Frankenstein's Monster as the Sublime

            On Thursday I skipped song practice for the second day in a row so I could dive into my essay after yoga at around 6:00. I finished the text of a slightly more than eight page essay a little after noon. For the next hour and a half I struggled with putting the citations into MLA format, as I had to look up how to do it for e-books and pdfs. I had to find exactly where to place a translator’s name and whether or not with a comma or period before it. The citations are the most annoying part of writing an essay because everything has to be placed just so with specific punctuation for specific things and on top of that the guidelines change every year.

            I printed my paper, stapled it and headed downtown. The drop box is on the sixth floor of the Jackman Humanities Building at St George and Bloor. Maybe I was disoriented from sitting in front of my computer and writing my essay for basically two days straight. In front of the elevators is a box with the words “Essay Drop Box” clearly and prominently marked and yet I still wasn’t sure if it was the right one. Maybe I was expecting a box with the sign, “Essay Drop Box for Christian’s Essay" but I think that it was more that I remembered that the Philosophy paper drop boxes each have the names of individual professors on them. Coincidentally, while I was standing there and trying to figure it out, the elevator opened and Professor Weisman came out with another woman. She said “Hi” and asked if I was dropping off my essay and I said yes but asked her to confirm that this was the drop box. She said, “Yes, that’s the drop box” in a tone that seemed to convey, “Yes, obviously that’s the drop box! Can’t you read?”

            I dropped it in and then quickly headed home.

Here is my essay:
                             
                                      We are ugly but we have the music – Leonard Cohen

                                                Frankenstein’s Monster as the Sublime

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein presents a dilemma of aesthetic perception. Victor Frankenstein is an artist and a lover of the sublime in nature who equates beauty with benevolence and deformity with wickedness. His only work of art is a living collage made from beautiful human parts but which turns out misshapen and grotesque because it is an expression of his own tumultuous inner nature. Frankenstein’s monster is the personification of the sublime.

Victor Frankenstein is a believer in physiognomy and thinks that the physical appearance of a person reflects the content of their mind (Henderson 33). Some examples of this from the book are that: his cousin is described as being the image of her mind with an “open and capacious forehead giving indications of good understanding” (Shelley 66, 102); the corpse of his mother, although empty of emotion, seems to him to express affection (Shelley 72); the scientific doctrine of a professor is rejected because of his repulsive countenance and gruff voice, while another teacher’s ideas are accepted because of the sweetness of his voice and the kindness of his appearance (Shelley 74-76); and the hard and rude lines on a nurse’s face express a brutality that is characteristic of her class (Shelley 183). One might expect that an inventor that detests unpleasant features would produce something that pleases his own eye, but this is not the case.

Victor is the creator of a new form of sentient life that is superior to humans in every way but one. As soon as Victor sees his creature come to life he rejects its very existence because of its grotesque appearance (Shelley 83-84). Later he recognizes the monster as being intelligent and is almost swayed by his logic but in the end sees the creature’s mind as deviously reflecting the ugliness of its countenance (Shelley 209). When tempted to sympathize with the monster his compassion is destroyed by the repulsion that comes from seeing and hearing the “mass of filth” that he has brought into the world (Shelley 158). Since Frankenstein believes that the outer aspect is a mirror of the character, he is afraid that if he were to accept the responsibility of caring for the creature he would be condemned by society’s reaction to his having produced such an ugly entity. It would be perceived that he was the source of the ugliness and he would be seen as hideous by association. Therefore Victor would have to face his own inner repulsiveness.

While Victor misinterprets external appearance his creature is also fooled by outer display. But for the monster the surface that deceives him is that of human behaviour. He is deluded by the benign conduct of a family into hoping that it might also spare some compassion for him. The blind father assures him that most people are kind and would not drive him away. But upon seeing him even this benevolent family faints, runs and attacks out of revulsion and terror (Shelley 147-148). As the author’s mother wrote, “If the hideous monster burst suddenly on our sight, fear and disgust render us more severe than man ought to be” (Shelley 232).  But unlike Victor, his creature learns that humans are not what they ought to be or think they are. This is one of the most interesting paradoxes of Frankenstein: that after his childhood education, other then learning how to create a creature that learns, Victor never learns again and in fact continues to self-deceive until his death (Shelley 216).

