Women's Erasure in Frankenstein: Close Reading and Analysis

We’ve been told Frankenstein is a warning about technology, but Mary Shelley wrote something much stranger. She wrote about loss. About creation without care. About what happens when the “mother” abandons the child. Technology wasn't really the point -- just the process.

This course takes you back to the beginning, to Mary Shelley’s own words, her journals, her grief, her genius, and reveals the hidden story at the heart of the novel: a story of mothers, monsters, and the cost of neglect.

What You’ll Get

• 7 video lessons walking you through the novel’s overlooked themes
• Supplemental texts from Mary Shelley’s journals, Wollstonecraft, Percy Shelley, Kristeva, Rich, Haraway, and more
• Discussion questions + journaling prompts that let you move beyond analysis into personal reflection
• Downloadable workbook (15 pages) to keep your insights organized and to push them further
• Optional book club use: designed so you can teach it, study it, or lead a group through it

I have taught this book for years at an all-girls' school, at both the high school and college level, and so much is misunderstood or not even explored. It's clear by the films and tv shows upon which its based -- most perspectives get a lot of it right, but most ignore the obvious: the women, or lack thereof. Is it possible it's because the films have only been directed by men?

For two centuries, classrooms, critics, and filmmakers have gotten it wrong.
They focused on the monster. They ignored the mother.

When men hold all the power of creation, women become expendable. Women have been erased from science in real life too. Rosalind Franklin discovered DNA’s structure. Men took the credit. Women coded the first computers, but men wrote the history books. Science has been built on women’s backs, and Mary Shelley saw it coming. Innovation without women isn’t progress; it’s control. Women in STEM is a movement because it must call attention to the obvious. Erasing women from how the story is taught is no different.

And I teach it differently.

Transformation

Before this course, you’ve read Frankenstein as a story about science.
After this course, you’ll understand it as a blueprint for how systems erase women, and how language exposes that erasure.

You’ll leave with:

• A critical framework to recognize how women’s absence is built into cultural “innovation.”
• Confidence to teach or discuss Frankenstein as a living feminist text, not a museum piece.
• A new reading lens that changes how you see authorship, technology, and power.

You won’t just understand Frankenstein. You’ll see the world through Mary Shelley’s eyes, and realize she was warning us about more than science.

How is Heavy Meta Girls' School different from SparkNotes?

Purpose

SN: To simplify and summarize literature so students can pass a test. HMGS: To deepen and complicate literature so readers can transform through it.

Approach to Reading

SN: Passive consumption — “Here’s what it means.” HMGS: Active inquiry — “Let’s ask what it could mean.”

Tone

SN: Detached, academic, and utility-based. HMGS: Intimate, reflective, feminist, and evolving.

Relationship to the Reader

SN: Authoritative voice providing answers. HMGS: Collaborative voice inviting interpretation and agency.

End Goal

SM: Comprehension and memorization. HMGS: Awakening curiosity, empathy, and self-understanding through language.