Culture Mary Shelley’s masterpiece was inspired by some truly freaky polycule action - Clairmont and Byron hooked up, Polidori wanted to hook up with Byron but was rebuffed, and Byron wanted to hook up with both Percy and Mary Shelley, but was rebuffed by Mary, who wrote Frankenstein instead, spurred on by Polidori’s idea of a spooky story.

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The famous story goes that rather than endure a threesome with her husband, the bisexual poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friend, the bisexual poet Lord Byron, Mary Shelley decided to invent science fiction.

Considering Byron’s obnoxious reputation, that was probably a wise choice. But during that famously horny weekend in Lake Geneva, an infamous polycule was formed, and literature has never quite looked the same.

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein—which is now back in the conversation thanks to Guillermo Del Toro’s ultra-gothic adaptation—and John Polidori got the inspiration for “The Vampyre” during those wild nights in the Villa Diodati, where sex, drugs, and fantastic visions couldn’t be escaped. The scene was so bisexual that Ken Russell used it as the inspiration for his hallucinatory film Gothic in 1986.
But what actually went down during that wet, wild weekend—and how much sex were these chaotic bisexuals really having? Here’s what we know.

1816 was an exceptionally miserable year, even for the already-miserable English landscape. The year before, a volcano eruption caused icy rains to fall over Europe for months, causing 1816 to be dubbed “the year without a summer.” To get away from the gloom, Mary Shelley and her then-boyfriend Percy, whom she would later marry, absconded to the Swiss villa to unwind. There, they were joined by a queer group of friends, including the bisexual Byron, the bisexual writer Polidori, and Byron’s girlfriend (also Mary’s stepsister) Claire Clairmont to smoke opium, have sex, and write future classics of the high school curriculum. Clairmont and Byron hooked up, Polidori wanted to hook up with Byron but was rebuffed, and Byron wanted to hook up with both Percy and Mary Shelley, but was rebuffed by Mary, who wrote Frankenstein instead, spurred on by Polidori’s idea of a spooky story contest.

During that fateful weekend, Mary Shelley didn’t get up to anything too spicy, despite these offers. Reeling from a recent miscarriage, she wasn’t in a mindset to enjoy the festivities. But a few years later, her bisexuality would enter the chat after she and Shelley had married and moved to Italy. There, in 1821, they met a couple who would pique the sexual interest of both Mary and Percy. These were Jane and Edward Williams, whose illicit relationship was similar enough to Mary and Percy’s that the couples ended up becoming great friends, with seemingly both Mary and Percy falling in love with Jane.

But things truly got crazy when Edward Williams and Percy Shelley took off on an Italian boat ride in 1822—and never returned. Both men died, and Mary and Jane were left to fend for themselves. Neither remarried, and they stayed in close contact for the rest of their lives. “Their own friendship grew deeper—and probably romantic as well,” a recent Vanity Fair article asserts.

“Being afraid of men, I was apt to get tousy-mousy for women,” Mary wrote later on—and you can probably guess what tousy-mousy means, but just in case, one scholar identified a similar phrase (“tuzzy-muzzy”) as slang for “vagina.”

Basically, both Mary and Percy really lived up to the chaotic bisexual stereotype, and throughout their lives together and apart, they seemed to find it fairly easy to cast off the Regency-era prudishness that plagued their contemporaries, even if it meant being forced to locate to Italy. They also liked to hang out with people like Byron and Polidori, who were just bisexually chaotic as themselves.

There’s also some compelling evidence that Mary had several lesbian and transmasc friends. When her pals Isabel Robinson and Walter Sholto Douglas, a Scottish trans man, needed a fake passport for Douglas so that the two could live legally as man and wife in Paris, Mary came through and managed to get one for them. Not only did Mary have several potential polycules throughout her life, she was clearly spending time in the gayborhood.

