Passivity and Resilience: Troubling the Master/Slave Binary in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Octavia E. Butler’s Wild Seed

In The Bonds of Love, Jessica Benjamin examines the bonds between mother/child and master/slave to understand the function of domination and submission in a patriarchal society. She demonstrates, through discussing the desire of recognition and lack of mutual connection, how the relationship between the power of domination and the oppression resulting in submission coexists. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the creature, who has the power of knowledge and free will, demands for his creator to provide him with recognition, but Victor Frankenstein absolves his responsibility towards the creature and attempts to isolate his creature into submission. In Octavia E. Butler’s Wild Seed, the protagonist Anyanwu falls prey to Doro’s intentions to create a master race, but womanhood/maternity/motherhood become the source of her strength and agency. While Doro uses her maternal love as leverage to control her, Anyanwu builds a domestic sphere to support her own function and purpose. Utilizing Jessica Benjamin as a lens into the bonds of love and submission, this thesis focuses on the function of the master/slave binary to analyze the relationships of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein/creature and Octavia E. Butler’s Doro/Anyanwu. As Doro and Victor Frankenstein believe the domestic sphere to belong to the weaker creatures of the female sex, they dismiss the power found in womanhood and motherhood. While Anyanwu and the creature live in patriarchal societies, this thesis argues that they both discover the power of female agency that lies within the patriarchal institutions of womanhood and motherhood. Through the analysis of the master/slave power dynamic, this thesis will argue that while women live in a patriarchal society, by rewriting and reconfiguring the female function in literature and, correspondingly, in life, women can gain agency through self-resilience and resistance to dominant discourse.