Incest In Frankenstein Is Not Always Literal But Often Manifests Through The Merging Of Roles--for Example,

i have something to say!!! about the differences between victor and elizabeth in the way they experience/express emotion, and what that means for the themes of gender in the novel

i briefly begun (began??) to talk about this in the tags of this post by the magnificent @frankingsteinery (i wanted to add this on to the original post but this ended up being kinda long) and i would like to clarify and expand upon what was said because i theorized a bunch of stuff unsubstantiated like an idiot 😭 raving under the cut

for context here are the tags that inspired my thoughts:

i left my little analysis in the tags because i was really just spitballing on the spot and when i do that i'm usually wrong 😭 but i'd actually find it fun to substantiate some of what i said w evidence from the text

to expand on my ramblings and robin's own additions in their reblog (with brilliant quotes that i did not even consider to search for because i am quite stupid). when i try to explain exactly how elizabeth and victor have differed in their approach to an early parentification role (elizabeth moreso in being groomed to emulate her mother in role and spirit, forced to remain domestic, unworldly, and unable to even entertain self-actualization, since the moment caroline dies she is the eldest female figure in the immediate family and must assume that role of maturity) (victor moreso in the fact that he literally. made a guy when he was like 20), i find this quote from alphonse quite telling:

"...but is it not a duty to the survivors that we should refrain from augmenting their unhappiness by an appearance or immoderate grief? Excessive sorrow prevents improvement or enjoyment, or even the discharge of daily usefulness, without which no man is fit for society."

victor immediately dismisses this advice as being:

"...totally inapplicable to my case; I should have been the first to hide my grief and console my friends, if remorse had not mingeled its bitterness, and terror its alarm, with my other sensations."

he acklowledges what is expected of him from society at large and actively claims himself incapable of it. he is not the reliable figure his family so desperately hoped could be upheld before they came to realize that he is really, irrevocably capricious and mentally unstable.

on the subject of the other quotes added, i think that in them we can see this shift in the family's perception of victor: they begin by expecting him to assume his prescribed role as the family's eldest man (besides alphonse cause he's old and useless) and caregiver, to be a stable and unshakeable foundation on which the family can always rely, but as victor remains on the trauma conga line and spirals into worsening mental health, the happiness of the family is reliant on victor's rapidly fluctuating states of health.

"Come, my dearest Victor; you alone can console Elizabeth..." (side note that after this quote he immediately starts taking about caroline, a bit of a freudian slip on alphonse's part in that he conflates caroline's very existence with a comforting and reliable disposition, and elizabeth is explicitly asked to 'take over' for caroline when she dies)

at the time alphonse writes this, henry (<3) has been purposefully concealing the extent of the "nervous fever" victor has suffered; alphonse is not aware of the trauma his son has undergone and how it has changed him, and so he automatically assumes that victor, upon returning home, now older and more educated, will embrace these expectations.

"'We all... depend on you, and if you are miserable, what must be our feelings?'"

at this point of the novel, however, elizabeth knows how mentally unstable victor is, and is begging him to come back happier than he left. everyone in the family at this point is so conscious and aware of victor's poor health, and thus his explosive and outwardly demonstrative emotions affect the family very deeply. in short their dependency on him shifts from perceiving him as a source of stability to perceiving him as a source of instability.

back to my original comparison!! jesus this is all over the place thank god i'm not an academic.

to reference alphonse's first quote that i referred to. it seems to me that elizabeth, unlike vic, takes alphonse's advice in stride. contrast victor's response to alphonse's quote with this description of elizabeth:

"She indeed veiled her grief, and strove to act the comforter to us all. She looked steadily on life, and assumed it's duities with courage and zeal."

indeed, she demonstrates this; victor often describes her as handling her grief in silence (literal silence, but ykwim):

"...a thousand conflicting emotions rendered her mute, and she bade me a tearful, silent farewell."

