What can Frankenstein teach us about prejudice?
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There’s a reason Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is so enduringly influential, well-adapted, and well-studied, and it has to do with the novel's brilliant exposé of ‘the other’. Over 200 years have passed since its initial publication and we're still reading Shelley's words and using them to reflect on our very human tendency to scape-goat, and ‘other’, those who don’t fit in. Frankenstein raises a whole lot of questions about different forms of prejudice and the institutions and ideologies they support, from patriarchy to slavery - learn more by watching this video.
Content Warning: This video discusses racism, sexism, and sexual abuse
Photosensitive warning: At 2:45 and 9:25 there is a flash. Once the sound of thunder has gone, it's safe to look back.
Written, presented, and edited by Rosie Whitcombe
@books_ncats
Directed, produced, and edited by Matty Phillips
@ma_ps_
mphotos.uk
Bibliography coming soon.
I don't know, being abandoned at birth by the guy who created you seems PRETTY traumatic to me!
Poor Adam!
Turtles get over it quick
And then being beaten and attacked by literally anyone who sees you, finding a friend in a blind man, before his sighted son drives you out with more beating.
I found this fascinating. My only addition is that Mary Shelley had lost a baby the year before she wrote it. A little girl who was premature. The idea of horror coming from dead body parts and deformity (we obviously do not know the cause of the premature birth) were, I think, a way for her to deal with this. Also, the idea of being able to reanimate a dead body is something that has crossed the mind of anyone who has lost a love one. ❤
It is very interesting to think of Frankenstein through this lense. I normally read it through the lense of disability. Creature is forced into hiding and unable to integrate into society though he wants to because society views him as ugly. Many disabled people are forced to do the same (especially in the 19th and early 20th centuries). I’m not sure of the dates but many towns had ugly laws that prevented disabled people to be seen at all. I think Victor’s refusal to create a female creature can also be seen through this lense as disabled people are often seen as incapable of having sexual relationships.
Btw it's lens, not lens-ey, it comes up a lot in photography for obvious reasons
I was going to write a whole essay in the comments about this creator’s disability erasure, but you wrote it first and I want to thank you for that. I don’t have time to educate fully-abled people. I’m tired of them their constant erasure and persistent ableism. So thank you. ❤️🩹👩🏻🦯
as a trans person i perceived it through a queer lens: what means to fail to live up to your parent's bigoted standards and the violence found within.
as i got older i increasingly began to perceive it through the lens of child neglect and its consequences.
I remember when I first read it I perceived it through the lens of an abused child, and then through criticism of colonialism. Now I think it can be interpreted in multiple lenses because the creature is an outcast, and that fits multiple groups.
I love adding to my hoard of onion-layer interpretations of Frankenstein.
The one that struck me the first time I read it in high school is one I don't really see very often: self-sabotage. Victor's rambling, wittering litany of fears about the female creature sounds exactly like a gifted-child-trauma anxiety spiral, to me. He attempted this absurdly extraordinary undertaking, something literally impossible... and accomplished it! He did the impossible. But it didn't turn out exactly the way he wanted it to. He created life from scratch, but it wasn't as drop-dead gorgeous and wise and articulate as he wanted it to be straight out of the box, so he instantly gave up and ran away from it. When asked to try again - by his "failure," no less - he makes a start and then rapidly convinces himself it's going to go horribly wrong, not entirely because of any characteristic of the actual creature he is creating, but because he is desperately looking for an excuse to abandon the undertaking before he can fail again.
I've never seen the overblown hubris in the book that film adaptations like to paint Victor with. The kid's just been saddled with excessive expectations his whole life, lives in fear of disappointing the people who hold him to those high standards, so he formulates the kind of grandiose ambitions he thinks he's supposed to have, and there's no such thing as therapy yet, so...
I've always felt he had the same vibe as some rather toxic gifted boys I knew as a kid, who were so stressed out by being labeled "bright" with no real support that they got themselves redpilled later on and are now ranting about women's mind-control pheromones and the Great Replacement on Xitter.
This is super interesting! Love this new frame to Victor's tremendous, tragic deception with his endeavors
Reading the X in Xitter like it's from an Asian language makes the end of this comment hilarious as in Many Asian languages X makes the "Sh" sound 😂
@@zeed6738 Ha! I'd been pronouncing it that way in my head out of spite; very pleased to learn there's a legitimate linguistic basis for doing so!
I feel that Frankenstein is a cautionary tale about what happens if you try and remove women from the equation. Victor attempted to make a motherless birth and by doing so he condemns every woman he's in contact with.
It's not necessarily him creating the creature that's the issue (although it presented as hubris), but the way he treats the creature. Victor definitely has misogyny, but it's a bit strange to paint the concept of male birth/pregnancy as the monster in this scenario. Trans men exist :)
This video should've been called stein and prejudice 😂😂😂
💯
You're right and you should say it
Does...does anyone think that rhymes?
The greatest crossover we never knew we needed
@@TamlinearthlyI don’t think so? Pride and Prejudice doesn’t rhyme either, so I’m not sure why it should?
Frankenstein was a personal favorite of mine since I was a kid. I used to keep it in the truck so I could read in the back. It really struck a cord with me. I felt I could relate to the feeling of being alone like the monster. I was the youngest of my siblings so they all moved out when I was little so I kind of got raised like an only child. I'm fairly sure I was neurodivergent as well, I didn't know it, but I knew what it felt like to be outcasted, having some people who liked me, but never really knowing how to actually befriend them. Me and the monster both had our creator who didn't pay much attention to us, and worried about their own needs first. It really taught me how to empathize with others early on because I felt so deeply for him. I always love hearing the way others go on to interpret the story because it really can be read in so many ways.
I think one other reading that deals with human prejudices is a disability reading. From the moment Victor sees this creature he's created, its very form repulses him, and no matter how intelligent and human the creature is, others flee in terror due to its appearance. As someone with several mostly-invisible disabilities, this is a way that the text sticks in my mind and I can't stop chewing on what it means for how we all treat each other.
I really love this. There's a lot that can be read into Frankenstein. I read it for class in high school, and we basically came up with the same idea the papers did. We felt bad for the Creature, because he was abandoned by his creator. We didn't really consider the historical context for this one. We understood being isolated to some degree and took it from that perspective. I think it's a pretty common reading because people don't really incorporate history into analyzing literature in schools. My English class did a bit, but I don't remember it for Frankenstein.
