The Hyperfixation Train Is A-chuggin, So Have Some More Frankenstein Sketches

all my frankensteins

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Emil Sinclair & Frau Eva

A consistent problem I’ve run into while discussing the novel Demian is the rejection of Emil’s relationship with Eva in favor and treating it as if it is nothing but a tool to analyze the relationship that he shares with Demian. People treat his feelings towards Eva as fake, imagined, and entirely as misplaced affections that he holds towards Demian and become quite defensive when told that isn’t the case in the actual text of the book. I’m no stranger to interpreting things in ways that don’t quite match canon, especially when they make me uncomfortable, and it is clear to me that discomfort or even disgust is how a lot of people view this relationship as given the age gap between them and the general preference for seeing Emil with Demian instead of Eva. I have no problems with that aspect of this little debate, discomfort is more than allowed and I’m not writing this to force people into liking the idea of their relationship.

What I am writing this for, and what I do find a problem with, is the way that people attempt to force an erasure of this aspect of the book and will accuse people of misreading the novel when acknowledging its existence. To say that someone does not understand the book or Emil’s character because they made reference to his love for Eva or his general affinity for mature women just seems to signal that there is a confusion of what the book actually says. Emil does love Eva and it is not misplaced love for Demian. From the moment he dreams of her to the moment Demian passes a kiss from his mother to Emil, Emil loves her. (That doesn’t mean he doesn’t also love Demian, by the way, but this post/essay isn’t about that, so I won’t be dwelling on the feelings he holds for Demian).

This is not going to be a complete, in-depth look at her character and role in the story and will instead simply focus on the actual relationship Emil has with her throughout the story and the ways that the novel sets up their relationship and makes it explicitly clear what sort of relationship exists between them. I feel it has been a massive disservice to her character to view her as nothing more than a woman getting in the way of a relationship or as if all of the quite beautiful descriptions of her person and effect on Emil are inconsequential and/or imagined, so I hope that this does some justice to Hesse’s work.

All quotes taken from the translation of the novel done by W. J. Strachan.

To begin, I will actually be talking about Max Demian himself, because Eva can be understood through son as he acts as a bit of a proto-Eva in Emil's life. They have a similar appearance, as it is often noted, they both bear the ‘sign’, they are deeply linked to Emil’s personal growth and relationship with the world, so to get a full grasp of his relationship with Eva it is also important to look at how he sees Demian and the key overlaps between them. So, let's look at one of the descriptions Emil writes of his dear friend.

This remarkable boy seemed older than he looked; he did not in fact seem like a boy at all. He moved among us more childish members of the school strangely mature, like a man, or rather a gentleman. He was not popular; he took no part in games, still less in the general rough and tumble and it was only the firm self-confident tone he adapted in his attitude towards the masters that won him favour with the other boys. He was called Max Demian.

Note how it focuses on his age and maturity, even though he is literally a couple years older than Emil, spiritually, thematically, he is older than even that. He is like a man, an adult. Here's a similar passage from another moment where Emil describes his friend:

I saw Demian's face and remarked that it was not a boy's face but a man's and then I saw, or rather became aware, that it was not really the face of a man either; it had something different about it, almost a feminine element. And for the time being his face seemed neither masculine nor childish, neither old nor young but a hundred years old, almost timeless and bearing the mark of other periods of history than our own.

Once again we see that he is more than a child, Demian is aged, grown, but not old nor young. In contrast to Emil who is youthful and immature, someone who has not yet begun his true journey. Here we also see a hint at there being a feminine element to Demian. Demian represents not just the fact that he is mature and capable of leading Emil through the spiritual journey he so longs for, but that he is not limited to just one world. He is not stuck in the dichotomy of light and dark, of masculine and feminine, of age and youth, he is both and neither.

Continuing the subject of maturity, we can take a look at the moment we share with Alfons Beck, a relationship that Emil describes with "we seemed to have a perfect understanding of each other" and, while a character who does not stay around long, acts as a mentor in the way he teaches Emil to grow up when it concerns sexuality and affections. It isn't long after this moment that Emil begins his venture into the world of darkness and almost loses himself to indulgence and excess of drinking and what have you, but it is clear from the later scenes with Knauer that Emil retains this personal growth surrounding sex and desire.

I heard amazing things; things I would not have thought possible were trotted out as part of everyday reality and seemed quite normal. Alfons Beck had already gained experience of women in his less than eighteen years of life. He had learned, for example, that girls were only out for flirtation and attention, which was all very agreeable but not the real thing. There was more chance of that with mature women. They were much more reasonable. You could talk with Frau Jaggelt who kept the stationer's shop, and a book could not contain all the various goings-on behind her counter. I sat there spell-bound and stupefied. Certainly I could never have loved Frau Jaggelt - but nevertheless it was terrific. There seemed to be hidden springs as least for my seniors, whose existence had never suspected. It all had a false ring about it, a more ordinary and insignificant flavour than love should have, in my opinion, but at all events it was life and adventure and I was sitting next to someone who had actually experienced it and to whom it seemed a normal thing.

By the end of this talk, Emil feels like a boy listening to a man. He understands that in this area he is behind, yet still is drawn to it. Alfons Beck is here, quite clearly, setting up and building upon the themes of maturity, especially that of women. This is very important seeing how it is one of the first times he is so explicit about his feelings regarding sexuality, and it is not by accident that this conversation regards mature, older women.

