Ok, I suppose this is an unpopular opinion:

I do think this book is, in part, a love story. Terrible, awful, abusive people can still experience love. It is one of the messy truths of the human experience, I fear. Just bc the lovers in question are fantastically horrific to each other and others doesn’t mean they didn’t have a love story. They did. But there’s a reason why we call it a “compelling but toxic af love story the likes of which I hope never finds me,” and NOT “the greatest love story of all time” or whatever. We certainly don’t classify it as a romance by today’s genre standards. Love story, yes. Romance by modern definitions, no.

I know a lot of folks will disagree with me and that’s okay!

(These musings brought to you by me reading about Cathy & Heathcliff running wild across the moors as children & becoming devoted to each other more and more over time 🫶🏽)

I could write a whole essay on the gender dynamics and commentary within this book (and I probably will once I reread the whole section with Justine), but I also do wanna point out the very obvious queer-coding in this story. Besides everything with Walton and Clerval (is Walton even subtext though?), I also just think it’s an important part of Victor’s character. I’m not sure if this part is intentional, but Victor’s obsession with anatomy (digging up graves and going through charnel houses) and his obsession with creating the most perfect and beautiful (male) creature feels very reminiscent to me of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and the renaissance obsession with capturing the idealized male form. However, I do think the rest of it is all definitely intentional considering Mary, Percy, and Byron were all queer and Percy even translated Plato’s Symposium for a wider audience.