to proceed" (59). On the contrary, always receiving, Mrs Saville remains a shadowy figure whose function is to listen without interrupting. where Susan Barton, the shipwrecked white woman, undertakes to tell the story of Friday, the black slave who was denied the right to speak). , Walton complains to his sister (31), and when they find Victor, he is full of brotherly affection for him: "My affection for Victor increases every day. He excites at once my admiration and pity to a surprising degree" (37). Victor's affection for his friend Henry is similarly overflowing: "I was indifferent... to my schoolfellows in general; but I joined myself with the bonds of the closest friendship to one of them. Henry Clerval was the son of a merchant from Geneva" (45). Later, it is Clerval's presence that revives Victor's spirit after the creation of the monster: "I grasped his hand and in a moment I forgot my horror and my bad luck; I suddenly felt, and for the first time in many months, a calm and serene joy" (62). Once again, it is Victor's father's friendship with Beaufort that drives him to seek out his friend, which ultimately leads him to marriage to Caroline Beaufort despite Friendship, male friendship, therefore, has a beneficial influence on the characters in the novel Victor is a father figure, and the word "father" and references to the Creation myth abound in the novel: "No." father could claim his son's gratitude as fully as I should deserve theirs" (58), "I knew that my silence disturbed them and I remembered my father's words well" (59) : "Remember that I am your creature; I should be your Adam" (93), "the countenance of my father was to me as that of my good angel" (157). The kind and wise figure of the patriarch in the old De Lacey fills the creature with admiration and respect; but the younger De Laceys fill him with hatred and disgust for humanity. On the contrary, the mother plays a marginal role in the development of the story, and both Caroline and Elizabeth are presented as sacrificial figures to atone for Victor's Promethean feat, a stereotype of the good mother for whom happiness means the happiness of her children. It is she who adopts little Elizabeth as a gift for Victor, and sacrifices her own life to save Elizabeth's: During her illness, many arguments had been urged to persuade her. my mother refrained from assisting her. At first she had yielded to our entreaties, but when she learned that the life of her favorite was in danger, she could no longer control her anxiety and took charge of her sick bed; , but the consequences of this imprudence were fatal to his conservator. (49) On her deathbed Carolina joins the hands of Vittorio and Elisabetta and gives Elisabetta her maternal vocation: "Elisabetta, my love, you must provide in my place for my youngest children" (49). Now Elizabeth becomes the mother, and the incest between Elizabeth and Victor takes on new meaning. It is the oedipal bond of the son with the mother. In this case, however, the mother must die for this to happenthe son can be saved. Victor survives several years of desperate searches and tribulations; Elizabeth dies on the night of her wedding. Clearly, biology is destiny. Yet, Elizabeth is as much a savior figure as Caroline. In order for Victor to survive free from the burdens of marriage and family, but with his vision of himself as a heroic victim of cosmic antagonism intact, Elizabeth must die. The death of the innocent Justine on charges of William's murder is equally revealing: Shelley models her female characters as vulnerable to the forces of nature; their sheer goodness and yet marginal influence on the scheme of things recalls the images of women that populate so much of nineteenth-century men's writing. It can be argued, therefore, that in Frankenstein the question of power and survivability is obscured by the structure of romantic love and the constant invocation of the mischievous creature whose goal is to destroy the good and the beautiful. the central theme of Frankenstein is the conflict of the father with the son. The creature asks Victor to make him a companion "of the same species and the same defects" (128). Victor refuses: the father's sexual jealousy transforms the son into an Oedipal rapist. The creature's almost sexual fascination with Caroline's portrait is symbolic of its revenge on its creator: "For a few moments I looked with joy at its dark eyes, fringed with deep lashes, and its lovely lips; but immediately my anger she returned: I remembered that I was forever deprived of the delights that such beautiful creatures could give” (127), the creature exacts its final revenge on its creator by depriving Victor of sexual consummation with his bride way, the creature's justification for William's murder is an indictment of Justine: "the murder I committed because I was forever robbed of all she could give me, she will atone for it. The crime had its source in her: let the punishment be hers." (127). Women, therefore, are made to suffer due to the father's conflict with his son. Shelley does not allow his protagonist to create a woman because his conception of woman (beautiful but weak) cannot come to terms with the creature's demand for a mate (hideous and strong): "I was now to form another being whose nature I will know was equally ignorant... and she, who in all likelihood would have become a thinking and reasoning animal, could have refused to respect a pact made before her creation" (144). Victor's fear, therefore, is both unconscious and ideological. Thus in Frankenstein Shelley implicitly supports a predominantly male discourse. But why does he do it? Perhaps his relationship with his father also has something to do with it (he even dedicated his book to his father). Recent critics have gone so far as to trace incest to Shelley's relationship with her father. Furthermore, the origin of the novel - a ghost story competition with two other established male poets, "a tale from the pen of one of whom would be far more acceptable to the public than anything I could ever hope to produce" (Preface , 27) - may have caused Shelley to address a male audience and follow male writing conventions. Likewise, if we consider Shelley as an early practitioner of science fiction (in Shelley's time science was primarily a male field of inquiry), then Shelley's use of a distinctly masculine style in addressing readers may not seem surprising. Thus, Fetterley's argument that only male authors assumed their readers were male appears to ignore the ideological, biographical contexts, 2000.