Table of Contents
1. Unquestioned Ugliness ………...3
2. “The Beauty of the Dream Vanished”………...5
3. Romantic Understandings of Ugliness………...17
4. The Blindness of Obsession………...24
5. The Creature as “Other”……….38
Chapter One: Unquestioned Ugliness
In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus, the Creature’s monstrosity and ugliness endure as unquestioned aspects of the novel’s constant hold on the public imagination. While adaptations may differ in characterization and setting and scholars may focus on diverse thematic questions, the Creature’s ugliness remains an
obvious, accepted fixture of the work. Throughout this thesis, I argue that the Creature’s ugliness should not be accepted automatically. If the Creature is repulsive, but not because of his ugliness, what makes him repulsive? Why have readers fixated on ugliness as the only explanation for his repulsiveness? What aspects of the text have readers missed because of the assumption of ugliness, rather than searching for alternative explanations? Why might Shelley have created a Creature with an ambiguous appearance? What, metaphorically, could this represent – if anything?
Throughout this thesis, I will explore these questions to propose that characters’ extreme reactions to the Creature’s supposed ugliness are actually reactions to his key deviances from humanity – or, as I call it, his status as “Other.” The Creature embodies an in-between state, made entirely from human bodies but completely and obviously inhuman to everyone he meets. In order to prove my assertion, I begin with “The Beauty of the Dream Vanished,” which traces the moments when Victor describes either the
Readers should note that these readings are merely lenses through which to view the text and focus our analysis upon my primary interest: the ambiguity of the Creature’s ugliness and “the richness and variousness of [the Creature’s] implications” (George Levine, “The
Ambiguous Heritage,” 8). I ask readers to take my interpretations provisionally under advisement despite their initially apparent contradictions. My understandings of the text complicate and enrich one another precisely due to their differences, and like the
Creature’s body itself, form an amalgamation to explore something not quite fully understood in the novel.
I explore the historical meanings in beauty and ugliness in Shelley’s age, with a
particular eye to how they might differ from modern definitions. Then, my section, “The Blindness of Obsession,” argues that Victor changed his initial perception after the Creature’s animation and examines one explanation: his opinion before animation may have been incorrect due to mental illness. By examining the text for clues concerning Victor’s mental state and analyzing information about mental illness in Shelley’s time period, I explore the possibility of Victor’s initial impression of the Creature’s beauty being an obsessive delusion. In “The Creature as Other,” I use historical references to
Chapter Two: “The Beauty of the Dream Vanished”
All readers walk away from Frankenstein understanding the Creature’s ugliness. His unfortunate appearance is a part of the novel that appears in every adaptation, whether for the stage or screen. However, I propose that the Creature’s ugliness may not
be as certain as Frankenstein’s many readers have always assumed.
Historical evidence lends credence to the potential of the Creature’s beauty (or at
least discredits outright ugliness as the cause of his repulsiveness). From what scholars know of the 1818 text’s revisions, Percy Shelley’s contributions were “not always sensitive to the complexity of character created by the author. He tended, for instance, to see the creature as more monstrous and less human than Mary” (Mellor, 62). In
examining Frankenstein’s text, then, the reader should understand that Mary always intended for the Creature to possess an ambiguous monstrosity. Why, then, could his appearance not also contain ambiguities, as well?
Similarly, this time period saw an evolution in how doctors understood vision. Elizabeth Dolan writes: “The eye, previously thought of in optics as a stable instrument
the Creature differently from those he meets in the novel, or at least consider the possibility that their reactions to him may not stem from simply ugliness, as the characters state. However, before theorizing about the reasons for Victor’s shift in
perspective or what Shelley might have intended by including it, readers should review the text itself. All quotations from Frankenstein in the following text are from the 1818,
not the 1831, edition.
Notably, until the Creature awakens, Frankenstein never describes his creation itself as ugly. He does describe the process of gathering the necessary materials as distasteful: “I collected bones from charnel houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame” (Shelley, 34). He also expresses disgust over the act of “filthy creation” and over materials gleaned from “[t]he dissecting room and the slaughter-house,” which “often” generated “loathing [for his] occupation” (Shelley, 34).
Here, though, all of Victor’s expressed negativity describes the process of creating the Creature or self-loathing of his own actions, not the Creature’s appearance, ugly or otherwise. In fact, the narrative’s later perspective – Victor tells his story to Walton after
creation, rather than the Creature’s appearance, only serves to further illuminate the possibility of the Creature’s tolerably attractive or even beautiful appearance.
However, Victor’s sudden change of heart about the Creature’s appearance cannot
be explained as something he merely failed to notice before animation. Victor does not fixate upon creation without any thought or consequence of what the future might bring. In fact, he visualizes an ultimate goal as motivation through his years of toil: “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me” (Shelley, 33). Through this passage, the reader understands that Frankenstein holds an optimistic view of what the Creature will mean for his future.
Additionally, readers may infer that Victor views his Creature as beautiful before its animation; based on his later extreme reaction to the Creature’s supposedly disappointing appearance, he would never have imagined an entire “new species bless[ing] [him] as its creator and source” if the being currently lying prone on his laboratory table were unbearably monstrous (Shelley, 33). Victor’s ability to imagine this dream and use it as motivation to continue his arduous work reveals both his unwavering belief in its
possibility and his current perception of the Creature’s body as tolerably attractive, if not
outright beautiful.
delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form?” (Shelley, 35). His sudden use of the term “catastrophe” to refer to the culmination of the obsessive, tireless work he pursued for several years seems outright baffling, as does his
decision to label the Creature as a “wretch,” especially when Frankenstein reiterates the “infinite pains and care [he …] endeavoured to form” in the very next clause of the sentence (Shelley, 35). In this reading, the Creature’s monstrosity must not stem from the Creature’s outright appearance at all; if it did, his ugliness should have been apparent before animation. Why would Victor emphasize how much thought and care he put into creating the Creature’s appearance if he ultimately failed? Perhaps he means to state that
no amount of care or design could have rendered the Creature beautiful, suggesting that his ugliness stems not from his individual parts or the totality of them together, but something else entirely. After all, each material used to form the Creature’s body was identical before animation and afterward, and Victor even acknowledges that he designed the Creature with an eye toward beauty, even if he now scoffs at the idea: “His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! – Great God!” (Shelley, 35).
Fascinatingly, Victor expresses the loss of his visualized goal both explicitly and subconsciously. Immediately after animating the Creature, he flees to his bedroom
Ingolstadt: “[A]s I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms” (Shelley, 36). This almost exactly mirrors Victor’s conscious
realization that his ultimate dream of creation has been destroyed: “I had desired [the Creature’s creation] with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (Shelley, 35-36). Victor’s own language – “the beauty of the dream vanished” – exactly describes the sudden change of his own opinion concerning the Creature’s appearance (Shelley, 36).
