𝓕𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓴𝔂steinery

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

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.

victor “i'm not mad i'm not a madman please believe me" frankenstein and his constant assertions that he’s not insane throughout the whole novel only to become the foundation for the mad scientist trope. puts head in hands

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

Feeling some kind of way about these passages from one of the books I've been consulting for my project on melancholia, which was written by Johann Freitag, who lived from 1587-1654.

In it, Freitag (who was a doctor) talks about how difficult it is to cure melancholy, and how patients often grow depressed, suspicious, and angry over the fact that their symptoms persist for months, years, or even their whole lives. He also describes melancholy as an "insolent guest, who doesn't obey the guest-rules" -- a description I absolutely love, in part because it sounds an awful lot like the way my friends and I talk about our own mental illnesses today.

The whole section just feels so true to my own experiences with mental illness (particularly fairly treatment-resistant mental illness), hundreds of years later. It's exactly why I chose this topic for my research project, and really incredible to me.

Another twitter meme

Og

imagine: victor drawing a portrait of henry during their studying-oriental-languages-together arc (i think he'd be good at art from practice during anatomical studies) and midway through henry glances up at him and victor goes “i’m not doing this for you. i’m doing this to deconstruct the planes of the face, and using it to further my studies” but the whole time he’s swooning and gets to stare at him unabashedly under the guise of drawing

idol achilles + beanie baby king achilles = constantly getting gifted beanie babies and not knowing what to do about it achilles.

i also finally have a reason to play around with these tweet generators. im having the time of my life. evidence attached below.

Victor Frankenstein upon reaching university

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.