Frankenstein's Monster is a Collage

            On Tuesday from 11:00 on, except for taking a 90-minute siesta in the early afternoon , I worked on my essay. I stopped working to post my blog, which should have taken less than five minutes but the HTML language was screwed up so that the background of my white text was white and so I had to crawl underneath and fix it for each paragraph and each line of poetry. That took at least 20 minutes. At bedtime I only had half of my paper written:

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein presents a dilemma of aesthetic perception. Victor Frankenstein believes that the physical appearance of a person reflects the content of their mind. He equates beauty with benevolence and deformity with wickedness. 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 he assesses its grotesque face as expressing evil. Even when later he recognizes the monster as being clever he only sees its mind as deviously reflecting the ugliness of its countenance. 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. 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 kind family faints, runs and attacks out of revulsion and terror. 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”. 

Victor Frankenstein is not a scientist. This is made evident by certain statements 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.” These are things that a real scientist would never say. Victor says that he selected the features of his living invention as beautiful and yet relates that his notes show that he had described the ugliness of his yet to be animated creature in detail. 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 have been 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 life 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 was lacking because of his own internal darkness and so the monster was the direct result of the expression his own interiority. We get a hint that Victor 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.” This suggests that he considered the possibility that he had produced a living sculpture that was a reflection of his own inner ruin.

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. While for St Augustine the proportionality of the creature’s limbs would have rendered it beautiful (Eco 48), the idea that beautiful features add to ugliness is a mirror reversal of what has always been true about ugly features such as beauty marks or moles on a woman’s face accentuate her overall beauty in such a way that she is considered more beautiful than an attractive woman 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. 

William Wordsworth may have provided some of the inspiration for the character of Victor Frankenstein. His abandonment of his own Romantic political ideals as is alluded to in Percy Shelley’s "To Wordsworth" can be seen as a parallel to Frankenstein’s rejection of his own creation. 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 both cases, upon the perversion of the ideal, the beautiful vision was born 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 an irony in Victor being repulsed by his creation even though it personifies the sublime, as the sublime in nature solemnizes Victor’s mind. There is another irony in that while the monster is easily able to survive in move through sublime environments, it is in the pastoral and with the community of people there that he longs live. The creature’s irony is easily understood because it is the result of circumstances beyond his control, but for Victor it is more complicated. He insists upon making his treks into the mountains alone because "the presence of another would destroy the solitary grandeur of the scene". Victor is a loner, despite his claims of closeness to his family. Other than perhaps some correspondence there is no indication that Victor had any close contact with his family from the time that he entered university until the creation of the creature. He would be in his late teens or twenty when he begins his experiments and this indicates that upon emerging as an adult he feels disconnected from friends and family. It is only the trauma of seeing himself reflected in his creation that compels him to seek solace with his family and yet even then he says he abhorred society and longed for solitude in the mountains. Interestingly there is no mention of Victor’s relationship with the sublime in nature until after he brings the living sublime in the form of his creature into existence. Because the monster is the sublime in human form the perceived level of harm is more pronounced because unlike the sublime, human beings have a will and intentions. This is accentuated by Victor’s belief that outward appearance reflects one’s inner state, which amplifies his terror upon seeing the overwhelming sublimity of his own inner nature that he has projected into the form of his artistic creation. It is after bringing the monster to life that he seeks strength from the mountains because on the edge 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.