Of Course She's Not More Upset About Justine's Trial Than William's Murder - But William Has Already

reviews for the name victor

oh my god. og my god. the symbolism of it all

“match my freak” how about you match my poetic misery instead

”this video is made possible by ingolstadt morgue. not sponsored” victor says while breaking and entering

Caring about Frankenstein was a mistake because I was just subjected to someone’s Horrid take out of nowhere and my nervous system reacted like a gun went off next to my head

stupid idiot learns his actions have consequences

i am thinking about how victor exists in a liminal space where he is expected to embody masculinity yet is repeatedly treated as something other than a man: he is caught between expectations and identity, unable to fully claim the masculinity he reaches for (or at the very least, is expected to reach for) yet not quite conforming to traditional femininity either. his existence is marked by contradiction: he outwardly pursues male-coded ambition and authority, yet is consistently denied the recognition, respect, and autonomy afforded to men. at the same time, he is subjected to treatment that mirrors the historical oppression of women, but without ever being fully aligned with femininity.

yet ultimately he does not belong to either category and instead oscillates between them, unable to find stability in one or the other, because he is both mother and father and simultaneously neither, a juxtaposition reinforced by his own method of creation. his horror at the creature’s birth mirrors a crisis of self--he has created something neither fully human nor entirely monstrous but an awkward inbetween, just as he himself does not fit neatly into the rigid constructs of gender that society demands

victor’s narrative, then, can be read as an exploration of dysphoria--not necessarily in the modern sense, but in the broader, existential discomfort of being forced into roles that do not align with one’s internal reality. his attempts to assert control, whether over life, death, or his own identity, continually fail because the world refuses to see him as he sees himself.

all this to say. victor nonbinary

i did some precursory reading on this and i think you may find priscilla wakefield's introduction to botany interesting; it was written in 1796, around the time victor would have died in the novel. i also skimmed anna sagal's botanical entanglements, but the scope of it was in all honestly beyond me.

in regard to woman's education with botany, i came back with a lot of conflicting information. there's a few things in wakefield's introduction that align with what you suggested, and, in general, the study of science, and by extension, botany, was inherently linked with the study of religion and of "the natural order of things." in regards to the 1800s like you were saying, i did find a source saying that it started to be considered a modern science around 1830s, thus a serious occupation for men, and as a result women's status in the field began to decline; mary shelley would have had written frankenstein before this turning point.

however, i couldn't find anything about women being taught botany specifically during the late 1700s; i think it's unlikely women would have had any sort of formal education in botany (and etc), because while the frankensteins were rather radical in their approach to education, intense study was still seen as unfeminine and/or it was thought that it was beyond the intellectual capacities of women to study and learn at a profound level. but! some sources said that botany was an alternative way of studying natural history that would allow a person to subtly defy the (social) limits of woman’s intellectual practice and education, which i believe is very in character for elizabeth. many botanists were also illustrators and painters, like elizabeth!

Something very cool I realized about Elizabeth Lavenza-Frankenstein

So, this is backed up with some pretty light research so please correct me if I’m wrong, but just know this is based on something an actual historian told me.

So, apparently back in the 1800s, young women would be taught botany in order to educate them about the natural order of things. It was meant to teach them how God created the earth to be. It was a branch of science women (specifically upper class women, like Elizabeth) thrived in.

In Frankenstein, Elizabeth is meant to be the model of a young upper-class women. She engages in the natural sciences because she knows the natural order of things, and how Hod intended the world to work. This is in contrast to Victor, who wants to defy God and take his powers for himself. Victor wants to disturb the natural order of the world, and Elizabeth wants to preserve it.

Fascinating trend I’ve noticed from lurking in Frankenstein-related tags:

If there’s a male construct, people frame him as the creator’s child. He has full agency and personhood and deserves to be raised in a family. The most obvious example of this is Frankenstein’s Creature, but you’ll see echoes of it with creators of robots, Pinocchio, etc.

If there’s a female construct, people frame it as expected that she’s created to be a romantic/sexual object. I saw a few posts that Pygmalion is morally superior to Victor Frankenstein because he fell in love with his creation, for instance. I don’t need to go into the dozens of “make a female robot and fall for her” tropes.

The most uncomfortable intersection of this dichotomy are the countless posts insisting that it was Victor’s duty as a father to create a female to gift to his son—and that the “wait but she’ll be an actual person of her own” reservations Victor had in the book were immoral. He owes his son (male construct = family, agency, personhood) the gift of a person (female construct = object, no agency, not family). She wouldn’t be a daughter, just “the Bride.” Nothing about Víctor owing her happiness, but the exact opposite: that she must be custom-designed to be miserable and rejected so she’d be trapped with the male-creature.

For a piece of literature where personhood is such a central theme, it’s a disturbing and disappointing trend.

(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.