A Little Frankenstein And Clerval Update

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 can be your angle...or yuor devil

hi i’m coming out as a huge frankenstein nerd. i love them more than my own family

you think this person kins victor

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

The first monster in Frankenstein is not this Creature... The famous Creature is a peripheral ephemeron, glimpsed by the crew on Walton's polar adventure as a near mirage on a far-distant ice-plain... The immediate astonishment is the appearance the next morning of a haggard being off the side of the ship on a fragment of ice, alone in a sled but for one dog, asking which direction the ship is headed. "Good God! Margaret, if you had seen the man who thus capitulated for his safety, your surprise would have been boundless," writes Captain Walton to his sister; "His limbs were nearly frozen, and his body dreadfully emaciated by fatigue and suffering. I never saw a man in so wretched a condition." This is the first dreadful wretch in Mary Shelley's novel, and soon the star of its first "Frankenstein" moment. The wretched being faints dead away then is revived, animated, by the crew... This crew brings life out of death. In a body dreadful to behold, teeth-gnashing, mad, wild, Victor Frankenstein receives concerned parental care as a fellow human being. Everything he recounts hereafter bears this tremendous irony. Monsters are not born, the Author of Frankenstein proposes; they are made and unmade on the variable scales of human sympathy.

The Annotated Frankenstein edited by Susan J. Wolfson and Ronald Levao

peak sibling behavior

"autism vs adhd" but its two panels one of vic and henry staring at eachother intesnely and in the next panel they kiss passionately

yeah

victor's belief that he's responsible for the deaths of his family (by extension of creating the creature) was borne out of excessive guilt, i might go as far as to say bordering on delusions of persecution. id argue walton was more directly responsible for deaths than victor ever was (several members of his crew died on his ship as a result of his inexperience and persistence), but first and foremost the creature was responsible, not victor, and to suggest otherwise i think is blatantly ignoring the creature's autonomy. he had a cultivated understanding of morality and the world's evils and chose, while knowing and feeling that it was a moral wrong, to murder. i think, eventually, it is this willingness to deliberately go against his own morals to commit evil acts that victor considers monstrous, not just the creature's monstrous appearance in of itself, which is one of the defining factors of his choice not to create the female creature.

if anything, id argue this passage is actually proof of victor acknowledging his "failure as a parent" or rather his duty as a parent, its just not done so directly. this is a story being told in retrospect, and that fact colors victor's narration because he already knows the events that are being described. in this sense, the quote seems more of an acknowledgement of this than anything else, particularly with the language of "creature" and "being to which they had given life" used to describe a child, which, like youre saying, are both blatant parallels to how victor describes the creature. if you look at this and then consider it within the context of victor and creature's confrontation on the alps, where victor does actually explicitly admit to his duties as a creator, i think it changes things:

For the first time, also, I felt what the duties of a creator towards his creature were, and that I ought to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness. These motives urged me to comply with his demand.

and then, later:

I was moved [...] I felt that there was some justice in his argument. His tale, and the feelings he now expressed, proved him to be a creature of fine sensations; and did I not as his maker, owe him all the portion of happiness that it was in my power to bestow?

in both quotes victor mentions he feels he owes the creature happiness, i.e. the same "train of enjoyment" he experienced in his own childhood, and it is the feelings the creature expressed (stemming from his mistreatment by victor, but also more importantly by society as a whole; i think people tend to overinflate the importance of the creature's "abandonment" by victor in the grand scheme of things) that push victor to this idea. that is, victor pretty directly admits to the effect of his absence on creature.

Victor Frankenstein admits multiple times that him creating the creature led to multiple deaths so he’s responsible in that sense but he assumes it’s because he created a monster but in my opinion, he knows him failing as a parent/abandoning the creature is why it turned out the way that it did, he just won’t admit it, and this passage from chapter one is my prime evidence.

I was their plaything and their idol, and something better—their child, the innocent and helpless creature bestowed on them by Heaven, whom to bring up to good, and whose future lot it was in their hands to direct to happiness or misery, according as they fulfilled their duties towards me. With this deep consciousness of what they owed towards the being to which they had given life, added to the active spirit of tenderness that animated both, it may be imagined that while during every hour of my infant life I received a lesson of patience, of charity, and of self-control, I was so guided by a silken cord that all seemed but one train of enjoyment to me.