"...I turned to contemplate the deep and voiceless grief of my Elizabeth."

in fact, the only time she comes close to being as expressive as victor is when she blames herself for the death of william, and in part her extreme reaction stems from the fact that she percives herself as having failed the duty that her mother bestowed upon her - it is unmotherly to allow such a thing to occur under her watchful, feminine eye.

even in childhood they had a very stark difference in temperament, elizabeth's more traditionally and overtly masculine:

"Elizabeth was of a calmer and more concentrated disposition, but, with all my ardor, I was capable of a more intense application..."

and, especially for a female character, she defies the will of her father several times:

"At first I attempted to prevent her, but she persisted, and entering the room where it lay..."

"Soon after we heard that the poor victim had expressed a desire to see my cousin. My father wished her not to go..."

all this considered, i don't think it's much of a stretch to say that while it should be vic's role, elizabeth is the "man of the house" (a sexist idea in its own right, but im communicating this in terms i think mary shelley might have intended).

tldr i just think this is such a fascinating exploration of family dynamics in frankenstein, and a brilliant portrayal of two opposite sides of the spectrum when it comes to people dealing with the undue parental and familial responsibilities they are made to uphold in youth. the lack of academic attention these themes have attracted is absolutely bonkers to me. anyway elizabeth the girlboss and victor the malewife <3

go vicube go!! go vicube go!!

finger prints

this is what i was doing in 2022. frankenstein coffee shop AU but the creature doesnt exist its just clervalstein both swooning over the marine biology student (whose minoring in poetry) together. peak nonsense

i am thinking about how victor exists in a liminal space where he is expected to embody masculinity yet is repeatedly treated as something other than a man: he is caught between expectations and identity, unable to fully claim the masculinity he reaches for (or at the very least, is expected to reach for) yet not quite conforming to traditional femininity either. his existence is marked by contradiction: he outwardly pursues male-coded ambition and authority, yet is consistently denied the recognition, respect, and autonomy afforded to men. at the same time, he is subjected to treatment that mirrors the historical oppression of women, but without ever being fully aligned with femininity.

yet ultimately he does not belong to either category and instead oscillates between them, unable to find stability in one or the other, because he is both mother and father and simultaneously neither, a juxtaposition reinforced by his own method of creation. his horror at the creature’s birth mirrors a crisis of self--he has created something neither fully human nor entirely monstrous but an awkward inbetween, just as he himself does not fit neatly into the rigid constructs of gender that society demands

victor’s narrative, then, can be read as an exploration of dysphoria--not necessarily in the modern sense, but in the broader, existential discomfort of being forced into roles that do not align with one’s internal reality. his attempts to assert control, whether over life, death, or his own identity, continually fail because the world refuses to see him as he sees himself.

all this to say. victor nonbinary

forever charmed by the way ernest says "mamma" and "papa" as opposed to victor's formal "mother" and "father"

Emil Sinclair & Frau Eva

A consistent problem I’ve run into while discussing the novel Demian is the rejection of Emil’s relationship with Eva in favor and treating it as if it is nothing but a tool to analyze the relationship that he shares with Demian. People treat his feelings towards Eva as fake, imagined, and entirely as misplaced affections that he holds towards Demian and become quite defensive when told that isn’t the case in the actual text of the book. I’m no stranger to interpreting things in ways that don’t quite match canon, especially when they make me uncomfortable, and it is clear to me that discomfort or even disgust is how a lot of people view this relationship as given the age gap between them and the general preference for seeing Emil with Demian instead of Eva. I have no problems with that aspect of this little debate, discomfort is more than allowed and I’m not writing this to force people into liking the idea of their relationship.

What I am writing this for, and what I do find a problem with, is the way that people attempt to force an erasure of this aspect of the book and will accuse people of misreading the novel when acknowledging its existence. To say that someone does not understand the book or Emil’s character because they made reference to his love for Eva or his general affinity for mature women just seems to signal that there is a confusion of what the book actually says. Emil does love Eva and it is not misplaced love for Demian. From the moment he dreams of her to the moment Demian passes a kiss from his mother to Emil, Emil loves her. (That doesn’t mean he doesn’t also love Demian, by the way, but this post/essay isn’t about that, so I won’t be dwelling on the feelings he holds for Demian).

This is not going to be a complete, in-depth look at her character and role in the story and will instead simply focus on the actual relationship Emil has with her throughout the story and the ways that the novel sets up their relationship and makes it explicitly clear what sort of relationship exists between them. I feel it has been a massive disservice to her character to view her as nothing more than a woman getting in the way of a relationship or as if all of the quite beautiful descriptions of her person and effect on Emil are inconsequential and/or imagined, so I hope that this does some justice to Hesse’s work.