Later, Victor compares his toil on the female creature to the first venture, this time infusing his narration with negativity and horror. While the first process inspired
“enthusiastic frenzy,” the second time Victor knows the consequences of his creation from the first Creature’s murders of the Frankenstein family. (Shelley, 118).
Consequently, he infuses life into the female Creature “in cold blood,” his heart often sicken[ing] at the work of [his] hands” (Shelley, 118). This change can only occur due to
Victor’s change of heart from the Creature’s actions, rather than the Creature’s appearance.
Except for pre-animation, not once throughout the entire text does Victor manage to describe the Creature’s appearance objectively, without any connection to the
but immediately after using both of these terms, Victor thinks of the Creature’s actions (Shelley, 119). He states, “[The Creature] had followed me in my travels; he had loitered in forests, hid himself in caves, or taken refuge in wide and desert heaths; and he now
came to mark my progress and claim the fulfilment of my promise” (Shelley, 119). Once again, readers can dismiss Victor’s descriptions as reflective only of the Creature’s actions – his murders of those closest to Victor – and not of the actual appearance of the Creature.
How then can readers determine the Creature’s actual appearance? Undoubtedly, the Creature comes across several unnamed characters as he wanders alone. The Creature
believes every negative encounter he has with humans occurs due to his ugliness. When the Creature unknowingly enters a house, the old man inhabiting the hut “shriek[s] loudly, and quitting the hut, [runs] across the fields with a speed of which his debilitated form hardly appeared capable” (Shelley, 72). Then, the Creature enters a village, enticed by the abundance of vegetables, milk, and cheese that he sees. Once more, he encounters an extremely negative reaction: “I had hardly placed my foot within the door before the children shrieked, and one of the women fainted. The whole village was roused; some
“dart[s] towards [him], and tearing the girl from [his] arms, hasten[s] towards the deeper parts of the wood” (Shelley, 99). The Creature continues: “I followed speedily, I hardly knew why; but when the man saw me draw near, he aimed a gun, which he carried, at my
body and fired” (Shelley, 99).
In all of these instances, however, the human characters’ reactions far exceed any reasonable reaction to mere ugliness. No elderly man would jump from his chair and flee to a nearby village, despite his senior age, in response to an ugly, or even deformed, human. Similarly, when the Creature enters the village, the children’s shrieks may represent a normal juvenile response to extreme ugliness, but the women’s faints again
illuminate something altogether different. Once again, fainting in response to ugliness or even deformity does not represent a normal response. Lastly, the man’s immediate negative response to the Creature again strikes the reader as abnormal. Ugliness or deformity would not cause any rational person to immediately assume malice or evil intent. Undoubtedly, a sensible human would never shoot another for following an injured person that he or she had just helped to save. Clearly, there has to be something else at work in the Creature’s appearance that strikes fear into the heart of everyone
Even the Creature’s appraisal of his own appearance cannot be taken as objective fact. He agonizingly describes the moment when he discovers his own appearance: “At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror;
and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification. Alas! I did not yet entirely know the fatal effects of this miserable deformity” (Shelley, 78-79). The Creature even curses the creator he doesn’t yet know for his looks: “Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even YOU turned from me in disgust?” (Shelley, 91). However, the Creature does not know how much effort Victor put into his creation, or
that he knowingly selected every part that now forms the Creature’s body as beautiful. The Creature does not know that the moment Victor flees from him only occurs after animation, and not before, even though the Creature’s appearance stays the same. When the Creature demands a mate, he asks for “a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself” (Shelley, 102). The Creature lacks the language or understanding to ask for a creature identical to him, the same species as him, or similar in aspect to him. The only way he knows how to convey his difference from humanity – or the similarity he hopes to
The Creature views his body and appearance as a negative distortion of the human body and selects “ugly” as the only way to describe his own appearance, in comparison with every other human he sees As he starts life with the size and mental capacity of an
adult, the Creature lacks the requisite life experiences and knowledge that could help him contextualize differences in any rational capacity. Clearly, the Creature understands that he looks different from literally every other being he sees. This fact cannot be called into question. He does not have the mental capacity or objectivity to conceptualize himself as a being separate from humanity, or as something that should not be considered or bound by humanity’s conceptions of beauty. In fact, he may be more beautiful than humans, but
his extreme difference from humans – the immediate, obvious realization that he’s something other, something to be feared and fought – may cause the conflict he faces with humanity, rather than the grotesque ugliness so many adaptations have assumed.
Perhaps the most tragic event in the Creature’s life, and the one that cements his understanding of himself as ugly, occurs when he meets the De Lacey family. After watching them for an extended period of time, learning language and history from them, and growing attached to the family, the Creature decides to approach the blind old man, who he believes will accept him honestly, as he can’t see his ugliness. During the encounter, however, the other members of the family return: “Agatha fainted, and Safie, unable to attend to her friend, rushed out of the cottage. Felix darted forward, and with
he dashed me to the ground and struck me violently with a stick’” (Shelley, 94). Once again, we see unusual responses to mere ugliness. No one faints, flees from, or attacks an ugly or deformed person. Their reaction, like those of the unnamed characters in shorter
encounters, must stem from a quality of the Creature’s that neither they nor the Creature himself can verbalize effectively. Later, when the Creature overhears Felix telling a stranger about the encounter, he claims, “My wife and my sister will never recover from their horror” (Shelley, 96). The use of the word “horror” comes closest to properly understanding what sets the Creature apart from mere ugliness. While monstrosity or horrific things may correlate with ugliness, they do not necessarily require mutuality. In
fact, the Creature could be even more frightening due to his extreme, supernatural beauty or any feature that sets him apart as inhuman.
In fact, the De Laceys may help contribute to a deeper understanding of Shelley’s intention. Many readers already see the similarities between Safie and the Creature. Both arrive in a virtually unknown land without knowing anyone, and both must learn their new country’s language and history. Felix’s lessons for Safie provide the Creature with the necessary knowledge that leads him toward his later path in life, including his
introduction to works of literature like Paradise Lost. However, could Safie also serve to help readers understand the key difference of the Creature? After all, Safie was born in another country, and she is likely of a different ethnicity than the majority of people
though Shelley mentions that Safie, like her mother, is a Christian). However, Safie’s humanity is never in doubt; in fact, everyone she meets remarks upon her extreme beauty. Thus, we know that the Creature’s otherness does not stem from his inability to
communicate, but rather from an appearance so radical that everyone realizes he’s inhuman, not merely different.
Initially, the readers may assume that Walton offers the most objective view of the Creature’s appearance, so his description at the novel’s end should carry the most weight. Undoubtedly, Walton describes him negatively, as “gigantic in stature, yet uncouth and distorted in its proportions” (Shelley,158). Walton states, “Never did I behold a vision so
horrible as his face, of such loathsome yet appalling hideousness” (Shelley, 158). When he attempts to have a conversation with the Creature, Walton does not bother making eye contact because “there was something so scaring and unearthly in his ugliness” (Shelley, 158). However, the Creature that Walton encounters in the arctic may not resemble the one that earlier unnamed characters meet. Victor also looks haggard and worn when he meets Walton, and while the Creature can undoubtedly survive more handily in extreme environments than his creator can, he also faces difficulties that likely hurt his
Victor’s perspective and view the Creature as an ugly monster. Therefore, Walton’s perspective cannot be accepted as truly objective.