The papers you showed kind of made it sound like they were outraged by this reading, and didn't try to understand it at all.
What I haven't seen discussed is that Shelly was also writing from a time that understood women as failed male humans. I know it's unusual, but I have always interpreted the creature as the character Galatea from the Pygmalion but put in a man's body. (I still feel this interpretation as interesting in the consideration of the denial of femininity to black women in particular). As an ex-"not like other girls" girl, it was common for me to reject not just femininity, but also women I deemed "too feminine", thus the concept of the creature being the monstrosity of a woman with agency in a book where the female characters are all passive felt obvious to me. I also interpreted the creature killing Victor's bride as agency destroying Victor's perception of his perfectly object like wife. Though I know now that I graduated college, I haven't read the book since middle school so I'm sure there is a lot of reading in what I wanted to see.
I do feel there is a healthy discussion to be had around interpreting Frankenstein as a horror novel version of George Shaw's play "Pygmalion" (though Frankenstein came first, but I think my meaning is understood) wherein the story is somewhere in between the point of views of the colonial-Victor and the feminine-creature.
I also always interpreted the monster in a woman way lol. Idk it just made sense to me
The framing device gets left out of adaptations so regularly; I'm glad you considered it in this analysis!
I will never understand this mindset of being just so outraged at the simple idea of looking at a work through a lens like racism, sexism, queerness, or ableism, etc. Like, it's a framework of analysis, it's not gonna hurt ya lol. These "modern" issues were also issues way back then, people did think and write and fight about the rights of different people. Even if the author herself had zero thoughts on race throughout her entire life...I still think reading her story through that lens is an interesting exercise. Art and its interpretation do not solely belong to its creator. I think a huge part of being able to think critically and understand media is to be able to do this. Or at least be willing to hear it out lol
I think I'd be more comfortable if the author was left out of it and it was framed as "hey, this is like what people in x community live with."
I bring up my dislike of English professors developing complex Christian symbolism for the old man and the sea. They were symbols never intended by the author and I hated having to listen to teachers insert what wasn't on the page. Can't a story be good without inserting tangential ideas into it?
I've written a few books and I'd really hate it if people started interpreting them in ways I never intended. So I'll go with the golden rule and not do it to others.
@@emmettobrian1874
But isn't it impossible to control how other people interpret pieces of art/media? There's a long history of people that have tried to do that (whether it's people bullying or shutting down others for healthy discourse around an interpretation of a piece of art/media, to some creators purposefully ham-fisting stuff/trying to tell their audience what they're supposed to feel and believe out of fear they aren't intelligent) - and it usually doesn't end very well. 0_0
I do agree that better media literacy is what more people should have (so that there can be people that recognize nuances, and not ban books/vilify videogames because they saw something negative that they wanted to see or out of context) - but being too controlling of how audiences interpret art/media goes against the point of art/media, which is for audiences to make their own interpretations/opinions about it.
@@Scarshadow666 I just think a lot of interpretation goes way too far. If you read a book and there's a passage that has an underlying meaning that you're trying to figure out, the rest of the text should be the guide, including the title especially. Frankenstein is about hubris. It's about technology going too far. There are other influences, yes, but to insert other interpretations as a focus is to distort the intention of the writer.
I don't have a problem with someone finding parallels and discussing them as something separate but informed by the text. For instance, I find parallels between the creature and neurodivergence. However, the book isn't about that and couldn't be because those ideas didn't exist at the time. It would be improper and just wrong to say Shelley had neurodivergence in mind while writing.
If you had the author of a book in front of you, and you explained your interpretation of her work and she said "Oh no, that's not what I meant at all." Isn't it disrespectful and a bit egotistical to insist that your interpretation is right?
I know that some people will insist it isn't, but here's a person whose mental output you appreciate, but now you're saying you know their own work better than them? It's a paradoxical position to stand by.
Of course we can't ask a deceased author, but just inserting our authorship over theirs is to steal their work from them just because they're dead.
If you wanted to write your own derivative work with the themes you have in mind, then as long as you're not infringing copyright, I'd be fine with that.
@@emmettobrian1874
I definitely agree to not being egotistical when it comes to interpreting other people's works and being respectful of what the artist/author intended while they were still alive, and definitely wouldn't walk up to someone saying that my interpretation is better (I'm sorry if that's how I came across in my previous comment - wasn't my intention). ^^;
I was thinking more of the death-of-the-author trope applying more to situations where someone can make their own interpretations/opinions about an art piece, but not in a way that they felt their interpretation is superior or anything nor affected how they interacted with others (like when ancient artists/authors/storytellers have long since passed and there isn't any record of what they intended with their artwork yet, or when someone has their own interpretation of an art piece but they keep it to themselves/don't post about it online). It's impossible to tell others if they're interpretations/opinions on something are right/wrong if their interpretations of an art piece are personal/unexpressed.
@@Scarshadow666 obviously there is a need for some interpretation. I'm also not accusing you of the extremes I mentioned, but I have seen people go to those extremes and that's why pushing interpretations bothers me.
I just ask for some humility in the process. Saying that you see parallels in an author's writing is much better, but it also doesn't hit with the same force as "I actually know what was going on in the mind of the author." Which is something English professors have insisted to me.
Actually, wouldn't it be much more impactful, if a reader drew a correlation between the author's work and their experience, and showed how one experience frames the other? Instead of imagining some intent by the author, state the experience you intend to explain, and then show the points of similarities with the text. That would be far more meaningful to me.
When you were assigned 'Frankenstein' THREE different times during high school and university but you still found new stuff to ponder on in this video and you want to make a really salient comment... and then Mouse curls up very smol and so very round and you lose all train of thought
I get something different every time I read the novel; now I'm looking forward to my next re-read through the lens of what is discussed in this video.
Wow, Dr. Whitcombe! I loved your well-researched, thoughtful and thought-provoking revelations and the questions you brought up regarding this timeless example of influential literature. I also enjoyed Mousy's calming presence.
I really liked the way you added quote around your face when you were quoting little bits, including the citation in the corner. Really cool way to do it. I also do find myself looking at the cat most of the time
I like the way that Penny Dreadful took the excerpt you read at 12:00 and just ran with it. An interesting expansion of the idea.
Penny Dreadful was a remarkable series. Never once did i feel sorry for the creature. His strength and vengefullness was overwhelming.
