Feeding Your Decaying Georgian Twunk How-to Guide: Soup, An Oaten Cake And A Frozen Dead Hare

historically, canes (walking sticks) were used both as an aid for mobility and balance, and as a reflection of status. this shift towards becoming a status symbol started during the renaissance, when canes began to be elaboratively carved and designed. there was also "the golden age of canes" during the 1800s, when canes became both a functional tool and versatile accessories, including concealed gadgets, weapons, and other mechanical features. things like crutches and other supports tended to be less ornate (source).

for example of some canes -- here's a cane from 1760, and here's another cane from the late 18th century!

in general, medical treatises are also a good place to look for information regarding disability aids. for example, sir benjamin collins brodie, a london surgeon, investigated joint disease and discusses mobility aids in his observations on the diseases of the joints:

“The careful employment of a walking stick or crutch can aid in maintaining activity while shielding the diseased joint from undue pressure, thus balancing rest with essential movement"

"Supportive aids such as canes or crutches... ease the transition from immobility to gradual weight-bearing, thereby ensuring that the delicate tissues of the joint are not overstrained during convalescence"

i thought this and this were interesting sources as well, especially the latter -- while they only touch on walking sticks used as a mobility aid, it's a good look into the history and significance of walking sticks. i've also requested the full text of an article discussing the history of wheelchairs; i'll get back to you if the author chooses to send it!

i hope this helps!

does anyone have any resources on late 1700s/Early 1800s canes or physical disability aids?

it's so interesting that the elizabeth was favored bc she was a girl. typically that's the other way around. typically being a disappointment bc of ur gender is a woman thing. it's almost as if victor is written to have feminine struggles

all the anti-abortion votes are crazy when victor literally has the metaphor for an abortion within the book. put some respect on his name

i want to preface this with this is all courtesy of @dykensteinery's genius and not my own, i am merely putting his ideas into words for her!!!

so charlie brought to my attention that this quote from frankenstein, where victor refers to clerval as essentially his "other half":

“I agree with you,” replied the stranger; “we are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves—such a friend ought to be—do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures. I once had a friend, the most noble of human creatures, and am entitled, therefore, to judge respecting friendship."

was an allusion to plato's symposium. in the symposium, aristophanes presents a mythological account of human origins: that humans were once spherical beings—complete wholes—until they were split in two by zeus. ever since, each human being has wandered the world searching for their missing "other half." this myth explains not only the drive for romantic love but the deeper longing for union, for completion, for the return to an original state of wholeness. specifically, it was an allusion to this line (any quotes pulled from the symposium are from percy shelley's translation):

"From this period, mutual Love has naturally existed in human beings; that reconciler and bond of union of their original nature, which seeks to make two, one, and to heal the divided nature of man. Every one of us is thus the half of what may be properly termed a man…the imperfect portion of an entire whole, perpetually necessitated to seek the half belonging to him.”

considering this line is present in the 1831 edition but not the 1818 edition, after percy's death, during a time where his works were being edited and published by mary posthumously in 1826 and forward, it feels like a much more deliberate allusion. furthermore, i don’t think it’s reaching to say this revision, this framing of love as something that completes a person, was colored by that loss.

it's crucial, also, that aristophanes’ speech does not limit this yearning for your "other half" to heterosexual couples but rather includes and legitimizes same-sex love, particularly between men, as a natural expression of a desire for one’s “own kind":

“Those who are a section of what in the beginning was entirely male seek the society of males…When they arrive at manhood they still only associate with those of their own sex; and they never engage in marriage and the propagation of the species from sensual desire but only in obedience to the laws…Such as I have described is ever an affectionate lover and a faithful friend, delighting in that which is in conformity with his own nature…Whenever, therefore, any such as I have described are impetuously struck, through the sentiment of their former union, with love and desire and the want of community, they are ever unwilling to be divided even for a moment.”

