I Did Some Precursory Reading On This And I Think You May Find Priscilla Wakefield's Introduction To

does anyone remember that time demian called a guy a kitten and then procceeded to beat his ass so bad he had to leave the country

“victor frankenstein was selfish” name 5 choices he actually made for himself

What do you think of Robert Walton? I love that silly sailor very dearly and in one of your post you said that he was a little like Percy Shelley and I'm really curious to know why that is :]

i can't believe i've never shared my waltonthoughts before!!! in short

to be honest for a pretty large majority of my frankenstein fandom time i've been fairly apathetic about walton? (sorry robin 😞) i felt really really bad because i couldn't quite pinpoint why; he's an intriguing character with some really interesting stuff going on, his narration is charming and incredibly complex but i just i don't know. he didn't arouse my curiosity and desire to analyze like the other characters did (i admit my frankenstein rereads i kinda. skip the letters at the beginning. i know i am so sorry). it might be that he's quite far removed from the themes in frankenstein that really intrigue me like mental illness, neurodivergency, and generational trauma so nothing abt him stuck out to me

but!!! i am no longer apathetic about him! i thought it would feel like a chore to go through his letters with a fine toothed comb but walton represents what i think is a really underrepresented dichotomy: he's very industrious and self-efficacious, kinda like one of those self made millionaire crypto bros, with a privileged station and promising, comfortable future, but he has this wanderlust for life and beauty and romance that he cant really reconcile with his and it causes him a lot of distress and loneliness. when he meets victor he thinks he finds someone that can satisfy this longing for the romantic and sublime, someone attractive, intelligent, engaging, and ostensibly an avatar of the tragic romantic figure - walton thinks that this is the only proxy by which he can be understood and further understand himself, the only adequate vessel for this longing, which is probably why he attaches onto victor so obsessively. victor is tragic, beautiful, pitiful, complex, fallen from grace, and because of his idealism and thirst for a romantic story walton thinks he can save them both. especially because they knew each other for a relatively short period of time, i don't know to what extent walton loves victor or just loves the narrative of loving victor. in the idiot by dostoevsky prince myshkin says of natasya filippovna "i love her not with love, but with pity" and i think that might be what's going on with walton and victor. i need to spend more time thinking about that though

on the subject of him being like percy the major similarity i noticed is that walton, being an orphan, was raised by his older sister, and ive seen some people attribute his emotional and "effeminate" nature to his being raised under her "gentle and feminine fosterage"; similarly, percy shelley was very close to his mother and sisters in his youth, and ive seen a couple scholars attribute his sentimentality of character and feminist-adjacent ideas (like free love) to his being close to female figures in his childhood and young adulthood. probably a stretch but i just think it's kinda interesting. the two also share some other similarities like being poets in profession (or at least trying to be 😭) and veneration for nature

i think i had more to say but my brain power is depleted 😭 im so so so sorry it took me so long to get around to this ask!!! i had to do a little rereading and critical thinking which is yucky

epic rap battles of history. miserable nineteen year old who is intellectually gifted but psychologically aberrant and has never been told ‘no’ losing everything he has because he dealt with consequences that neither he nor any person could ever fully comprehend through complete avoidance and dissociation after being catalyzed by grief and motivated by insatiable curiosity, deadly obsession, and painfully human pride to commit a horrific crime against nature without knowing exactly what he was getting into. versus miserable corpse man who has been abandoned by his creator, the closest thing he has to a god and his only chance at salvation, and despised by both said creator and society as a whole, desperate to experience the world even if his existence within it is unwilling and strange, yet perpetually separated from it, isolated and ultimately doomed by circumstances outside of his control, a being who never really had a chance in the first place

Alright, so here's a thing about Frankenstein that I do not understand.

At one point the monster asks Victor to make him a wife, and he refuses, fearing that they two might reproduce.

Dude... just don't give her ovaries and that's it. You're supposed to know anatomy, Victor!

It's even weirder when you realize that his fear implies the fact that his monster can get an erection. Did he really spent his time giving him a working penis when he could've make him sexless/give him no reproductive system, and by extension avoid this whole problem from the beginning?

Seriously?!

as i was reading the 1818 annotated text of mary shelley’s frankenstein, i noticed that one of my favorite lines, “Clerval was a being formed in the very poetry of nature”, had an annotation by Shelley connecting it to The Story Of Rimini by Leigh Hunt.

i obviously checked it out, and found out that that line was describing PAOLO from dante’s inferno… as in paolo and francesca… THE star-crossed lovers… francesca was in an arranged marriage (familiar?) and sinned by falling in love with paolo… and theyre together in hell and regret nothing…

i’m actually weeping over this being a canon parallel. go stream francesca by hozier one billion times

proposition: boy valentine

Can I ask what the context is behind ur banner image? it gave me a chuckle ::-)

AW so a couple months ago i fell down a rabbit hole of frankenstein “draw my life” type of videos, most of them were really low quality and obviously school assignments from students that did not want to be doing them. that particular drawing was of victor collecting the materials to make creature and it was just funny to me

@kitsu-katsu’s comments (i hope you don’t mind—i thought this was all very clever analysis and wanted to reblog it separately for myself)

Something has been bothering me about the book Frankenstein, and I have to say it.

Why didn’t Victor Frankenstein give the creature a wife but just, like, tie her tubes. Like, the Creature, I’m going to call him Adam, doesn’t know anatomy? He wouldn’t know that. His brain was from a dead guy. That guy probably didn’t know anatomy. Even if he did, Adam wouldn’t know it. Adam is very smart, so even if he did go out and learn 1818 anatomy, Victor could probably just go and be sneaky about it? Not add ovaries? Or heck, get ovaries from someone who was infertile? I mean, there’s lots of couples who are in love and don’t have children. When Adam asked for a bride, he was mostly asking for companionship. He was alone in the world with nobody to talk to.

Frankenstein could have had a happy ending if he was smart about it.

(I know, not the point of the book, but seriously, I feel like this could have been a solution, rather than just point blank destroying the bride, telling the creature no, and having his wife killed as a result)

No because the fact that Victor’s death didn’t fuel Robert’s anger. Like in his letter before he is so ashamed and frustrated and just furious but then he writes of Victor’s death, starting with “It has passed”. And like it’s super easy to say that Robert isn’t as emotional as Victor but really it’s their grief manifesting in different ways. Victor’s grief only strengthened his anger, and is what ultimately led to his demise. Robert can’t afford to have that happen. His grief numbs the anger. How can his feelings burn so bright when he lost one he had come to love so dearly? While Victor’s grief made him drunk with rage, Robert’s sobered him.