Another element here is that Emil points out that he finds more passing encounters, attraction without the intent to form a significant relationship, to be not founded in love - or at least the type of love he desires. I point this out because it establishes the idea that the types of relationships and attraction Emil is most interested in are ones that are serious and lasting. Quick, temporary connections excite him, intrigue him, because of course they do, he is a young man away from home and free to explore the world for the first time in his life and he has wants and desires. But, as we will see in his actions towards Eva later on, what he is most interested in a more true kind of love.

I'm going to hop straight to the painting next, as it is the real start of his relationship with Eva. There's a lot with the painting that I don't believe needs to be quoted directly so I've chosen a description of his realization of who it reminds him of.

Then one morning when I awoke from one of these dreams, I suddenly recognized it. It looked so fantastically familiar and seemed to call out my name. It appeared to know me as a mother, as if its eyes had been fixed on me all my life. I stared at the picture with beating heart, the close, brown hair, the half-feminine mouth, the strong forehead with its strange brightness-which it had assumed of its own accord-and I realized that my recognition, my rediscovery and knowledge of it were becoming more and more a reality.

He says after this that it resembles Demian, it was not his features exactly but there is no mistaking the fact that it was ultimately Demian's face. A motherly, matured woman version of Demian. This will later be seen to be the same description he gives Eva, even beyond the fact that he explicitly states that it is her as I'll quote later.

The effects this painting have on him are, as we all know, quite extreme and trigger many contradictory feelings within him. It is obvious that he worships it, he puts it on the wall in a way he can look at the face first thing in the morning, the same way one would look at a lover in bed upon waking up, he cries over it and clearly experiences intense lust and attraction towards the figure depicted in it. He also finds these feelings towards it revolting and terrifying, and would sometimes call it a devil and a murderer. At this point in the story, he still has lingering shame for these sorts of desires, even if he has begun to embrace them in some ways, he hasn’t fully overcome his belief that the world is separated in two halves and as a result views many things in extremes of both the most beautiful parts of the world of the light and the worst of the tempting world of darkness.

But for full context on this painting, we also need to look at the dream in which its subject appeared in, the most important dream of his life that he dreamed of night after night.

This dream, the most important and enduring of my life, followed this pattern: I was on my way to my parents' home and over the main entrance the heraldic bird gleamed gold on an azure ground. My mother walked towards me but when I entered and she was about to kiss me, it was no longer she but a form I had never set eyes on, tall and strong with a look of Max Demian and my painted portrait - yet it was somehow different and despite the robust frame, very feminine. The form drew me to itself and enveloped me in a deep, shuddering embrace. My feelings were a mixture of ecstasy and horror, the embrace was at once an act of worship and a crime. The form that embraced me had something about it of both my mother and my friend Demian and also this embrace violated every sense of religious awe, yet it was bliss. Sometimes I awoke out of this dream with a feeling of ecstasy, sometimes in mortal fear and with a tortured conscience as if I had committed some terrible sin.

Here we see Emil's most important dream: one where he is filled with ecstasy when embracing a figure that is a sort of halfway point between his mother and his friend. I'm going to share another passage from later, when he sees Frau Eva for the first time since childhood.

Sensing my interest in them, she took me into the house, looked out a leather album and showed me a photograph of Demian's mother. I could hardly remember her but now that I had the small photograph before me my heart stood still. It was the picture of my dreams. There she was, the tall, almost masculine figure, looking like her son, but with maternal traits, traits of severity and deep passion, beautiful and alluring, beautiful and unapproachable, daimon and mother, fate and lover. There was no mistaking her! The discovery that my dream image existed on this earth affected me like some fantastic miracle! So there was a woman who looked like that, who bore the features of my destiny! Where was she? Where? And she was Demian's mother!

So, this figure he dreams about, the figure he paints? It is Frau Eva. And we see here that, much like how her son is described as feminine, she is described as masculine. She also is inherently full of contrasts: daimon and mother, beautiful and unapproachable. Frau Eva and Demian follow the same pattern of being opposing natures who exist in one, the deconstruction of the binary and embracing something that is less easy to categorize. They embody the same ideals as Abraxas, of Emil's dreams.

Speaking of Abraxas and Frau Eva, here is his proper introduction to her as an adult.

With eyes moistened with tears I gazed at my painting, absorbed in my reflections. Then my glance dropped. Under the picture of the bird in the opened door stood a tall woman in a dark dress. It was she. I was unable to utter a word. From a face that resembled her son's, timeless and ageless and full of inward strength, the beautiful, dignified woman gave me a friendly smile. Her gaze was fulfillment, her greeting a homecoming. Silently I stretched out my hands towards her. She took them both in her warm. firm hands. "You are Sinclair. I recognized you at once. Welcome!" Her voice was deep and warm. I drank it up like sweet wine. And now I looked up and into her quiet face, the black unfathomable eyes, at her fresh, ripe lips, the open, queenly brow that bore the 'sign.' "How glad I am!" I said and kissed her hands. "I believe I have been on my way here the whole of my life and now I have reached home at last." She gave a motherly smile.

Eva makes her entrance quite literally alongside the painting of Abraxas Emil painted not long after he put a name to the face of the painting he made of her. He describes this as reaching home, incredibly important to him after he has been feeling so outcast from the home he grew up in. And he loves her deep voice, her quiet face that resembles her son's, and her friendly, motherly smile.