William, Victor’s younger brother, may offer the most clear-eyed analysis of the
Creature in the moments before his death. William cries, “Monster! Ugly wretch! You wish to eat me and tear me to pieces. You are an ogre” (Shelley, 100). While William calls the Creature ugly, he also calls him an “ogre,” which clearly alludes to something non-human (Shelley, 100). William, despite his youth, recognizes the Creature’s
difference from humanity and reaches for a supernatural term to describe him. As a child, William obviously lacks the life experience and knowledge to accurately understand the
Creature’s difference from humanity, just as the Creature himself does. However, William’s youth simultaneously allows him to identify the Creature’s otherness. His familiarity and perhaps even belief in supernatural creatures due to his young age might cause him to mentally reach for a supernatural explanation more quickly than adults might. By using a supernatural term, William reveals that the Creature represents something more than human, like an ogre, which does not necessarily have to be ugly.
While few academic scholars have questioned Victor’s sudden change of opinion
the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs” (Shelley, 35). Thus, Dolan plausibly posits the Creature’s eyes as the turning point for Victor’s assessment. For her,
the difference does not occur after animation, but only when Victor sees the Creature’s yellow eyes: “When the creature opens his eyes and looks back, Victor immediately shifts from seeing him as a creature to seeing him as a monster” (Dolan, 51).
Anne Mellor, in contrast, offers several explanations. Based on the Creature’s actions, the scholar argues that both the characters and the readers tend to misunderstand the Creature, “judging a mere appearance rather than the hidden reality” (Mellor, 128-9).
Additionally, Mellor points out that the Creature’s “unfamiliar physiognomy” continually causes the characters both to fear the Creature and believe he has evil intent, even when he has entirely benign motivations (Mellor, 128). While Mellor never explicitly questions the Creature’s ugliness, she does use a feminist argument to imply that the female
Creature’s repulsiveness – and the Creature’s, presumably – stems from its behavior, rather than the actual countenance: “A woman who is sexually liberated, free to choose her own life, her own sexual partner (by force, if necessary), and to propagate at will can
appear only monstrously ugly to Victor Frankenstein, for she defies that sexist aesthetic that insists that women be small, delicate, modest, passive, and sexually pleasing – but available only to their lawful husbands” (Mellor, 120). While she does not state that the
of her actual appearance. These arguments should logically extend to the existing Creature as well, given that Victor used the same creation process in order to give the Creature a matching mate. These differing perspectives and my opinion on their validity
Chapter 3: Contemporary Understandings of Ugliness
During and immediately before Shelley’s time period, philosophers struggled to define abstract concepts like beauty and ugliness that accurately characterized and categorized the world around them. Beauty, ugliness, and an understanding of the
sublime reached new definitions during this time. For example, Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful,
defines the sublime as “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger; that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, […] that is, it is productive of the strongest emotions which the mind is capable of feeling” (Burke, 39).
Burke fails to describe ugliness throughout the entire text. Instead, he focuses on the various components of beauty and how it relates to or differs from the sublime. Beauty has “a social quality,” and Burke states that “we like to have [beautiful beings]
likewise distinguish love, by which I mean that satisfaction which arises to the mind upon contemplating anything beautiful” (Burke, 91).
Particularly interesting when considered in relation to Frankenstein, Burke asserts that some “principles of taste” are “so common to all” that even to imagine “that the same cause operating in the same manner […] will produce different effects […] would be highly absurd” (Burke, 13-14). Through Burke’s perspective, then, Victor’s initial perception of the Creature as beautiful must be indicative of deficient taste, as the
Creature strikes all the other characters as horrific. Burke explicitly connects this notion to mental illness by stating, “any man […] who declares that to him tobacco has a Taste like sugar [… is not merely] wrong in his notions, but absolutely mad” (Burke, 14). Thus, Victor becomes the man who initially believes “tobacco has a Taste like sugar,” marking him as “mad” until he realizes his mistake after the Creature’s animation (Burke, 14).
Academic scholar Denise Gigante also explores Romantic-era understandings of beauty and ugliness in “Facing the Ugly: The Case of Frankenstein.” While Gigante
novel “extracts the Creature from the crack opened up by the ugly in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory in order to posit him as that aesthetic impossibility: the positive
manifestation of ugliness” (Gigante, 567). Still, several questions remain. How does the
Creature represent positive ugliness? How can readers be sure that the Creature’s ugliness actually exists at all?
Gigante proffers an interesting metaphor to understand her conception of the Creature’s ugliness: “He is, like the blood and guts oozing from the fissures in his skin, an excess of existence, exceeding representation, and hence appearing to others as a chaotic spillage from his own representational shell” (Gigante, 566). Thus, when
confronted with the living Creature, Victor cannot classify him according to the beings he’s always known; the Creature becomes something exceeding life itself. Gigante argues that Victor’s descent into obsession and perhaps insanity follows this: “For as the
‘contaminating life’ of the Creature spills out from his overstretched skin to pursue Victor physically and psychologically, it threatens to ‘consume’ him and the entire symbolic order in which he is implicated,” she argues (Gigante, 569). Read in this manner, Victor’s nervous breakdowns and obsession with the Creature become more
logical to the reader; who wouldn’t respond extremely to a being that defies all the laws of life and existence one has ever known?
However, Gigante deviates from the author’s preferred reading of the Creature’s
the Creature defies representation or classification by the people he meets. She argues that the Creature’s ugliness stems from unusual or repulsive features combined with beautiful ones, which combined together make it impossible to find him beautiful (Gigante, 570).
Because Victor and everyone else that meets the Creature cannot comfortably combine these features together, he becomes perceived as ugly and cannot be fully understood: “As cracks and fissures emerge in the representation, the visceral reality of the Creature leaks through to destroy all fantasy. […] [T]he combined form cannot aesthetically contain its own existence” (Gigante, 570). While the Creature undeniably provokes revulsion in almost everyone he meets, and the amalgamation of his parts may prove
difficult for others to comprehend, much less appreciate, several aspects of Gigante’s argument fall apart with further textual analysis.
Gigante’s argument might be considered suspect due to her attribution of one of the Creature’s described features as negative, when the detail in question should be considered ambiguous, if not outright positive. She specifically labels his “work of muscles and arteries” as “unsightly,” along with his “straight black lips” (Gigante, 570). Given the grammatical structure of the sentence within Shelley’s original text, Victor
with his watery eyes” (Shelley, 35). Shelley’s use of “these luxuriances” applies to all of the descriptions before it, including the “muscles and arteries” that the Creature’s skin “scarcely cover[s]” (Shelley 35). While a reader can logically infer the negative image
that Gigante intends to project onto the Creature, one can also imagine a well-muscled Creature, with taut skin similar to the ones among today’s male models. Obviously, no scholar can determine exactly what image Shelley meant to impart by her reference to the Creature’s muscles and arteries visible through his taut skin, but the inclusion of this detail among other features that are universally considered positive and attractive
suggests that this particular element was not meant to connote horror.
