Happy Mother’s Day To Victor Frankenstein

they call me the responsibility ignorer. for no discernible reason.

he became sentient to handle data. she controls the moon. he has like 2 friends. she plays pranks by destroying infrastructure. he loves Sherlock Holmes. she has a female name and voice which is french. he joined a revolution. she makes awful puns. he communicates by phone. she made a humansona named adam selene. he bombed earth with rocks and got off on it. she kind of died. i didn't say a name but it popped into your head didn't it?

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

peak sibling behavior

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”

Hey. Don't cry. Weird teenage girl somewhere out there reading Frankenstein for the first time. Ok?

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 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

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.

(in response to @mrbrainrot’s post here)

it feels incorrect, to me, to claim that victor views elizabeth as an accessory: while it’s tempting, i think, to view his portrayal of elizabeth as reductive (casting her as a saint, an ideal of feminine domesticity, the “angel in the house”), we must acknowledge that victor’s narration also recounts her standing in front of the corrupt court system to defend justine, speaking against the injustice of the system and attempting to fight against its verdict, critiquing 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. she is, within his own account, thoughtful, courageous, and politically aware. 

while i’m open to being proved wrong, to me, most of the “victor views elizabeth as a possession” viewpoints hinge primarily on one specific line, where victor says the following: 

“'I have a pretty present for my Victor—tomorrow he shall have it.' And when, on the morrow, she presented Elizabeth to me as her promised gift, I, with childish seriousness, interpreted her words literally and looked upon Elizabeth as mine—mine to protect, love, and cherish. All praises bestowed on her I received as made to a possession of my own... till death she was to be mine only."

i am hesitant to call his relationship with elizabeth straightforwardly objectifying, at least not in the flat, dehumanizing way that this quote and this interpretation often implies. the keyword here, to me, is that victor explicitly names this mindset as “childish.” he is not presenting this possessiveness as justified. it is clearly marked by the text (and victor himself) as something immature, shaped by how caroline frames elizabeth’s role rather than how victor sees her. in that sense, this passage become less a declaration of elizabeth’s status as an object to victor and more an origin for victor’s warped understanding of intimacy with elizabeth. victor also seems to outgrow this view, as the rest of the novel doesn’t support the idea that he views elizabeth merely as an object.

beyond that, my stance on whether or not there was genuine romantic sentiment between victor and elizabeth becomes a lot more muddied. i've already analyzed the way that they were groomed and the psuedo-incestuous implications of their relationship in depth (here), but this in itself does not denote a lack of romance between them. the conclusion that there could have been some sort of romantic love there even despite them seeing each other as siblings is a disturbing one, but it's one i'd argue is to an extent supported by the text, even if it is inseparable from the preordained nature of their relationship. but at the same time, i'd also argue that victor is aware of this on a subconscious level and is simultaneously repulsed by it: the only kiss in the entire book is in victor's infamous dream where elizabeth decays into caroline in his arms, which feels like a very deliberate piece of subtext.

in regard to clerval i may have to articulate my thoughts on him in a separate post as this is already long enough as it is lol.