v. frankenstein is a transsexual butch

Also if you haven’t read/watched it already, I think you would like The Summer Hikaru Died. It’s a manga/anime about grief, life, and love. It’s similar in many ways to Frankenstein, but at the same time is very different. All the characters are also very nuanced. The queer themes are woven into the narrative beautifully, and Yoshiki is canonically gay. It’s a queer story, but it isn’t a romance. A lot of people here ship Yoshiki and Hikaru, but they canonically have an undefined/qpr type of relationship that’s really lovely to see

the relationship of henry clerval and victor frankenstein is doubtlessly drowned in queer subtext. however, i would not personally say that their care or "softness" for each other is something that can quite serve as evidence for an implied romance; such a notion, i believe, is one that does devalue the care that is within friendship. it is only sensible for one's closest companion to choose to care of them when they are disabled, and for them to talk of said companion with tenderness. additionally—though more nitpicky of me—i don't think it's "clear" that victor views elizabeth familially; i do believe he does on a subsconscious view her as family as opposed to romantic partner, despite having been arranged to marry, however his perception is to wrapped in their grooming for this fact to be particularly obvious (and when it comes to writing, this is a good thing).

clerval's character is sometimes interpreted as mary shelley's idealised version of percy shelley during and after her pregnancy(/ies). by extension, victor is sometimes interpreted as mary shelley herself. analysing fiction with too much biography—especially by woman writers—is a mode i tend to discourage as more often than not it appears to be a mad scramble to figure out which figure of x author's life is secretly the fictional character they wrote, but percy shelleyan figures are not uncommon in the stories which MWS wrote (in frankenstein, it is arguably both clerval and victor but we focus on clerval for now). in both frankenstein and her later work, The Last Man, which is more intentionally "autobiographical," these figures are the companions of a character who appears to lean to being more like mary shelley, despite these characters also being male themselves. thus, undoubtedly, it would be considered rather queer when two fictional characters of the same sex are based off married people.

shelley's own queerness as bisexual—in the terminological assumption of the 21st century—is something that could have very well easily influenced her work, yes. i once had a friend, who is now too busy with the tumult of life to keep in contact now, who said there was evidence of gender queerness with her as well, and had supplied some primary sources and essays to it. regrettably i am unable to locate them now, and might be speaking with hazy memory. take it with a grain of salt. girlenstein forever. (in the analysis of transfemininity in frankenstein, we argue that clerval takes the role of The Husband, but i digress.)

departing from biographical application, there is not a lack of allusions to "romantic" tales when it comes to clerval and victor in the novel. only two come to mind immediately at this moment: quoting leigh hunt's The Story of Rimni—which is about the love of The Divine Comedy's paolo and francesca despite francesca's loveless marriage—in regards to henry clerval ("He was a being formed in the “very poetry of nature.”"), alongside the 1831 revision which, though i do not quite like as much as the original 1818 editions, alludes to the symposium and the myth of the circular man:

we are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves—such a friend ought to be—do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures. I once had a friend, the most noble of human creatures, and am entitled, therefore, to judge respecting friendship.

this allusion is one that i've "written" more about in this post.

there’s an implicit link here between femininity and disability here that i resent (because that is what this typically boils down to: equating victor's physical illness with being stereotypically "girly"). victor is, in a way, feminized in-text, and yes, it is in part because of his illness, due to the historical context, but beyond that it’s so much more, and in so many more complex and interesting ways: it is the birth metaphor, his failing to uphold traditionally masculine values, his general lack of autonomy and of any meaningful way to change his circumstances, the gendered oppression for his "feminine" emotional demonstrativeness, having to rely on a man to preserve his narrative voice, etc.

it is true that victor frankenstein experiences moments of genuine physical weakness, as described by walton or even victor himself, namely his nervous fevers and long convalescences. but these moments do not inherently make him frail nor feminine. the persistence of this idea reflects a broader cultural discomfort with illness, particularly when it comes to male characters, and a deeply ingrained habit of framing symptoms of disability or physical vulnerability through femininity. in short, illness becomes effeteness, and effeteness becomes weakness

however!! i'd make argument that, in order for this concept of the Being being the Pinnacle of Masculinity to follow through the novel, a transfeminine reading would apply easier; as we look at the events of the book, isn't then the Spectre Of Idealised Masculinity then Haunting victor until he reaches his deathbed? i feel that is a more transfeminine kind of horror, if that makes sense. victor spends years of his life haunted by Masculinity and its ruins his entire life.

you try in vain to create the most Perfect Man one can be but you fail because you fundamentally cannot achieve that and now it is a deformed broken masculinity that YOU cannot bring yourself to look at anymore and you run from it and it chases you and chases you and chases you until you technically die because of it. and then it kills itself also. Well ok.

and now my friend:

obviously very patriarchal families something something. though you were the one to give birth to me, i am a man and you are not and i have more power than you.