looking at this within the context of frankenstein, to me, this invites further reflection on a queer reading of the novel. the language of this passage—and others like it—have homoromantic subtext, especially when looking at it through this context. aristophanes describes those descended from the original male-male whole who pursue other men as “affectionate lover[s] and faithful friend[s]," which finds obvious parallels in the language mary uses to describe victor's idealization of clerval: victor constantly refers to him as noble, pure, good, better than himself. the language of friendship in the 18th and 19th century was often emotionally demonstrative in ways we don't see now, yes—but here, in light of the aristophanic frame, it rings a little different.

so basically? clervalstein real

when will people stop blaming victor for not being omniscient 

we as the clervalstein nation do not talk enough about this chunk of text

For the last time: Mary Shelley and Lord Byron were friends. She didn't hate him. His death was a very painful loss to her. She didn't write Frankenstein because she was stuck in a house with him and he was an unbearable person. For God's sake, just read her journals and letters.

i have something to say!!! about the differences between victor and elizabeth in the way they experience/express emotion, and what that means for the themes of gender in the novel

i briefly begun (began??) to talk about this in the tags of this post by the magnificent @frankingsteinery (i wanted to add this on to the original post but this ended up being kinda long) and i would like to clarify and expand upon what was said because i theorized a bunch of stuff unsubstantiated like an idiot 😭 raving under the cut

for context here are the tags that inspired my thoughts:

i left my little analysis in the tags because i was really just spitballing on the spot and when i do that i'm usually wrong 😭 but i'd actually find it fun to substantiate some of what i said w evidence from the text

to expand on my ramblings and robin's own additions in their reblog (with brilliant quotes that i did not even consider to search for because i am quite stupid). when i try to explain exactly how elizabeth and victor have differed in their approach to an early parentification role (elizabeth moreso in being groomed to emulate her mother in role and spirit, forced to remain domestic, unworldly, and unable to even entertain self-actualization, since the moment caroline dies she is the eldest female figure in the immediate family and must assume that role of maturity) (victor moreso in the fact that he literally. made a guy when he was like 20), i find this quote from alphonse quite telling:

"...but is it not a duty to the survivors that we should refrain from augmenting their unhappiness by an appearance or immoderate grief? Excessive sorrow prevents improvement or enjoyment, or even the discharge of daily usefulness, without which no man is fit for society."

victor immediately dismisses this advice as being:

"...totally inapplicable to my case; I should have been the first to hide my grief and console my friends, if remorse had not mingeled its bitterness, and terror its alarm, with my other sensations."

he acklowledges what is expected of him from society at large and actively claims himself incapable of it. he is not the reliable figure his family so desperately hoped could be upheld before they came to realize that he is really, irrevocably capricious and mentally unstable.

on the subject of the other quotes added, i think that in them we can see this shift in the family's perception of victor: they begin by expecting him to assume his prescribed role as the family's eldest man (besides alphonse cause he's old and useless) and caregiver, to be a stable and unshakeable foundation on which the family can always rely, but as victor remains on the trauma conga line and spirals into worsening mental health, the happiness of the family is reliant on victor's rapidly fluctuating states of health.

"Come, my dearest Victor; you alone can console Elizabeth..." (side note that after this quote he immediately starts taking about caroline, a bit of a freudian slip on alphonse's part in that he conflates caroline's very existence with a comforting and reliable disposition, and elizabeth is explicitly asked to 'take over' for caroline when she dies)

at the time alphonse writes this, henry (<3) has been purposefully concealing the extent of the "nervous fever" victor has suffered; alphonse is not aware of the trauma his son has undergone and how it has changed him, and so he automatically assumes that victor, upon returning home, now older and more educated, will embrace these expectations.