Eva and Abraxas, the god he worships and adores, are linked beings. This all builds on to the Demian and Cain, Eva and Eve connections. Eve the mother of both Cain the murderer and Abel the victim, Eve the woman born of God who spoke to the Devil and committed the first sin (which to bearer's of the Sign was surely not a sin), is now properly linked to Abraxas and it all feeds quite well into a similar theme. Eva is mother and she is home.

Eva is the origin of Demian, an embodiment of his ideals with even more maturity, she created the one who created Emil in a manner of speaking. She truly represents a world that is not divided into light and darkness, the very world that Emil chases after and wishes to believe in. It only makes sense, then, that he would find her so attractive and want her, desire her. By this point, so late into the novel, Emil is quite grown up, literally and spiritually, compared to the young, lost boy he was at the start. He has accepted sexual desires, accepted the world is complex and rejected many of the beliefs he held as a child, and he wants Eva the way any grown man might.

But, of course as we established earlier, Emil wants more than a passing encounter fueled by lust. He wants a real kind of love. And when he has gotten to know her and understand her as a real person rather than just a figure in his dreams, he writes the following, detailed, heavily romantic, filled with yearning and love passage:

On many occasions I believed that it was not really just her as a person, whom I yearned for with all my being, but that she existed as an outward symbol of my inner self and her sole purpose was to lead me more deeply into myself. Things she said often sounded like replies from my unconscious mind to burning questions which tormented me. There were other moments when as I sat beside her I was consumed with sensual desire and kissed objects which she had touched. And little by little sensual and transcendental love, reality and symbol mingled together. As I thought about her in my room at home in tranquil absorption, I felt her hand in mine and her lips touching my lips. Or I would be conscious of her presence, look into her face, speak with her and hear her voice, not knowing whether she was real or a dream. I began to realize how one can be possessed of a lasting and immortal love. I would gain knowledge of a new religion from my reading, and it would give me the same feeling as a kiss from Eva. She stroked my hair and smiled with all her warm affection, and I had the same feeling as when I took a step forward in knowledge of my inner self. Her person embraced everything that was significant and fateful for me. She could be transformed into each one of my thoughts and each of my thoughts could be transformed into her.

This paragraph here always sticks with me, the way his love transcends reality. It mirrors the way that Demian's existence is questionably real, that the moments he shared with the Demian family are somewhere fundamentally between imagined and real. Does she kiss him or is it imagined? It hardly matters, because reality and symbol are mixing together and becoming one and the same. These are his manifestations, these are his calls to the world to make his love true. And that love is so true in his heart he can hardly tell when it is real.

Also I just want to point out how cute he is when he's in love... kissing the things that belong to her, linking his learning and his growth as a person to her. It is similar to his behavior with Beatrice, in that this woman is helping inspire him to improve upon himself, but now it is not the desperate clutch to an unknown figure as a guiding light he can never speak to, it is a woman who pulls answers from his own mind, a woman who exists as a symbol of his inner self. Frau Eva, again just like Demian, is an extension of Emil's self and soul.

Alright, so I have now established Emil's feelings towards Frau Eva, but what of her feelings towards him? This following passage comes immediately after the one before

When I arrived back at H-- I stayed away from her for two days in order to savour this security and independence from her physical presence. I had dreams too in which my union with her was consummated in a symbolic act. She was a star and I was a star on my way to her, and we met and mutually attracted, remained together and circled round each other blissfully in all eternity to the accompaniment of the music of the spheres. I told her this dream on my first visit on returning. "It is a lovely dream," she said quietly, "Make it true!"

Emil tells her that he had a dream of the two of them in which they consummated their union (which, just to make this abundantly clear, means having sex. there is no getting around that fact) through a symbolic act of entwining around each other for all of eternity and Frau Eva tells him to make it true. She tells him, explicitly, that this dream he has of them making love is lovely and that he should work on making it happen in reality. This is of course a further extension of her trying to help Emil manifest a kind of mutual attraction between them through his extended longing and deep, honest desires. While she does not currently reciprocate the romantic affections he has for her, she is clear about being open to the idea of that one day being the case.

Let's also look at this bit, which is mostly about Sinclair's affections towards her but provides a bit of a conclusion to this theme of manifesting her love.

One day this foreboding came over me with such force that my love for Eva flared up suddenly and caused me great pain. My God, what a short time I had left; soon I should no longer be seeing her, no longer hearing her good, assured step about the house, no longer finding her flowers on my table! And what had I achieved? I had luxuriated in dreams and comfort instead of winning her, instead of struggling for her and clasping her to me forever! Everything she had told me about true love came back to me, a kindred stirring, admonitory messages, and as many gentle promises and words of encouragement, too, perhaps; and what had I made out of it all? Nothing. I stood in the middle of the room, summoned my whole conscious being and thought of Eva. I wanted to gather all the power of my soul in order to make her aware of my love and attract her to me. She must come; she must long for my embrace, my kisses must tremble on her ripe lips.

Emil is realizing that despite her encouragements and his continued love for her, he has never truly spent the energy required to make his love reciprocated. These things, him wanting her be his forever, him wanting to kiss her so much that he shakes, to attract her to him so that she desires him in the same way that he does her... those are the things Eva wanted him to manifest. Now, this also makes it clear that for as much time as they spent together (the book mentions that Max was out for long stretches of time, leaving Emil alone with Eva for the majority of his days there), they did not get to do any of the things he wanted so passionately AND that she had still be encouraging him to manifest this.