I remember we went over this back in my high school, now kids might not be able to read books like this and do a deep analysis of certain themes presented in the books. Im so glad you and so many others are dedicating so much time and effort to make these educational and informative videos. You are truly a blessing.
As someone who has never read Frankenstein, I am suddenly inspired to give the book another reading attempt!! I first tried to read Frankenstein before I started taking anthropology classes in college, and upon hearing your view I am fascinated to see what I can discover. Thank you for this video!!
This is awesome, Im literally drawing a book cover reimagine for Frankenstein right now!
do you post your art anywhere? I'd love to see it!
I would also love to see it! I’m writing a paper on Frankenstein rn for my college thesis hehe
I've always loved Frankenstein but never thought about it with so much context. This was a wonderful listen. It would be lovely to be in a book club with her.
Wonderful video! It introduced me to a lot of new ideas. Re. the pastiche of anti-slavery and pro-slavery narratives, one reason I like Frankenstein is that it's dialogic. It's not reducible to one narrative making one point because the different characters have different perspectives and arguments that butt up against each other in irreducible ways, so it makes sense to me that there would be conflicting implications about slavery.
I've seen every film on "Frankenstein" and Mary Shelley's scary story. After reading her mother's biography, and that she was a feminist and a French Revolutionary, I understand her daughter more & more.❤❤❤❤❤
I think antinatalism is an interesting idea through which we can look at the book. In a way, Victor's deed of creation is a malicious act that might make the creature hate him.
so excited for this video!!!! frankenstein is my favourite book ever ⚡️🧠
I just found your channel from your video on Shirley Jackson and domestic horror, and I almost screamed when I saw this as your most recent video, because Frankenstein is my all time FAVORITE novel. I can't wait to hear your analysis. ❤
oh this is gonna be brilliant!!!!
especially for my alevel after half term!
Frankenstein's monster is ABSOLUTELY a victim of surgical horror beyond even Human Centipede levels of invasive destruction.
Your Chanel just popped up on my feed and it's amazing!
Greetings from Greece and thank you for your amazing videos!! A true educational channel!
So excited!!
New subscriber. I thoroughly enjoyed this discussion/topic: Exploring Shelley's Frankenstein through the lens of slavery and race. Also, to expound on this topic, Shelly's work could lend itself to the discussion surrounding the historical exploitation of black bodies in medical science. Victor's complete disregard and contempt for a creation that was born out of his egostical and unethical experimentation-to some degree-mirrors that of the white doctor and enslaved black patient. Authors and scholars such as Maia A. Hill, Owens D. Cooper, and Harriet Washington have written extensively about the historical so-called "painless black body," which was a deeply disturbing concept that medical doctors espoused to rationalize inhumane medical procedures on black bodies; patients and subjects were often black women and girls. In fact, Hill's work elucidates that the development of American gynecology was made possible through the exploitation and experimentation of black women's bodies.
Frankenstein is my favorite book of all time and I just love learning more about the different interpretations that people have about the book!! For an intro to gay and lesbian fiction class in university I did a queer reading of Frankenstein and focused on how the “otherness” and the prejudice that the creature faces represents queerness and homophobia so thinking about it in the lens of slavery and race is super interesting.
What a fantastic video! So thought provoking. I’ve loved this novel for decades. Thanks so much
YES YES YES!!!!! OUGH I love this video so much! This has given me ANOTHER new lense to view the text! Frankenstein has been my favorite novel ever since I was fourteen and I love seeing it get more love!!! Great work!!!
i love this! i'm rereading frankenstein right now for my senior research paper (on queer representation and reappropriation in the gothic) and your reading is very insightful and helpful! something i noticed too that aligns with your reading is how victor also judges his professors on their appearance when they tell him his views are outdated. he calls m. krempe "a squat little man, with a gruff voice and repulsive countenance," so he ignores his advice, while m. waldman is "short, but remarkably erect; and his voice the sweetest [he] had ever heard," so victor listens to him (vol 1 ch 2). he definitely values beauty over everything, and has very limited notions on what is beautiful. i'm definitely gonna check out the rest of your videos!
This is a fascinating way to look at Frankenstein.
I had always thought that it was written at a time when Science was thought to soon find a solution to everything, and Mary Shelley was like, Wait a minute, what if Science Doesn't solve everything? What if Science creates a monster we can't control?
This interpretation always seemed very apt to modern times as well.
I’ve listened to this multiple times. Excellent work. Very well done.
Hadn't thought about the novel through this particular lens, lots to chew over, thank you!
This analysis is so well done thank you so much for ur work i hope to be a patron soon when i can afford it!!
Yay! This is gonna be great. :-)
I had an independent study on 19th Century British Gothic Literature this semester, looking at gender dynamics in a few different texts and comparing them with contemporary writings, and Frankenstein was one of them! I wrote a paper comparing Frankenstein's characters to a section in Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women.
When I became a parent, I thought of Frankenstein as the ultimate bad single dad. He wants to procreate without a woman. He can't handle that his child is amoral, uncouth and uneducated. The "monster" has to go to a kind of boarding school to learn to be a human. His father isn't up for the challenge. Frankenstein experiences the horror of the offspring expresses sexuality. The genius of the novel is that is works on so many levels.
I just found your channel and this is absolutely amazing.
20:47 is there a reason everyone doesn’t use his name? The creation did name himself, he chose the name Adam after hearing the blind old man read Paradise Lost to his kids.
Because he’s never actually been named. He’s always been referred to as “the Creature” or some other dehumanizing term. He’s never named himself either but made comparisons of himself to Adam in relation to his creation AND Lucifer for the bitterness he feels for his creator/world. Although it’s pretty common for fans to refer to the Creature as Adam in absence of an actual name.
@@A_fellow_observer I remember him calling himself Adam that’s why I always see it that way. However it’s been… 13 years? 12? Since I read the book
@@SebastianSeanCrow But Victor, and then Walton are telling the story... so as authors... he doesn't get a name. I love the idea that if he did get a name, it would have to include the surname... Frankenstein. And as Victor's first born... that could mean something.
A masterful analysis! Thank you!
Oh this is a wonderful video on one of my favorite books of all time.
stellar ... great analysis and presentation, ty
This was really interesting and i think informs a lot of the context of where this book came from... the more context the better, so we can understand the text better! ❤❤❤❤❤❤😻😻😻
I understood the Creature was the victim in Frankenstein from the first time I read the book, like 20 years ago when I was a teen. Some people just lack media literacy, common sense, and empathy o.O
Fascinating video!