Victor Frankenstein is not a scientist. This is made evident by certain statements that he makes throughout the story such as, “The mere presence of the idea was an irresistible proof of the fact” and “I banished from my mind every thought that could lead to a different conclusion” (Shelley 99, 178). These are things that a real scientist would never say. Victor recounts that he selected the features of his living invention as beautiful and yet his creature relates that Victor’s notes show that he had described its ugliness in great detail before bringing it to life (Shelley 83, 144). He either knew that the animated creation would be repulsive or thought that when alive its inner being would render it beautiful. A scientist would not care about the aesthetic appearance of his brainchild but would be elated that the experiment was a success. What we see at the moment that his creature comes to life is Frankenstein revealing himself to be not a scientist but rather an artist.

The choosing of beautiful features and assembling them to create a vibrant whole is prophetic of the later collage art that was directly inspired by the Romantic interest in archaeological ruins (Henderson 192). But Victor the artist’s ability to create something beautiful is lacking because of his own internal darkness and so the monster is the direct result of the expression of Victor’s interiority. We get a hint that even he suspects this to be true when he says ““I considered him in the light of my own vampire. My own spirit let loose from the grave” (Shelley 100). This suggests that he contemplates the possibility that he has produced a living sculpture that is a reflection of his own inner ruins.

The ugliness of the monster, according to Victor, is accentuated by the elements of beauty that are present in its appearance, such as its proportionate limbs, its lustrous, flowing black hair and its white teeth (Shelley 83). While for St Augustine the proportionality of the creature’s limbs would have rendered it beautiful (Eco 48), the idea that appealing lineaments can be misassembled to make a disharmonious whole is a mirror reversal of what is frequently held to be true in aesthetics. Imperfect features such as beauty marks or moles on someone’s face are often considered to accentuate one’s overall beauty in such a way that one is considered more beautiful than an attractive person that does not have those imperfections.

This has applied to art since antiquity because the point of art is to create the new and beautiful, but the new must expand the concept of accepted beauty and therefore must draw from elements that are seen by the status quo as ugly. Beauty is composed of many ugly parts and the artist must always learn how to see and use them to make beautiful art (Eco 279). Aristotle says beauty can be created through the masterful imitation of the unpleasant or fearsome (Eco 33). Hubert Parry writes “every advance in art has been made by accepting something that has been recognized as ugly by artistic authorities. Without ugliness breaking the rules there would be no social or artistic progress and we would be buried beneath mountains of dead conventions” (Henderson 143).  That which is seen as unpleasant changes over time according to how it is portrayed in art.  For example, before the Romantic period poetry was dominated by upper class language because the speech of the common man was considered brutal (Coleridge 502). This changed with William Wordsworth’s insistence on the use of common language in his groundbreaking contributions to Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth 305-306). 

William Wordsworth may have provided some of the inspiration for the character of Victor Frankenstein (Shelley 166). Wordsworth’s abandonment of his own Romantic political ideals is alluded to in Percy Shelley’s "To Wordsworth" and can be seen as a parallel to Frankenstein’s rejection of his own creation (Percy Shelley 767). In this sense then, one can see the monster as the personification of Romanticism and the monster’s revenge as the reign of terror. The idea that for Victor the beauty of his dream vanished when he saw the creature in motion parallels Wordsworth’s own reaction to the terrible aftermath of the French revolution in which he had held so much hope (Wordsworth 397-400). In the cases of both Wordsworth and Frankenstein, upon seeing the perversion of their ideals, their beautiful visions were born horribly deformed.

As St Augustine says, “Those that cannot contemplate the whole are disturbed by the deformity of the parts (Eco 114).” Victor Hugo also puts beauty in coincidence with ugliness when he writes, “What we call ugly is a detail from a great whole that eludes us ... Beauty has only one type. Ugliness has thousands. Contact with the deformed has conferred the sublime upon its portrayal in art (Eco 281).” The sublime is the feeling that comes from experiencing something “unfavourable to the will” (Eco 400). Then the powerful, rough, awful, terrible, raging, quick and dangerous living mountain that is Frankenstein’s monster can be seen as the anthropomorphization of the sublime in Romanticism. The sublimity of the creature and the presence of the sublime in art just before and in the Romantic period changed the way we see ugliness (Eco 272). That which is seen as ugly becomes less so in direct proportion to the diminishment of the fear of that object, and as Nietzsche says, “The sublime subjugates terror by means of art” (Eco 276). 