Even without the knowledge of Mary’s spicy exploits, Frankenstein remains one of the most compelling stories we have about humanity, transformation, and the sometimes invisible line between good and evil. We don’t know how queer Del Toro’s adaptation will be—though images of a zaddified Oscar Isaac prove that it’s queer enough for us—but any version of the ageless tale is sure to have something for the girls, gays, theys, and poly folks among us.
 
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Blewberry Nausea dijo:
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein—which is now back in the conversation thanks to Guillermo Del Toro’s ultra-gothic adaptation
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Frankenstein’s lab will be filled with random steampunk garbage, and the ceiling will have an abstract motif that looks like ovaries. There, that’s the extent of his creative vision. Christ, I’m so sick of this fat hack.
 
Frankenstein is a terrible book that is obviously written by a teenage girl. Frankenstein himself is a whiny bitch throughout the entire novel and at no point do any of the male characters act like a nothing other than catty women. It’s blown completely out of the water by its contemporaries and is a miserable slog to read through.
 
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"Polycules existed even back in the day, so it's okay to try one. Nevermind the high probability of mental illness among those in polycules. Forget love and companionship, just go bust a nut and get that body count up."

Fucking propaganda everywhere.
 
Never not funny how faggots trip over themselves tie everything to queerism.

"Oh yeah, that tale about a horrific zombie monster going around killing people, yeah that's totally a work about society's unjust treatment and reaction to the queers. Also everyone you ever liked was totally gay, so let me hit that already. No I'm not a mentally ill degenerate, how dare you imply otherwise!"

They never connect the dots.
 
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That reminds me; anyone got the legendary lost 4chan copypasted of the woman that was obsessed with Byron, wrote a trashy book about her self insert fucking Byron, and then after he kept telling her to fuck off tried to drown herself only to not only be saved by police but then arrested for public nuisance, branded with the mark that states she's a hooker given that no one believed she was an upper class lady, then put her in the stocks so people could torment her further?
 
MirrorNoir dijo:
That reminds me; anyone got the legendary lost 4chan copypasted of the woman that was obsessed with Byron, wrote a trashy book about her self insert fucking Byron, and then after he kept telling her to fuck off tried to drown herself only to not only be saved by police but then arrested for public nuisance, branded with the mark that states she's a hooker given that no one believed she was an upper class lady, then put her in the stocks so people could torment her further?
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Are you talking about Lady Caroline Lamb
 
If you want a romantic heroine then Bettina von Arnim is your woman. Here's a profile published in the Guardian 20 years ago

A virtuoso muse​


She was Beethoven's inspiration, Goethe's companion and caught the eye of Napoleon. But many still regard Bettina Brentano as a fraud, says Jan Swafford

Jan Swafford
Sat 23 Aug 2003 02.15 BST

"Who," asked Napoleon Bonaparte, "is that fuzzy young person?" She was Elisabeth Brentano, known simply as Bettina. Actually, Napoleon was not among her conquests, nor was he her type.

She did not jump into his lap, as she did with Goethe, or croon her name into his ear, as with Beethoven, or go for intimate walks, as with Karl Marx. Napoleon did not dedicate a battle to her, as Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms dedicated songs and the Grimms an edition of their fairy tales. But, even at a distance, Bettina Brentano drew comment.

She was sister to one famous poet, wife to another and inspiration to others, but declined to write poetry. What she did write has outraged and fascinated people ever since. She was a supreme muse, a one-woman literary movement, at once among the singular and most representative figures of the Romantic century.

Bettina was born in Frankfurt in 1785 to the large family of an Italian merchant. Her grandmother was an acclaimed sentimental novelist. Her mother had been Goethe's first great love and Bettina grew up thinking of him as family property.

When her mother died, Bettina, then aged eight, was dispatched to a convent. When she was 12 and living with her grandmother, a handsome young man turned up. It was her brother Clemens, whom she had not seen since she was five. He became her mentor and protector.

Clemens encouraged Bettina to read Goethe. She promptly went mad for the fabled character of Mignon in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. Goethe's Mignon was a little Italian dancer, stolen from her family by circus performers.