Another amazing vid! ❤
Loved this!
Haven't watched this video yet but I'm commenting because I think your channel is awesome and I want it to succeed in life. :) Or shall I say, succeed MORE than it is already succeeding? In any case, keep up the good work!
Thank you for this.
Looks interesting!
I can't believe I have found such a wonderful channel! Thank you for explaining the topic of Femininism in my favorite book 📖 🖤💀
Could write essays on Frankenstein, Shelley, and Woolstonecraft as well as the cultural impact!!!! Even a novel "ELIZABETH FRANKENSTEIN" is a cool revelation of Victor's mother, his "gypsy sister" and Witchcraft!!!👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼❤❤❤❤❤
Your reminder that the story that the "monster" tells is a narrative within a narrative within a narrative is helpful for those of us who want to retell the story in our own ways. How faithful is Walton's retelling of Frankenstein's story? How faithful is Frankenstein's retelling of his creature's story?
Oh yessss I am so ready.
I really like your videos, in this one -when the female creature was about to be created, I think those ideas about the possibility of her being violent, going away and other ideas, are not connected with him being a man, but having the experience of having created a previous being.
Love this take but for me reading the 1818 edition as a trans man I related so much to the creatures rage, and i think its interesting to have the creature be such a literal representation of constructed masculinity both in his nature and in how he learns ideas about gender as you mentioned. then i mentioned this to a friend and they said yeah Susan Stryker wrote about this ages ago and sent me a copy of My Words To Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix and I was delighted to discover an incredible piece of writing that I think every frankenstein fan should read.
I love your channel ❤
I never did finish it because of Adhd, but I've read enough to know those headlines are written by no-one who's read the book.
It's just a really, really good book.
i didn't expect anyone to use the national theatre adaptation as reference, i got a matching quote as a tattoo from it with one of my friends. throwback!
I highly recommend looking up the lens from which this book is about Adam Weishaupt
Thank you so much for this. I work at a deradicalization camp in London and after showing the inmates this they all agreed to never be racist again 🥲
5:44 reading this in class was my first time encountering using POV framing (I forget what it’s called but it’s a story within a story within a story via POV)
i can not waittttttt
I feel that the villagers were totally justified in not being comfortable with a vindictive, murderous zombie walking around.
It's not just that they didn't read the book. I mean, EVERYBODY knows he was misunderstood and most people haven't read the book. It's just pop culture knowledge. The guy from the second headline has been living under a rock and doesn't realize that he's calling EVERYBODY snowflakes. I remember kids (at my freshman high school class) - *kids* - making fun of other kids (the small minority) for not knowing that already when we went to read it in class. I'd say most adaptations I've seen (mostly mainstream) feature that aspect of the story
The first headline, I get it. If you are in denial of what black people go trough, you wouldn't see the connection, but the second - oh, the second - it's making my blood boil. How can someone be so ignorant in literature, pop culture, history, and write about those topics with zero research
subscribed !
Although not at all the intention of Mary Shelly I personally relate to the monster as a trans person. To be created in the ideal image of one's parents only to be rejected when not living up to the image set upon you. And to be misunderstood a rejected by society and the imagery of a created person one built and not born deeply resonates with the process of transition. And this created form being the one the causes the alienation. Again not an intended reading but one I see a lot in the trans community relating to
That’s the beauty of Frankenstein! It’s so universal that it can be read in so many fabulous and diverse ways! Your interpretation and connection to the book just adds more evidence to the fact of the books timelessness!!
Wonderful video!! It is so fascinating how many lenses can be utilized when analyzing Frankenstein. I have analyzed the book through numerous lenses, including queer, and disabled lenses. I have looked at the characters in relation to mental health.
Specifically addressing the feminist aspect of Frankenstein while looking at mental health. Victor displays common traits of hysteria which was something exclusively diagnosed in women at the time. His behavior, such as emotional outbursts, fainting, and insomnia, subverts the idea that only women experience hysteria. Because of Victor’s behavior, the women in Frankenstein, often seem far for reasonable and analytical by comparison. But Victor’s more “feminine traits,” such as birthing the Creature and his various hysterical episodes, lead to his downfall. So is the book not saying that men who adopt “feminine” traits will suffer?
The book suggests conflicting ideas and questions. Because of that conflict, we can analyze and understand the book in so many different ways.
I had not fully delved into understanding the slave and master narratives within the book. Watching this video provided even more insight into Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein! Thank you for this. It ways a very informative video!!
Nice!
Man, people in these comments are actually mad you didnt talk about literally every possible topic relating to Frankenstein in a 40 min video
Yes I definitely agree that, despite the creature fitting many marginalized roles, he does have adopt male privilege.
I think this is because he first learns what a man is and what a man is supposed to be and that he is one. The he learns what a woman is and how she is to relate to him.
I think he has such a controlling attitude towards women because his introduction to them was through eve and safie.
First eve. The creature considers himself to be like Adam, so he might think it’s natural for an eve to be created For him. An eve is something he thinks he deserves because he inherits Christian values.
Secondly, safie. He understands safie was promised to Felix in return for his good actions. This probably taught him that pretty women are gifts given to men who do good.
Both are kind of objectifying, and both lead him to assume he deserves the love of a woman.
Am I presenting a new hot take here? Not really, just presenting evidence I thought was relevant.
Thank you, this video is phenomenal!
What is the stage play you show clips from? Is it available on DVD? Amazing analysis btw 👍🏼
25:35 I was reading that and then just kinda stopped to consider the time period when it was written. I just assumed it was just old but that line made me question the book; it's been ages since I read it and it is a bit weird to look back on in places. Would still recommend though, it's a great gothic novel
lol the look Mousey gives you when you call them creature lol
What is the background music called? I know it from somewhere and it's bugging me 😅
Did Mrs. Shelly ever comment or discuss her interpretation of her novel?
I love the irony in the fact that you named your cat mousy.
