Mary Shelly's Frankenstein focuses on human nature and on the possibility of controlling experience in order to shape character and cultural values. Specifically, it focuses on the influence of education and experience in effecting behavior. In general, the characters are divided in to three groups by education and experience: passive rescued women, ambitious bourgeoisie men, and the self-taught lonesome creature. Through the female character group, Mary Shelly illustrates how the combination of education and experience shape attitudes and behaviors of women to be passive objects, which leads to their demise.

Mary Shelly spends the least time describing the education of women, repeating one version of female upbringing. The lack of time devoted to female characters in general is not a blatant disregard of women; rather, it is testimony to the limited role women exercised in public sphere of society.

Caroline Beaufort is the model of virtuous femininity rescued from poverty to bourgeois passivity. Caroline, the daughter of a proud, failed businessman, follows her father into self-imposed exile to avoid the humiliation of failure where he falls into a terrible sickness of humi

The death of Justine Moritz is an example not of women selflessly dedicating their lives to others, but rather, of passive women being acted upon. Justine was wrongfully accused of killing William Frankenstein due to circumstantial evidence. A family servant, while washing clothes, found a locket that Elizabeth had given to William shortly before his death. Once on trial, Justine is unable to effectively argue her innocence due to a series of odd circumstances and questionable explanations for those circumstances. Upon this, Justine declares that she "commit[s] [her] cause to the justices of [her] judges, yet [she] see[s] no room for hope" (Shelly 54). Fully educated in the female bourgeois ideal of a passive female, she neither is unable to nor even effectively attempts to prove her innocence. Rather, she calls on people to testify on her behalf, including Elizabeth. Elizabeth, like Justine, does not even attempt to effectively uncover the truth regarding William's death. Instead, she focuses on how well Justine fulfilled the role of a bourgeois woman and had no reason to murder anybody. Elizabeth, like Justine, lacks the ability to effectively argue against Justine being the murderer. Instead, relying on their perceived goodness effectively making them passive to the entire ordeal. Both Justine and Elizabeth have learned well the lessons of submissiveness and devotion that Caroline Beaufort epitomized for them. Similarly, their model behavoir lowers their resistance to the forces that kill them.

Luckily, for Caroline, an associate of her fathers rescued her from her sudden socially imposed poverty. While mourning her father's death, Alphonse Frankenstein "came like a protecting spirit to the poor girl, who committed herself to his care" (Shelly 32). Caroline translates her gratitude of being saved from a tough mans world into lifelong subservience. She immediately transfers her selfless dedication from one man, her father, to ano

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Approximate Word count = 1323
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)