Latest Posts by frankingsteinery - Page 2
incest in frankenstein is not always literal but often manifests through the merging of roles--for example, caroline makes elizabeth into an extension of herself, shaping her into a replacement maternal figure who then becomes victor's bride. caroline's actions suggest a deferred form of incestuous desire (particularly when considering victor's nightmare where elizabeth turns into caroline and he kisses her)--she does not act on it herself but instead uses elizabeth as an intermediary, crafting her in her own image and ensuring she remains within the family unit as both daughter, sister and wife. in doing so, elizabeth not only fulfills the role of wife to victor but also the role of wife to alphonse, as she becomes his quote "more than daughter." given this history, victor's act of creation becomes more than just a scientific endeavor--it is, in a sense, an unconscious repetition of the generational cycle of misplaced desire. victor talks about his creature during the creation process in ways that strongly resemble euphemisms for sexual transgression (as much as people who favor the creature-as-son interpretation don’t like to acknowledge this): he describes a night of feverish anticipation, bodily toil, and an act of creation or "birth" conducted in solitude, followed by overwhelming regret and self-loathing the moment he sees what hes done. there is, too, the same blurring of boundaries between victor and the creature that is a running theme within the rest of the frankensteins: creator and created, parent and child, self and other. victor's disgust at his creature, then, is twofold: he is repulsed by its monstrous form, yes, but he is also repulsed by what it represents--his own participation in perpetuating an ongoing legacy of psuedo-incest. when the creature demands a mate, this dynamic becomes more pronounced. the creature essentially asks victor to complete the incestuous cycle by providing him with a bride, a second creature formed in the same manner, what would technically be the creature's sister; victor's destruction of the female creature suggests an almost violent reaction to his own subconscious recognition of the pattern he is repeating. it is significant then that he chooses, though without realizing it, to break this cycle of abuse by refusing to comply to a marriage between siblings like his mother did to him and elizabeth.
Sappy do you remember what the bad take about Frankenstein and Mary Shelley was please spill
found the post. to be fair to them. not the most egregious thing said on this post, but they did endorse the rest of it so.
ignoring "horny frat boys" being an insane way to describe percy, byron, and polidori, not to mention poor fucking claire lmao. theres a pervasive issue of people really wanting mary shelley's life and career to be a story of a woman being greatly underestimated and silenced by her (male) peers but persevering nonetheless and this idea is generally pushed in popular culture and by some ill informed biographers to the point that it is just no longer reflective of her actual experiences. i think people forget a lot that mary shelley existed in radical circles that, while not devoid of misogyny, had moved past the idea that women shouldn't have opinions and be writing and have lives outside of their relationships with men and who certainly were not discouraging her from pursuing a career in writing. she was deeply admired for being the daughter of wollstonecraft and godwin and then as a writer in her own right, and i think its sad that this idea that she was discouraged from pursuing writing by the men in her life, especially by her husband, is so pervasive because one of the most interesting things about her social group to me is the creative relationships built among them. people joke a lot that percy shelley is just remembered as the wife of the author of frankenstien as a diss on him but everything he is on record saying about her work implies that he would be fucking honored. they had a deep creative partnership and mutual admiration for one another's work that was much stronger than even their romantic relationship and its deeply frustrating how that is often disregarded and put down because people are so fixated on this stereotype of how they think 19th century women should exist that they dont let themselves engage with what her life was actually like.
also i dont even fucking like polidori but why are we acting like he didn't as part of this competition LITERALLY invent the modern vampire. like hello.
the fact that I cannot find any YouTube videos/articles discussing gender themes (in depth) in Demian upsets me greatly. im considering taking matters into my own hands (<- has never completed a project ever in her life)
skgjsjsjf I get you I wish people looked more into it because there's a lot to talk about... Dont get me wrong it's nice to see people discuss how stupidly homoerotic the whole thing is because it's true but I wish there was more discussion about the themes around gender, specially surrounding Frau Eva? An idealized representation of motherhood, who shows up at the end of the journey and makes you feel safe and secured and on top of that is as androgynous as her kid?? How Sinclair associates motherhood and specially femininity with the world of light since childhood???? How the guy who's supposed to represent the duality of the two worlds has being androgynous as one of his main features???Whatever this was??
