What role do women play in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein?

Throughout Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the women are characterised as passive, disposable figures who exist to serve a utilitarian function in response to male action in the novel. Women such as Elizabeth and Justine are punished and mistreated, not for their own actions, but as a consequence of male transgressions, namely Victor Frankenstein’s. However, it is through Shelley's explicit use of these submissive, oppressed women that we, the reader, are made so keenly aware of the social injustices’ women have continued to face throughout history.Shelley also exhibits the lack of female voice in 19^th Century literature by denying characters, such as Margaret Saville and Caroline Beaufort, of any direct speech, instead allowing the novel to be told through three male narrators. Margaret Saville, whose only identity feature is her relationship to Robert Walton, becomes nothing but a name and a medium through which her brother can vent his feelings. As with Caroline Beaufort, whose death occurs before the novel is set, Margaret is never given her own voice, merely acting as the thread connecting men in the outside world to the domesticity and comfort of the home, associated with women. It is this lack of speech which isolates Margaret from the readers, hindering our ability to know and therefore empathise with her and forcing us to dismiss her as a mere tool in this male-centred novel.