All quotes taken from the translation of the novel done by W. J. Strachan.

To begin, I will actually be talking about Max Demian himself, because Eva can be understood through son as he acts as a bit of a proto-Eva in Emil's life. They have a similar appearance, as it is often noted, they both bear the ‘sign’, they are deeply linked to Emil’s personal growth and relationship with the world, so to get a full grasp of his relationship with Eva it is also important to look at how he sees Demian and the key overlaps between them. So, let's look at one of the descriptions Emil writes of his dear friend.

This remarkable boy seemed older than he looked; he did not in fact seem like a boy at all. He moved among us more childish members of the school strangely mature, like a man, or rather a gentleman. He was not popular; he took no part in games, still less in the general rough and tumble and it was only the firm self-confident tone he adapted in his attitude towards the masters that won him favour with the other boys. He was called Max Demian.

Note how it focuses on his age and maturity, even though he is literally a couple years older than Emil, spiritually, thematically, he is older than even that. He is like a man, an adult. Here's a similar passage from another moment where Emil describes his friend:

I saw Demian's face and remarked that it was not a boy's face but a man's and then I saw, or rather became aware, that it was not really the face of a man either; it had something different about it, almost a feminine element. And for the time being his face seemed neither masculine nor childish, neither old nor young but a hundred years old, almost timeless and bearing the mark of other periods of history than our own.

Once again we see that he is more than a child, Demian is aged, grown, but not old nor young. In contrast to Emil who is youthful and immature, someone who has not yet begun his true journey. Here we also see a hint at there being a feminine element to Demian. Demian represents not just the fact that he is mature and capable of leading Emil through the spiritual journey he so longs for, but that he is not limited to just one world. He is not stuck in the dichotomy of light and dark, of masculine and feminine, of age and youth, he is both and neither.

Continuing the subject of maturity, we can take a look at the moment we share with Alfons Beck, a relationship that Emil describes with "we seemed to have a perfect understanding of each other" and, while a character who does not stay around long, acts as a mentor in the way he teaches Emil to grow up when it concerns sexuality and affections. It isn't long after this moment that Emil begins his venture into the world of darkness and almost loses himself to indulgence and excess of drinking and what have you, but it is clear from the later scenes with Knauer that Emil retains this personal growth surrounding sex and desire.

I heard amazing things; things I would not have thought possible were trotted out as part of everyday reality and seemed quite normal. Alfons Beck had already gained experience of women in his less than eighteen years of life. He had learned, for example, that girls were only out for flirtation and attention, which was all very agreeable but not the real thing. There was more chance of that with mature women. They were much more reasonable. You could talk with Frau Jaggelt who kept the stationer's shop, and a book could not contain all the various goings-on behind her counter. I sat there spell-bound and stupefied. Certainly I could never have loved Frau Jaggelt - but nevertheless it was terrific. There seemed to be hidden springs as least for my seniors, whose existence had never suspected. It all had a false ring about it, a more ordinary and insignificant flavour than love should have, in my opinion, but at all events it was life and adventure and I was sitting next to someone who had actually experienced it and to whom it seemed a normal thing.

By the end of this talk, Emil feels like a boy listening to a man. He understands that in this area he is behind, yet still is drawn to it. Alfons Beck is here, quite clearly, setting up and building upon the themes of maturity, especially that of women. This is very important seeing how it is one of the first times he is so explicit about his feelings regarding sexuality, and it is not by accident that this conversation regards mature, older women.

Another element here is that Emil points out that he finds more passing encounters, attraction without the intent to form a significant relationship, to be not founded in love - or at least the type of love he desires. I point this out because it establishes the idea that the types of relationships and attraction Emil is most interested in are ones that are serious and lasting. Quick, temporary connections excite him, intrigue him, because of course they do, he is a young man away from home and free to explore the world for the first time in his life and he has wants and desires. But, as we will see in his actions towards Eva later on, what he is most interested in a more true kind of love.

