When Victor, in Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, begins to
collect the parts for his creature, he does so with the greatest attention to detail. Victor
desires to create a beautiful creature that will deem him the best "father" in the
world.
A new species
would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being
to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve
theirs.
It is these thoughts which
propelled Victor to create a being which owed both its existence and its beauty to Victor.
Upon realizing his "son" lived, Victor is horrified at the
creature's physical nature.
His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his
features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great
God!
Victor had gone through great
lengths to find the appropriate parts which would make his creature beautiful. His recognition
that his creature is not beautiful is utterly shocking to Victor. Instead of being beautiful, the
creature is so hideous that Victor cannot bear to look at him.
The
importance of Victor's horror lies in the fact that Shelley desired to frighten her readers in
the same way she, herself, had been frightened at the monster's creation in her nightmare. Her
1831 introduction defines her desire to frighten her readers.
O! if I could only contrive one which would frighten my
reader as I myself had been frightened that
night!
Shelley's use of emotive words,
such as horror, ugly and hideous, are used to allow the reader to create an image of a monster so
frightening that they, themselves, will have nightmares similar to her own. Given that Shelley
does not paint a complete picture of the monster, only showing the yellow eyes, she allows
readers to create their own image of a monster. Through Victor's recollection of the monster,
this effect is compounded given he can only describe emotions attributed to fear and not actual
images of fear.
The repetition of the word horror, used four times
in chapter five alone, compounds both Victor and the reader's fright. Given that people tend to
have different ideas of what is horrific, ugly and hideous, the use of these words is meant to
evoke true fear for the reader.
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