The worm and the incel
My thoughts on Frankenstein :)
I’ve been thinking about how I want this newsletter and my progeny Cool New Book Club to interact, and my v1 thought is that I’ll write about book club discussion topics here. That way anyone who couldn’t make it to IRL book club has something to read and respond to!
The club’s first book was Frankenstein, and today I’ll be covering:
The Frankenstein main characters I liked most and least
Frankenstein: feminist?
Frankenstein x modern life
Friendship chaos in Frankenstein
Dr. Frankenstein’s sickliness
Sexual tension between Dr. Frankenstein and his monster
The movie vs. the book
If you, too, read Frankenstein and are overflowing with opinions and feelings, I would LOVE it if people wrote their own Frankenstein Substacks and sent them to me. Or hosted their own book clubs! (Here’s the list of book club discussion questions.) My dream is for this to all be very Open Source and Conversational.
Alrighty, here we go.
The Frankenstein main characters I liked most and least:
I’m going to focus on just the three narrators, for concision — here’s my power ranking:
Robert Walton: Sort of wins by default, because he’s never killed anyone, and he shows an ability to learn and grow. When we meet him, he’s on an obsessive quest to find the magnet at the North Pole — so basically, he’s looking for individualistic glory on the Frontiers of Knowledge — but by the end, he turns his ship around goes the eff home. His men want him to. He wants to see his sister. Growth! He probably mainly wins this ranking because we get to know him the least.
The monster: He IS a serial killer and I hold that against him, but he isn’t trying to hide it, and he can talk openly about his motivations and impact. It turns out I value self-awareness over not killing people?! I’m in danger. I also feel sympathy for the monster because a lot of his difficulties are not his fault — he didn’t ask to be born (and won’t let you hear the end of it!), or to be abandoned at birth. As Eminem would say, “Where were the parents?” A lot of this fella’s wrongdoing comes from a huge, curdled desire to connect and love.
Dr. Frankenstein: THISSSSS WORMY LITTLE GUY. If he has zero haters, I’m dead. He’s such an irresponsible and neglectful scientist, husband, and friend. A man constantly wallowing in self-pity about problems he caused himself! He is the king of self-sabotage and self-unawareness. Even on his deathbed, he can’t clock his greatest misstep: abandoning his creation when it first came to life. The monster never needed to become a monster, dude! No one has more deservedly died a virgin than Dr. Frankenstein.
Frankenstein: feminist?
I’ve heard that it is but I’m not so sure. Can a book be feminist if the female characters rarely appear, and when they do they’re like, “Eh, no big deal if I get wrongfully guillotined! 🤷♀️😇” ? I want more for them all—especially Robert’s sister, who spends the entire book being addressed and never speaking.
But I do think the core, unnatural “horror” of the novel is that a man, on his own, created a life. Dr. Frankenstein cracks immediately under the weight of that responsibility, like literally doesn’t lift a caretaking finger and falls ill for months. He only realizes YEARS later he might owe the monster some kind of guardianship, and even then he “realizes” murkily at best. Meanwhile IRL, women routinely create life and carry caretaking responsibilities, and often do a good job. (Though not all/only women, sometimes a bad job, etc.) The book brought that contrast into focus for me, which is arguably feminist.
Then AGAIN, Frankenstein doesn’t critique men in general so much as Dr. Frankenstein specifically. Other male characters would surely handle his situation better: his dad, Clerval, even the monster. (The monster would be a super-devoted dad!) So like I said, I’m on the fence.
One thing I definitely think is feminist is that Mary Shelley thought of this story and shared that with the world. It’s VERY strange! I support women being strange in public.
Frankenstein x modern life:
Reading Frankenstein in the present day, I felt like the monster was our first incel. I was struck by the parallels between his worldview and Elliot Rodger’s on a recent reread Amia Srivinivasan’s “Does anyone have the right to sex?” (loved her whole essay collection btw, banger).
The biggest parallel is that the monster and Elliot both blame their social rejection on their looks — but as Amia astutely points out, that’s probably not it:
Rodger was a creep, and it was at least partly his insistence on his own aesthetic, moral and racial superiority, and whatever it was in him that made him capable of stabbing his housemates and his friend a total of 134 times, not his failure to meet the demands of heteromasculinity, that kept women away.
I mean, YEAH. Yeah. For the monster too, his capacity to murder probably comes through in his vibes.
