#victor is his creator and while not necessarily his god the monster is HIS adam

[levitanias]

thinking about frankenstein's monster again, not anything in particular just kinda brain rotating him like he's the well liked side character of a bad shonen anime

[illuminopseudonymous]

From Calliope on Cohost

Folks in the thread know this obviously, but as a comment, yeah, this is basically the point of the book. Though, I'd say it's not Gnosticism as much as just, you know, the monotheist God. There's a reason the book begins by quoting Paradise Lost.

Less glibly, there are a lot of different ways to read Victor's guilt -- and in fact this is why I roll my eyes at the people who make fun of "well Frankenstein is the doctor's name." It is important, for a few reasons. The first is that the Creature doesn't have a name. Like, that's important. Second, it's the Creature -- the book itself never calls him a monster, very carefully avoiding loaded words for him. He has the chance to interrogate his creator and find that creator lacking.

You see similar vibes in Moby-Dick; like the first few passages where Ishmael says God is a poor craftsman because his creation -- the human body -- fails so often.

Anyway, reading Victor's guilt. I taught Frankenstein for several years, and I usually did three different broad readings. There are obviously more.

The first was religious, as above: Victor is a God, a creator of life. I wish I'd known more about Agrippa at the time, because now that I do I'd like to be able to teach more on how it's Agrippa that inspires Victor, and how it's as much alchemy as necromancy that he performs. But in general, it's Paradise Lost, a poem the Romantics loved very much: Lucifer and Adam both crying out that they did not ask to be born, nor to be saddled with unreachable responsibilities.

The second reading is feminist: Victor is a parent, and the Creature his child, except Victor is the only parent, which means he must be read as feminine -- and the book codes him in this way often. This is important because now we can read the book as a portrait of post-partum depression: Victor is sick and senseless after the Creature's birth, and is freaked out by the sight of his creation in a way similar to how many people who give birth can feel ambivalent feelings towards their new child as the depression sets in. We have these terms now, and they didn't then, but Mary Shelley may have had the experience for herself, and given the statistics, she probably knew someone who did.

This reading is even more complex because while Victor is still guilty, he's understandable: he's sick, hallucinating, half-starved; when he reacts to the Creature and accidentally pushes it away, he doesn't know what he's doing, really. However, after that one moment we can sympathize with, we see Victor close up shop and go home as though nothing happened -- as though he isn't now responsible for a life. And, of course, he's alone. There's no support structure to help him, so in that way, the world around Victor is equally culpable (which we see as it fails to aid the Creature in similar ways).

The final reading is queer: if Victor is coded as feminine at times, given the book's date of composition, that means we can read him as queer, not necessarily (or not singly) as a stand-in for women (1818 gender binaries, not only women have babies, so on). This is a very strong contender, because Victor is 100% in love with his best dude friend, Henry Clerval.

You know all the sorta kidding but not really readings of the second Downey Sherlock Holmes, that say Holmes and Watson are going on honeymoon and Holmes literally throws the woman out the window to take her place? Yeah, so Victor does that.

He's been "in love with" Elizabeth, a young woman his family took in, since he was a child. I mean, they were the same age, she wasn't a young woman when he was a child. Anyway, they're engaged, and he's been putting the wedding off to, first, make the Creature, and second, to recover. But when the time comes, he declares it's time to get married, takes a deep breath, and... travels Europe with Henry (who, I should note, took care of Victor when he was convalescing). This reads very easily as a man who thinks he "ought" to be straight but who isn't, who in all the good faith he can muster keeps trying to marry a woman he genuinely does love -- just not like that.

This becomes important to the Creature's story in two ways. First, Victor tells Walton that he chose each body part of the Creature with care, and that each part was perfect, beautiful and perfect. The Creature asks for a wife, so they can go off together away from humans and start a family. This means, and I don't want to put to fine a point on it, that the Creature can fuck, which means Victor carefully and lovingly chose a penis to put on the Creature, one he felt was beautiful and perfect.

Secondly, let's loop back to the Creature's request: a wife. Victor agrees, actually, and there's a grimly comical note where he travels Europe with Henry while carrying around a suitcase full of body parts he's taken from graveyards, which somehow never rot. He builds the lady Creature, she's finished, but in the mysterious process he uses to vivify her, to give her life, he stops, and in an excess of disgust he tears the body limb from limb and swears he'll never do it.

I don't want to expand this already-long post further with references, but Kristeva's theory of abjectness is important here, that feeling of having drunk rotten milk, that the horror is both external and internal. Victor's visceral disgust can't be adequately explained by his rational statements -- which mostly boil down to his belief the Creature is evil and that allowing him to propagate would end humanity. We can't believe that because those thoughts do not cause that disgust. That level of bodily hatred emerges from somewhere else.

This drifts us even further from Victor as the villain, because, now, we can hardly blame Victor for being closeted and irrational when confronted with the things that disgust him that he believes he must accept. But, always, underpinning everything, is the simple fact that Victor made a life and then abandoned it.