She perched on roofs; some days she would not speak and others spoke in riddles; she carried a cutlass and fought with brigands. In manner and dress, Bettina became the elfin, inexplicable Mignon. Meanwhile, for Goethe himself, she conceived a passion that would simmer until she died.

Oddly enough, it was Clemens's main concern that Bettina should marry well and become a proper hausfrau. He was afraid that his sister would hook up with a mad poet.

Clemens knew about mad poets because he was one himself. At one point he painted his room (floor to ceiling), the carpet, the curtains and his own face blue. He wrote plays and fairy tales and, with his friend Achim von Arnim (and with help from Bettina), gathered the folk poems for the epochal collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a touchstone of German Romanticism. As a lyric poet, Clemens rivalled Goethe.

Decades later, Bettina would publish her correspondence with her brother. We find him alternately encouraging her and trying to rein her in. She resisted relentlessly. "For heaven's sake," he chided, "don't become a Seeress... If you knew that... witches of former centuries were none other than the victims of constipation, you would take more care."

Already Bettina had a horror of the ordinary. To Clemens she wrote, in terms she would echo for the rest of her life: "It is no use telling me to be calm; to me that conveys sitting with my hands in my lap, looking forward to the broth we are having for supper... My soul is a passionate dancer; she dances to hidden music which only I can hear... Whatever police the world may prescribe to rule the soul, I refuse to obey them."

Bettina was small and delicate, with black blossoming curls, porcelain skin, fathomless brown eyes and a magnetism beyond conventional beauty. "What artist could do justice to her?" Goethe exclaimed.

Teenaged Bettina's first actual love was for a girl five years older, a beautiful, melancholy, impoverished poet, who lived in a convent: Karoline von Günderrode.

Bettina would publish their letters, too. "I can't write poetry like you, Günderrode, but I can talk with nature... And when I come back... we put our beds side by side and chat away together all night... great profound speculations which make the old world creak on its rusty hinges."

But Günderrode had a desperate passion for a married man. One day she opened her dress to show Bettina the place on her breast where a knife would find her heart. Finally the lover went back to his wife, and Günderrode put a dagger through the place on her breast. (Goethe used the incident in stories.) Bettina was devastated but not defeated. Günderrode had fallen to the dark side of the Romantic temperament: fatal longing, like Goethe's Werther. Bettina was the sunny side.

Replacements for Günderrode turned up. In 1807 Bettina befriended Goethe's mother and listened to stories of her son and the old days. Through Bettina, Goethe would mine those stories for his autobiography.

The same year Bettina finally got an introduction to Goethe: he was 58, she 21. He asked what interested her. "Nothing interests me but you," she said. He invited her to make herself at home. She jumped into his lap, threw her arms around his neck - and went to sleep. Clemens reported that, for three hours, Bettina extolled Goethe, chastised him, revitalised him.

"Don't forget, Goethe, how it was I learned to love you," she wrote to him. It was through his books. "I have been jealous [he wrote often of his loves] and sometimes I have felt myself to be the subject of your poems - and why shouldn't I dream myself into happiness? What higher reality is there than dream?"

She wanted to be his muse and his seeress. His replies were appreciative but stunned. "I have only read the first half of your letter and am too moved to continue. In the meantime, accept my thanks, go on preaching your sermons from the heights of the Rhine and let your psalms flow down to me and the fishes." He meant that, like the mystical Saint Anthony, she should preach to humans and nature alike.

Soon Bettina was stalking the other demigod of the age, Beethoven. Music to her was, like nature, a revelation beyond language and intellect, and she sang beautifully. Beethoven knew her half-brother Franz and his wife, Antonie.

One day, as the nearly deaf composer was working at the piano, he felt hands on his shoulders. He turned in anger to find an attractive young woman who spoke melodiously in his ear: "My name is Brentano." A warm smile lit up his bulldog features. Would she like to hear the song he was composing? It was none other than Goethe's Kennst du das Land: Mignon's famous lyric, Bettina's theme song.

