1869 ______________________________________________________________ DOI: https://doi.org/10.33258/birci.v3i3.1119 The Presence or Absence of Female Characters in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Shahrzad Mohammad Hossein 1 , Narges Raoufzadeh 2 , Fatemeh Sadat Basirizadeh 3 1 Department of English Language and Literature, North Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran 2,3 Department of English Language and Literature, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran shahrzadmohammadhosein@gmail.com I. Introduction British Literature has been a long tale of struggle of women authors for their identity as human being and of course the struggle to demolish the gender differences and social evils like racism and women as second class citizen of this world. Hence, female writers could not be as open as they wanted to and could not express whatever they desired due to ensuring their work’s publication and obtaining good reception amongst the majority of people, they had to pay attention to what they wrote and depicted in their novels and tread lightly. However, despite such restrictions, all of them have broken the rules by portraying women who are powerful and do not conform to men, women who possess many masculine attribute and cannot be called conventional. Also have rebelled against patriarchy by creating male characters with feminine feature who are under the influence and dominance of the female characters and who need their support and assistance. Basirizadeh (2019) in her article entitled A Comparative Study of the Psychoanalytical Portrayal of the Women Characters by Virginia Woolf and Zoya Pirzad mentions that, “In de Beauvoir's view if women really want a status, they should deconstruct the structures of the masculine society and present their own definition of feminity. This definition would Abstract Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley (1979 – 1851), the daughter and later the wife of one of the keenest critics in England, wrote the novel Frankenstein (1818) when she was only nineteen years old. Since its publication, the novel has been the subject of many literary discussions due to the myriad controversial issues discovered in the novel in the light of different literary approaches; such as, eco-criticism, feminism, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, queer studies and post-colonial studies to name a few. This paper aims to discover whether it is a fact that the novel is flawed, mainly due to the absence of forceful female characters. The novel’s schematic arrangement of characters was deemed as deficient simply because, first of all, readers had developed the wrong kind of expectation from the author and secondly, they were not giving the novel the critical, observant reading that it deserved. Contrary to what a superficial reading of the work will reveal, this novel is not deficient at all if it comes to the presence of female characters. Instances from the novel can depict and illustrate this claim and it is only weak traditional readings of the novel which tend to overlook its intensely sexual materials. In the light of such findings, Frankenstein can be judged as one of the most bewildering, intricate works of literature of the Victorian era. Keywords diaspora; sex; gender; feminism ; mother-lode