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Yeah, I think the title says enough.
thyswanacrow
histoirepeanut
The really hilarious thing about Frankenstein that modern adaptations almost invariably leave out is that the dude wasn’t even a scientist.
Yeah, there’s that post going around about how he wasn’t really a doctor because he never graduated university, but here’s the thing: he wasn’t even studying science.
The text is explicit on this point: Frankenstein was a student of alchemy, not medicine. He thought he was pretty hot stuff because his alchemist cred impressed folks in the middle-of-nowhere town where he grew up, but then he enrolled in a big city university and everybody laughed at him, not because his ideas where too cutting edge, but because they were absurdly archaic.
Here’s these people literally forging new paths in surgery and germ theory and everything that would become modern medicine, and then here’s this punk kid shooting his mouth off about, like, vital humours and shit. How could they not mock him?
That’s where the whole “I’ll show them - I’ll show them all!” bit comes from.
Ok so I came across a theory before about how the monster wasn’t made from corpse parts. Think about it, the monster was somehow made larger than life, was made to custom order by Frankenstein, and it pointed out that the bride was made in some remote seaside Scottish shack, far away from any corpse sources. So victor using not modern chemistry but alchemy, which includes the idea of a homonculus, makes perfect sense.
Quite so. While it’s implied that Victor did engage in grave-robbing in order to obtain some of the ingredients for his creation, the notion that the Creature is literally stitched together from corpse parts is a modern invention; interpreting him as an alchemical homunculus is fully supported by the text.
I just finished reading it and yeah, it’s pretty explicit that it’s a homonculous and not a patchwork - he specifically states that he’s making his monster extra tall so that he doesn’t have to make all the fiddly bits like nerves human sized, they can be bigger. He’s making those parts from scratch, not taking them from someone else.
omg i’m really glad i found this post because i thought i’d gone mad and made up the idea that he was fabricating his parts through chemistry and alchemy but i do want to point out that while frankenstein was initially mocked by one professor for having studied alchemy in his youth, upon the commencement of his studies at university he proves himself a fast learner and more than proficient scientist.
“As I applied so closely, it may be easily conceived that my progress was rapid. My ardour was indeed the astonishment of the students, and my proficiency that of the masters. Professor Krempe often asked me, with a sly smile, how Cornelius Agrippa went on, whilst M. Waldman expressed the most heartfelt exultation in my progress. Two years passed in this manner, during which I paid no visit to Geneva, but was engaged, heart and soul, in the pursuit of some discoveries which I hoped to make. None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science. In other studies you go as far as others have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder. A mind of moderate capacity which closely pursues one study must infallibly arrive at great proficiency in that study; and I, who continually sought the attainment of one object of pursuit and was solely wrapped up in this, improved so rapidly that at the end of two years I made some discoveries in the improvement of some chemical instruments, which procured me great esteem and admiration at the university.“
the book is actually very explicit that it is his combining of alchemy and chemistry which allows him to achieve what he does. he achieves what the philosophers promised through the means the scientists discovered.
#the monster is also explicitly described as being beautiful #like very very pretty but with spooky eyes
hmm. frankenstein does state that he selected the monster’s features as beautiful, and he describes lustrous, black, flowing hair and pearly white teeth which “only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes,” which he also describes as “almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set” (dun here meaning “dusty grey brown.”)
but i dont think the total effect he is describing is of someone who is beautiful but with unnerving eyes. he also describes the monster’s skin, which was yellow, as scarcely covering the muscles and arteries beneath (a description i interpret to mean his skin was somewhat translucent), his complexion as “shrivelled,” and his lips as black.
the monster is repeatedly described as hideous and terrifying to behold. i think the idea is that frankenstein tried to create something beautiful and those efforts only succeeded in creating something all the more horrific (though something like the uncanny valley effect, i expect.)
so hold up are you saying that frankenstein’s monser is a replicant
If you like this, you should check out The Frankenstein Chronicles on Netflix.
I only watched Season 1, does it get better?