Friends, Bookworms, Bitter Lovers Of Classic Literature’s Greatest And Most Greatly Cheated Horrors,

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.

what do yall know about achilles de flandres

i should stop making thoughtful analysis. i need to become a hater

every time someone says victor hated the creature because of his scary yellow eyes an angel loses its wings

of COURSE you’re textually alive yet narratively dead. and a trans allegory.

i kinda wish more people discussed when bringing up the Gloves in hammer frankenstein that victor wears them because of his disability. it is one of the most consistently canon facts not just about victor, but in universe, period, considering all the contradictions and unreliable narration in the series.

he has been disabled since the fire during the ending of evil at the very least, and if even you don't consider that movie canon, his disability is still mentioned, focused on, and/or important throughout every film after that. the motifs of fire, disability, and mind vs body of the series are only intensified and made more profound considering victor's disability.

the sheer significance of the disability being of his hands, his hands of G-d, the things he uses to create is something that i rarely ever see anyone else pointing out. besides the implications of him being a disabled person who wants to literally have a perfect, immortal body already being powerful enough on its own to make it worthy of note, it can also be looked upon as a more visual metaphor/representation of infertility.

the plots and dramas of every film after evil are very much fueled by him being disabled. and that is just explicitly canon.

we as the clervalstein nation do not talk enough about this chunk of text

Frankenstein…

elizabeth lavenza:

stood up in front of a corrupt court that condemned her innocent best friend and called them cowards while also defending that friend's innocence, even knowing and saying that it would be considered 'indecent' (volume 1, chapter 7)

goes on an entire rant about how unjust the death penalty is; one could say this is just the author's own beliefs being reflected in her work, which is true! but also doesn't negate that elizabeth was the character chosen to convey this opinion (volume 1, chapter 7)

is described to continuously self sacrifice for the sake of others without complaint, but also shows some resentment for this role she plays when she laments being unable to join victor across europe (volume 1, chapter 2 and volume 3, chapter 1)

is an artist and a writer (volume 1, chapter 1)

is emotional, imaginative, lively, and active (volume 1, chapter 1)

her passive aggressive tone in her letter to victor about justine and how he probably doesnt remember her, the girl who lived with them for five whole years (volume 1, chapter 5)

after justine's wrongful conviction and execution she becomes much more pessimistic and laments about the unfairness of the world and that "men appear to [her] as monsters thirsting for each others blood" (volume 2, chapter 1)

yet because the 1831 revision of the novel removed or changed so much of this people -- movie writers, musical writers, fans, etc! -- act like she is and always has been a nothing character, instead of thinking critically about why mary shelley would revise her novel with her very radical for the time she lived in opinions during a time of financial stress.

i have something to say!!! about the differences between victor and elizabeth in the way they experience/express emotion, and what that means for the themes of gender in the novel

i briefly begun (began??) to talk about this in the tags of this post by the magnificent @frankingsteinery (i wanted to add this on to the original post but this ended up being kinda long) and i would like to clarify and expand upon what was said because i theorized a bunch of stuff unsubstantiated like an idiot 😭 raving under the cut

for context here are the tags that inspired my thoughts:

i left my little analysis in the tags because i was really just spitballing on the spot and when i do that i'm usually wrong 😭 but i'd actually find it fun to substantiate some of what i said w evidence from the text

to expand on my ramblings and robin's own additions in their reblog (with brilliant quotes that i did not even consider to search for because i am quite stupid). when i try to explain exactly how elizabeth and victor have differed in their approach to an early parentification role (elizabeth moreso in being groomed to emulate her mother in role and spirit, forced to remain domestic, unworldly, and unable to even entertain self-actualization, since the moment caroline dies she is the eldest female figure in the immediate family and must assume that role of maturity) (victor moreso in the fact that he literally. made a guy when he was like 20), i find this quote from alphonse quite telling:

