Hale’s key argument through the article “Constructing Connectedness: Gender, Sexuality and Race in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein” is the notion of pleasure. In the aspect of homosocial relationships, she portrays the idea that prominent male characters, including Walton, and Victor through both the creature and Henry Clerval, as well as the creature itself, exhibit a need and an urgency to find a man or a form similar to their own who can sympathize with them on an intellectual level and to balance and “perfectionate” them. In fact, they go as far to assume the perceived social roles of women such as caretaking and providing a level of intimacy or in the case of the creature, a lack there of.

Additionally, in promoting the concept of pleasure, Hale close reads the quote: “the gaze is the object in which the subject can see himself seeing himself” (14). Here, she moves past the romantic light to which a gaze often represents and into the notion of a mirror. More directly, she characterizes the transparent surface of the eyes as the ability for Victor to see his ego, his desire, and his conscious within another creature. In this case, he is looking upon the corpse of his dear friend Clerval and looking through the eyes of the mirror toward the creation of death, simultaneously imagining his relationship with life and death in the form of his creature.

Hale’s explanation of the “pleasure principle” as argued by Sigmund Freud from the book “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” represents a strong use of a secondary source towards creating additional relevant information and adding credibility (ethos) towards her overarching argument through the work of a famous psychologist. She uses his principle to define the notion that all mental processes are concerned with “an avoidance of unpleasure” or in the same, but opposite notion, “a production of pleasure”. She then uses this to characterizes the drive for sexual desire and deprivation, as well as the creature’s acts of murder to fulfill such needs of pleasure, be it sexually driven or not.

The term sanguinary (16) was unfamiliar to me and upon researching its definition through online dictionaries, I found its meaning to be “involving or causing much bloodshed”.