Additionally, Gigante makes another mistake when she insists the Creature’s
ugliness also occurs from his marred complexion. She structures her analysis by pointing out Burke’s definition of beauty as requiring smoothness, before arguing that the
Creature’s skin does not meet that requirement (Gigante, 573). However, both quotes that Gigante pulls from Shelley’s text to illustrate her point here do not necessarily confirm what she intends to prove. First, Gigante uses the word “shrivelled” to argue that the Creature’s complexion isn’t smooth, and thus contributes to his ugliness. While
“shrivelled” can mean wrinkled, this doesn’t seem to fit with Shelley’s earlier description
Victor harvests the Creature’s body parts from recently deceased human bodies, reading the Creature’s skin as dehydrated makes perfect sense.
Gigante also implies that Victor’s use of “filthy mass” applies to the Creature’s
skin (or even his appearance generally). However, viewed contextually, Victor makes this disparaging description when conversing with the Creature after he murders William (and Justine, consequently). While the text emphasizes Victor seeing the Creature’s “filthy mass,” the creator’s feelings immediately move to “horror and hatred” (Shelley, 103). While horror might arise from the Creature’s appearance, hatred seems less likely. If one reads Victor’s thoughts of the Creature’s “filthy mass” as a reflection on the Creature’s
prior actions of killing William and Justine, “horror and hatred” both make sense. Additionally, Victor’s subsequent remarks also align with his focus on the Creature’s actions, rather than his appearance: “‘You swear,’ I said, ‘to be harmless; but have you not already shown a degree of malice that should reasonably make me distrust you?’ (Shelley, 103).
Lastly, Gigante also explicitly references the Creature’s “stitches [that] we can only assume are holding him together” (Gigante, 574). While she does acknowledge this
image is “impressed upon us by screen versions of Frankenstein,” she still uses it as evidence to support her overall point of the Creature’s ugliness stemming from a lack of smoothness of his skin, as well as to further her original metaphor of the individual pieces
While the many adaptations of Frankenstein almost unanimously agree on the presence
of stitches, this, once again, does not have to be the case. Victor states that he makes the Creature extremely large because “the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to [Victor’s] speed” (Shelley, 33). Thus, the Creature likely had enough skin and sheer size for Victor to form a complete being without slicing him open every few inches to adjust the body’s internal systems. Lastly, as long as Victor pores over the Creature, both positively before animation and negatively afterwards, it strikes the reader as unnatural
for him not to mention any type of suture present. As hateful as Victor becomes when discussing the Creature and his appearance toward the end of the novel, the exclusion of such a detail must stem from a lack of stitches or sutures marring the Creature’s skin.
Gigante primarily implies that Victor’s mistake in making the Creature stems from his inability to properly contain the “hodgepodge of individually selected limbs and features” because he “went to it in cold blood” (Gigante, 570). However, this chronically misreads Victor’s statement. Victor only goes “to it in cold blood” when he attempts to make the female Creature, and acknowledges that his second attempt at creation is
nothing like his first: “During my first experiment, a kind of enthusiastic frenzy had
blinded me to the horror of my employment […]. But now I went to it in cold blood”
parts and the inability of humans to comprehend his being. Misreading the text here only serves to delegitimize a critical piece of the argument I want to make, which is an
unfortunate mistake.
Gigante identifies the Creature’s struggle to present himself as a complete human being, despite not being human at all. “If the Creature is not to be seen as a mere
mechanistic collection of limbs,” she argues, “he must inspire his viewer with the
imaginative power necessary to unite his various anatomical components into the totality
of a human being” (Gigante, 570). Here, Gigante precisely labels the conflict that perpetually occurs between the Creature and every human he meets. Each character
cannot “unite his various anatomical components into the totality of a human being,” precisely because the Creature isn’t one, nor was he created to be one (Gigante, 570).
Because each human tries to do so, and ultimately fails, they’re confronted with
individual parts of the Creature and helplessly call him ugly and monstrous because they
Chapter 4: The Blindness of Obsession
In the previous chapters, I assumed Victor’s initial statements describing the Creature’s inanimate body as objective and rational, and that he only realizes his mistake after the Creature attains life and subsequently demonstrates his differences from
humanity. However, such an assumption may not be warranted. Given Victor’s own analysis of his tragic, obsessive quest, the analysis of Victor’s shift from classifying the Creature as beautiful to monstrously ugly should be flipped for the reader’s consideration.
Perhaps Victor’s initial description of the Creature was not objectivity, but rather the obsessive fantasy of a man unwilling to confront the reality of his actions and their consequences. In this reading, the mistake occurs in Victor’s initial belief in the Creature’s beauty, and only after animation does he confront the actual reality of the Creature’s monstrosity.
This reading certainly makes sense based on contemporary standards and
Shelley’s own stated inclinations for psychological novels. The author’s father, William
Frankenstein and other psychological novels, like the ones by the author’s father: “[T]he
early assessments of [Frankenstein] identified it as the production of a new member of Godwin’s ‘school’ of psychological writers, a view that Shelley, by dedicating her work
to Godwin, and Percy Shelley, by writing a preface emphasizing the work’s delineation of human passion, did much to encourage” (Brewer, 17). Thus, Shelley would have expected and wanted readers and critics to keep a close eye on the characters’ mental
states in Frankenstein.
Even the novel’s status as a work of gothic fiction lends credence to a
psychological reading of the text. Diane Hoeveler, in her analysis of common tropes
throughout the gothic in Gothic Riffs, identifies the psychological bent as one such “riff” (Hoeveler, 6). She writes: “By looking at literary characters as if they were actual case studies for how the human mind and emotions operate during periods of stress, literary critics provided the first models for psychoanalysts” (Hoeveler, 59). Thus, Shelley’s
desire to explore the psychological ramifications of what might later be called obsessive-compulsive disorder makes perfect sense.
potential mental state should be based on what Shelley would have understood at the time period, and “one needs to examine [her] work[…] within the contexts of the terms, texts, and scientific/philosophical theories available to [her]” (Brewer, 27).