when the traditional literary idea of the house as a symbol for childhood is applied to the house of frankenstein, the symbol mutates into representing the incestuous marriage of frankenstein & elizabeth lavenza; it was in the childhood, within the walls of this house, their marriage arrangement was first conceived. in this same geneva estate hangs alphonse's commisioned portrait of caroline beaufort—a woman groomed into a pseudo-incestuous marriage—kneeling over her father's deathbed. if the frankenstein house is a symbol of incest, victor's avoidance of the home becomes analogous to the repulsion of said incest.

in order to understand the extent of the house's symbolism, it need be acknowledged that there are main two houses constructed in the novel, not only one. this part of my analysis—on the duality of the geneva house and the belrive house—is a part my beloved friend @frankingsteinery helped expand into this on my initial concept of the house, so let any talk of duality in specific is from her analysis in specific. the geneva estate and the belrive retreat function as the two poles of domestic experience (the structured versus the natural, the arranged versus the felt). as aforementioned, the geneva house is the birthplace of the marriage and where the portrait is hung, etc. by contrast, the belrive house is a more idyllic space, as victor describes it as traveling there to be "particularly agreeable" and his "principal residence," in part because it is located a league away from the city, which victor emphasizes is not his scene since right after saying this he highlights his reservation of strangers.

elizabeth's position in the frankenstein family and in regard to her relationship with victor also mirrors this duality of houses: they fluctuate between two homes, much like how she fluctuates between the roles of daughter, sister and wife. elizabeth’s identity, like the family’s notion of “home,” is split, never fully realized as one or the other. she inhabits all of these roles simultaneously and thus becomes the living embodiment of the house’s doubleness.

victor, in turn, eventually flees from both. if the house is a symbol of the incestuous marriage, victor's pursuit of science at ingolstadt can be seen as a flight from elizabeth's dual identity, and therefore from the incestuous fusion of sister and wife that the two houses represent. he cannot bear to occupy either domestic sphere without being implicated in that conflation.

when frankenstein does eventually make his journey homewards from ingolstadt, after having been informed of william's death, he mentions that although he initially "wished to hurry on (...) when I drew near my native town, I slackened my progress." the fact that victor actively avoided returning home was stated already, but this delay stands out from his previous reasons for delay; the specific idea of being closer to his native town—where the house stands—seems to be the reasoning of his slowing.

of course, victor directly attributes his slackening to the assumed small but many changes his town could have undergone in his six years of absence, asking the rhetorical "How altered every thing might be during that time?" however, this question is quickly followed by:

Fear overcame me; I dared not advance, dreading a thousand nameless evils that made me tremble, although I was unable to define them.

as these two lines sit closely in the text, this may be interpreted as only an extension of victor's aversion to the potential alterations of the town. however, the amount of fear—of which victor apparently was "unable to define" as well—turns his words into something that seems to be more than only an expression of aversion to change. undoubtedly victor's apparent fears partially remain that aversion and could have also, in the doylist sense, been written to act as a foreshadowing of the Being's imminent arrival but! victor, at this point of the story, has forgotten about the Being completely. this is vital to keep in mind. thus, with the Being out of question, the source of this fright might in truth be the subconscious repulsion of the house frankenstein is nearing, the aversion to going back to the home where the marriage to the dual-identity'ed elizabeth lavenza had been arranged and would soon be officiated in.

either way, arguably the fear of marriage and the fear of change can go hand in hand; marriage, especially during a time period that had expected families to emerge out of it (victor would then be expected to commit sexual incest to have children), is a drastic change to one's life.

victor remains in lausanne for two days instead of continuing with his journey in order to delay. when he begins his travels again, he continues to speak of how his mood worsens as he goes nearer and nearer to the geneva house, saying that as he "drew nearer home, grief and fear again overcame me." as day turned to night, with gloomy mind victor claims to have foreseen then that he was "destined to become the most wretched of human beings". as this narrative is the production of victor retelling his life's story to robert walton, victor thusly claims this foreseeing to be related to the Being's destruction of his life, saying afterwards that he has "prophesied truly". the point will be restated that victor, at this point of the story, was unaware of the Being—not even yet assuming him to be william's murderer. once again, the repulsion of the incestuous marriage symbolised by the home frankenstein approaches comes into play; when victor arrives, soon he will marry. soon he will be expected to have children—soon he will be expected to commit the act of incest imposed upon himself and elizabeth by caroline in recreation of her own abuse, the act victor had tried to flee from via the creation of the Being in attempts of asexual reproduction. that was what victor had subconsciously thought would make him wretched, back then.

Dracula Daily can be for anything in the public domain.... so why not some non-fiction? LEF will send out, approximately weekly, a letter (of varying length) relevant to the French Revolution on the relevant date. We will begin on 14 Juillet 1789 and slowly make our way to 1794. People can hop on and off the train at any time, and "necroposting" is completely fine.

You can participate by:

subscribing to the Substack (salutpublic.substack.com)

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interacting with other people's posts

submitting letters you want to see to this Tumblr with an ask (please do this hehehe)

Because of the long cycle of this subscription, every new month there will be an "off-season" letter, which can be from any point in the French Revolution, or outside within reason, so you can expect four regular letters and one additional letter every month.