A cool thing about Frankenstein’s nested narrative structure is that the innermost narrative box contains Safie and the outermost box contains Margaret. The giant, sprawling story of so many self-absorbed, dramatic, yearning men is bookended by a woman trying to communicate and a woman who may or may not be trying to listen, and the idea that this whole mess can be read as a game of telephone between two almost entirely voiceless female characters is super compelling.
I’d like to add that when there is a female voice, such as with Elizabeth’s letters and testimony at Justine’s trial and Justine’s profession to Elizabeth and Victor, are also very nested within the narrative. The only time we are given female voices, we are given them so deeply through the lens of the male gaze that their characterization is deeply colored by Victor’s (and then Walton’s) opinions of them.
As Victor paints his dead wife as a saint, the woman reading of her, Margaret, is left to imagine who Elizabeth Lavenza is when not the object of Victor’s desire. Who is this woman when she isn’t penning letters? Some inferences I’ve made include that Elizabeth, as the woman of the house, was left to raise Ernest and William since she was sixteen. Though Justine was their governess, she was as close to a mother as they had. She ran the Frankenstein household and, until Victor made the Creature and upended his family’s peace, things ran smoothly, even though Elizabeth suffered the same griefs as Victor - perhaps more, depending on which version of the story you’re reading (1818 vs. 1831).
The same is true of Justine. We see her through not only Victor’s eyes, but Elizabeth’s. Elizabeth’s letter paints Justine as a victim - perhaps even a martyr - long before she truly becomes one. Justine never talks of her past tragedies herself and even if she did, her voice would still be filtered through Victor’s, which is then filtered through Walton’s. When Justine speaks for herself, again, we have the opinions of the male narrators filtering her words.
This says a lot about how Victor (and Walton) see women. If Victor were to report about the flaws of the women he loved, they would not have a tragic, fairytale quality to them, even though Victor surely knows the sins, secrets, and flaws of both Justine and especially Elizabeth. He grew up alongside them. If he knows their damning qualities, his omission of them not only garners the readers’ sympathy, but gives an incomplete and romanticized picture of both women. It’s almost as if Victor doesn’t want to believe that anything either woman did was even mildly reprehensible. Whether that’s to soothe his own soul (likely) that they did not deserve their fates, whether that’s to convince Walton that they did not deserve their fates, whether that’s to condemn himself for bringing tragedy on the undeserving (possible), or whether that’s because he’s genuinely blocked out any negativity surrounding Elizabeth and/or Justine as people in order to cope with the trauma, it’s hard to say. What it does do is place these women so far above reproach that they seem more like angels than people.
On a meta-textual level, this way of depicting women says a lot about how men view women and what kind of women are considered “good”. If Victor dared to focus on negative aspects of Elizabeth or Justine, they might have been viewed (either by Walton or by the audience) as “bad” women, who perhaps deserved to be killed. It creates a Madonna/whore dichotomy without even depicting any whores. It’s smart writing - of course it is. But I call it “smart writing” because it takes a trope that has dominated Western fiction for centuries (and continued/continues to dominate Western fiction) and upends it. If all the women are Madonnas, regardless of faults, none of them deserve the violence men and monsters commit against them.
However smart that writing must be to a 21st century reader, one can only imagine what it must have been like to be Margaret Sackville, reading her brother’s letters about these unimpeachable women - Elizabeth, Justine, Safie, Agatha, Caroline - and wondering just how unauthorized Victor Frankenstein is to tell their stories and how incomplete his understanding of them is.
This is some fantastic commentary, but I do want to add that Victor pretty much portrays his father, Clerval, William, and even someone like M. Waldman as absolutely flawless angels, too. The only person close to him who’s allowed even the slightest hint of a flaw is Ernest, and that’s only because Elizabeth mentions in a letter that he “never had [Victor’s] powers of application” and she’s afraid he’ll “become an idler”. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Victor barely ever mentions Ernest, so we never actually get to see this supposed flaw in action.)
The Creature also starts off portraying Felix and De Lacey as absolute paragons of virtue, and even though he ultimately ends up condemning Felix for attacking him (“Why do you not hate Felix, who drove his friend from his door with contumely?”), it’s more in the context of condemning humanity as a whole than really portraying it as a flaw unique to Felix. I’d argue the only characters in the book who are really allowed much in the way of moral complexity at all are Victor and the Creature themselves.
I get the feeling that’s partly because Victor is a rather black-and-white person - he seems to see people as either wholly good or wholly bad, which is why I think he struggles to sympathize with the Creature and acknowledge his own part in making him what he became. I also think in the cases of his parents, Justine, Elizabeth, William and Clerval, he’s very likely turned them into martyrs in his mind to deal with the grief of losing them.
That isn’t to say I’m arguing that his perspective is sexist, because it definitely is and I think that affects how he sees all of the women in his life. But I also think he has a strong tendency towards putting people in black-and-white moral categories and idealizing the people he loves, which isn’t limited to the women in the novel.
