lafemmeankou: dduane:Go look at the whole thread, it’s delightful. (Devolves into cat pics, bu
lafemmeankou: dduane:Go look at the whole thread, it’s delightful. (Devolves into cat pics, but it’s not like that’s a bad thing.) Okay, first of all, this isn’t even close to what happened. Mary was absolutely treated as an equal by Shelley and Byron (who were absolutely not dude-bros, by any stretch of the imagination.) She loved being there and they hung on her every word because both of them–yes, even Lord Byron–considered Mary to be their equal. She was also greatly respected basically from birth as the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, to the point that she was considered a minor celebrity.Furthermore, on the dude-bro thing, Shelley was an activist, proto-Marxist, abolitionist, and feminist, and found a publisher for Mary after editing Frankenstein himself. They read and edited each other’s work and considered each other to be equals in every respect. If anyone was treated unequally, it would have been Claire Clairmont (whom Byron actively ignored, even though they were literally next door to each other) or Polidori, who was routinely left behind when Byron and Shelley would go boating.Mary also greatly respected Lord Byron and counted him among her closest friends for the rest of her life. This bullshit thing about her being mistreated by either of them is just patently untrue. Was her married life with Shelley entirely happy? Absolutely not–mainly due to the majority of her children dying of illnesses and both of them plummeting into major depression. But did he creatively stifle her? Absolutely not. And she wouldn’t have stood for it if he had. Give her more credit than that! Mary Shelley was a badass.Dr. Frankenstein, in many ways, is totes based on Shelley. He experimented with electricity and was a bit of a mad scientist himself. The monster could totally be seen as a Byronic figure, sure. But! They’d been up for hours talking about philosophy, death, etc. To reduce this to her being ticked off about a bunch of dudes ignoring her is absolutely untrue and really fucking ignorant, since there is so much documentation of exactly what was discussed and what led to the creation of Frankenstein. It was a contest. It was inspired by what they’d discussed and events in her own past and Shelley’s, and that’s literally it.There are plenty of cases of female artists being treated terribly by their artist spouses and their boys’ club circle of male friends, but Mary Shelley is NOT one of them. She is NOT Zelda Fitzgerald or Frida Kahlo, and Percy Shelley is NOT F. Scott Fitzgerald or Diego Rivera. Don’t reduce their story to this just because it’s easy and expected. Learn some history before you speak on it.Lol, I will cage fight everyone in this thread. The assumption that every famous/talented woman is so one-dimensional as to excel at her work for the sole purpose of being petty towards men is kind of anti-feminist really; in any case it’s just performative when used with the intentions of bolstering feminism -- source link
#mary shelley#romantics