I'm going to hop straight to the painting next, as it is the real start of his relationship with Eva. There's a lot with the painting that I don't believe needs to be quoted directly so I've chosen a description of his realization of who it reminds him of.

Then one morning when I awoke from one of these dreams, I suddenly recognized it. It looked so fantastically familiar and seemed to call out my name. It appeared to know me as a mother, as if its eyes had been fixed on me all my life. I stared at the picture with beating heart, the close, brown hair, the half-feminine mouth, the strong forehead with its strange brightness-which it had assumed of its own accord-and I realized that my recognition, my rediscovery and knowledge of it were becoming more and more a reality.

He says after this that it resembles Demian, it was not his features exactly but there is no mistaking the fact that it was ultimately Demian's face. A motherly, matured woman version of Demian. This will later be seen to be the same description he gives Eva, even beyond the fact that he explicitly states that it is her as I'll quote later.

The effects this painting have on him are, as we all know, quite extreme and trigger many contradictory feelings within him. It is obvious that he worships it, he puts it on the wall in a way he can look at the face first thing in the morning, the same way one would look at a lover in bed upon waking up, he cries over it and clearly experiences intense lust and attraction towards the figure depicted in it. He also finds these feelings towards it revolting and terrifying, and would sometimes call it a devil and a murderer. At this point in the story, he still has lingering shame for these sorts of desires, even if he has begun to embrace them in some ways, he hasn’t fully overcome his belief that the world is separated in two halves and as a result views many things in extremes of both the most beautiful parts of the world of the light and the worst of the tempting world of darkness.

But for full context on this painting, we also need to look at the dream in which its subject appeared in, the most important dream of his life that he dreamed of night after night.

This dream, the most important and enduring of my life, followed this pattern: I was on my way to my parents' home and over the main entrance the heraldic bird gleamed gold on an azure ground. My mother walked towards me but when I entered and she was about to kiss me, it was no longer she but a form I had never set eyes on, tall and strong with a look of Max Demian and my painted portrait - yet it was somehow different and despite the robust frame, very feminine. The form drew me to itself and enveloped me in a deep, shuddering embrace. My feelings were a mixture of ecstasy and horror, the embrace was at once an act of worship and a crime. The form that embraced me had something about it of both my mother and my friend Demian and also this embrace violated every sense of religious awe, yet it was bliss. Sometimes I awoke out of this dream with a feeling of ecstasy, sometimes in mortal fear and with a tortured conscience as if I had committed some terrible sin.

Here we see Emil's most important dream: one where he is filled with ecstasy when embracing a figure that is a sort of halfway point between his mother and his friend. I'm going to share another passage from later, when he sees Frau Eva for the first time since childhood.

Sensing my interest in them, she took me into the house, looked out a leather album and showed me a photograph of Demian's mother. I could hardly remember her but now that I had the small photograph before me my heart stood still. It was the picture of my dreams. There she was, the tall, almost masculine figure, looking like her son, but with maternal traits, traits of severity and deep passion, beautiful and alluring, beautiful and unapproachable, daimon and mother, fate and lover. There was no mistaking her! The discovery that my dream image existed on this earth affected me like some fantastic miracle! So there was a woman who looked like that, who bore the features of my destiny! Where was she? Where? And she was Demian's mother!

So, this figure he dreams about, the figure he paints? It is Frau Eva. And we see here that, much like how her son is described as feminine, she is described as masculine. She also is inherently full of contrasts: daimon and mother, beautiful and unapproachable. Frau Eva and Demian follow the same pattern of being opposing natures who exist in one, the deconstruction of the binary and embracing something that is less easy to categorize. They embody the same ideals as Abraxas, of Emil's dreams.

Speaking of Abraxas and Frau Eva, here is his proper introduction to her as an adult.

With eyes moistened with tears I gazed at my painting, absorbed in my reflections. Then my glance dropped. Under the picture of the bird in the opened door stood a tall woman in a dark dress. It was she. I was unable to utter a word. From a face that resembled her son's, timeless and ageless and full of inward strength, the beautiful, dignified woman gave me a friendly smile. Her gaze was fulfillment, her greeting a homecoming. Silently I stretched out my hands towards her. She took them both in her warm. firm hands. "You are Sinclair. I recognized you at once. Welcome!" Her voice was deep and warm. I drank it up like sweet wine. And now I looked up and into her quiet face, the black unfathomable eyes, at her fresh, ripe lips, the open, queenly brow that bore the 'sign.' "How glad I am!" I said and kissed her hands. "I believe I have been on my way here the whole of my life and now I have reached home at last." She gave a motherly smile.