And does she get this message? Yes! She does, only there is The War starting and so she does not go herself to him, but she does tell him that she heard his appeal and to do it again if he should ever need her.

Now, let's talk about the ending of the book, about the kiss.

"And there is something else. Frau Eva said that if things ever went badly with you, I was to pass on a kiss from her which she gave me … Close your eyes, Sinclair." I closed my eyes in obedience. I felt the brush of a kiss on my lips on which there was a bead of blood that never seemed to diminish. Then I fell asleep.

Demian (who is made clear to be a hallucination or a purely spiritual being at this moment, regardless of what you believe his regular appearances are that of a real actual boy or a reflection of Emil's self or a mixture of the two. in this scene he is a dream-like being existing from Emil's mind here to help conclude the narrative) passes on a kiss that his mother gave to him. Eva wanted to give this kiss to Emil after all of those appeals he made for her love, and uses Demian as a vessel to give this to him.

Now I am absolutely not here to deny any sort of queerness in this moment, in the fact that it is not Eva herself who appears but rather Max. What I am trying to say is that Eva and Max are linked people, especially in the mind of Emil, and therefore it makes thematic sense for the boy who had introduced him to the world of the enlightened and to the woman he would come to love to be here in this quiet, scary moment and pass on a message from his mother. I am trying to say that denying that this kiss is even the slightest bit from Eva and 100% Max's moment is ignoring her entire character and a large, large portion of Emil's.

I could’ve gone on for longer, I skipped over the story she tells Emil of the man in love with a star and how that star eventually came to love him in return and how Frau Eva is his star. His last description of her before leaving for the war is about the myriad of stars glowing in the night sky and it is quite romantic, but I feel getting into the star symbolism in Demian would double the length of this and her feelings towards him cannot get any clearer than the part where she encourages consummating their union, which itself is still linked to the star story. This was all done taking passages I remembered off the top of my head and not a full reread of the book, but I feel like this does more than enough to explain my point.

In conclusion: never tell me again that I misunderstood the 1919 novel Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth by Hermann Hesse because I joked about how Emil is into MILFs. He is.

my dealer: got some straight gas 🔥😛 this strain is called “Demian Chapter 6 : Jacob Wrestling” 😳 you’ll be zonked out of your gourd 💯

me: yeah whatever. I don’t feel shit

five minutes later: dude I just woke up in the middle of the night not yet fully aware of what I was doing to burn my painting— the one that I’ve been praying at and masturbating to— yes, the one that looks like the milf that keeps appearing in my dreams and also Demian and also my soul and also Abraxas, that’s right— and awoke to find that I had eaten the ashes

my buddy Pistorius pacing: rad. do you want to sit next to me and stare at this fire for 5 hours straight again

Idk everyone can take what they wish from media, but for me the moral of “Frankenstein” was not that Victor is the true monster or even that he’s necessarily stupid. Makes me sad to see a story fundamentally about humanity being reduced to black and white. How can one recognize that the monster is unjustly robbed of humanity and compassion and then rob Victor of that same thing. Lol

i’ve seen the “monsters aren’t born they’re created” line of reasoning applied quite a few times in defense of the creature, wherein creature was inherently good-hearted but turned into a monster via victor’s “abandonment” and his subsequent abusive treatment by other humans, but this logic is so scarcely applied to victor. victor, to me, is often sympathetic for the same reasons as the creature, it’s just those reasons are not as blatantly obvious and require reading in-between the lines of victor’s narration a bit more. most “victor was evil and bad” or even some “victor was unsympathetic” arguments tend to fall through when you flip the same premise onto victor: if monsters are created, than who created victor frankenstein?

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i agree with most of this, except one major point: victor’s motivation to find the secret of life wasn’t spurred by caroline’s death. there’s no evidence to suggest this in-text - it wasn’t about reanimation (this concept was only mentioned once in a throwaway line, and it was not regarding caroline), it was about creating new life. what he wound up doing was not really reversing death, but what was, essentially, childbirth. this is a significant detail when you consider it in the context of victor and elizabeth’s relationship - if victor’s goal was to create life, and he intentionally foregoes women (elizabeth) in this process, then is it that big of a leap to suggest he was doing so so that he wouldn’t have to perform incest?

now if we step back and take a look at the events before the creature’s creation, i really do think they saw each other as siblings - considering the context of elizabeth being adopted into the frankenstein family, elizabeth and victor referring to each other as cousins, and being in an arranged marriage to victor (both normal things in higher society but strange when paired together), and that caroline selects elizabeth specifically because she had a background similar to her own, a daughter that would be like her. then she calls elizabeth her favorite, and rears her and victor under the expectation that they are to be wed when they are older. from the age of six, victor and elizabeth, notably TOGETHER, were helping raise ernest (and later william) while both caroline and alphonse were still in the picture, described as his “constant nurses”... and if i remember correctly, at this point alphonse had retired after ernest’s birth specifically to care for his children, yet elizabeth and victor are still raising their younger siblings, treating ernest as if he were their child... and then caroline, as her literal dying wish, has elizabeth promise to marry her son and take her place in the family and help raise her other children.

it’s as if caroline grooms elizabeth into being this second version of her, which makes her dictating victor and elizabeth’s marriage to each other all the more horrible.