The themes of otherness, of monstrosity, of subordination, of being an outcast, of not fitting in, etc, are present in a lot of situations, they are very important themes through out human history, and so it is normal that you can look at Frankenstein through a lot of different lenses. But to claim that Shelley was inspired by these ideas is quite far fetch sometimes. A lot of these analyses are too complicated and try to put a narrative that just is not there. Frankenstein does not want to create another creature, not because she would be a woman and free women are scary, but because he learned from the first experience of creating a being, he now thinks that the first creation was a mistake, that these creations can be dangerous, they are horrible, and they should not proliferate. These are sufficient arguments (from his point of view), make sense with the rest of the important theme of hubris (it's in the title), and are given by the text. Another particularly weird part for me is claiming that she is promoting the idea that black men are sexually violent because the creature kills a woman in a way "that has been repeatedly read as an act of sexual violence". You have too many analogies in one go: the creature is not literally a black man (again, otherness is a universal subject), she is not literally reaped (physical violence and rape are also universal subjects and are interlinked, it is difficult to mention one without being a little bit reminiscent of the other), and it's a revenge, not an act coming from animal instincts.
I really love this video and it’s divulgence into more progressive and complex themes, and i kinda wanted to input some of my own thoughts bc this book has been doing circles in my head; I wanted to focus more on other characters that weren’t the Monster/Creature bc I’ve often noticed that when discussing certain themes of the book, there’s often emphasis on sympathizing with the creature and villainizing Victor, so I wanted to switch it up a bit. Really sorry about the length and any confusion.
(The actual yapping is in the replies)
Tl;dr: To say the women in Frankenstein are completely silent is a tad disingenuous bc Elizabeth does have autonomy and defies society, only is forced into submission by her non consensual and pseudo incestuous marriage with Victor. Victor similarly can be seen as rebelling against the marriage through refusing to create a female creation after recognizing that she may not wish to conform to a contract made before her creation. There is also an ableist element in how Victor was raised to suppress his emotions, causing them to be expressed in intense and overwhelming manners that are still demonized and lead him to hide certain secrets that would earn him the label of “mad”. It could also be connected to feminism and gender considering how it is often speculated that he had postpartum depression and was unable to adequately receive the proper care for his mental health. This is most supported by how Victor is at his happiest and healthiest when with Henry Clerval, who actively tended to Victor and did not undermine him emotions. There is thus a queer coding of the text in how both Elizabeth and Victor seek escape from the roles expected from them as the conventional wife and husband through these nonconventional relationships with Justine and Henry respectively.
Feminism:
While I definitely agree that the women in Frankenstein don’t have nearly as much autonomy as the men, I think it would disingenuous to imply that they are completely silent and passive. For one, Elizabeth, the most prominent female character and the one that most often gets written off as “the subservient wife” is actually quite proactive and headstrong in her own right. She convinces her father/uncle to let Ernest pursue farming for his happiness and benevolence, she defies him several instances (when seeing William’s body after he tried to prevent her and when she decides to visit Justine on death row even after Alphonse recommended against it) and most notably, takes leadership during Justine’s trial and is one of the few defending her in court when Victor stood on the sidelines. Her shift into becoming that more stereotypically feminine nurturer only occurs after Justine’s death, and it’s then when she realizes “Before, I looked upon the accounts of vice and injustice, that I read in books or heard from others, as tales of ancient days, or imaginary evils…but now misery has come home, and men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each others blood”. Following this instance, it’s important to remember that she was basically raised by her aunt/mom to be Victors wife and to take over the role of the mother after her death (“Elizabeth, my love, you must supply my place to your younger cousins”) and I kind of see Justine’s death as this turning point in her recognization of how truly stifled she is in her role as a woman in an unjust society and rather than trying to continue rebelling in futility, she shifts her perspective to trying to seek happiness the way it was taught to her, through her union with Victor (“my foremost hopes of future happiness were placed on the prospect of your union” -said by Victors mother on her deathbed). I think this is especially apparent when you compare the two letters she sends to Victor, the first before Justine’s death while Victor is at Ingolstadt and the second after Henry’s death and before their wedding. In the first, she is a lot more conversational, talking about the family, Justine, and even sharing gossip with him. In the second, she’s almost entirely catering to Victor and his happiness regarding the marriage. I think this really highlights not only that shift in her mentality, but also how, the way I see it, Victor and Elizabeth actually had a relatively genuine relationship as family, whether it be cousins or siblings, but the toxicity of their dynamic is more so created through their union in a romantic context. I think this is shown in how their dynamic completely flips following their wedding. When visiting Justine, it is said: “‘Yes’ said Elizabeth, ‘I will go, although she is guilt; and you, Victor shall accompany me: I cannot go alone.’ The idea of this visit was torture to me, yet I could not refuse.” But on the day of their actual wedding, Victor is constantly thinking of his own misery and Elizabeth has to conform to him: “You are sorrowful, my love, Ah! if you knew what I have suffered, and what I may yet endure, you would endeavor to let me taste the quiet, and freedom from despair, that this one day at least permits me to enjoy.”I understand the difference in time period may have had some affect in this plot point and maybe adopting kids or planning marriages since childhood was pretty normal back then, but Mary Shelley herself was very against the convention of marriage and ran off with her husband while he was still married to someone else. For her to portray a relationship in her book that is meant to be romanticized/seen as Victors better option as the very basis of convention and heteronormativity seems a bit strange to me, especially since multiple characters comment on it. Elizabeth herself recognizes “our union had been the favourite plan of your parents ever since our infancy. We were told this when young, and taught to look forward to it as an event that would certainly take place…But as brother and sister often entertain a lively affection towards each other, without desiring a more intimate union, may not such also be our case?”. In context, this could be more so commentary on the toxic convention of marriage and gender roles, by portraying two characters, who perhaps viewed each other as family and loved each other in that platonic sense, being groomed into a marriage that ultimately embodies a unbalanced and stereotypically heteronormative relationship that both characters feel the need to conform to and mutilates themselves to fit.
Viewing their marriage under this lens could maybe also add insight into Victor’s decision to destroy the female monster. I completely understand the sentiment that it was a sexist excursion and an example of his God complex, but I just wanted to raise a different interpretation of the way I kind of saw things. It is kind of going more so off the 1831 version, so sorry about that, but I guess it could be applicable to 1818. Anyway, when Victor is making the bride for his monster, he recognizes that this “wife” “was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation.”I think there is a level of subconscious selflessness and honestly empathy. It can be read as a reflection of how he and Elizabeth were similarly forced into marriage without either of their consent ever since they were children. In this scenario, he’s essentially putting himself in the position of his mother: tasked with creating a bride out of his daughter (??) to gift for his son, only this time, perhaps he realizes through the female monster subconsciously how his and Elizabeth’s autonomy were robbed from them in a similar fashion. Under this assumption, Victor essentially recognizes what his mother never did and chooses to spare his female creation the anguish of having to conform to a marriage enforced upon you since infancy.
