It’s Weird That In All The Essays I Read On Frankenstein None Of Them Have Noted That Victor Is Heavily

it's so interesting that the elizabeth was favored bc she was a girl. typically that's the other way around. typically being a disappointment bc of ur gender is a woman thing. it's almost as if victor is written to have feminine struggles

I really enjoy neurodivergent readings of classic literature because the whole "i have an obsession with being pure/great/always seen as morally good" "sometimes I get obsessed with an idea and believe I'm on the right path and don't act rationally" "i feel uneasy and incapable of enjoying things since [traumatic event(s)]" "I feel alienated from society and don't understand it at all" bunch of thoughts that are very present in most classics are almost always big symptoms of some kind of mental illness (which, in fact, does add a lot to the story) and I love to see people talk about them from that perspective instead of just "lol this guy is whiny and dumb"

behold: the doomed unrequited waltonstein manifesto courtesy of twitter user ustfile

Another twitter meme

Og

here's an updated video of everything herbert refers to Dan!!

(now including last names/variants, deleted/extended scenes, and a counter!!)

i love you enderverse

i've noticed that some frankenstein adaptions that include walton (the only good ones ☝️🤓) choose to depict him as a naval officer (aesthetically, at the very least — one of my favourite examples is in the 2018 manchester royal exchange theatre production because well. LOOK AT HIM)

this phenomena is so interesting to me because he is explicitly Not that, textually

on one hand i get it because the correlation between polar exploration and the navy especially during the 18th and 19th centuries is there and makes sense; it’s an easy connection to make if you just want walton “on screen” and a visual short hand for the reason behind the type of journey he’s making (i.e. discovery service expedition to the arctic sent by the admiralty) without any real exploration of his character and the inner thoughts that he communicates to margaret (and ultimately the reader) through his letters

but walton himself makes the claim very early in his narrative that his voyage is entirely independent, and that he basically funded the entire thing himself (with a little help from his cousin, whoever they are/were). most importantly, because he was prohibited from going to sea as a boy by his father, he served on whaling ships for years to train himself mentally and physically:

Six years have passed since I resolved on my present undertaking. I can, even now, remember the hour from which I dedicated myself to this great enterprise. I commenced by inuring my body to hardship. I accompanied the whale-fishers on several expeditions to the North Sea; I voluntarily endured cold, famine, thirst, and want of sleep; I often worked harder than the common sailors during the day and devoted my nights to the study of mathematics, the theory of medicine, and those branches of physical science from which a naval adventurer might derive the greatest practical advantage. Twice I actually hired myself as an under-mate in a Greenland whaler, and acquitted myself to admiration. I must own I felt a little proud when my captain offered me the second dignity in the vessel and entreated me to remain with the greatest earnestness, so valuable did he consider my services.

his voyage is motivated not by any sort of command from above by lifelong ambition and self-interest. he considers what he can contribute to science and maritime navigation, which, granted, serves his country as much as it serves him; but to me it is primarily his passion for the sublime beauty that the arctic represents, even if the reality is much more dangerous than he could have predicted, that drives him forward. he needs to see it for himself, to know that he can do it, no matter the cost (sound like someone else we know?)

if i had to draw a comparison between walton and any real-life polar explorer from around the time frankenstein was written it would be william scoresby, an english scientist who began his own career on whaling ships (ironically he thought the open polar sea theory that walton espouses was complete bs — and he was right, lmao)

janice cavell’s article ‘The Sea of Ice and the Icy Sea: The Arctic Frame of Frankenstein’ has a lot more to say on this topic and i’d highly recommend it but i just have to include this extract here because i was so delighted to learn about some of the real people who likely inspired walton in shelley’s mind:

Here, then, was material for both the Creature's journey and Walton's doomed mission. Moreover, here Mary found a surname for her Arctic captain in the list of officers who served under Vitus Bering in 1733-41: Peter Lassenius, William Walton, Dmitri Laptiew, Jego Jendauro, Dmitri Owzin, Swen Waxel, Wasili Prontischischtschew, Michailo Plautin, and Alexander Scheltinga. Walton, the sole Englishman on this list of exotically named foreigners, was in command of the Hope (Müller, 1761:15, 26; on William Walton, see Cross, 2007:177-178). The ship's name reflects the most prominent characteristic of the fictional Walton, whose first name, Robert, may have been taken from Robert Thorne, the 16th-century originator of the open polar sea theory. Even though Walton's theories about the Arctic are opposed to Scoresby's, Mary may have intended to acknowledge Scoresby's status as both a whaler and a man of science when she had Walton train himself for his chosen career through whaling voyages.

like! the Real Walton’s ship being named the Hope and “the ship’s name reflects the most prominent characteristic of the fictional Walton” ohhhh i am NOT going to cry don’t LOOK at me

anyway this post doesn’t really have much of a point. i guess tl;dr i just think it’s more interesting that walton is canonically just some overly ambitious guy with big dreams and more money than he knows what to do with who is willing to hang out on gross whaling ships for half a decade rather than pursue the more respectable maritime profession because he wants what he wants on his own terms and no one else’s

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

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

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.