there’s several moments that make it clear that elizabeth and victor view each other as family, or at the very least, are romantically disinterested in each other. elizabeth bringing up in letters how she and victor as a pair is strange, giving victor several outs to their marriage, elizabeth literally hitting the nail on the head when suggesting victor considers himself honor-bound to fulfill his parent’s wishes, their hesitance on their wedding day, elizabeth referring to william (and by extension, ernest and victor) as a brother during justine’s trial, victor’s dream where he’s kissing elizabeth and then she literally turns into his mother in his arms, etc.

and before all that - there’s this constant, excessive dependence on victor for emotional support, and it started in childhood, from which he was his parents “plaything” and their “idol” and where, growing up, “[caroline’s] firmest hopes of future happiness were placed on the prospect of [elizabeth and victor’s] union” and, after her death, “this expectation [would be] the consolation of [his] father.” 

so now we have victor, who his parents have been emotionally dependent on all his life, who is expected to carry on his family’s legacy, who is in an arranged marriage he doesn’t want, with someone who is his cousin/sister/acting as his mother stand-in. under all this expectation, this marriage he has literally been raised with, he doesn’t try to subvert it entirely, no, he’s been told that his family’s happiness depends on this marriage! but he does the best he could in the situation he’s been given, dodging an act of incest by performing the act of creating life by himself, by making the creature.

Let's talk about Victor...

But not in the usual way.

Warnings: Will contain some talk of Grooming and incest.

And warnings for some large spoilers for the Frankenstein novel. If you're still reading it, I do suggest not reading this post.

We discuss a lot, Victor's faults, what he could have done better and done different, ect. We are not going to be discussing that for this, for now we are putting those discussions and debates aside.

There is one large, hmm, complaint or judgement perhaps, that's always not quite sat right with me. And that's, his relationship with Elizabeth, and how it's treated as his fault. And I'm not talking about how he treats her, or what happens to Elizabeth or anything like that. I'm talking about how it's often treated like the relationship itself is his fault and he's a disgusting pig for it. When honestly...I feel he's a victim of it as well.

Now, of course, this is my interpretation of things. I know not everyone agrees or will agree with it, which is perfectly fine. This is my interpretation of something in a story that is meant to have different interpretations. This is just something I feel and I feel like is not often discussed. In fact I haven't even seen it discussed.

So, here we go.

I feel like both Victor and Elizabeth are victims and didn't really have a choice in the matter of the relationship. Yes, by the times, Victor has an advantage of being a man and Elizabeth has to be a wife and be dependent on him, I'm not saying that isn't true.

I'm talking about his mother. Caroline. I feel, in pointing the finger at Victor for the relationship with Elizabeth, his mother is often forgotten. His mother, whether you're doing the version where Elizabeth is his cousin or adopted sister, basically took Elizabeth in, and immediately decides she'd be the perfect match for her boy.

And told them that. Constantly. As they were growing up. As they were learning.

I do believe, Victor and Elizabeth loved each other, as best friends, as siblings. I don't think they were ever really allowed to think of it as anything other then romantic love though. And so that's how they accepted it. It's how his, and honestly their, mother saw it.

And then to make it worse. Caroline's death. His mother, who, when you look into the novel, really, who's death really begins Victor's physiological breakdown. What leads him to want to, really, defeat and overcome death.

On her deathbed. Her dying wish, she grabs their hands and tells Victor and Elizabeth it is her dying wish to see them wed. That she's always thought this, thought they were perfect together, and always wanted this. And please, I ask to really think on this, after all mentioned above.

We talk about when his father asks him, "Maybe you don't want to marry Elizabeth, maybe you've come to see her as a sister." And he said yes, he loves her and still wants to marry her.

Y'all. Maybe this is just my interpretation, but he had never been given a choice to think anything otherwise. His mother had never allowed anything else, had constantly shoved into their heads their relationship would be/was romantic. To the point they believed it.

Anything they felt towards each other, any affection, any love, was and had to be romantic.

After all, it was their mother, who raised them, put this into their heads as children and it was her dying wish for them to be married, so what else could it be?

Yes, it gets messy when you have to take in the time of things. That it is true, for the time, you were lucky to even just like the person you were to marry. Maybe that's what Caroline saw, saw two people that could marry, and the relationship wouldn't be horrible. But even if that was her reasoning, I don't think it makes her innocent. And I do think she greatly screwed both Elizabeth and Victor up.

Their relationship has then been put through much in adaptions. Victor gets put as a creep, sometimes outright predator to Elizabeth. The part connecting them as cousins or adoptive siblings gets cut out and they get put as the romantic couple.

Hell, look at Bride of Frankenstein. She's the beautiful, clearly all is good and Christian, humane option Victor Henry (because for some reason their names were switched) turns his back on. Which is wrong and evil and against God. And eventually, he comes back to, and they get to escape the tower, run off as the tower explores with the Monster, the Bride, and Dr. Pretorius in it. And have a happy ending. They're the romantic couple you're supposed to cheer for, as these movies set things up.

We have been made to veiw them, in many different ways. And sometimes I feel that affects how we then veiw them when looking at the novel. That's just some of the adaptions.

I do, again, think they loved each other. As best friends, as siblings.

