Perspectivas feministas em Lily Frankenstein, de Penny Dreadful : desdobramento contemporâneo da obra de May Shelley

Abstract

This study investigates the character Lily Frankenstein, from the television series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016), as an unfolding of the female creature that was only idealized by Victor Frankenstein and his creature, in Mary Shelley’s literary work Frankenstein (1818), from a feminist criticism point of view. To do so, we verify the historical context behind the creation of the novel, which constitutes an important period for the feminist issues and also works as background for the series. In order to place Shelley’s work as relevant for the gender critics, we go through such analyses that have been made from it. Due to the transposition from literature to television, we also verify the intertextuality that exists between the romance and its adaptation to television; through this process, we intend to determine the relevance of interacting with the original work even today. Regarding the television series, we verify the most relevant aspects of the character, the prostitution and her monstrosity, being the latter related to the horror genre proposed by the series. As for the feminist criticism, we direct our discussion from Donna Haraway’s perspectives (2009), also approximating to theorists such as Rosi Braidotti (1994) and Simone de Beauvoir (1980), in order to notice Lily Frankenstein as an innovative character amongst the other adaptations of Frankenstein and also as a relevant element for the current feminist issues. We argue that Lily is close to the cyborg concept proposed by Haraway (2009), as she presents post-gender elements and engages in different relations with her social space. Thus, she represents, as a fictional character, the ambitions of the feminist theorists presented in this dissertation, and can also be analyzed by many other contemporary perspectives.