#He has good reason to not like Krempe as much

[5-turtleducks-in-a-trenchcoat]

It will never not be funny to me how Victor just goes: "M. Krempe isn’t sexy enough for me, so I am not interested in what he has to say."

[eolewyn1010]

Dragging Frankenstein - Chapter 4

Onward and downward, but before we get down to brass tacks: I know Shelley talks her way around the actual process of making the Creature, but. The Creature needs to sleep, needs to eat, needs to recover from wounds - everything we know about this guy indicates that he's made of organic, "living" matter. So I will go with the traditional reading that all the corpses weren't just delivering reference material, but also building material to Frankenstein. Which means, yeah, I'm gonna mention the rotting issue, and no, I'm not talking of Victor's decaying morals.

“found even in M. Krempe a great deal of sound sense and real information, combined, it is true, with a repulsive physiognomy and manners” – ooookaaay, this is making me mildly sick. Although with the way Mary Shelley writes it, she strongly implies that Victor’s attitude is wrong, so I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt. (And kick the little shit against the shin.) DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR: 3

“two years during which I paid no visit to Geneva” – okay, WHAT. You don’t even go home for Christmas?? Your siblings, your father, your preciousest Elizabeth??? Egotist.

Ok, fine, he makes a lot of progress. Only serves to blow up his ego tho.

Not to be morbid here, but Victor studying the dead and decay is the first point where the story really had me in its grip and I fully bought into his dedication to science itself, not to the glory in it. Good shit.

“like the Arabian who had been buried with the dead and found a passage to light, only aided by one glimmering and seemingly ineffectual light” – ???? Is this something one should know? I’m kind of afraid to research it; I suspect some gross cultural misrep. Or is it Biblical?

How very practical that Victor has a morally sound reason not to share the secret of creating life, so nobody can ever confirm or deny his singular-in-history brilliance. DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR: 4

“how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world” – how does Victor manage to criticize himself and his own attitudes and still come across as belittling?

“give life to an animal as complex and wonderful as a man” – sorry, I have to. DAS GAY: 13

Hey, he’s not building a woman there.

Incidentally, a woman would get him to the way more obvious process of creating life; why is he studying corpses but not pregnancies? Is that icky to get his hands on or what?

“I resolved to make the being of a gigantic stature” – not to be gross here, but I think Victor fantasizes about getting absolutely ravished by a tall, strong man.

“having spent some months in successfully collecting and arranging my materials” – aw, what a sweet phrasing for defiling corpses.

“A new species would bless me as its creator and source" – DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR: 5

God-Adam-Lucifer delusion, go!

Also, a man. He’s trying to build a human man. From human materials. This is not a new species. It’s not an act of creating something that wasn’t there before. The original idea is the process of creation, not the resulting creature.

“No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs” – there’s so many things wrong with that. First of all, manipulative as all shit. Second, do you make a child to have them indebted to you? Third, with the homoerotic undertones of Victor desiring to create a beautiful man, this gets a very unhealthy one on the INCEST VIBES: 4

“renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption” – uhm. Isn’t that what he needs to do now, too? How do the parts for his man-in-the-making not decay further during the process? Especially since it’s in a tower room during the summer. The stench must be hell. How is nobody noticing him sneaking around carrying body parts and his room smelling absolutely horrible? Huh. People get up to some weird shit in college, I guess.

“tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay” – aw, he’s such a sweetheart. How comes he’s not missed at university? He’s probably not attending lessons anymore; how can he stay around?

“It was a most beautiful season” etc. – ok, how would he know? He says he’s not paying attention to anything. Shelley, that’s a POV error. And he doesn’t even reply to his father’s concerns. IT’S ALL ABOUT ME: 3

The attitude tho. “I then thought that my father would be unjust if he ascribed my neglect to vice, or faultiness on my part, but I am now convinced that he was justified in conceiving that I should not be altogether free from blame.” – okay, WHAT. 1st, robbing graveyards is very much a vice, Victor. 2nd, you are absolutely to blame entirely. 3rd, he’s right, you are neglecting university. Where does Victor get off painting himself in such a saintly light?

“if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquility of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Caesar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru would not have been destroyed.”

I. WHAT.

…I choose to be a highly offended historian about this, and move on. Also, because he thinks it’s so very simple to just apply his personal faults to all of human history and therefore solve all problems, this gets a glaring IT’S ALL ABOUT ME: 4

“But I forget that I am moralizing” – HA! I’m in incredulous giggles here.

“I shunned my fellow-creatures as if I had been guilty of a crime” …honey, you are. Multiple crimes, actually. And counting. Self-awareness whomst?

Whew, this chapter was dense. And so is Victor.