Elizabeth deserved better. By her family, by, though I adore him, Adam himself who killed her in revenge for Victor destroying the to-be-reanimated body of his potential mate who may or may not have even liked him. By the time itself, she was born in. She got little time, and deserved better.

Victor cared for her, loved her as a sibling. If he did love anyone romantically in the novel, I do agree with, he romantically loved Henry. But believed he did love Elizabeth, and of course had to repress anything towards another man. But, that takes us on a whole other thing that can be discussed another time.

Thank you for reading all of this, my reasoning, my rambles. Again, my interpretation, but something I feel is not often talked about. In the aspect of Victor's and Elizabeth's relationship, how it came to be, how they thought of each other, I do believe, they were both victims.

I want to preface this with that it is all in friendly debate, for the sake of media analysis, and I don’t mean to come off too strong or as if I am upset/angry - I’m just passionate !!

Why can you sympathize with the Creature, literal murderer 3x over, but not Victor, who had realistic (and at times reasonable) reactions given the circumstances? Do Victor’s very genuine and understandable pains and sufferings condemn the Creature as well, then? Why can we apply this logic to the Creature but not to Victor? And do Victor’s pain and sufferings both pre-Ingolstadt (weird and wacky childhood, excessive expectations from family, mother dying) and post Ingolstadt (grieving the recent loss of his mother, a big life change that he necessarily didn’t want [college in foreign area], severe mental and physical illness) not explain HIS actions and make him more sympathetic?

“He spent months looking at his creation, why the sudden reaction, when he succeeded at bring him to life?” Looking at a still corpse on a table is much different then looking at an Alive, Moving corpse. 

Also, he wanted or considered stopping several times but was so out of it and had severe obsessive compulsions that kept him from eating and sleeping. He could not, in his own mind, have easily stopped at any time nor was of sound enough mind to realize the extent of what he was doing. And Victor just generally lacks foresight and what is obvious to the reader (that you should prepare to take care of your reanimated corpse) was not obvious to Victor at the time. He didn’t know or consider, nor was he in the right state of mind to know or consider, that the Creature was going to rely on him.

He didn’t suddenly up and flee from a lack of backbone. Victor was sick, manic, hallucinating and dying and had been for MONTHS. He’d been sticking his unwashed, grubby hands in gore pre-germ theory, for, like, two years by now. He didn’t just see the Creature’s spooky eyes and scream and run away. It was so bad he literally didn’t have the strength to hold a pen for months afterwards, writing a letter took everything out of him.

Also - why are we condemning Victor for having a sudden and strong reaction (fleeing the scene and leaving Creature) but not the Creature (being rejected by DeLaceys, burning their house down and going off on a murder spree)?

Yes, Vic made Creature and he was therefore responsible for him, but it would have been bad for Creature and Victor both for Vic to be solely responsible and care for Creature. Even if Victor was physically well enough to care for a newborn (he wasn’t) he was NOT mentally well enough or in the right mind to care for another being, and that would have been damaging for the both of them. It was better for them to be separated for the good of both Vic and Creech. 

Now, Creature shouldn’t have been abandoned, but in the best case scenario someone should have intervened and/or Victor asks someone for help (Henry), but even Henry and Victor alone couldn’t have cared for Creature properly. They’re two teenagers in college classes. Henry spent all his free time nursing Victor back to health from the brink of death after a mental health crisis. They would have had to get outside help - and who would have helped them with their corpse experiment? There was no chance of a stable upbringing for the First Reanimated Corpse no matter the outcome or choices made.  

I don’t think Victor had ‘several opportunities to interfere in the Creature’s life and do the right thing.’ They only met face-to-face about three times: notably, when the Creature first woke, their confrontation in the alps, and while Victor was creating the bride. The first time Victor was deathly sick, feverish and hallucinating that the Creature wanted to kill him. The second time was after Creature killed William, and Victor was actually very charitable for the circumstances IMO. I don’t blame him for starting off swinging - I’d do the same if I thought someone else killed my little brother. And, AFTER the murder of his little brother, Victor still wound up agreeing to make the Creature a wife, even if he went back on the deal. I’ll elaborate more on the Bride later.

You say Creature showed remorse but that Victor failed to feel remorse or compassion entirely, only self-pity. I disagree. Victor was canonically so moved (he literally admits to being moved) by the Creature’s story to the extent that he went from trying to pummel him to agreeing to make him a wife (the creation of which nearly killed him in the past). This is all AFTER Victor believes the Creature killed William. Let’s look at a few quotes during their confrontation in the alps:

“For the first time, also, I felt what the duties of a creator towards his creature were, and that I ought to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness. These motives urged me to comply with his demand”

“His words had a strange effect upon me. I compassionated him, and sometimes felt a wish to console him; but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened, and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred. I tried to stifle these sensations; I thought that, as I could not sympathise with him, I had no right to withhold from him the small portion of happiness which was yet in my power to bestow.”

“I was moved. I shuddered when I thought of the possible consequences of my consent; but I felt that there was some justice in his argument. His tale, and the feelings he now expressed, proved him to be a creature of fine sensations; and did I not as his maker owe him all the portion of happiness that it was in my power to bestow?”

Victor both takes accountability here (owns up to his duties as creator to owe him the happiness he had the power to bestow) and feels compassion towards him, he tries to wrangle down his own horror and hatred to at least hear the Creature out fairly.

