Reviews For The Name Victor

or, how robert walton did not become the ancient mariner, but met him in victor frankenstein, and became the wedding-guest instead.

the light starts to go out.

@lesamis’s tags

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.

As I finished reading yesterday's chapter, the ending got me thinking about the usage of water in Frankenstein. I don't quite have the bandwidth at the moment to properly explore it all, but I think there's some really interesting usage of it. Here's a few pieces:

There's repeated imagery of Victor drifting aimlessly on a lake, both in times of happiness and when he is avoiding his promise to the Creature.

He goes to an island, separated from the mainland to build the female Creature. And then when he decides not to complete his work, he disposes of her body in the ocean. Immediately afterward, his habitual drifting is turned against him, with the sea sweeping him away and nearly killing him, then delivering him directly to Henry's corpse

Once again he finds brief peace while laying on the deck of the ship leaving Ireland, looking at the sky above... but again it's interrupted, this time by a nightmare

Elizabeth and Victor travel from their wedding by water, and the narration of the passage really drives home the beauty around them, but that their travel towards shore is taking them away from a place of refuge and into danger. There's a feeling of 'if they just stayed on the water...'

So that's Victor. And there could be something said about the difference between still water/safety, and moving water/danger, perhaps. Which would be an interesting detail as well to how all the beautiful things Elizabeth points out are in motion. But there there's also:

The Creature first seeing himself in a puddle

Him saving that girl from drowning in a river as his final positive (for them, very much not for him) encounter with people before every following one turning out violent

He first meets Victor by the 'frozen sea', is linked seemingly with glaciers and frozen water

He follows Victor across the ocean and to his isolated island, and seems to have acquired his own boat/be an expert at steering it and traveling rapidly across the water

And that's not even getting into the framing device set in the Arctic, with Walton's intentions to explore, the danger of the ice. The Creature (better at resisting cold than humans) being chased by Victor. Just a whole bunch of stuff. It feels intentional, it feels like there's something to talk about here, but I can't quite parse it all out.

imagine: picture of henry and walton staring at each other intensely. captioned “team jacob vs team edward”

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

In the clerb(al) we all fam(kenstein)

@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)

hey so it turns out nick dear’s frankenstein is funny as fuck. what do you mean full of beans

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