Contemporaneous with Mary Shelley, several ideas concerning the origins of madness circulated widely. William Battie, a widely respected psychologist in the eighteenth-century, reveals his opinion of madness as a consequence of a disorder of imagination (Battie, 5-6). Battie separates general madness into two types, based on what causes their occurrence in the patient’s brain: original (“owing to an internal disorder of the nervous substance”) and consequential (“caused by organic disease or injury to the
brain”) (Brewer, 131-2). In contrast, Hoeveler traces the development of gothic fiction as a genre growing “in tandem with the growing science of psychology,” and argues
“sudden shock[s] to the nervous system or trauma [are] the likeliest causes of mental aberrations” (Hoeveler, 59). Michel Foucault focused more on the sudden onset of madness and implied that anyone, regardless of social stance or seeming sanity, could fall prey to mental illness at any moment. Preceding Hoeveler’s focus on sudden shocks causing madness, Foucault goes on to quote “Matthey, a Geneva[n] physician,” who said:
“An unexpected event, a sharp and sudden emotion of the soul will abruptly change the most reasonable and intelligent man into a raving idiot” (Foucault, 201).
John Locke, an eminent philosopher, agrees with Battie in his perception of a
Understanding, he defends the logic of madmen, pinpointing their error instead in the
falseness of their beliefs (Locke, 108). Similarly, Victor might imagine the Creature as beautiful because he desires very much for his creation to be. Only when the Creature awakens and exists as an object separate from Victor’s own inclinations does he face the
reality of the Creature’s appearance. Interestingly, Locke precedes Foucault in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding when he asserts that mental illness is “a weakness to
which all men are so liable” (Locke, 261)
In many works immediately before Shelley’s time or contemporaneous with her, authors proposed the cause of madness stemmed from obsessional passions. Brewer asserts that psychology in the time period focused intensely on passions, rather than on any physical aspect of the brain: “For many writers during the Romantic period, the study of the mind is virtually equivalent to the study of the passions […]. Because the passions are such a powerful determinant of human behavior, a number of Romantic-era writers
tend to focus on them rather than on other facets of the psyche” (Brewer, 86). Even philosophers agreed that passions could subdue reason. In A Treatise of Human Nature,
David Hume states that reason is passion’s slave (Hume, 415). In Observations on Man, David Hartley details how ruling passions come to rule over one’s behavior: “If the same Passion returns frequently, it may have so great an Effect upon the Associations, as that
Mary Shelley seems most indebted to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conceptions of
obsessional passion. First, Brewer notes that Shelley read Rousseau’s Confessions while in the midst of writing Frankenstein and points out several similarities between the two texts (Brewer, 32-3). For example, Rousseau writes: “Climates, seasons, sounds, colours, darkness, light, the elements, food, noise, silence, movement, repose: they all act on our
machines, and consequently upon our souls, and they all offer us innumerable and almost certain opportunities for controlling those feelings which we allow to dominate us at their very onset” (Rousseau, Book IX). Brewer notes that Shelley wrote extensively about her approval of Rousseau’s conception of human psychology, further acknowledging the
philosopher’s influence on her understanding of Victor’s psychology in Frankenstein: “No author knows better than Rousseau how to spread a charm over / internal movements of the mind, over the struggles of passion, over romantic reveries that absorb the soul, abstracting it from real life and our fellow-creatures, and causing it to find its joys in itself” (Brewer, 33).
Modern critics believe the societal fixation on ruling passions leading to madness
fits aptly with Shelley’s Frankenstein. Brewer notes that Shelley’s characters frequently “find themselves under the control of perverse impulses that seem to defy rational
quality of the novel depends on this projection of the self into an objectively existing, independent reality over which one necessarily loses control as it acts out one’s own monstrous passions” (Levine, 17). Philip Stevick labels Victor’s behavior as mental
illness, but does not focus his argument on exploring the consequences of doing so: “During the period of the experiment, [Victor] visibly disintegrates, becoming obsessive and compulsive, moved by thoughts of the creation of a new race grateful to him for its creation – yet he speaks of his work as horrible, filthy, and loathsome” (Stevick, 224). Lee Sterrenburg, in contrast, focuses more on the “battle” that Victor faces between his basic personality and his perhaps obsessive passion to achieve animation: “The innate
benevolence of his ‘human nature’ is at war with a counter tendency, his perpetually increasing ‘eagerness’ to revive the dead. His fanatical desires (which are symbolized by his staring eyes and incessant nighttime labors) do battle with his natural ‘loathing’ of the horrors around him. The fanaticism wins. But a battle has taken place within”
(Sterrenburg, 152).
Within the text itself, readers can find an abundance of evidence that supports a reading of the Creature’s ugliness as the result of Victor’s mental illness. Victor’s own
ugly reality of the Creature? Couldn’t his “enthusiastic frenzy” have also “blinded” him to the actual appearance of the Creature (Shelley, 118)?
Additionally, Victor explicitly references the unusual state of his mind while he
creates the Creature: “Even now I cannot recollect, without passion, my reveries while the work was incomplete. I trod heaven in my thoughts, now exulting in my powers, now burning with the idea of their effects” (Shelley, 152). Beyond the reference to “passion,” which the reader might take as further evidence of Shelley’s intent to show the disastrous effects of obsessional passions taking over one’s behavior, Victor’s claim to have “trod heaven in [his] thoughts” while “exulting in [his] powers” and “burning with the idea of
their effects” strikes the reader as nothing short of delusions of grandiosity similar to the ones typically seen in mental illness (Shelley, 152). He literally does not consider earthly things, stuck in the “heaven” of his “thoughts,” and I propose that his dissociation from the reality in front of him may allow him to misperceive the actual appearance of the Creature initially (Shelley, 152).
Once Victor’s illusions have been shattered, he looks back on the time before the Creature’s animation and confirms his disconnection from reality once more: “Dreams
philosophical phrases of “ruling” passions, which controlled Victor as he worked to animate the Creature (Shelley, 36). Once he endowed the Creature with life, however, the monstrosity of reality “overthrows” the “ruling” passion and forces him to face the
consequences of his actions (Shelley, 36).
Levine comes close to explaining Victor’s sudden shift in perception of the Creature’s appearance through mental illness, but he does not complete the argument: “Victor falls into a ‘trance,’ so driven by his creative energy that even what is loathsome becomes possible to him. In his ‘work-shop of filthy creation’ he loses ‘all soul or sensation’” (Levine, 6). However, instead of making the logical leap that would explain
Victor’s behavior, Levine backs away at the last minute: “It is not possible, for example, to understand why Victor goes to the ‘filthy’ lengths he does in handling corpses to create his Monster; or to explain […] why he immediately assumes that the Monster is guilty of
William’s murder” (Levine, 20). I propose that it is possible to understand why Victor undertakes such distasteful actions and why he immediately links the Creature to anything negative, regardless of how unlikely it seems to the reader that the Creature is involved. If Victor does have obsessive-compulsive disorder, all of these behaviors fit together and become a compelling way to read the character, rather than bluntly labeling him as simply odd or erratic.
If Shelley proposes reading Victor as someone with a mental illness, does she
cures that may have allowed his narrative to turn out differently? I argue the text supports cures like language used as a type of oral therapy, as well as friendship, with varying degrees of success.
