Liliana Velasco 15 April 2024 English 246 Professor Bryce Campbell On the Surface Versus Below: Contrasting Frankenstein and Visions of the Daughters of Albion Separated by twenty five years, different literary genres, and distinctly different authors, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion find similarity in their gender analysis in the form of role reversal. Their undertaking of the opposite gender results in a brilliant inversion of typical gender roles, where William Blake applies sexual liberation to a woman and Mary Shelley applies motherhood to a man. Both Blake and Shelley employ the opposite gender to add intrigue to the perspectives of the characters in relation to the authors. In Visions …show more content…
Another flower shall spring, because the soul of sweet delight Can never pass away,” (CITE) and Oothoon plucks the flower to place it between her breasts, she assumes a persona of the sexually liberated woman that is based on the expectation that Theotormon will accept her. When he does not, the persona falls apart and so the enslaved daughters of Albion, including Oothoon, are left to woe their station. If her liberated attitude crumples at Theotormon’s disdain, her dignity following the rape was never authentic and in fact was dependent upon him viewing her as a flower that could be plucked anew. An ostensible lack of female representation haunts the novel Frankenstein written by Mary Shelley, which is instead overpowered by the male voices of the narrators as told through a story that passes through Robert Walton, Victor, and the Creature. With few female characters to examine, the reader is left with mostly Victor’s ramblings, as Shelley intends. His mad endeavor towards the “creation of a human being,” (page 41 physical book) is not only about the discovery of the secret of life, notoriety for reanimating the dead, or justification for his alchemical studies, but about what attention and surrogate love he will receive from his