Sappy do you remember what the bad take about Frankenstein and Mary Shelley was please spill
found the post. to be fair to them. not the most egregious thing said on this post, but they did endorse the rest of it so.
ignoring "horny frat boys" being an insane way to describe percy, byron, and polidori, not to mention poor fucking claire lmao. theres a pervasive issue of people really wanting mary shelley's life and career to be a story of a woman being greatly underestimated and silenced by her (male) peers but persevering nonetheless and this idea is generally pushed in popular culture and by some ill informed biographers to the point that it is just no longer reflective of her actual experiences. i think people forget a lot that mary shelley existed in radical circles that, while not devoid of misogyny, had moved past the idea that women shouldn't have opinions and be writing and have lives outside of their relationships with men and who certainly were not discouraging her from pursuing a career in writing. she was deeply admired for being the daughter of wollstonecraft and godwin and then as a writer in her own right, and i think its sad that this idea that she was discouraged from pursuing writing by the men in her life, especially by her husband, is so pervasive because one of the most interesting things about her social group to me is the creative relationships built among them. people joke a lot that percy shelley is just remembered as the wife of the author of frankenstien as a diss on him but everything he is on record saying about her work implies that he would be fucking honored. they had a deep creative partnership and mutual admiration for one another's work that was much stronger than even their romantic relationship and its deeply frustrating how that is often disregarded and put down because people are so fixated on this stereotype of how they think 19th century women should exist that they dont let themselves engage with what her life was actually like.
also i dont even fucking like polidori but why are we acting like he didn't as part of this competition LITERALLY invent the modern vampire. like hello.
Wasn't her peer group full of horny frat boys
no. it was full of adult men, many of whom were bullied in school and would have been entirely unwelcome in fraternities.
who were constantly having parties
not unless by "parties" you mean "quiet boat rides in the morning" or "group literary analysis in the evening".
she mentioned that there's this writing thing and vaguely insinuated that they wouldn't be able to do it
fact check: false. Byron was the one who proposed the writing competition. also, others present were already published authors, and the concept of writing was new to none of them, as they were literally only gathered because of their literary accomplishments.
Mary Shelley finally had time to write about this idea she had dreamed about
fact check: false. Mary Shelley struggled to come up with an idea for days/weeks before having a "waking dream" about one scene that she then built a story around.
without some dumb horny boy trying to tell her how women should be in his bed instead of writing
again, not "dumb horny boy(s)", intelligent men (i cannot speak to their libido).
Byron was notoriously horny to the point that I think everyone sort of assumes all the people who hung out with him were also that horny, and also that they probably had sex with him. Some of them did! But with others there's no real way of knowing and all we have to go on is gossip, which of course is not reliable.
Anyway Mary Shelley spent two years living with Percy while he was still married. This was absolute social death for a woman at the time. Anyone who thought women shouldn't write would already have cut her out of their circles for being a married man's mistress. These were not people whose opinions she cared for, nor would most of them have bothered trying to tell her what to do, given how thoroughly she'd rejected their rules.