Reading oral therapy as a psychoanalytic cure for Victor’s mental illness makes sense given the text’s incredible focus on language and the necessity of telling stories. Levine points out the nested structure of the narrative itself within the tripled characters of Walton, Victor, and the Creature, respectively (Levine, 18). This mirroring and constant portrayal of attempted storytelling by each of the characters reveals Shelley’s insistence on the power of oral therapy and language to redeem her characters, but as
Levine points out, “it is not clear that any of the three learn from the stories they hear” (Levine, 18). In fact, as Levine notes, Shelley reiterates the futility of oral therapy by insisting on Victor’s inability to properly express his feelings: “One of the surest signs of the frailty of the language is the frequency with which Victor fails to describe his
feelings. He is always telling Walton that he ‘cannot describe’ his emotion, or that ‘no one can conceive’ the horror” (Levine, 19).
Similarly, the Creature attempts to find sympathetic listeners for his own tale.
one another through language, is simply ecstatic: “I found that these people possessed a method of communicating their experience and feelings to one another by articulate sounds. […] This was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to become
acquainted with it” (Shelley, 77). Brewer argues that the Creature’s immediate
fascination with language and instant desire to learn how to communicate stems from his belief in language’s ability to bridge the gap of perception between his outward
appearance and his benevolent interior (Brewer, 169-70). Unfortunately, as readers know, the Creature’s plan does not succeed. While blind De Lacey does not immediately rebuff the Creature, he does not represent an adequate test subject of language’s ability to bridge
the gap of otherness between the Creature and humanity. He cannot see the Creature’s appearance, so for the old De Lacey, no dichotomy exists between the Creature’s
appearance and his interiority. When the others return and refuse to listen to anything the
Creature says before attacking him, Shelley once again implies the inability of language to change perceptions within the narrative she tells.
Eventually, the Creature gives up his belief in language as a bridge between himself and humanity. Rather, he views it as the cause of his isolation. While he cannot use language to find community with humans, he begs Victor for a mate and specifically implies that language will bring the pair together: “I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being, and become linked to a chain of existence and events, from which I am now
perspective toward language: “The Monster intuitively grasps that language will be of importance to him because by its very nature it implies the ‘chain of existence and events’ within which he seeks a place, defines the interdependency of senders and
receivers of messages in that chain, and provides the possibility of emotional effect independent of any designation” (Brooks, 209). Thus, Brooks argues, the Creature’s decision to view language no longer as a bridge between himself and humanity, but as a link between himself and the female Creature solely, creates the ethical dilemma Victor faces and ultimately destroys, along with the female Creature’s body: “Precisely because the special creation demanded by the Monster has as its purpose the inception of an
affective chain outside humanity – a new family, a new society – it raises the frightening possibility of a new and uncontrollable signifying chain, one with unknown rules and grammar” (Brooks, 213). Through this perspective, the Creature’s hysteria after Victor
destroys the unfinished female Creature is not just his fury at being denied a mate or Victor’s reneged promise, but rather his now certain isolation from the world for his entire lifespan.
Interestingly, the Creature finally finds a half-sympathy at the novel’s end with Walton, who despite hearing Victor’s entire narration and presumably believing every part of his story, still refrains from attacking the Creature and instead listens to what he says. Brewer writes: “Although language cannot in and of itself enable the monster to
his crimes and articulating his miseries before a man who, if not totally sympathetic, is at least torn between ‘curiosity and compassion’” (Brewer, 169-70; Shelley, 158).
In fact, the way the main characters in Frankenstein compulsively tell their stories to listeners, whether sympathetic or unsympathetic, brings to mind Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Shelley knew this poem well and even quotes from it in the epigraph to her short story “Transformation:” “Forthwith this frame of mine was wrench’d / With a woful agony / Which forced me to begin my tale, / And then it set me
free. / Since then, at an uncertain hour, / That agony returns; / And till my ghastly tale is told / This heart within me burns” (Shelley, Collected Tales and Stories, 121; Coleridge). This brings to mind the way Walton writes his letters to Margaret Saville, as the reader
never hears her response to his letters, if she ever receives them at all. Similarly, Walton easily compels Victor to share his story, and the Creature longs for nothing more than to share his experiences with a sympathetic listener. At times, each of the three characters resembles the narrator in Coleridge’s poem, wrenched with an agonizing desire to share their narratives.
Interestingly, Shelley implies that friendship may be the best cure to the mental illness Victor faces. After finishing the Creature and fleeing in horror, Victor experiences
recognize that Victor fell into madness, and he credits Clerval’s friendship as the only thing capable of “restor[ing] […] [him] to life” (Shelley, 39). However, the Creature soon deprives Victor of his friend, and when Victor learns of Clerval’s death, he once again
falls into insanity. This time, his madness lasts longer than his initial incapacity after the creature’s animation: “I lay for two months on the point of death: my ravings, as I afterwards heard, were frightful […]. [N]o one was near me who soothed me with the gentle voice of love; no dear hand supported me” (Shelley, 128). Victor implies that both the length of his madness at this time and its cause can be traced to his lack of friendship. His relationship deprivation leads to Victor’s bout of madness and prevents him from
regaining sanity as quickly as he did during his earlier nervous breakdown. Victor’s last bout of madness comes after the deaths of Elizabeth and his father. Once again, his madness lasts longer than either of his previous experiences: “[T]hey […] called me mad; and during many months, as I understood, a solitary cell had been my habitation”
(Shelley, 150). This type of madness could only be healed by time, but Shelley suggests that perhaps Victor might have healed faster if he still had friends.
Victor expounds upon the dangers of obsessive passions that he’s learned
firsthand: “If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquility of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country; America would have been explored more
Victor, then, his fatal error stems from allowing his “pursuit […] to interfere” with “his domestic affections” (Shelley, 34). While Victor does not explicitly state what he means by “domestic affections,” I interpret this phrase to mean the bonds between family and
close friends. Victor blames not only his own despair and personal tragedy upon his obsessive pursuit, but also the downfalls of Greece, Caesar, America, Mexico, and Peru, demonstrating to the reader that Victor believes a larger lesson can be learned from his travails.
This understanding certainly fits with Romantic-era understandings of friendship
as a balm for mental ailments. In Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he writes of the dangers of solitude and the benefits of communication and relationships with others (Smith, 198). Through this understanding, Shelley might have seen Victor’s fatal error as insisting upon solitude during his studies. If he continued his friendships
with Clerval and his professors as he worked for animation, he might have been
convinced of the improprieties of his actions or perhaps might have accepted the Creature despite his appearance. Victor’s later improvements when he experiences contact with his friends and family further serves to enhance this reading of friendship as a potential cure for mental illness, but the Creature manages to deprive his creator of these balms, forcing him to deal with the torturous realms of his own mind without relief.