The thing is that there's not really any villain in Frankenstein. Victor is as much a victim as the Creature, but -- and this is important -- Victor has the agency that the Creature lacks, because he, Victor, is responsible for both the Creature's very existence and his own abject status. Remember he was basically forcing himself into marrying a woman he grew up with; he felt like he was marrying his sister.

And always remember, too, that this story is filtered, several times: Victor is recounting it all to Walton, a jackass leading an expedition to the North Pole who got his ship stuck almost immediately, and who is very likely going to die. The book is actually Walton's letters to his sister. Walton and Victor both mention feeling a sense of kinship, one to the other -- and unlike, say, finding the Northwest Passage or circumnavigating the globe, there's not a lot of conceivable use to going to the North Pole. Especially as Walton isn't a scientist, he's just a rich goober. He wants to be the first there so he can say he's the first there.

We're supposed to roll our eyes at Walton, see him get closer to Victor, and realize these two are fools. And then, hopefully, we remember that Walton dragged an entire ship's crew out into this ice to die, just as Victor ruined his own life, Elizabeth's life, and the Creature's.

In sympathizing more with Victor, we actually come to dislike him more. He is no longer a villain but a fool, doing things because he can, and failing entirely to think of the consequences.

And that's why, to me at least, it's important to differentiate the book's dark mirror held up to Christianity from what we know of Gnosticism: the demiurgos is often cast as a villain, but with there being no discernible reason for existence itself, the buck must be passed further on. According to the book, God, the monotheistic One, itself, is a fool leading innocent people, Creatures and sailors, into a lonely death in a field of ice.

I don't actually think Shelley believed that, at least not when she first wrote the book. She may very well have indulged in those thoughts later, as her husband and children all died one by one, and the 1837 edition of Frankenstein is notable for how the revisions make things more dire, more depressing, and more inevitable. The 1818 edition hinges more on accident, offering the possibility of better outcomes. But the book itself, as a gothic novel, unsettles exactly insofar as it questions one of the core beliefs of cultural monotheism: God is good, and God made the world, and the world is therefore good. Perhaps it's neither good nor bad, but a Creature made in a moment with no thought for anything beyond wondering whether it's possible.

[omilicevic2025]

Frankenstein Entry 18: (2/6/22)

Theme: Where’s God? 

This theme is probably the most important out of all 3 themes for this entire novel. After reading Mary Shelley’s introduction, there was one thing that she said that really struck out to me. 

“Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.” (Shelley, Appendix I, pg 350-1)

When Mary Shelley said this about her nightmare, I personally can see why this tale is more frightening and I can truly see more of God’s power and judgement within the story. While he isn’t necessarily present, it is almost as if he was there the whole entire time with Victor and the creature. 

I believe God doesn’t give us whatever we desire. I think that when we pray for things that we want like beauty or wisdom, he gives us two paths to choose from, one leads to another path that gets you closer to your desires, but the other path leads you in the opposite direction. He continuously will give us opportunities to ask ourselves “Do I really want this?” 

He gave these two paths to Victor, but Victor kept going down the wrong path which gave Satan the better advantage of consuming his mind of selfish pride, misery, and fear which damaged him and the creature more and more as time went on.

I also believe that the paradise lost moments help gave us an idea more as to how powerful God really is when one goes against his words. He cast Lucifer out of heaven, and he cast Adam and Eve out of the garden of Eden. Did he stop protecting Victor after he mocked His work and abandoned his own creation? 

As benevolent as God is, I don’t think He even could protect the creature well enough from the evils of mankind. The creature is a sinful piece of work made by man that goes against the laws of nature, but I believe He still gave the creature the feeling of hope and the ability to learn but he couldn’t protect him from becoming what Satan wanted him to become, an angry miserable monster.

Satan was said to be bitter of those who were happy, could Satan be playing in the role of making Victor become a madman and the creature lose his kindness and benevolence for others?

I believe that is the case. Satan has always wanted to corrupt the minds of people so they couldn’t be able to speak up to God and ask for help or forgiveness. 

My mother has always said,” If the devil can’t make you evil, he will keep you busy.”

That phrase is a good mix of both Victor and the creature falling victim to Satan’s dark power.

[youareenoughphan]

Hmm. Okay. As he's gaining more knowledge he continually compares his situation to that if adam's and lucifer's. Yet, he does not refer to himself as having the same creator. The sheer sense of isolation there is astounding. His creator was man, not god, so he is imperfect. Yet aren't we imperfect? Are we not the children of man and the children of God (if you're christian)? Also, I feel like it's important that he doesn't refer to victor as his father. While men and women can "create" children, the monster has not been created in the "normal" way; but does this necessarily negate his humanity, or victor's fatherhood? I think he only sees himself as different, but essentially he is a human. It's upsetting to see a character feel so separate from their sense of humanity, although given his profound isolation, sense of difference, and rejection from birth, his feelings are understandable. Don't we all feel different sometimes? Anyway, many thoughts, head jumbled, also I'm only halfway through so I'll probably have different opinions by the end

Oh god I'm yelling. One of the first books frankenstein's monster ever read was was the sorrows of young werther. This explains so much aslddjsljfls