Eva makes her entrance quite literally alongside the painting of Abraxas Emil painted not long after he put a name to the face of the painting he made of her. He describes this as reaching home, incredibly important to him after he has been feeling so outcast from the home he grew up in. And he loves her deep voice, her quiet face that resembles her son's, and her friendly, motherly smile.

Eva and Abraxas, the god he worships and adores, are linked beings. This all builds on to the Demian and Cain, Eva and Eve connections. Eve the mother of both Cain the murderer and Abel the victim, Eve the woman born of God who spoke to the Devil and committed the first sin (which to bearer's of the Sign was surely not a sin), is now properly linked to Abraxas and it all feeds quite well into a similar theme. Eva is mother and she is home.

Eva is the origin of Demian, an embodiment of his ideals with even more maturity, she created the one who created Emil in a manner of speaking. She truly represents a world that is not divided into light and darkness, the very world that Emil chases after and wishes to believe in. It only makes sense, then, that he would find her so attractive and want her, desire her. By this point, so late into the novel, Emil is quite grown up, literally and spiritually, compared to the young, lost boy he was at the start. He has accepted sexual desires, accepted the world is complex and rejected many of the beliefs he held as a child, and he wants Eva the way any grown man might.

But, of course as we established earlier, Emil wants more than a passing encounter fueled by lust. He wants a real kind of love. And when he has gotten to know her and understand her as a real person rather than just a figure in his dreams, he writes the following, detailed, heavily romantic, filled with yearning and love passage:

On many occasions I believed that it was not really just her as a person, whom I yearned for with all my being, but that she existed as an outward symbol of my inner self and her sole purpose was to lead me more deeply into myself. Things she said often sounded like replies from my unconscious mind to burning questions which tormented me. There were other moments when as I sat beside her I was consumed with sensual desire and kissed objects which she had touched. And little by little sensual and transcendental love, reality and symbol mingled together. As I thought about her in my room at home in tranquil absorption, I felt her hand in mine and her lips touching my lips. Or I would be conscious of her presence, look into her face, speak with her and hear her voice, not knowing whether she was real or a dream. I began to realize how one can be possessed of a lasting and immortal love. I would gain knowledge of a new religion from my reading, and it would give me the same feeling as a kiss from Eva. She stroked my hair and smiled with all her warm affection, and I had the same feeling as when I took a step forward in knowledge of my inner self. Her person embraced everything that was significant and fateful for me. She could be transformed into each one of my thoughts and each of my thoughts could be transformed into her.

This paragraph here always sticks with me, the way his love transcends reality. It mirrors the way that Demian's existence is questionably real, that the moments he shared with the Demian family are somewhere fundamentally between imagined and real. Does she kiss him or is it imagined? It hardly matters, because reality and symbol are mixing together and becoming one and the same. These are his manifestations, these are his calls to the world to make his love true. And that love is so true in his heart he can hardly tell when it is real.

Also I just want to point out how cute he is when he's in love... kissing the things that belong to her, linking his learning and his growth as a person to her. It is similar to his behavior with Beatrice, in that this woman is helping inspire him to improve upon himself, but now it is not the desperate clutch to an unknown figure as a guiding light he can never speak to, it is a woman who pulls answers from his own mind, a woman who exists as a symbol of his inner self. Frau Eva, again just like Demian, is an extension of Emil's self and soul.

Alright, so I have now established Emil's feelings towards Frau Eva, but what of her feelings towards him? This following passage comes immediately after the one before

When I arrived back at H-- I stayed away from her for two days in order to savour this security and independence from her physical presence. I had dreams too in which my union with her was consummated in a symbolic act. She was a star and I was a star on my way to her, and we met and mutually attracted, remained together and circled round each other blissfully in all eternity to the accompaniment of the music of the spheres. I told her this dream on my first visit on returning. "It is a lovely dream," she said quietly, "Make it true!"