Literary critics agree with this reading, but many of them disagree with the notion
a type of passion – the same mental abstraction that can lead to ruling passions, like Victor’s obsession with animating the Creature – but because it’s focused externally upon others, rather than internally upon one’s own goals and desires, it does not lead to
disastrous consequences (Brewer, 127). While he acknowledges that “Clerval’s loving care of Frankenstein […] is far more salutary than the chains and darkness of an asylum” to curing Victor’s occasional bouts of madness, he still insists that “friends may not be able to ‘cure’ individuals who are under the influence of a ruling passion” (Brewer, 149-50, 128). Levine agrees that love is a type of friendship, but argues that since the novel ends in Victor’s demise and the deaths of everyone he loves, readers should not view
friendship as a way to cure the mental illness Victor faces: “Mary Shelley’s novel can be seen as an exploration of the powerlessness of love to control the passions that are hidden deep in our being, that are sure to find physical expression, and, finally, that are
unimaginable without pain or guilt” (Levine, 6). While Levine makes a compelling point given the events of the novel, I believe Shelley might argue that friendship could have averted the novel’s entire tragic plot if Victor had not isolated himself during his quest for animation. Thus, while friendship may not always be able to save an individual after
mental illness has begun, friendship may have prevented Victor’s fatal mistake in the first place.
Victor’s initial description of the Creature as deeply flawed, and yet the ambiguity of the Creature’s appearance cannot be denied, either. Thus, I propose the Creature may not be beautiful in the traditional human sense, but he also cannot be described as ugly in the
traditional human sense. There’s something distinctly off about him, something that immediately strikes anyone who sees him as inhuman and supernatural. While Victor may lose himself in an obsessive quest to create life, he maintains enough logic and rationality to complete the process, which seems extraordinarily difficult and science-driven. Thus, his ability to deduce each individual part as beautiful may still be accurate, but the totality of the sum of the parts cannot be reconciled with traditional human
Chapter 5: The Creature as “Other”
While one might easily read Victor’s potential mental illness as negating all conversation about the Creature’s potential beauty, rather than his supposed ugliness, the Creature can also be read as representing an “other” that the other characters lack the ability to describe. Through this reading, the Creature may be frightening, but not because of ugliness. Instead, his physical deviances from traditional humanity cause discomfort in everyone who sees him. I argue in this chapter that the characters within
Frankenstein and even readers in Shelley’s own time lacked the language and the
understanding to deal with an “other,” so they resorted to language of ugliness to describe the fear they felt in response to difference.
First, readers can choose to read the Creature as an “other” by using the genre of gothic fiction as a metaphor. During Shelley’s time period, the gothic was a new genre, yet, as Diane Hoeveler writes, it “is a distinctly hybrid genre, neither purely a novel form nor purely a romance” (Hoeveler, xvi). Beyond possessing qualities of multiple genres, the gothic also focused on bringing the dissimilar together in content, as well. Hoeveler argues that gothic fiction possesses a “highly repetitive quality” and “fixat[es] on
enchanted and the disenchanted,” while Griffin points out the necessity of “the
reconciliation of elements opposed or different in kind, whether in nature or in art: external with internal, intellectual with emotional, conscious with unconscious, matter with spirit” (Hoeveler, 4; Griffin, 50).
Shelley overtly meant the Creature to represent gothic fiction, as shown by how
his appearance and other characters’ reactions to him correlate with contemporaneous understandings of the sublime. Anne Mellor believes the Creature “embodies the human sublime” because “[h]is gigantic stature, his physical strength, his predilection for desert mountains and dreary glaciers, and above all his origin in the transgression of the
boundary between life and death, all render him both ‘obscure’ and ‘vast,’ the
touchstones of the sublime” (Mellor, 132). As I addressed earlier, the Creature does not merely garner disapproval due to his appearance, but evokes emotions of the highest
power, causing characters to flee before the sight of him. Mellor argues this further constitutes confirmation of Shelley’s intent to embody the sublime in the Creature, as “[his] very existence seems to constitute a threat to human life” (Mellor, 132).
But more than merely representing the sublime, I argue that Shelley attempts to manifest a threatening “Other” in her Creature, and it’s precisely this deviance from humanity that frightens the characters and leads to his ugly label. Elizabeth Dolan points out Victor only views the Creature as monstrous when he’s a whole being, rather than a
aspect of gothic fiction as a whole, which similarly combines aspects of separate genres as well as seemingly oppositional topics. Hoeveler writes that the gothic genre fixates upon “the bifurcation that plagues definitions of the self, as well as contradictory attitudes
toward the body, agency, sex, class, and race” (Hoeveler, 19). Ruth Anolik agrees, writing that the gothic focuses upon “the shadowy, mysterious, and unknowable space inhabited by the inhumanly unknowable Other – supernatural or human. The Gothic adventure is the journey of the normative, enlightened Self as it encounters the unknown”
(Anolik, 2). Thus, Frankenstein as a gothic novel seems well suited to the task of
exploring the effects of an “Other” disrupting traditional societal forces, and the Creature undeniably represents the “Other” in question.
Even other characters’ responses to the Creature fall in line with traditional representations of otherness in gothic fiction. Jerrold Hogle emphasizes that the
Creature’s monstrosity stems from a mixture of qualities that are not usually found together: “The creature is a monster in that it/he embodies and distances ‘all that a society refuses to name’ – all the betwixt-and-between, even ambisexual, cross-class, and
2). I agree entirely with her definition of “human difference” as “monstrosity,” as I believe it’s the simultaneity of the Creature’s human-like appearance combined with all of his supernatural features that creates the intensely negative reaction he faces.
Interestingly, Anolik addresses the gothic tradition of coming to identify with the “Other” represented in various gothic fictions (Anolik, 2). She continues this thought by pointing out “the subversive Gothic inclination to empathize with the Other, the non-normative, transgressive figure who troubles the category of the norm and transgresses the boundaries necessary to create the norm” (Anolik, 7). While this may be a more
modern phenomenon, readers of Frankenstein repeatedly view the text as a cautionary tale against overreaching. Victor possesses the personality flaws that ultimately lead to his own destruction. One cannot help but pity the Creature, who tries again and again to warm others’ hearts and gain a community of his own, particularly shown by his scenes
observing the De Lacey family. Thus, readers’ near-universal agreement on Victor’s responsibility for the tragic plot and sympathy with the Creature (by no means excusing his later violent acts of vengeance) further serves to solidify the Creature’s status as the “Other” commonly found in gothic fiction texts contemporaneous with Shelley.
The Other can be defined through the limitations on humanity that people – authors or otherwise – construct. Clearly, to recognize an “Other,” there has to be an accepted boundary of humanity for an Other to cross or supersede. Mellor asserts that
the human and the nonhuman and thus to fix the boundaries between us and them” (Mellor, 134). Humans continually do this “to control the terrors of the unknown” (Mellor, 134). Dolan chooses to focus on the physiological and medical advances for the
human eye during Shelley’s time period, particularly the difference in how ordinary people came to see the function of the eye and vision as a whole: “The eye allows seeing subjects to differentiate between self and world through the visual images it forms and thus helps construct the ‘I-you’ boundaries that are crucial to identity” (Dolan, 6). By extending Dolan’s argument, the eye can also help distinguish between human and
non-human, as the characters in Frankenstein prove so adept at doing.
