Jessica Hale’s “Constructing Connectedness: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” argues that the homosocial relationships in Frankenstein make a statement of the inability of women to reach a certain level of intellectual and intimate connections with men in the nineteenth century.  In the novel, male intimacy is the primary choice, and marriage is then seen as a secondary choice, which is used in exposing the strengths and inadequacies of the nuclear family.  The homosocial desire found in Shelley’s Frankenstein serves to define the separation of the domestic female role from the external male role that is prevalent in the nineteenth century.

Hale close reads the specific passage “I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine” to emphasize that the erotic desire is for a male companion and not a wife or sexual partner, even though the man Walton dreams of serves an unromantic purpose (Shelley 4).

A secondary source of “men who feel secure enough in their masculinity to display feelings of domestic affection… who seem perfectly balanced in their manliness which incorporates rather than categorically excludes the feminine” (Schoene-Harwood 16), which is utilized by Hale to create a “they say, I say” statement that expresses agreement to the feminine and nurturing qualities displayed, but disagrees with the incorporation rather than exclusion of the feminine.  She uses it to support her argument and provide clarification and verification to her ideas.

One unfamiliar term that I came across in the same section was “mélange,” which is used in a sentence describing the comparisons between Victor’s homosocial desire for Clerval and his paternal desire for the child he created.  I used contextual evidence to deduce that it meant a combination, and verified it by looking it up on dictionary.com, where the definition says a mixture, medley.  The easiest way to track down a definition for an unfamiliar term is generally to use a dictionary, which have become very accessible due to the internet.