Ableism:
The Frankenstein household is first and foremost nothing if not very gendered and societically conventional (or at least, an attempt to be). However, the ultimate irony lies in how the role of the emotional burden bearer that Elizabeth adopts is the similar role expected of Victor, and the one Alphonse attempts to keep pushing Victor into throughout the book. Being the eldest son, he’s the one expected to carry on the name, the estate, rule and govern the house shown in how his father wanted him to hide his own emotions for the sake of his family: “…but is it not a duty to the survivors, that we should refrain from augmenting their unhappiness by an appearance of immoderate grief? It is also a duty owed to yourself; for excessive sorrow prevents improvement or enjoyment, or even the discharge of daily usefulness, without which no man is fit for society”. When he is quite lucid, he is more concerned with disguising his mental state from others and his family: he, throughout the book, doesn’t care about his life or potential death, he is more concerned with appearing mad: “I avoided explanation, and maintained a continual silence concerning the wretched I had created. I had a persuasion that I should be supposed mad; and this in itself would forever have chained my tongue. I checked, therefore, my impatient thirst for sympathy, and was silent when I would have given the world to have confided in the fatal secret.” But the thing about Victor is that ultimately, no matter how he may try to be what his family wants him to be (a stoic, respectable and reliable figure), he is mentally unstable, irresponsible, and prone to emotional outbursts that his father especially wishes to quell; all of which were expected of women from society (ie. hysteria, fragility).Victor’s emotional condition is less of a mockery of “female hysteria” and more a societally demonized perception of it and by extension mental illness and emotions in general.
Whenever Victor does express his emotions or even discuss his crimes, he is met with people dismissing those confessions and believing him to be crazy: when he does ramble about his thoughts unconsciously, his father responds with “…I entreat you to never make such an assertion again”, to which he responds immediately with “I am not mad”. This internal battle he faces to assume the role expected of him conflicts with the truth that his true identity is anything but stereotypically masculine, and this grapple between himself and what he should be only increases his despair and distress and inability to ever convey his emotions effectively. This culminates in two notable affects. 1. He ends up hiding all of his pain and his secrets, knowing he will be met with condemnation and 2. When people bottle up all their emotions and are, like Victor, very emotional at heart, those emotions are going to need an outlet. Victor, who was never taught how to properly regulate nor express his emotions in a healthy manner, expresses those emotions either unconsciously and/or to such an extreme and intense degree that they completely overwhelm and control him (his unchecked ambition, his nervous fevers).
Under this context, you could definitely characterize Victor as another “other”, only while the creature is ostracized for physical deformity, Victor ostracized himself/is condemned because of societal prejudice and dismissal of his mental health (I do often hear of neurodivergent people who relate to him and the Monster, and I similarly do see a lot of myself in Victor, suffering from my own share of mental and neurological disorders). In retrospect, I saw both of them as being less of allegories for racism (but that is definitely applicable and valid, it’s very interesting) and more as allegories for ableism. You could also tie this back into feminism and gender as it’s often speculated that Victor could’ve been suffering from postpartum depression: in his inability to connect with his child, suicidal tendencies, withdrawls from society, insomnia, anxiety, inability to think clearly, and generally depressed state. It would also make sense when taking Mary Shelley’s experience into context. To sum things up (bc I don’t exactly have the most thorough understanding, I apologize), it was pretty awful. Her mother died giving birth to her and by the time she wrote Frankenstein, she had lost children of her own, both after birthing them and through miscarriages. Her half sister, the product of an illegitimate connection between her mother and an American man, was ostracized from society and condemned; she later killed herself while Frankenstein was being written. All things considered, the typical portrayal of birth and pregnancy perpetrated by media is really quite a sugar coated lens to view pregnancy. Media will portray it as the liberation of femininity or the answer to female despair, something beautiful and magical. Thus, Shelley’s portrayal of pregnancy differs from the norm: most stories end with pregnancy as the happy ending, but Frankenstein begins with it to truly portray its impact. Victor had this ideal of creation and giving life, but it was ultimately crushed by that exact realization of the aftermath: that he is responsible for the life he created and the grievances that follow. He wasn’t prepared for that: he was barely into his early twenties.
Through this lens, the stigmatization of mental illness and the general expectations placed upon new mothers to live up to the standard of caring for a new life could be applied to this book, and seen in how Victor constantly denies responsibility of his child to others out of this fear of appearing mad. Women are typically expected to remain constant and stable, and they are often chastised for being “hysterical”, especially in the way we have our emotions diminished as just “that time of the month” or “symptoms of pregnancy”. It’s not often that these emotions are allowed to be processed without society villainizing any expression of emotion, whether it be man or women: Victor never spoke up about his creation out of fear that he would be seen as a madman, he is disbelieved and deemed crazy in the book while in real life, he is considered whiny and his melodramatics are exhausting.
This concept of demonization regarding his emotions is made especially apparent when you compare how Victor’s dad responds to his trauma compared to how Henry Clerval does, considering Alphonse wanted Victor to essentially suck it up and be a man, while Henry, who actually went out of his way to care and make accommodations for him (“But I was in reality very ill; and surely nothing hit the unbounded and unremitting attentions of my friend could have restored me to life”), is one of the few characters who could draw Victor out into tranquility and happiness: “A selfish pursuit had cramped and narrowed me, until your gentleness and affections warmed and opened my senses”.
Homosexuality:
Another interesting thing about gender and the male power that often gets overlooked I feel is how Henry Clerval plays into that. Especially comparing Henry and Elizabeth, they really broke gender roles in their characterizations. Henry is very stereotypically feminine, in his compassion, loyalty, servitude and love for nature and literature. Elizabeth could be interpreted as rather masculine in how she is rather headstrong, outspoken, and critical of the justice system. Obviously I do not mean to imply that they rigidly fit into these labels, but rather that considering the time period of the book and present day, the stereotypical gender roles aren’t exactly followed and in fact subverted. In fact, both characters seem to be limited in their gender expression by their parent of the same gender that push convention upon them. Elizabeth’s mother/aunt wished for her to wed Victor and assume her role as the “mother”, and thus she is forced into the role of servitude and the emotional burden bearer, required to be subservient to a man she is supposed to see as a husband. Henry’s literary hobbies are restricted by his father, and he was barred from pursuing a “liberal education” on the basis that it was unnecessary for the occupation picked for him: that of a merchant/trader. Only where the two differ is that Henry managed to convince his father to accept his own passions and in doing so, escaped the confines of conventional masculinity, in a sense becoming some sort of symbol of freedom. Really, I think it’s intriguing how femininity is a trap for Elizabeth but an escape for Henry, and how Victor, who was forced into being a husband the same way Elizabeth was a wife, who was told this was what he should do by his mother and told that he shouldn’t express his grief by his father, is actually drawn out of this societal grip by Henry. Through actually accepting and working to accommodate Victor’s trauma, he essentially becomes a source of emotional safety for Victor; perhaps that is why Victor is more passionate when discussing Henry then he is about any other character.