Emil tells her that he had a dream of the two of them in which they consummated their union (which, just to make this abundantly clear, means having sex. there is no getting around that fact) through a symbolic act of entwining around each other for all of eternity and Frau Eva tells him to make it true. She tells him, explicitly, that this dream he has of them making love is lovely and that he should work on making it happen in reality. This is of course a further extension of her trying to help Emil manifest a kind of mutual attraction between them through his extended longing and deep, honest desires. While she does not currently reciprocate the romantic affections he has for her, she is clear about being open to the idea of that one day being the case.

Let's also look at this bit, which is mostly about Sinclair's affections towards her but provides a bit of a conclusion to this theme of manifesting her love.

One day this foreboding came over me with such force that my love for Eva flared up suddenly and caused me great pain. My God, what a short time I had left; soon I should no longer be seeing her, no longer hearing her good, assured step about the house, no longer finding her flowers on my table! And what had I achieved? I had luxuriated in dreams and comfort instead of winning her, instead of struggling for her and clasping her to me forever! Everything she had told me about true love came back to me, a kindred stirring, admonitory messages, and as many gentle promises and words of encouragement, too, perhaps; and what had I made out of it all? Nothing. I stood in the middle of the room, summoned my whole conscious being and thought of Eva. I wanted to gather all the power of my soul in order to make her aware of my love and attract her to me. She must come; she must long for my embrace, my kisses must tremble on her ripe lips.

Emil is realizing that despite her encouragements and his continued love for her, he has never truly spent the energy required to make his love reciprocated. These things, him wanting her be his forever, him wanting to kiss her so much that he shakes, to attract her to him so that she desires him in the same way that he does her... those are the things Eva wanted him to manifest. Now, this also makes it clear that for as much time as they spent together (the book mentions that Max was out for long stretches of time, leaving Emil alone with Eva for the majority of his days there), they did not get to do any of the things he wanted so passionately AND that she had still be encouraging him to manifest this.

And does she get this message? Yes! She does, only there is The War starting and so she does not go herself to him, but she does tell him that she heard his appeal and to do it again if he should ever need her.

Now, let's talk about the ending of the book, about the kiss.

"And there is something else. Frau Eva said that if things ever went badly with you, I was to pass on a kiss from her which she gave me … Close your eyes, Sinclair." I closed my eyes in obedience. I felt the brush of a kiss on my lips on which there was a bead of blood that never seemed to diminish. Then I fell asleep.

Demian (who is made clear to be a hallucination or a purely spiritual being at this moment, regardless of what you believe his regular appearances are that of a real actual boy or a reflection of Emil's self or a mixture of the two. in this scene he is a dream-like being existing from Emil's mind here to help conclude the narrative) passes on a kiss that his mother gave to him. Eva wanted to give this kiss to Emil after all of those appeals he made for her love, and uses Demian as a vessel to give this to him.

Now I am absolutely not here to deny any sort of queerness in this moment, in the fact that it is not Eva herself who appears but rather Max. What I am trying to say is that Eva and Max are linked people, especially in the mind of Emil, and therefore it makes thematic sense for the boy who had introduced him to the world of the enlightened and to the woman he would come to love to be here in this quiet, scary moment and pass on a message from his mother. I am trying to say that denying that this kiss is even the slightest bit from Eva and 100% Max's moment is ignoring her entire character and a large, large portion of Emil's.

I could’ve gone on for longer, I skipped over the story she tells Emil of the man in love with a star and how that star eventually came to love him in return and how Frau Eva is his star. His last description of her before leaving for the war is about the myriad of stars glowing in the night sky and it is quite romantic, but I feel getting into the star symbolism in Demian would double the length of this and her feelings towards him cannot get any clearer than the part where she encourages consummating their union, which itself is still linked to the star story. This was all done taking passages I remembered off the top of my head and not a full reread of the book, but I feel like this does more than enough to explain my point.