"'We all... depend on you, and if you are miserable, what must be our feelings?'"

at this point of the novel, however, elizabeth knows how mentally unstable victor is, and is begging him to come back happier than he left. everyone in the family at this point is so conscious and aware of victor's poor health, and thus his explosive and outwardly demonstrative emotions affect the family very deeply. in short their dependency on him shifts from perceiving him as a source of stability to perceiving him as a source of instability.

back to my original comparison!! jesus this is all over the place thank god i'm not an academic.

to reference alphonse's first quote that i referred to. it seems to me that elizabeth, unlike vic, takes alphonse's advice in stride. contrast victor's response to alphonse's quote with this description of elizabeth:

"She indeed veiled her grief, and strove to act the comforter to us all. She looked steadily on life, and assumed it's duities with courage and zeal."

indeed, she demonstrates this; victor often describes her as handling her grief in silence (literal silence, but ykwim):

"...a thousand conflicting emotions rendered her mute, and she bade me a tearful, silent farewell."

"...I turned to contemplate the deep and voiceless grief of my Elizabeth."

in fact, the only time she comes close to being as expressive as victor is when she blames herself for the death of william, and in part her extreme reaction stems from the fact that she percives herself as having failed the duty that her mother bestowed upon her - it is unmotherly to allow such a thing to occur under her watchful, feminine eye.

even in childhood they had a very stark difference in temperament, elizabeth's more traditionally and overtly masculine:

"Elizabeth was of a calmer and more concentrated disposition, but, with all my ardor, I was capable of a more intense application..."

and, especially for a female character, she defies the will of her father several times:

"At first I attempted to prevent her, but she persisted, and entering the room where it lay..."

"Soon after we heard that the poor victim had expressed a desire to see my cousin. My father wished her not to go..."

all this considered, i don't think it's much of a stretch to say that while it should be vic's role, elizabeth is the "man of the house" (a sexist idea in its own right, but im communicating this in terms i think mary shelley might have intended).

tldr i just think this is such a fascinating exploration of family dynamics in frankenstein, and a brilliant portrayal of two opposite sides of the spectrum when it comes to people dealing with the undue parental and familial responsibilities they are made to uphold in youth. the lack of academic attention these themes have attracted is absolutely bonkers to me. anyway elizabeth the girlboss and victor the malewife <3

(for your desire to frankenyap-) what is your favorite Henry Clerval Moment™ in the novel?

henry clerval!!!!! my one true love

my favorite moment of his that i cannot believe people don't talk about is him diverting the subject when theyre talking to waldman abt victor's "progress in the sciences." he is so ridiculously thoughtful it's absolutely adorable. ive written out how i think that particular conversation went for a writing exercise and i fell so in love w henry. victor i get it so divinely wrought and beaming with beauty fr

this um. turned into a super long analysis somehow 😭 under the cut

i have a lot more to say about my least favorite henry moment though; i know we all clown on the 1831 turning henry into a colonizer thing, and i absolutely love to make fun of it as well because is was A Choice, but henry's character assassination in the 1831 edition fills me with genuine and outstanding rage. to what extent he just serves as a love letter to percy shelley (i think the idea has merit that clerval was based on percy but i also think it kinda follows the general trend of people attributing mary's genius and independent work to percy at every conceivable opportunity) (if anything i'd argue walton is more like percy) can be debated, but it is so infuriating to me how henry goes from a character that seems to have been written with genuine affection and enthusiasm, hence why he's so charming, to being a glorified plot device in the 1831 edition. having henry go from a sensual capital r Romantic whose only goals are to worship nature and discover all the beautiful corners of the earth, learning eastern languages and going to england just for the sake of living out a worldly life, to some businessman whose actions are spurred on by some manly commitment to "enterprise" is so annoying to me. i really really do hate what she did to him in the 1831 edition but i get why. this is a trend with the 1831 edition: making the male characters' more sensitive and emotionally demonstrative behaviors less obvious and making the female characters' more headstrong personalities milder show how mary had to nuke the subtleties of the novel to make it more palatable and interpretable for victorian society. ofc she was older when she wrote the 1831 edition so much of it could've been her own shifting perspective but i maintain that 1831 is decidedly much more conservative and seems to tread on eggshells on the subjects mary used to be so bold discussing in frankenstein. i don't think that one edition is better than the other, there are things i like and disliked about both, but i do think you need to know the differences between the two and their exigence to get a holistic understanding of the novel.

jesus christ i lost the plot. anyway henry come home the husband and kids miss you <3

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.