“The only thing he felt was self-pity. Even his attempts at killing the Creature weren’t really motivated by responsibility and stopping the killings. It was pure self-indulgent revenge.” Revenge for… killing his family members, right? Wasn’t his motivation to stop the murders of his family (or at least avenge them), then?

I think it’s an unfair expectation in the first place for Victor to make the Creature a bride. The toll it took on Victor’s physical and mental health nearly killed him the first time around, and left him bedridden with fever, chronically ill, hallucinatory, and traumatized. That’s enough reason to not do it alone, on top of Victor being frightened of two creatures existing. Is Victor supposed to go through that again? Your proposition for Victor to stop the killings (something the Creature, uh, shouldn’t be doing in the first place and can stop anytime LOL) is for Victor to what - risk killing himself? And even if Victor’s reasoning for destroying the Bride were wholly rooted in hate, pride, cowardice and selfishness -  what of the Bride’s autonomy? She’s just supposed to wake up and live as Creature’s ready-to-go-GF and be perfectly happy?

The Creature already knew right from wrong without Victor’s influence by the time he killed William. While yes, he was only ever met with violence himself, he observed and understood, from the outside, love and affection. He understood society and dynamics and morals well enough from his time watching the DeLaceys, and still chose to burn down their house and murder an innocent child - Creature knew better, and he chose violence and he chose revenge. You say it could have been prevented ‘with an ounce of decency’ on Victor’s part. But the Creature was at fault in the first place for understanding the gravity of what he was doing, and still choosing to murder. This shouldn’t have been something Victor was expected to prevent - Creature zsimply should not have done it. Also, if my son murdered my little brother, my best friend/boyfriend, and my sister-cousin-wife, I’d hate him too. That’s justified. 

Also are you genuinely trying to tell me you would be super understanding and reasonable and forgive the murderer of your little brother had you been in Victor’s shoes??

‘I don’t believe revenge is ever justified. If Victor had killed the creature from a sense of justice or wanting to protect others, I could have accepted that.  But, it wasn’t that, imho.’ But you can accept (not condone, but accept) and sympathize with Creature’s actions, who murdered innocent people for revenge? What horrible act of revenge did Victor even perform? He realized that people shouldn’t make ready-to-go-GFs and went back on a deal that could have killed him or made him deathly sick?  

I think pinning the responsibility of Justine’s execution wholly on Victor is wrong, and blaming his inaction entirely on pure cowardice is wrong as well.

Victor had just barely recovered from a near death experience where he was feverish and hallucinating (and possibly still hallucinating just days before, after walking out all day and night in the rain). He was not thinking clearly and certainly not in a proper state to testify for someone on trial and/or defend himself on trial if he put the blame on himself.

Also, I don’t expect Victor to be the beacon of morals and sound reasoning not only after his brother was just MURDERED, but also after just recovering from a near-death experience, while suffering from untreated severe mental illness that actively disrupts reality.

Victor’s reasoning for not speaking up about the Creature in court was this:

“My first thought was to discover what I knew of the murderer, and cause instant pursuit to be made. But I paused when I reflected on the story that I had to tell. A being whom I myself had formed, and endued with life, had met me at midnight among the precipices of an inaccessible mountain. I remembered also the nervous fever with which I had been seized just at the time that I dated my creation, and which would give an air of delirium to a tale otherwise so utterly improbable. I well knew that if any other had communicated such a relation to me, I should have looked upon it as the ravings of insanity… These reflections determined me, and I resolved to remain silent”

His original intent WAS to tell everyone the truth, so that the Creature could be condemned. He immediately told his family - the people closest to him - that he knew the murderer, and that it couldn’t be Justine. They all dismiss him immediately (apart from Elizabeth, who was bent on Justine’s innocence). If his own family won’t believe him, how is he supposed to sway the court? 

So Victor decides not to tell the court, because he believed that they would take him (a person who had been recently sick, hallucinatory and feverish for months) and think it the ramblings of a madman or of the ill (which was exactly what Henry did to him, what his family did to him, and what the police did to him). And while we don’t know what would have happened had Victor actually told the court, we do have a similar circumstance after Elizabeth’s death where, after a similar bout of illness, Victor goes straight to the magistrate and tells them the story. He was not believed and was dismissed. So Victor’s reasoning doesn’t really feel unfounded here, and definitely not from a place of pure cowardice and/or pride.

I don’t feel there was any good possible outcome for the trial. What struck me as the most unfair was not Victor’s actions or lack of action but the way Justine was trialed itself. The judges manipulated her into a coerced confession. Her confessor threatened excommunication and damnation until she began to think she was the monster that he said she was. Justine’s confession is what decided her fate above all else, not Victor’s lack of intervention.

You criticize Victor for 1) abandoning and hating his son, and 2) for not standing up for Justine in court. But if he had taken responsibility and viewed the creature as his child, what was Victor supposed to do? Point the finger at the Creature, his child, and condemn him for a murder in which he knows he would have been executed for had they believed him? 

The only other options Victor really had to 1) make up a feasible lie that he saw a strange man in the area, which would not be able to hold up against the literal evidence in Justine’s pocket, is easily dismissed as the ramblings of someone who was recently sick and feverish and spent the whole night walking in the rain, AND Victor wasn’t even in the area during the time of the crime or 2) Defend Justine’s character, which is what he DOES do before and after the trial (quote “my passionate and indignant appeals were lost on [the court]”), and exactly what Elizabeth does, which fails both times. He did try, just not in a way that would make himself out to be a madman and discredit everything he was saying.