In the next days they walked and made music. In later years, some speculated that Beethoven's mysterious Immortal Beloved was Bettina. She was not; but it was through her that he met the woman who may have been the Immortal Beloved: Bettina's half-sister-in-law Antonie Brentano.

Bettina determined to bring together Goethe and Beethoven. In letters she would publish in Goethe's Correspondence with a Child, she quoted Beethoven's ecstatic vision of his art: "Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy, the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am the Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for humankind... Those who understand [my music] will be freed by it from all the miseries the others drag about with them."

These and other credos from Bettina's letters would become the composer's most famous utterances about music, and help build the Romantic myth of Beethoven.

But those cloud-capped words were Bettina's, not Beethoven's. She dreamed them. Beethoven did not say things like that. In the one authentic surviving letter to Bettina, he groaned of a "bacchanalia" the night before, for which he was now suffering. Bettina would turn Beethoven's hangover into a vision of Bacchus pressing transcendent wine.

She did the same in publishing the letters of Goethe, Günderrode, her brother and herself. She embroidered and invented. Scholars have long cried fraud. Recent admirers declare that Bettina created her own literary genre, the "epistolary novel". The jury is still out.

There is another, perhaps shocking, element. So far as we know, Bettina was never physically the lover of Beethoven or Goethe. She fascinated Goethe and he liked young women. Surely she aspired to be his mistress.

But in the end she was too much for him. He turned her and her letters into material for books and poems, but kept her at arm's length. We should not be surprised that she stayed loyal to him. Affairs were a fraught and risky business: witness Günderrode. Romantics managed such longing partly by spiritualising desire, and Bettina was a virtuoso at that.

Beethoven and Goethe finally did meet. Bettina was not there to see it because she had insulted Goethe's wife. (By then she was married to a poet, Clemens's friend Von Arnim.) The two men walked, talked and parted uneasily.

Bettina made up the famous story that Beethoven jostled through the Imperial party on the street while Goethe stood aside and bowed. But it is true that Beethoven criticised Goethe's deference to the nobility. Goethe wrote that Beethoven's "talent amazed me", but otherwise he found him a pain in the neck. They never met again.

Those were the years of Bettina's first glory. More were to come. With Von Arnim she produced seven children and her spirit survived the domestic life she had dreaded. She still sparkled and still collected famous admirers (Liszt, Schumann, Emerson). In 1824 she designed a memorial for Goethe that delighted the old man.

It shows him seated on a throne, and in front is a little naked muse holding a lyre. She told him it was Mignon; he knew it was Bettina. Today her monument stands in marble in Frankfurt, but, in 1830, an observer wondered: "What's the use of an elf in a commercial age? Who wants her trick dances, her treetop games and flowery palaces?"

As it turned out, many wanted them. After her husband and Goethe died, Bettina resurrected herself. Her Goethe letters made her famous. She dedicated the Günderrode letters to the student radicals whom the despotic Prussian government feared. The students gave her a torchlight parade.

She became a muse to beleaguered progressives; she was branded a communist before the Communist Manifesto; she campaigned against antisemitism. She got away with two extraordinary and dangerous political books entreating the Prussian throne to liberalise because she was a woman, and because the Prussian king was an admirer.

In her strange last book, Conversations with Demons, she imagines herself as a spirit whispering of reform to the king as he sleeps. She nearly went bankrupt publishing it and nobody read it.

Bettina died in her bed at 74, surrounded by her children, a bust of Goethe before her eyes. Long before, Clemens had drawn her in paradoxes: "Half witch, half angel... half seeress, half liar; half cat, half dove; half lizard, half butterfly... half chaste moonlight, half wanton flesh..." And so on, for a dozen more lines.

In a century rich with extravagant characters, Bettina remained unique. She was everyone's muse, she craved love from every quarter, but she was never other than her own person. To echo what was said of another extravagant Romantic, Walt Whitman: her greatest creation was herself.
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