Frankenstein added to my concept of incels, too, because it made me consider that they might be lonely more generally for friends and human connection. The monster surely is. As much as I was disturbed that he asked for a “female companion” because she would be… literally a sex slave from birth… Frankenstein is also a very unhorny book. I think the monster’s request came mainly from wanting a family.
Could incels want that… too? Maybe the fixation on sex in incel culture (which I don’t know that well) (guys I’m coming out as not an incel) is spackling over some secret similar dreams of happy family life, or vibrant friend groups…
It could be more vulnerable to talk about those kinds of dream in public, because you can’t achieve lasting loving relationships with violence. So when you can’t get them, there’s no tinge of choice or agency. You’re not abstaining from crime… you’re just purely flopping.
A possibility! If you’re an incel who has read Frankenstein please write in with your thoughts here, genuinely.
Friendship chaos in Frankenstein:
Every narrator in Frankenstein has an intense relationship with friendship. These men yearn for friends and they also don’t totally get what friends are, which might be why isolation stalks them all throughout the book — almost like some kind of monster???
Like, here’s an early passage that kind of captures everyone’s issue. This is about Robert Walton’s dad and his friend Beaufort, who moved to a new city due to financial troubles:
My father loved Beaufort with the truest friendship… Beaufort had taken effectual measures to conceal himself, and it was ten months before my father discovered his abode.
Hm. Is that friendship or stalking?
And then here we have the monster seeing William, a brother/cousin/idk of Dr. Frankenstein’s in the woods:
Suddenly, as I gazed on him, an idea seized me, that this little creature was unprejudiced, and had lived too short a time to have imbibed a horror of deformity. If, therefore, I could seize him, and educate him as my companion and friend, I should not be so desolate in this peopled earth. [bold mine]
He proceeds to seize him by the NECK and strangle him to death. There’s a reason normal people don’t find their friends through a SURPRISE SEIZE!
This forceful idea of friendship also pops up towards the end of the book: Dr. Frankenstein tells Robert he can’t be his friend — Victor’s already “done” friends (weird but okay) — and Robert persists in calling the doctor his friend. It’s nuts! I wrote “rape culture!” in the margins.
On reread this all really echoes the incel stuff above. You can’t take a sustainable, reciprocal, genuinely caring relationship by force! To have a fun, caring friend you also need to also BE a fun, caring friend who knows the difference between socializing, nursing a rando back to health in the Arctic, and murder. (Some call these The Big Three.)
Clerval is a really good friend, though! Very nurturing to Dr. Frankenstein. Not all men, etc.
His name sounds horrible on the tongue, though… like an STD. CLERVAL, ew.
Dr. Frankenstein’s sickliness:
Listen, I trust almost everyone when they say they are sick. Dr. Frankenstein??! The man’s not sick. I know he “died” of his “sickness,” textually, but I’m pretty sure he has the same guilt-masquerading-as-fever issue Raskolnikov had all through Crime & Punishment. In my professional, medical opinion (I work in marketing but shhhh), Dr. Frankenstein would have lived a long healthy life if he had been open with or apologized to anyone he loved, ever.
Sexual tension between Dr. Frankenstein and his monster:
Is it there? They sure are always thinking about each other, and one is always chasing while the other one flees. In my experience (especially when the pursuer switches midway?) this is a sign of dysfunctional sexual desire.
BUT. I actually think Dr. Frankenstein is so intensely avoidantly attached to this life that he is basically asexual. And then I think the monster just wants Dr. Frankenstein to give him a hug.
The new Guillermo del Toro movie vs. the book:
I thought the Guillermo del Toro Frankenstein adaptation was odd. He clearly read the book — the monster ate berries, and no one but Mary Shelley thinks monsters eat berries — but his version of the story is full of people dying in gun battles and CGI wolf attacks. There’s so much conflict and fire onscreen!
This didn’t sit totally right with me. I thought the main message of Frankenstein was that violence can look like negative space, too — you can kill obliviously, by neglecting people out in the cold, and never even fully notice you did it.You just happen to be kinda sick all the time. You just randomly have an 8-foot monster following you around… so unlucky!
Q for readers:
If you read Frankenstein, what did you think? Did anyone think Dr. Frankenstein was a solid guy? (Guillermo del Toro sure didn’t lol.)
If you didn’t read Frankenstein, was this tolerably or INtolerably boring? I guess if it’s intolerably boring you prob won’t get down here.
Linxxx
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