Expanding on that idea of societal convention and minority voices, I believe it’d actually be rather integral to apply a queer reading to the text. Most notably, Victor is far more passionate in his praise and adoration of Henry than he is for Elizabeth (compare his reactions to their deaths: when after Henry’s he falls into a 2 month fever, is catatonic, and tries to take his own life while after Elizabeth’s death, he faints and cries and then decides to go chase after the monster). Really, the characters both Elizabeth and Victor show the most passion towards are respectively Justine and Henry, which I think is indicative of how both of the latter draw the former from the confines of a heteronormative society and the expectations that were enforced upon them (and the fact that they are the same gender adds more to that idea of rejection of convention). Victor, having learned since childhood to be more ambitious in his pursuit of power and control (in the 1831 version “And when, on the morrow, she presented Elizabeth to me as her promised gift, I, with childish seriousness, interpreted her words literally and looked upon Elizabeth as mine…all praises bestowed on her, I received as made to a possession of my own”), is far healthier and happier while in the presence of Henry. Victor often talks about how often Henry was able to cheat him into peace, draw out the better sensibilities of his heart, and revive him from the selfishness that plagued him, and Victor, who is more often than not quite egotistical, relinquishes a certain amount of that arrogance to praise and revere Henry’s kindness and selflessness (“Clerval! beloved friend! even now it delights me to record your words, and to dwell on the praise of which you are so eminently deserving. He was a being formed in the ‘very poetry of nature.’ His wild and enthusiastic imagination was chastened by the sensibilities of his heart.”). You can also draw this parallel to Justine and Elizabeth. Elizabeth was, again, required to mask her grief to conform to the emotions of the men (most notably Victor) and is passive in her subservience to them. Despite this, Justine is when Elizabeth is at her most influential and when she is most unbound by her expected role as a wife/mother/woman, being the one to tell Justine’s story, being one of the few to stand up for her in a court of law, forsaking her father/uncle to visit her in prison, and allowing her own pain and anger to be expressed - one of the only instances where she allows herself to be exceptionally and outwardly emotional and critical of society: “They call this retribution. Hateful name! When that word is pronounced, I know greater and more horrid punishments are going to be inflicted than the gloomiest tyrant has ever invented to stained his utmost revenge.” Of course, it is important that the characters that draw these traits out of them are of the same genders, as the passion they show for these characters is not only unprecedented and unconventional when viewed through a romantic lens, thus drawing home the theme of the “other”, but is further emphasized through contrasting these relationships to Victor and Elizabeths’ romantic union. During their wedding, Victor “…felt my heart sink within me. But I concealed my feelings by an appearance of hilarity, that brought smiles and joy to the countenance of my father…” and Elizabeth “looked forward to our union with placid contentment, not unmingled with a little fear”; a stark difference.
yeah that’s just what I think take it with a grain of salt through bc I’m just a mentally ill teenager but I would love to hear other thoughts bc I’ve been obsessed with this book for a while. Sorry if I said anything stupid or anything.
Something I've been on a tangent about for awhile are the people who praise Mary Shelly and then all of their context is from the movies or the kindle version that was heavily edited by a bunch of dudes.
The protagonist of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein is Victor Frankenstein. He goes from someone who believes he is a victim of fate and travels on a tragic journey to enlightenment and his confession at the end of his life saves.the crew of what would otherwise be a doomed expedition.
The monster was a monster. It had intelligence but failed to learn. We were not intended to sympathize with it. Regarding the books the monster read to learn language we have three tales that should have been all the information an intelligent artificial intelligence needs to know that his quest would end in tragedy and failure and yet he murdered and threatened his way to achieve personal, irrational goals.
The narrator is the closest thing to the voice of the author we can get in literature and the final word from him is that the monster is a miserable wretch and hypocrite who had nothing more to live for now that the victim of his abuse (Victor) was dead.
Lol, if you say so.
You seem male.
28:40 "burden of the white man". *rolls eyes* I'm not even surprised.
I made a similar argument on the feminist nature of Frankenstein in a college paper a long time ago, leaning heavily on interpreting the creature as Victor's Id, and adding that both Elizabeth and Justine die because of Victor's actions/inaction, and both are presented as somewhat maternal figures, with Victor creating the creature as an action of womb envy that allows him to eliminate women. And the final twist was that the story's ultimate receptor is a woman, this whole story in which women are constantly are being erased or murdered is being relayed to a woman, subverting Victor's attempts.
IRL almost every time i get excited to hear someone mention Frankenstein i get disappointed because i realize they're only talking about the universal horror movie
I'd even be cool with that if they wanted to talk about actual film analysis.
I totally agree that Shelley was inspired by first person narratives of former slaves. I'd also agree with her pushing back against huberist of European men, while showing the reasonableness of the women in the story. A lot of the other interpretation seems like it's reaching too far.
It strikes me like the interpretation of The Old Man and The Sea, where English scholars invented complex symbolism of the old man representing Christ and even stranger things. These symbols were their own invention, never intended by the author.
I think much of what is offered here is an invention, not in the book. The title reminds us of Prometheus and that he transgressed the gods and suffered for it. Shelley was concerned with men who would be more concerned about whether they can do a thing rather than whether they should. If anything, the creature today is AI and it's development.
Victor is repulsed by the creature's uncanny valley effect. He resembles a human form, but something about the creature's behavior informs him there is something wrong. Like bad CGI but alive. Interesting to me are the studies that show how most people react with instinctive dislike (hate) to autistic people. But these things are not what Shelley was writing about, because she couldn't have. Autism wasn't a category people could be put in and the uncanny valley hadn't been identified.
The point is, interpretation can find patterns that don't exist and that's why I'm opposed to it.
