Mary Shelley's criticism of the foundations of a society that forges different routes for men and women is often noted as one of Frankenstein's most powerful statements. What has perhaps been less obvious, and which I lay out in this chapter, is its relationship to social contract theory. Frankenstein presents a sustained engagement with the central problem of this book – social contract theory's question of whether individualism is compatible with sociability. In the creation stories of the creature and of his planned but unrealisable female mate, Shelley points to the social contract's underlying dilemmas. All readers of Frankenstein agree with Victor that his creation of the monster was a terrible mistake, and yet few are certain about how it should be resolved. Shelley offers two vexed solutions to one of Romanticism's most haunting problems – the creature's dilemma. The first, explored in the plot of Frankenstein, unfolds with an air of tragic inevitability; Victor destroys his creature and – by extension – himself. But the second solution that Shelley raises, through the creature's earnest behest that Victor make him a partner, presents a different set of obstacles. Shelley invites her readers to sympathise with the monster's predicament, but not with its resolution in the nightmarish prospect of a ‘race of devils … propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror’ (Shelley 1996a: 128). Shelley devises her own critique of social contract theory by bringing William Godwin's wax effigies, texts and fetishes from his novels Fleetwood and Deloraine together with Mary Wollstonecraft's reflections on gender politics. She transforms Godwin's automatons into Victor's male creature and his envisioned female counterpart, examining their separate paths in a culture that excludes women from the social contract. Shelley criticises Godwin's and Wollstonecraft's assumption that women may have a potential place within the social contract, and emphasises their silencing within her own radically gendered reading of the general will.

The influence of Rousseau's literary writings on Frankenstein, a profoundly intertextual novel, is well established; but Shelley's dialogue with his works of political theory is not.