There is irony in Victor being repulsed by a work of art that he created that personifies the sublime. He declares that he loves the sublime in nature for the positive, invigorating effect that it produces on his mind (Shelley 115-117). There is also irony in the fact that while Victor’s monster is easily able to survive in and move through extremely sublime environments (Shelley 117, 159), it is in pastoral settings and with the community of people that reside there that he longs to live (Shelley 121-148). The creature’s irony is easily understood because it is the result of circumstances beyond his control, but for Victor it is more complicated.

Victor prefers making his treks into the mountains alone because "the presence of another would destroy the solitary grandeur of the scene" (Shelley 116). Victor is a loner, despite his claims of closeness to his family. Other than perhaps some correspondence there is no indication that Victor has any close contact with his family from the time that he enters university until the creation of the monster (Shelley 74-83). He would be in his late teens or twenty years old when he begins his organic animation experiments and his lack of communication indicates that upon emerging as an adult he feels disconnected from friends and family. If not for the trauma of seeing himself reflected in his creation shocking him back into a need for the familiar he may not have welcomed his friend’s visit so gratefully (Shelley 85). When family tragedies compel him to return home, outside of his duties he says “I shunned the face of man; all sound of joy or complacency was torture to me; solitude was my only consolation – deep, dark, death-like solitude” (Shelley 111).

There is no mention in Frankenstein of Victor’s relationship with the sublime in nature until after he brings his creature into existence. Because the monster is the sublime in human form the perceived level of danger is more pronounced because unlike mountains and other challenging environments of the Earth, human beings have a will that is aimed by emotion with the ability to deliberately injure or kill. Victor’s fear of violence from his creation is accentuated by his belief that outward appearance reflects one’s inner state. Upon seeing the overwhelming sublimity of his own savage nature projected into the form of his artistic creation, Victor is terrified without relief. It is after feeling weakened by the tragedies that have resulted from the monster’s existence that Victor seeks strength from the mountains (Shelley 116-117). On the precipices of the flexing extremes of nature there is, as Schopenhauer says, a fear of harm that when it is not realized raises the observer up to the sense of equality with the sublime (Eco 275). As Victor’s creation is already equal to the sublime it is fitting that their first meeting is in the mountains where Victor is at his strongest. The sublime and solitude are the only common ground between Victor and his creation. 

The fact that Victor has shaped a living work of art that he considers to be terrifyingly grotesque shows that there is something within Victor that is fearsome and abhorrent to himself. How this inner darkness was formed and why it releases itself with such terrible force begins with his childhood. Victor has lived a sheltered life with just his close-knit family, including Elizabeth and only one named friend in Clerval. Victor says that his secluded and domestic upbringing have given him an invincible repugnance to new countenances (Shelley 73).

In the Frankenstein home the most prominent image on display is a painting commissioned by Alphonse Frankenstein of Victor’s mother which depicts her kneeling in the agony of grief beside her father’s coffin (Shelley 100). That someone would want to remember one’s wife and have one’s children remember their mother in this manner presents a dark view of beauty.  Being raised by a father who considers grief to be beautiful has resulted in Victor’s inheritance of this same aesthetic. He finds the young woman dressed in mourning that is about to receive a death sentence in her trial for the murder of his brother to have been rendered exquisitely beautiful by the solemnity of her feelings (Shelley 103). The tragic circumstances of death in the history of the Frankenstein family have been aestheticized by their collective unconscious into a particularly dark understanding of beauty. Victor, in assembling dead human parts into a new living whole has contradicted the Frankenstein family aesthetic because it is only the remembered dead that are beautiful to Victor’s unconscious mind.

Victor’s father’s encouragement of the repression of the trauma and negative feelings surrounding death, and Victor’s use of the utmost self-violence to keep everything inside shows the result of the bad parenting that Shelley’s mother warned about (Shelley 190): “A great proportion of the misery that wanders in hideous forms around the world is allowed to rise from the negligence of parents” (Shelley 233). This perpetuation of misery shows that the Frankensteins live in a morbid world and Elizabeth alludes to this when she says of Justine’s execution that, “Misery has come home” (Shelley 113). Elizabeth’s misery has made her less beautiful but still a fitting match for one as miserable as Victor (Shelley 193). If misery is a primary part of the Frankenstein family identity then it is literally true when Victor’s creation declares that, “Misery made me a fiend” (Shelley 119).

Ugliness was too close and beauty was too far away for Victor Frankenstein. He rejected his work of art because to him it was an aesthetic failure. It is true that his creature was a poorly assembled and therefore ugly whole made up of beautiful parts. But ironically, what Victor could not see was that his creation’s ugliness was only part of another more beautiful whole. The monster was a masterpiece.