Theres a lot of "bro you gotta fuse with a woman" and "this woman represents your fate and inner self" stuff going around Sinclair and religious meaning aside the way femininity and masculinity are treated separately + the (bad) relationship Sinclair has with masculinity and masculine roles like fatherhood is so interesting. Theres something Big going on in here.
its so interesting to see the variety of ways in which people can interpret the same characters in the same story based on their own variety of life experiences and values and influences!! ive seen quite a few posts going around lately about transfem frankenstein which gave me a moment of pause to realize "huh I literally never thought about that before" and how fascinating it is to see the same things interpreted in opposite ways
ive always been in the "victor is a trans man whose struggles come in part from being incompatible with the female roles that are constantly imposed on him" school and viewed the story and character under that lens and i dont think I've ever actually listed what stands out to me to influence that reading. meandering list under cut:
from childhood, he accepts unquestioningly his mother's declaration that Elizabeth is a present for him, an object that can be transferred to his possession. iirc she's the only character besides the creature that Victor affords any significant physical description at all. he compares her in his descriptions to animals (a summer insect, a bird), and states that he "loved to tend on her, as [he] should on a favourite animal." in the 1831 edition, he refers to her as something otherwordly, a "distinct species," "saintly," "a being heaven-sent, and bearing a celestial stamp in all her features." (ironically, Victor himself later is on the receiving end of this objectification by Walton, described as being like a "celestial spirit, that has a halo around him," "divine wanderer," "godlike," etc.) despite how close Victor and Elizabeth seem based on Victor's tenderness toward and admiration of her, he definitely "others" her as a female peer and keeps her clearly separated in ways that he doesn't quite do with his male peers. to me this comes across as his having negative feelings of connections to women and relies on his parents' assurance that women are something altogether different; and how could he have a feminine role if he accepted that Elizabeth was the one put in his possession to defer to him?
he was put in the role of nurturer/caretaker as a child, a "constant nurse" alongside Elizabeth to Ernest
his nightmare on the night of the creation involved only women: the affection he demonstrated to Elizabeth made her rot into the worm-eaten corpse of his mother, both a punishment of displaying passion towards a woman as well as tying his relationship to Elizabeth back to the presence and wishes of his mother
the most obvious one is the metaphor of childbirth/giving life, which Victor devotes himself to circumventing. it's not the fact that Victor is desperate to find a way to create life that's significant to the transmasc interpretation, but the fact that he dedicates himself to finding a way to create life that's completely separate from one's own body. he still suffers in his extreme labors over the project, but he does succeed in physically externalizing the process. (there's also his preoccupation with masculine ideals in building his creation)
though he divorced himself from the traditional way of giving life, he still in a way tried to compromise between his own strong feelings and the expectations of gender pushed on him. relenting to a "female" role of giving life, no matter how intelligently and miraculously he compromised to meet the expectation in his own way, locked him into an unfortunate reality in which his maleness would not be taken seriously by those around him:
though he had never been previously inclined to anxiety or paranoia and thus couldn't really have known how his friends or family would react if he told the truth of his creation, he was completely confident that if he were to tell anyone he would be dismissed as insane and delirious. he was already aware that his overwhelming emotion and nervous fevers would disqualify him from being taken seriously, even by his family (another obvious one, very strong parallels to the historical view of "female hysteria" that placed the blame of all a woman's troubles on the fact of, simply, being a woman)
over the course of Victor's struggles with guilt and anxiety, he loses virtually all his independence. in his illness he is rendered unable to do anything on his own and is forced to rely fully on men for survival (Clerval and Walton). he also is resigned to the reliance on men to speak for him: Clerval to intervene with the professors, to steer conversations away from the topic of science to less offensive academia; Walton to command his crew of curious sailors to stop harassing Victor with persistent questions.