At this point in the book, Victor had absolutely no evidence. Not even no evidence to present to the court - no evidence that the Creature had done it At All. Even if he made something up, it wouldn’t be as damning as the literal locket in Justine’s pocket. The only reason why Victor latched onto the idea of the Creature being the murderer of William was because, during a storm, he saw (or hallucinated) the silhouette of a tall figure that sort of resembled the Creature on his way home to Geneva. This took place OUTSIDE OF GENEVA, not even in the area William was murdered. It just so happened that Victor was correct and the Creature HAD killed William, but Victor was still jumping to conclusions at this point.

I also think it’s important to take in the context of Victor’s upbringing here. His father was a well-respected, distinguished syndic/judge. Victor grew up with a strong belief in the legal system. Before the trial he says something along the lines of “there's no WAY they would condemn Justine only on circumstantial evidence!” He had faith in it, he grew up with faith in it. If Victor had settled on a half-truth and pulled up and tried to go “I saw a big scary man” the court would have dismissed it as the ramblings of a sickly madman, and it could have tainted the Frankenstein family’s reputation and his father’s standing, who have historically for generations been counsellors and syndics. The current generation of Frankensteins including Victor were being reared and expected to carry on this legacy as well.

Justine’s explanation during her trial (essentially I didn’t do it, I wasn’t there, I don’t know how the locket got in my pocket) was much more feasible than Victor’s (I built a corpse man in my dorm room and I think I saw him in the middle of the night during a storm miles away from the crime scene so I just KNOW he killed William!) which wound up being the actual truth, and Justine was still executed.

He feels genuine remorse, guilt and self-hatred throughout the trial, and even has suicidal thoughts following it. He blames himself and thinks, paraphrasing here, “the deed [William’s murder] was not mine in name but in effect.” This wasn’t him being entirely self-pitying, self-preservational, shirking blame and sitting trembling in court here.

And while I agree that Victor is an unreliable narrator, I don’t think Victor’s reliability as a narrator matters much here about the whole ‘I’ll be with you on your wedding night’ shtick. I think Vic misinterpreted Creature here, that he genuinely thought the Creature was talking about him, not that he was making up this misinterpretation after the fact to glamorize things for Walton. And if we’re going to cherry-pick and dismiss what Victor says when it suits your argument then that same line of reasoning should apply to the Creature, who is ALSO an unreliable narrator and IMO just as unreliable if not more so.

Even if Victor married Elizabeth for selfish reasons (I don’t think this is true but I digress), he was still expected to marry her for the good of the family. It has been an expectation for them to be wed since they were six, they promised it to their mother together as her literal dying wish, Alphonse later tells Victor it would bring him happiness and unite the family in their time of mourning, etc. Even if Victor’s own intentions in marrying her were somehow selfish, its effect on the family wouldn’t have been selfish - they had told him it would make them happy. And I believe Elizabeth would have been harmed either way, had they been wed or not - he arguably loved Henry just as much as Elizabeth, and the Creature had no issues offing him, no marriage involved.

And blaming Victor and calling it an act of abject cowardice for being “terrified and traumatized” after abandoning the creature is. Uh. Let’s not blame trauma victims for. Having trauma??

The Creature made things worse, too. He could have. Y’know. Not murdered 3 people.

 I don’t think we should continue to blame Victor for making things worse when he really made very little choices (and had very little opportunity TO make choices) in the first place. /nm

So I finished reading the original Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and I do not understand in the SLIGHTEST why people insist that in the book the Creature is the victim of the story and Victor is the villain. Did we read the same fucking book??!!! The Creature is literally one of the most malicious villains I have EVER seen put to paper and actively chooses to commit evil act after evil act despite KNOWING it is wrong and feeling remorse and feeling horrible and yet consistently taunts and destroys Victor’s life OVER AND OVER.

The Creature kept bemoaning again and again that Victor had no idea the extent of his misery, that he was the most miserable creature on earth and nothing could fix this and I just??? Did people take him at his word??? The Creature of course believes this, but you go through the book seeing Victor grieve his loved ones viscerally and end up in prison accused of murdering his best friend, and a mental institution for what is likely psychosis. There is so much evidence in the book that the Creature is 100% biased and knew EXACTLY what he was doing in making Victor miserable and I agree in Walton calling him a hypocrite at the end. I just don’t understand how people can say he is the victim of this book when it describes in extremely visceral detail how the Creature systematically killed four people that Victor loved, the first being his 12 year old brother, all to make him miserable for the mistake of creating him. He never even SPOKE to Victor until he killed two people. Five people died in total, not counting Victor, considering his father died of grief due to Elizabeth’s death too.

Victor’s fuckups in this book, at least in my opinion, were normal human reactions to extreme situations. His single dumbest decision was running away from the Creature in horror when he brought him to life. He is an impulsive, reckless person but NONE of what he suffered could be justified by the Creature.

This is a massive ESH situation, heavily leaning towards the Creature as the biggest asshole in this entire story. I don’t even think his age justifies this, he acts and thinks and talks like an adult. He is fully cognizant of what he is doing to Victor and it is with the purpose of torturing him. He STATES this numerous times.

I don’t know where the hell the take that he is the victim of the story comes from because holy shit I don’t think it’s from people who read Mary Shelley’s book.

this shit is sending me