#(definitely agree on jonmina obviously)

[vickyvicarious]

Yes while Victor DID dream of kissing his cousin on the lips, when awake he doesn't seem to be maintaining this kind of romantic feelings that much. Maybe partly due to this being said in retrospect, or maybe because he doesn't really see her as a romantic partner. I haven't read many books with romance in them lately to compare (been reading Moby Dick, 20k Leagues, Jekyll And Hyde) but comparing the, contrary to popular belief, evident attraction between Jonathan and Mina, or between Marcus and Cosette (though in a different context) it reads are less romantic to me.

To be honest, I forgot about any such scene. So I looked it up, and, well...

At length lassitude succeeded to the tumult I had before endured; and I threw myself on the bed in my clothes, endeavouring to seek a few moments of forgetfulness. But it was in vain: I slept indeed, but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel.

Yeah, there's a reason this scene didn't stick in my memory as 'Victor dreams about kissing Elizabeth' so much as 'Victor has pretty revealing nightmares about the things on his mind'. This kiss doesn't seem romantic to me at all.

Elizabeth is very clearly overlapping his mother here - quite literally, she turns into her. I think that points to a couple things.

First, Elizabeth greeted with a first kiss = Victor meeting his mother's final wishes (on her deathbed some of the final words were that she had always hoped to be made happy by seeing Victor and Elizabeth married).

And yet his kiss is the kiss of death, killing her = reflecting Victor's horror over what he's done, the Creature he created being something monstrous to his eyes (also foreshadowing how his relationship to her will put her in danger along with his other loved ones, but that's meta knowing how things with him and the Creature turn out)

Elizabeth becomes his mother's corpse as she dies = again the preoccupation with his mother. One of his stated goals was to eventually master bringing back the dead, and he embarked on this study not long after her death, so the link there feels pretty easy to make for me. After his 'failure' to make the beautiful human he imagined this now seems out of his reach too, and he's still grieving.

He wakes up shuddering and then Creature is looming over him... it all ties in much more to his feelings about what he has just done than his feelings about/for Elizabeth, in my eyes. The happy impulse doesn't read to me like genuine romantic feelings but more just the idea of a happier reality (the one his mother longed for).

I mean, Frankenstein is definitely not a romance, but neither are Dracula and Les Miserables. But they feature a romantic relationship, whereas in my opinion the role of Elizabeth and Victor's relationship is much more bound up in ideals and expectations and familial love than anything romantic.