the creature could have killed Elizabeth at any time, but instead, he promised it would be the specific date of Victor's wedding-night. this was also, significantly, the last straw for Victor: a punishment for publicly taking on a new distinctly male role of husband
even in his last days, deathly ill and devastated by all the tragedies in his life, he was objectified by a man. to Walton, he was something beautiful and captivating and mysterious, whose secrets must be dug out and conquered, much like Walton thought of the North Pole. despite the fact that Victor himself was in such dire need of help, Walton focused less on how he could meet Victor's needs, and more on how Victor could fulfill Walton's own desires and fill a vacancy in his life, thus relating Victor back to himself. (similar to what Victor had expected of Elizabeth: that she would be his comfort and provide happiness and repose from everything he had gone through, focusing more on how she could "fix" everything when she became his wife and relating her existence to propping up his own)
his deathbed—essentially his coffin—was a ship; at his last, he was walled up by an object historically referred to as female and symbolic of a mother figure
the story of Victor's life itself is relayed to readers not directly, but through the record of Walton. everything he had to say was filtered for the rest of the world through a man. his entire life and legacy was more or less passed into the hands of a man to control how or if it would be shared
imo. my perspective is that this smacks of the experience of a man who isn't respected or recognized as a man by the rest of the world. no matter how he tried to separate himself from connotations of femininity and sought to define himself, he is repeatedly forced back into female roles and viewed through a female lens. at the same time, he both isn't allowed by others and doesn't allow himself genuine connection with female figures in his life, with all the female presences slowly chipped away (losses of his mother, Justine, Elizabeth). in the end, the only woman who finally saw his mind and heart laid bare was Margaret—a woman who Victor never even met
the discomfort and horror aspects come not from the pervading presence of and emphasis on femininity, but from the depiction of how women have faced being pushed into such rigid roles, their emotions and wishes dismissed, or derided and how uncomfortable it is to directly face that reality in witnessing a man be treated that way and how he experiences it for the smothering, draining misery it is. more specifically: the smothering, draining misery of a man whose personal reality of being male seems to be invisible to those around him as he's constantly placed under constraints and expectations ascribed to women. femininity and feminine qualities themselves aren't horrors in the story, but the social response to them and the forcible assignment of them on someone who sees them from the outside as separate from himself are
and thats just my interpretation, which I ofc don't think is the "right" one or even a primary one or incompatible with any other readings
Hey. Don't cry. Weird teenage girl somewhere out there reading Frankenstein for the first time. Ok?
There is a passage from one of the Ender’s Game sequels that lives rent free in my mind every time I enter a public restroom of like… Bean thinking very hard about which stall to select because appropriately masculine men never select the first stall, if you take the last stall you’re trying too hard, but you can’t take a stall next to a stall next to one that’s already occupied…
Orson Scott Card is having a Real Normal One Over Here, I Guess.
had a fascinating english class that resulted in the notes header “the forcefeminization of victor frankenstein”
Finished animation for my compositing class! This is my first time REALLY using after effects and it’s so cool to know what I can do now for lighting 😋🫶 I love Frankenstein
i've noticed that some frankenstein adaptions that include walton (the only good ones ☝️🤓) choose to depict him as a naval officer (aesthetically, at the very least — one of my favourite examples is in the 2018 manchester royal exchange theatre production because well. LOOK AT HIM)
this phenomena is so interesting to me because he is explicitly Not that, textually
on one hand i get it because the correlation between polar exploration and the navy especially during the 18th and 19th centuries is there and makes sense; it’s an easy connection to make if you just want walton “on screen” and a visual short hand for the reason behind the type of journey he’s making (i.e. discovery service expedition to the arctic sent by the admiralty) without any real exploration of his character and the inner thoughts that he communicates to margaret (and ultimately the reader) through his letters
but walton himself makes the claim very early in his narrative that his voyage is entirely independent, and that he basically funded the entire thing himself (with a little help from his cousin, whoever they are/were). most importantly, because he was prohibited from going to sea as a boy by his father, he served on whaling ships for years to train himself mentally and physically:
Six years have passed since I resolved on my present undertaking. I can, even now, remember the hour from which I dedicated myself to this great enterprise. I commenced by inuring my body to hardship. I accompanied the whale-fishers on several expeditions to the North Sea; I voluntarily endured cold, famine, thirst, and want of sleep; I often worked harder than the common sailors during the day and devoted my nights to the study of mathematics, the theory of medicine, and those branches of physical science from which a naval adventurer might derive the greatest practical advantage. Twice I actually hired myself as an under-mate in a Greenland whaler, and acquitted myself to admiration. I must own I felt a little proud when my captain offered me the second dignity in the vessel and entreated me to remain with the greatest earnestness, so valuable did he consider my services.
