Marginalization In Mary Shelley's The Last Man

will examine why and how female characters are marginalized in Mary

Shelley 's The Last Man while male characters are represented as protagonists. This study, under the feminist theories attempts to highlight those elements that are evidences of marginalization and investigates the reason of this marginalization. Although this novel is known as an autobiographical novel in which Shelley models the central characters of The

Last Man on her Italian circle, Lord Raymond, who leaves England to fight for the Greeks and Dies Constantinople, is based on Lord Byron. Adrian, Earl of Windsor, who leads his followers in search of a natural paradise and dies when his boat sinks in a storm, is a fictional portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley. But as a 19th century novel we see

They are men who determine how they live and act according with the room women are in.and in play when it suits men and how men perceive the women dependent on which room. As Riding asserts the lady of the house was seen only as she appeared in each room, according to the nature of the lord of the room. None saw the whole of her, none but herself.

For the light which she was both her mirror and her body. None could tell the whole of her, none but herself (qtd . in Knudsen). In practice, this means that the role of woman is determined by the charge that she has in each room; when she is in the kitchen her duty was to cook, in children 's room as a mother and in bedroom or living room as wife with the major purpose of pleasing her husband .Indeed, a woman is described and defined by a man andhe observes her accordingly to the context. As Simone de Beauvoir believes a woman ismade, not born and the makers are both the men and society as well (330).Beauvoir indicatesthat women are not born 'feminine ' but are socially constructed to be a woman (feminine) in order to suit in to their place as the oppressed or ' second sex ' within our patriarchal