"...but is it not a duty to the survivors that we should refrain from augmenting their unhappiness by an appearance or immoderate grief? Excessive sorrow prevents improvement or enjoyment, or even the discharge of daily usefulness, without which no man is fit for society."

victor immediately dismisses this advice as being:

"...totally inapplicable to my case; I should have been the first to hide my grief and console my friends, if remorse had not mingeled its bitterness, and terror its alarm, with my other sensations."

he acklowledges what is expected of him from society at large and actively claims himself incapable of it. he is not the reliable figure his family so desperately hoped could be upheld before they came to realize that he is really, irrevocably capricious and mentally unstable.

on the subject of the other quotes added, i think that in them we can see this shift in the family's perception of victor: they begin by expecting him to assume his prescribed role as the family's eldest man (besides alphonse cause he's old and useless) and caregiver, to be a stable and unshakeable foundation on which the family can always rely, but as victor remains on the trauma conga line and spirals into worsening mental health, the happiness of the family is reliant on victor's rapidly fluctuating states of health.

"Come, my dearest Victor; you alone can console Elizabeth..." (side note that after this quote he immediately starts taking about caroline, a bit of a freudian slip on alphonse's part in that he conflates caroline's very existence with a comforting and reliable disposition, and elizabeth is explicitly asked to 'take over' for caroline when she dies)

at the time alphonse writes this, henry (<3) has been purposefully concealing the extent of the "nervous fever" victor has suffered; alphonse is not aware of the trauma his son has undergone and how it has changed him, and so he automatically assumes that victor, upon returning home, now older and more educated, will embrace these expectations.

"'We all... depend on you, and if you are miserable, what must be our feelings?'"

at this point of the novel, however, elizabeth knows how mentally unstable victor is, and is begging him to come back happier than he left. everyone in the family at this point is so conscious and aware of victor's poor health, and thus his explosive and outwardly demonstrative emotions affect the family very deeply. in short their dependency on him shifts from perceiving him as a source of stability to perceiving him as a source of instability.

back to my original comparison!! jesus this is all over the place thank god i'm not an academic.

to reference alphonse's first quote that i referred to. it seems to me that elizabeth, unlike vic, takes alphonse's advice in stride. contrast victor's response to alphonse's quote with this description of elizabeth:

"She indeed veiled her grief, and strove to act the comforter to us all. She looked steadily on life, and assumed it's duities with courage and zeal."

indeed, she demonstrates this; victor often describes her as handling her grief in silence (literal silence, but ykwim):

"...a thousand conflicting emotions rendered her mute, and she bade me a tearful, silent farewell."

"...I turned to contemplate the deep and voiceless grief of my Elizabeth."

in fact, the only time she comes close to being as expressive as victor is when she blames herself for the death of william, and in part her extreme reaction stems from the fact that she percives herself as having failed the duty that her mother bestowed upon her - it is unmotherly to allow such a thing to occur under her watchful, feminine eye.

even in childhood they had a very stark difference in temperament, elizabeth's more traditionally and overtly masculine:

"Elizabeth was of a calmer and more concentrated disposition, but, with all my ardor, I was capable of a more intense application..."

and, especially for a female character, she defies the will of her father several times:

"At first I attempted to prevent her, but she persisted, and entering the room where it lay..."

"Soon after we heard that the poor victim had expressed a desire to see my cousin. My father wished her not to go..."

all this considered, i don't think it's much of a stretch to say that while it should be vic's role, elizabeth is the "man of the house" (a sexist idea in its own right, but im communicating this in terms i think mary shelley might have intended).

tldr i just think this is such a fascinating exploration of family dynamics in frankenstein, and a brilliant portrayal of two opposite sides of the spectrum when it comes to people dealing with the undue parental and familial responsibilities they are made to uphold in youth. the lack of academic attention these themes have attracted is absolutely bonkers to me. anyway elizabeth the girlboss and victor the malewife <3