The important thing to note about gothic fiction in general – and the Creature in
particular – is that the represented Other is not an entirely supernatural force. The Creature is not a vampire, zombie, or werewolf; he is made from human parts and only human parts and does not possess superpowers of any kind. (Some might argue that his incredible strength, speed, and ability to survive in harsh climates should be categorized as a superpower, but I choose to read these characteristics of the Creature as a result of his large size, which Victor intentionally created from the body parts of other humans. For the purposes of this argument, I will assume that any human who happened to be the
same size as the Creature would also possess the same strength, speed, and ability to survive in harsh conditions.) Peter Brooks makes the importance of the Creature’s
Unheimliche, as “a monstrous potentiality so close to us – so close to home – that we
have repressed its possibility” (Brooks, 217-8). The Creature’s deviances from humanity would not matter if he did not possess any similarities with humanity; because he
possesses both at once, he becomes frightening to behold, regardless of the beauty or ugliness of his actual appearance. In fact, one might imagine a supernaturally beautiful Creature, representing humanity in its purest form. The characters this imaginary
Creature comes across might still recoil in terror, but not from ugliness. In this case, their
recoil and repulsion would stem from their recognition of the Creature’s difference from humanity, its supernatural state given away by an unnatural, unnerving perfection.
Despite the simultaneity of similarities with and differences from humanity, the Creature’s resonance in popular culture stems primarily from its representation of difference. As Anolik writes, “[I]n its considerations of the human Other of the
Enlightenment – inhuman, unknowable, dangerously uncontrollable – the Gothic presents human difference as monstrous, and then, paradoxically, subverts the categories of
poor, or women – should not be held accountable for the numerous societal upheavals and cultural dislocation seen in Shelley’s time.
The entire genre of gothic fiction occurs primarily in response to fears of change
in societal transformation of various kinds. Hoeveler writes, “[T]h gothic arises at precisely the time when upper-class white males felt increasingly under siege by middle- and lower-class men, women’s rights, political unrest, and the rapid economic, political, and social transformations of their society” (Hoeveler, 19). Readers can see this anxiety
in Frankenstein specifically in many places. The economic transformations of their society led to increasingly fast technological and medical innovations, so Victor’s quest did not seem particularly outlandish or impossible, especially to those who might not be well-educated or trained in science. Additionally, the Creature can easily be read as a metaphor for almost every oppressed class who desires more out of life. As Hoeveler
Interestingly, the Creature not only represents oppressed classes, he also learns to voice his concerns eloquently. In continuing the metaphor, the Creature’s eloquence and decision to use his newfound language to argue for the rights he believes he deserves
parallels the increasing expansion of rights in Shelley’s time period. Lee Sterrenburg focuses on the Creature’s narrative of injustice: “From the republican tradition of social monsters, he seems to have derived his acerbic, verbal critique of poverty and injustice, which serves as his stated rationale for insurrection. As he tells us with pointed
eloquence, monsters are driven to rebellion by suffering and oppression” (Sterrenburg, 165). The United Kingdom was not immune from suffering and oppression, whether at
home or in its colonies abroad. Thus, Frankenstein contains a powerful warning and critique of oppression, while using fear to captivate readers.
The Creature’s oppression and later behavior serves as a metaphor for many
oppressed groups, as Mellor articulates: “A creature denied both parental love and peers; a working class denied access to meaningful work but condemned instead, in Ruskin’s words, to make the same glass bead over and over; a colonized and degraded race: all are potential monsters, dehumanized by their uncaring employers and unable to feel the bonds of citizenship with the capitalist society in which they live” (Mellor, 113-4). This critique indicts society for how these classes behave and perhaps suggests that any insurrections are not only inevitable but righteous, as well. Jerrold Hogle points out the
oppressed groups and Victor’s creation: “Moreover, the racial otherness of the creature, […] forces itself on his creator’s attention in ‘his yellow skin,’ his non-Asian ‘flowing’ hair, and his ‘straight black lips’” (Hogle, 185). By alluding to features of varying
ethnicities that readers contemporaneous with the author might instinctively link to colonized people abroad, Shelley may be subtly underlining the Creature’s behavior as metaphorical for underrepresented and dissatisfied groups in British society.
Undoubtedly, readers understood this metaphor. Mellor quotes an 1824 speech from the foreign secretary and leader of the House of Commons, George Canning, who used the Creature as a metaphor to argue against emancipation for the slaves in the West
Indies, a British colony: “To turn [a slave] loose in the manhood of his physical strength, […] but in the infancy of his uninstructed reason, would be to raise up a creature
resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance; the hero of which constructs a human form, with all the corporeal capabilities of man, and with the thews and sinews of a giant; but being unable to impart to the work of his hands a perception of right and wrong, he finds too late that he has only created a more than mortal power of doing mischief, and himself recoils from the monster which he has made” (Canning, quoted in
upper classes of British society then be morally at fault for any supposed moral deficiency the freed slaves displayed?
Shelley’s use of the Creature as a metaphor for societal upheaval does not only
extend to the lower classes or slaves. As Elizabeth Dolan explains, Shelley’s use of the Creature’s eyes as the locus of Victor’s shift from perceiving his creation as beautiful to monstrous creates a link with military efforts in Egypt. Immediately upon the Creature’s animation, Victor notes his “dull yellow eyes,” and suddenly labels his creation as horrific despite stating that he’d chosen all of the Creature’s parts as beautiful only a few moments previously. Unfortunately for the Creature, “[y]ellow, watery eyes were
symptomatic of several systemic diseases, including yellow fever” (Dolan, 52). Known colloquially as Egyptian ophthalmia, the disease arrived in the United Kingdom when “soldiers fighting in the alliance against Napoleon in Egypt” came home (Dolan, 50). The disease “continued to rage in England and France while Mary Shelley wrote
Frankenstein,” and Dolan notes that “[t]he disease was not simply something to avoid,
but something that inspired terror and universal apprehension” (Dolan, 50, 59). Perhaps the most interesting reading of the Creature’s eyes as indicative of Egyptian ophthalmia stems from the British cultural shift of perception between viewing the disease as endemic and as epidemic. Initially believed to be only contagious to Egyptians, “the illness of another people in the eyes of the British,” when it inevitably
threatening to one’s health” (Dolan, 54). Thus, Victor’s refusal to have contact with the Creature serves to illustrate a literal fear for his own health, which perhaps renders his behavior at this critical scene more understandable. The transition to the disease as
epidemic meant “to be at the top of the hierarchy is not to be protected” because “an epidemic – uncontained difference that threatens to spread – is potentially infectious to those in power” (Dolan, 57-8). To literate British elites in Shelley’s time period, this prospect would have been absolutely terrifying, yet compulsively intriguing, just as the
