ABSTRACT
The central fiction of Frankenstein is the artificial production of a human being. Homans reads it as a telling portrayal of a masculine fantasy, that of doing without the mother and the physical embodiment that the relation to her implies. For Homans, the fiction reflects Mary Shelley's experience of being the target of such a fantasy, rather than that of sharing it. Frankenstein portrays the situation of women obliged to play the role of the literal in a culture that devalues it. In this sense, the novel is simultaneously about the death and obviation of the mother and about the son's quest for a substitute object of desire. The novel criticizes the self-contradictory male requirement that substitute at once embody and not embody the object of desire. The horror of the demon that Frankenstein creates is that it is the literalization of its creator's desire for an object, a desire that never really seeks its own fulfillment.
