Frankenstein gay

This essay proposes to read one more time the issue of homosexuality in Mary Shelley's first novel, Frankenstein. I spent my early teenage years desperate for a boyfriend. The Age of Frankenstein, as the critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called this period in England, was one in which gay men suffered constant fear of exposure and arrest, which could result in a sentence.

On the one hand, queer characters have often been used as props to shock and revolt audiences — but on the other hand, horror has also allowed queer creators to express themselves more freely through the lens of metaphor and the plausible deniability of a genre whose whole purpose is exploring forbidden topics.

Frankenstein itself is entwined with queer history, too; James Whale, the frankenstein director to bring Frankenstein to the silver screen as wildly different from the book as his adaptation waswas openly frankenstein, and recent evidence suggests that Mary Shelley herself may have been bisexual.

This choice of career was inspired by another college class, one on nineteenth century science, in which one of our lectures focused on Victorian paleoart — a. Stryker mourns the effect this kind of hostility has had upon the trans community, driving many to suicide.

That was where the idea for the novel started: as an exploration of how some Victorian descendant of Frankenstein might go about actually bringing a prehistoric reptile to life. Mary, the protagonist of my novel Our Hideous Progeny and the great-niece of Victor Frankenstein, is a sharp-minded and sharp-tongued young woman desperate to make her name as a palaeontologist.

Mary, with her attraction toward other women and her desire for a career in science and her aversion to pregnancy and motherhood, is queer in many ways by Victorian standards, a perversion of all that nature supposedly intended her to be.

I was spitting mad, the first time I heard this interpretation; to me, it smacked of sexism and bioessentialism, that woo-woo way that TERFs and conservative Christians alike have of romanticizing pregnancy as some kind of feminine communion with nature, rather than one of the most arduous processes a body can endure.

Did Shelley, with her proto-feminist mother and her tragic history of miscarriages, truly intend such a reading? I tried on several labels over the next few years — asexual? Frankenstein itself is entwined with queer history, too; James Whale, the first director to bring Frankenstein to the silver screen (as gay horn different from the book as his adaptation was), was openly gay, and recent evidence suggests that Mary Shelley herself may have been bisexual.

I was freshly fifteen, slogging my way through a series of classics for English class, and desperate to be spending my time finishing up Buffy or The Vampire Chronicles instead. In many ways, although Mary is cisgender, I felt as though I were writing a trans character.

As for the monster, whose long monologues my teenage self had skimmed, his rage and sorrow and loneliness hit my older, queer self like a train. In arder to offer a new angle on the homosexual component of Victor Frankenstein's relationship with his creature when next teaching this most canonical Romantic novel, this essay considers Shelley's work alongside four film adaptations: James Whale's Frankenstein, Whale's.

Thus, to be queer at all was to be gender non-conforming, and to be gender non-conforming was to be queer. Pure nature vs. Some years later, armed with a perilous sort of self-acceptance and a brand new gender crisis, I revisited Frankenstein — and felt like Gay was reading a whole new story.

These words struck me to my core, and cemented my new love of Frankenstein forever. Like Victor, Mary is ambitious, driven, arrogant; like the monster, she is an outsider, prejudged for things she cannot control, vacillating between self-loathing and rage at the unfair hand the world has dealt her.

Queerness and horror have a long and complicated history. The first time I read FrankensteinI was unimpressed. Bride of Frankenstein is a dark comedy, filled with graveyard humor and an obvious gay subtext. I finished the book, answered my reading questions, and promptly forgot about it.

As portrayed by Thesiger, Dr. Praetorius is a screaming, effeminate queen who cringes at the sight of women and stares longingly at his male pupil. Gay realization of what that was came to me not like a lightning strike but like a creeping sense of dread, a series of helpfully informative Tumblr posts haunting me late into the night.

As Victor retreated to the wilds of Scotland to recuperate, I had retreated to the social sciences. I had feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn. The biggest exception to this literary erasure is, ironically enough, the most iconic and celebrated screen versions of Shelley’s work, Universal Pictures’s Frankenstein () and its sequel Bride Of Frankenstein (), both directed by James Whale, one of the few openly gay men in Hollywood at that time.

I found Victor Frankenstein relatable enough in the beginning; like him, I was a precocious read: terribly conceited student, determined to make my mark as a scientist. And later, when I realized I wanted to write a spin-off of the novel, I knew this was the perfect opportunity for me to play with some of those themes of monstrosity and queerness I loved so dearly.