Straight Friend Groups: (brunette Girl) (frat Boy) (“the Funny One”) (kyle) (blonde Girl)

"some destiny of the most horrible kind hangs over me, or surely i should have died on the coffin of henry" son or "i wish that i were to die with you; i cannot live in this world of misery" daughter

feeding your decaying georgian twunk how-to guide: soup, an oaten cake and a frozen dead hare

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

imagine if victor frankenstein was a modern day influencer. he records an unboxing video for his youtube channel (account name “the modern prometheus”) and he’s like “hi re-animators! before the video starts, make sure to hit that red subscribe button down below if you want more content like this. today we will be unboxing…” and then the camera pans over to a person lying on an autopsy table

all victor hateposts boil down to are "i hate victor because [he displays XYZ mental/physical illness symptom]" or "i hate victor because [he does things or reacts in a certain way because of reasons outside of his control due to his illness]"

FRANKENSTEIN, Mary Shelley | WISHBONE CLASSICS FRANKENSTEIN, Micheal Burgan | THE ROOM WHERE THE CORPSE LAY, Bernie Wrightson | FRANKENSTEIN, Alexander Utz | FRANKENSTEIN, Director Kevin Connor | THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, Nicole Mello | FRANKENSTEIN, Deborah Tempest | | FRANKENSTEIN, Mary Shelley.

victor's grief for henry

forever funny to me that when lamenting on henry’s death victor reminisces on how long his eyelashes were. and the word choice of ORBS. bro had it bad

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

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

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

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

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

when referring to the cycle of abuse i am mostly talking about the pseudo-incestous relationships within the frankenstein family, specifically between alphonse and caroline and victor and elizabeth. while i need to make a catch-all post explaining it all at once, there’s quite a bit of analysis regarding the topic sprinkled around my blog, specifically here and here and here. though again its something i need to elaborate on, i speak a little bit on why and how victor’s perception of his own childhood is so idealized here, which is why his idealistic narration regarding his parents (the passages you pointed out) are so different from my interpretation of his childhood. essentially, caroline was groomed by alphonse (her father figure replacement of sorts) into becoming his wife. caroline then perpetuates her own abusive situation with her children by grooming elizabeth into a second version of herself, and then dictating her marriage to victor (who is all but her biological sibling) so that, like her mother before her, elizabeths shifts from a familial role to a wife role with the same person. it’s not explicit that they see each other as siblings but there’s an egregious amount of subtext suggesting they do. also they are actually blood related in the 1818 version, but call each other cousins in both versions, and elizabeth refers to victor’s siblings as her brothers. also never apologize there are no stupid questions

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?

victor describing himself as “always having been imbued with a fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature” and then a few chapters later saying "[henry] was a being formed in the very poetry of nature". 🤨🤨 i know what you are