In conclusion: never tell me again that I misunderstood the 1919 novel Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth by Hermann Hesse because I joked about how Emil is into MILFs. He is.

if victor is the creature's literal father, then by extension the female creature would have been the creature's literal sister. by choosing to break his promise and destroy the bride, victor is breaking the cycle of abuse by refusing to comply to the demand that he dictate a marriage between siblings, like his mother did to him and elizabeth.

i've noticed that some frankenstein adaptions that include walton (the only good ones ☝️🤓) choose to depict him as a naval officer (aesthetically, at the very least — one of my favourite examples is in the 2018 manchester royal exchange theatre production because well. LOOK AT HIM)

this phenomena is so interesting to me because he is explicitly Not that, textually

on one hand i get it because the correlation between polar exploration and the navy especially during the 18th and 19th centuries is there and makes sense; it’s an easy connection to make if you just want walton “on screen” and a visual short hand for the reason behind the type of journey he’s making (i.e. discovery service expedition to the arctic sent by the admiralty) without any real exploration of his character and the inner thoughts that he communicates to margaret (and ultimately the reader) through his letters

but walton himself makes the claim very early in his narrative that his voyage is entirely independent, and that he basically funded the entire thing himself (with a little help from his cousin, whoever they are/were). most importantly, because he was prohibited from going to sea as a boy by his father, he served on whaling ships for years to train himself mentally and physically:

Six years have passed since I resolved on my present undertaking. I can, even now, remember the hour from which I dedicated myself to this great enterprise. I commenced by inuring my body to hardship. I accompanied the whale-fishers on several expeditions to the North Sea; I voluntarily endured cold, famine, thirst, and want of sleep; I often worked harder than the common sailors during the day and devoted my nights to the study of mathematics, the theory of medicine, and those branches of physical science from which a naval adventurer might derive the greatest practical advantage. Twice I actually hired myself as an under-mate in a Greenland whaler, and acquitted myself to admiration. I must own I felt a little proud when my captain offered me the second dignity in the vessel and entreated me to remain with the greatest earnestness, so valuable did he consider my services.

his voyage is motivated not by any sort of command from above by lifelong ambition and self-interest. he considers what he can contribute to science and maritime navigation, which, granted, serves his country as much as it serves him; but to me it is primarily his passion for the sublime beauty that the arctic represents, even if the reality is much more dangerous than he could have predicted, that drives him forward. he needs to see it for himself, to know that he can do it, no matter the cost (sound like someone else we know?)

if i had to draw a comparison between walton and any real-life polar explorer from around the time frankenstein was written it would be william scoresby, an english scientist who began his own career on whaling ships (ironically he thought the open polar sea theory that walton espouses was complete bs — and he was right, lmao)

janice cavell’s article ‘The Sea of Ice and the Icy Sea: The Arctic Frame of Frankenstein’ has a lot more to say on this topic and i’d highly recommend it but i just have to include this extract here because i was so delighted to learn about some of the real people who likely inspired walton in shelley’s mind:

Here, then, was material for both the Creature's journey and Walton's doomed mission. Moreover, here Mary found a surname for her Arctic captain in the list of officers who served under Vitus Bering in 1733-41: Peter Lassenius, William Walton, Dmitri Laptiew, Jego Jendauro, Dmitri Owzin, Swen Waxel, Wasili Prontischischtschew, Michailo Plautin, and Alexander Scheltinga. Walton, the sole Englishman on this list of exotically named foreigners, was in command of the Hope (Müller, 1761:15, 26; on William Walton, see Cross, 2007:177-178). The ship's name reflects the most prominent characteristic of the fictional Walton, whose first name, Robert, may have been taken from Robert Thorne, the 16th-century originator of the open polar sea theory. Even though Walton's theories about the Arctic are opposed to Scoresby's, Mary may have intended to acknowledge Scoresby's status as both a whaler and a man of science when she had Walton train himself for his chosen career through whaling voyages.

like! the Real Walton’s ship being named the Hope and “the ship’s name reflects the most prominent characteristic of the fictional Walton” ohhhh i am NOT going to cry don’t LOOK at me

anyway this post doesn’t really have much of a point. i guess tl;dr i just think it’s more interesting that walton is canonically just some overly ambitious guy with big dreams and more money than he knows what to do with who is willing to hang out on gross whaling ships for half a decade rather than pursue the more respectable maritime profession because he wants what he wants on his own terms and no one else’s