Imagine: Victor Drawing A Portrait Of Henry During Their Studying-oriental-languages-together Arc (i

i really believe that discussing the character with someone who shares ur interpretation is the closest u can get to modern day philosophy. we are like plato and aristotle but talking about a fictional guys trauma

It’s weird that in all the essays I read on Frankenstein none of them have noted that Victor is heavily transmasculine-coded. Like he hits on a weirdly large number of transmasculine, particularly gay transmasculine experiences that are relevant today:

pregnancy and childbirth as traumatic and horrible yet unstoppable experiences that are totally foreign to nature

obsessive fantasies and ideation of an ideal masculine body

society finding your fantasized idealized male form monstrous and especially dangerous to children

being punished for recognizing that women are capable of independence and therefore can be as monstrous as their male counterparts

parents wishing for a real daughter when all they have is you

feigning attraction to a woman, any woman, for some scrap of masculinity, even though it’s obvious you’re not actually interested

weird esoteric historical interests that everyone around you denigrates as useless that you keep doing anyway

falling for your male best friend in a totally gay way

physically and mentally falling apart because of an unexplainable secret

trying to reveal the unexplainable secret getting shrugged off as impossible and you’re considered crazy — even your best friend seems to think it’s due to trauma you can’t articulate rather than what you’re actually literally saying

creating the man “responsible” for destroying your family and being a menace to society

I’m sure there’s more but that’s all I can think of off the top of my head. And yet cis people still keep pushing stories of girls dressing up as boys to experience the glory of war as transmasculine experiences. Why.

she franken on my stein till i beautiful! great god! his yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

FRANKENSTEIN, Mary Shelley | FRANKENSTEIN: A NEW MUSICAL, Mark Baron | MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN, Steph Lady | WISHBONE CLASSICS FRANKENSTEIN, Micheal Burgan | FRANKENSTEIN, Mary Shelley | A CATHEDRAL OF ALMOST LOVERS, cornflakesortoast | MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN, Steph Lady | FRANKENSTEIN, Joellen Bland | FRANKENSTEIN, Frank Darabont | FRANKENSTEIN, Mary Shelley

waltonstein, throughout several adaptations

d ivorce means two christmases <3

characters in frankenstein commonly to refer to each other as “dear” or “my dear” throughout the novel, but victor and henry are the only ones who mutually address eachother as “my dearest”

i was trying to find a specific post that i half-remembered at like 4am last night but out of context this is really funny

for some reason people seem to think that mary somehow stumbled into writing a commentary on marriage/incest accidentally, and that the themes of frankenstein are all about her trauma due to her experiences as a victim of the patriarchy, as a woman and a mother surrounded by men - as if she wasnt the child of radical liberals who publicly renounced marriage, as if she herself as well as percy shelley had similar politics on marriage, as if she would not go on to write a novel where the central theme is explicitly that of father/daughter incest years later…

the most obvious and frequent critique of victor i see is of his attempt to create life - the creature - without female presence. it’s taught in schools, wrote about by academics, talked about in fandom spaces - mary shelley was a feminist who wrote about feminism by making victor a misogynist. he’s misogynistic because he invented a method of procreation without involving women purely out of male entitlement and masculine arrogance and superiority, and shelley demonstrates the consequences of subverting women in the creation process/and by extension the patriarchy because this method fails terribly - his son in a monster, and victor is punished for his arrogance via the murder of his entire family; thus there is no place for procreation without the presence of women, right?

while this interpretation – though far from my favorite – is not without merit, i see it thrown around as The interpretation, which i feel does a great disservice to the other themes surrounding victor, the creature, the relationship between mother and child, parenthood, marriage, etc.

this argument also, ironically, tends to undermine the agency and power of frankenstein’s female characters, because it often relies on interpreting them as being solely passive, demure archetypes to establish their distinction from the 3 male narrators, who in contrast are performing violent and/or reprehensible actions while all the woman stay home (i.e., shelley paradoxically critiques the patriarchy by making all her female characters the reductive stereotypes that were enforced during her time period, so the flaws of our male narrators arise due to this social inequality).

in doing so it completely strips elizabeth (and caroline and justine to a lesser extent) of the power of the actions that she DID take — standing up in front of a corrupt court, speaking against the injustice of the system and attempting to fight against its verdict, lamenting the state of female social status that prevented her from visiting victor at ingolstadt, subverting traditional gender roles by offering victor an out to their arranged marriage as opposed to the other way around, taking part in determining ernest’s career and education in direct opposition to alphonse, etc. it also comes off as a very “i could fix him,” vibe, that is, it suggests if women were given equal social standing to men then elizabeth would have been able to rein victor in so to speak and prevent the events of the book from happening. which is a demeaning expectation/obligation in of itself and only reinforces the reductive passive, motherly archetypes that these same people are speaking against

it is also not very well supported: most of the argument rests on ignoring female character’s actual characterization and focusing one specific quote, often taken out of context (“a new species would bless me as its creator and source…no father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as i should deserve theirs”) which “proves” victor’s sense of male superiority, and on victors treatment/perception of elizabeth, primarily from a line of thinking he had at five years old, where he objectified her by thinking of her (or rather — being told so by caroline) as a gift to him. again, the morality of victor’s character is being determined by thoughts he had at five years old.

obviously this is not at all to say i think their relationship was a healthy one - i dont think victor and elizabeth’s marriage was ever intended to be perceived as good, but more importantly, writing their relationship this way was a deliberate critique of marriage culture.

this is what i was doing in 2022. frankenstein coffee shop AU but the creature doesnt exist its just clervalstein both swooning over the marine biology student (whose minoring in poetry) together. peak nonsense

The first monster in Frankenstein is not this Creature... The famous Creature is a peripheral ephemeron, glimpsed by the crew on Walton's polar adventure as a near mirage on a far-distant ice-plain... The immediate astonishment is the appearance the next morning of a haggard being off the side of the ship on a fragment of ice, alone in a sled but for one dog, asking which direction the ship is headed. "Good God! Margaret, if you had seen the man who thus capitulated for his safety, your surprise would have been boundless," writes Captain Walton to his sister; "His limbs were nearly frozen, and his body dreadfully emaciated by fatigue and suffering. I never saw a man in so wretched a condition." This is the first dreadful wretch in Mary Shelley's novel, and soon the star of its first "Frankenstein" moment. The wretched being faints dead away then is revived, animated, by the crew... This crew brings life out of death. In a body dreadful to behold, teeth-gnashing, mad, wild, Victor Frankenstein receives concerned parental care as a fellow human being. Everything he recounts hereafter bears this tremendous irony. Monsters are not born, the Author of Frankenstein proposes; they are made and unmade on the variable scales of human sympathy.

The Annotated Frankenstein edited by Susan J. Wolfson and Ronald Levao