his voyage is motivated not by any sort of command from above by lifelong ambition and self-interest. he considers what he can contribute to science and maritime navigation, which, granted, serves his country as much as it serves him; but to me it is primarily his passion for the sublime beauty that the arctic represents, even if the reality is much more dangerous than he could have predicted, that drives him forward. he needs to see it for himself, to know that he can do it, no matter the cost (sound like someone else we know?)
if i had to draw a comparison between walton and any real-life polar explorer from around the time frankenstein was written it would be william scoresby, an english scientist who began his own career on whaling ships (ironically he thought the open polar sea theory that walton espouses was complete bs — and he was right, lmao)
janice cavell’s article ‘The Sea of Ice and the Icy Sea: The Arctic Frame of Frankenstein’ has a lot more to say on this topic and i’d highly recommend it but i just have to include this extract here because i was so delighted to learn about some of the real people who likely inspired walton in shelley’s mind:
Here, then, was material for both the Creature's journey and Walton's doomed mission. Moreover, here Mary found a surname for her Arctic captain in the list of officers who served under Vitus Bering in 1733-41: Peter Lassenius, William Walton, Dmitri Laptiew, Jego Jendauro, Dmitri Owzin, Swen Waxel, Wasili Prontischischtschew, Michailo Plautin, and Alexander Scheltinga. Walton, the sole Englishman on this list of exotically named foreigners, was in command of the Hope (Müller, 1761:15, 26; on William Walton, see Cross, 2007:177-178). The ship's name reflects the most prominent characteristic of the fictional Walton, whose first name, Robert, may have been taken from Robert Thorne, the 16th-century originator of the open polar sea theory. Even though Walton's theories about the Arctic are opposed to Scoresby's, Mary may have intended to acknowledge Scoresby's status as both a whaler and a man of science when she had Walton train himself for his chosen career through whaling voyages.
like! the Real Walton’s ship being named the Hope and “the ship’s name reflects the most prominent characteristic of the fictional Walton” ohhhh i am NOT going to cry don’t LOOK at me
anyway this post doesn’t really have much of a point. i guess tl;dr i just think it’s more interesting that walton is canonically just some overly ambitious guy with big dreams and more money than he knows what to do with who is willing to hang out on gross whaling ships for half a decade rather than pursue the more respectable maritime profession because he wants what he wants on his own terms and no one else’s
if you think about it victor was multilingual as fuck. he would have spoken french (his first language as a genevese), german (due to going to ingolstadt university), english (he communicated with walton who was english) latin (to read ancient alchemy, also likely part of his education as a european), and hebrew, arabic or different oriental language(s) (which he learned with henry at ingolstadt), and, this is purely speculative, but he may have been familiar with swiss-german dialects and MAYBE italian; he traveled there in his youth and geneva is very close to the italian border. all by his mid 20s. thats NUTS
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
I really enjoy neurodivergent readings of classic literature because the whole "i have an obsession with being pure/great/always seen as morally good" "sometimes I get obsessed with an idea and believe I'm on the right path and don't act rationally" "i feel uneasy and incapable of enjoying things since [traumatic event(s)]" "I feel alienated from society and don't understand it at all" bunch of thoughts that are very present in most classics are almost always big symptoms of some kind of mental illness (which, in fact, does add a lot to the story) and I love to see people talk about them from that perspective instead of just "lol this guy is whiny and dumb"
happy walton expedition day to all who celebrate! ⚓️
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?
forever charmed by the way ernest says "mamma" and "papa" as opposed to victor's formal "mother" and "father"
top 3 worst frankenstein takes:
"frankenstein is the REAL monster". boring, hackneyed, overdone
"mary shelley wrote this just to get away from lord byron" embarassingly wrong, read anything at all she wrote about him to be immediately disproven
transphobia, somehow