I particularly find it odd that you call out the creature for not thinking about his proposed "bride's" autonomy, but then critique Victor when he does consider it as being malicious. I'm not saying Victor's the good guy , just that he makes valid points that the situation he is in, could become worse if he follows through. Creating a female could horribly backfire for the creature too. The sensible intelligent thing would have been to stop and discuss this with the creature, but that's not how Victor operates. He acts without thinking things through or collaborating. He briefly broke his pattern and then went back to it.
In a sense, although Shelley did not have it in mind, Victor is confronted with the same problem AI developers are. Should AI developers allow their models to self tune? (This being somewhat akin to reproduction.) If they did, there's no way to know if AI will stay aligned with humanity. Victor faces this same danger in that a species more powerful than humans might not abide by their parent's promises. Victor can't undo what he's already done, but he makes one right choice at least by not creating this time.
I think Shelley built Victor to be what many in her circles would consider to be an "admirable" man at first, only to subvert it. I think that's also why she revised him to be less admirable, because people weren't getting the point.
I readf thisa novel almost 10 years ago, when I was 14, and u tell mee it could have been cool?! Whyyyyy did we focus so much on the landscape instead of this topics?????? i feeel like i lost my entire year, -.-
MISSED YOU
I don't know, i have a paper you might be interested in changing your perspective just a bit. Reach out if interested!
0:14 “snowflake students claim the monster is a victim” THESE ARTICLES ARE WRITTEN WITH PEOPLE WITH NO LOTERACY WHO DID NOT READ IT
it’s kinda hurt people hurt people but there’s a meme that’s so true of
“Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein was the monster wisdom is knowing **frankenstein** was the monster”
I drives me crazy that Poor Things perpetually gets compared to Frankenstein but not Pygmalion
Saying Frankenstein wanted to create a male-only immortal (we have no idea how long the creature would live) race is really jumping the shark there. And, yeah, no kidding he didn't have any apprehension about how the first creature would turn out because nothing had gone HORRIBLY wrong yet. It HAD when he was making the female. Why WOULDN'T he have second thoughts? Do you think if the monster was gay and wanted a male companion the Victor would just do it without a second thought about ANOTHER horrible outcome? Victor is being perfectly logical with these doubts in light of what happened the first time.
Yeah that part made me question the analysis coz my reading was that victor never imagined his first creature would even be alive. he was a dog chasing his own tail not knowing what would happen when he caught his tail. victor would be having similar thoughts if he was asked to create another male creature minus the reproduction¯\_(ツ)_/¯
also, I have not read Frankenstein. Call this low effort or off topic if you must, but I will speak of literature in general
compartmentalization, or the ability to contextualize things in some idealized or perfectly neutral universe, to possess the ideal of disinterest or detachment, is what lets a writer portray the vile or the hypocritical, the privileged, the apathetic, the monster within, with such abandon. The idealized intellectual has an ice-castle kind of dungeon, in which exist little worlds. And yet, the prejudices and biases innate in us, whether the fault of our time or our genes or society's groomin (hint, the finger points everywhere and nowhere, this finger of blame and responsibility),
these true colors Seem to come through. Only... the perceiver's biases are what tell the perceiver that, let's say, the author is too comfortable with the evil rather than simply able to relay it, to sympathize with the reader, and, charm their more base aspect into cooperation. So it's a bit of duality, I guess. Some aspect of this drama going on in terms of touching upon (historical or present) prejudice and (lack of) human respect and value, well, is good, and some is bad. As in the simultaneous horror and bliss... the perception of evil and the perception of the distance or difference. The Other being the bearer of the evil, forcibly, the scapegoat. the Pied piper aspect of the existence of villains in literature to begin with, the romantic idea that it draws the evil out of us. There is a kind of evil that does no evil, just as there is a kind of virtue that does no virtue. The negation of agency and responsibility... is that not the detachment aspect of literature's pocket worlds? So it is weirdly magical. A thing which each person experiences differently. Is literature's role an absolution or an indictment? It seems like that quote attributed to Nietzsche: 'virtue is offensive.' As in, the existence of good discomforts those who look bad in its light. The comforter hides the reader away, in the anonymity of being an outsider of this world. Yet the fictional world mirrors reality, and may even reflect back things entirely unwelcome. It makes me think of the (attributed to Buddhism) concept that we are to become fully awake, and that because we are partially asleep, we live tainted lives, creating karma rather than immediately ceasing from it.
So, to sum up (And please, I hope you simply read the following, because, the first part is like a rough draft, quite flow of consciousness or spaghetti-like)
I enjoy books that bring me near to, but still keep me safe from, those things I am afraid of. To me, either this is cathartic or empowering, preparation or a celebration of the privilege of living without the threats represented by the book. In short, books give me an experience of detachment, without me having had to do the stickier part of finding that detachment within myself, of doing the work myself. Or I enjoy the connectedness a book gives me, in that I identify with the psychology and drama within its pages.
The ice-cold detached writer (to my mind) can portray the themes of evil, even satirically, and yet looking back on them, the modern reader is an outsider and thinks the satirist is the villain for being familiar enough with the evil portrayed to represent it so wholly. And yet, do we not love bad boys? I mean, do we not prefer to think that the edgy things that tickle our psychology are good and will in no way bring us any ruin? Or to have the somewhat perverse freedom to not regard the societal implications of what we read, but to have an unbridled, unbound adventure and go on about our lives? The presence of good is a threat to bad, per-se, according to Nietzsche, when he said that virtue is offensive. And the cliché that the constant reader is finding their fix in the cartoon heroes in the story, or perhaps the cartoon underdogs, really must be correct, and that the non-reader just sees an addict of sorts, though an elevated one since literature is an ultimate refinement. Woe, the debauchery of literature! The scandal of higher cognition rendering microcosms of worlds. To be free is to be on the run in one sense, on the run from those who have it that the only freedom that exists is a perverse privilege, and that reality is unfree. "Riots are the language of the unheard" and the intellectual, and the writer, riot as well, though perhaps quietly, as, we compartmentalize. We learned to, so we could experience the good in spite of the presence of the bad. To learn how to craft a world that sustains us through times where there is no apparent silver lining, perhaps.
I apologize for the extreme length of this, but I felt that deleting some of it would just deny part of its truth. Or something. lol
MARY SHELLY'S MOTHER WAS MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT?
Noice!
😬 frankenstein doubts the creation of the second creature after seeing what the first can do.
you have to do so many mental gymnastics to tie this to feminism that its almost impressive
it still astounds me that shelly wrote the novel in the early 1800s.