Victor Frankenstein seems to have mixed emotions at the time of the creature’s birth; he is nervous yet scared and disgusted at the outcome of his long toil. The author shows this with the quote, “with an anxiety that almost amounted to agony”, again this really brings out the gothic image using pain and suffering to make sure the reader realises the full extent of the horror that Frankenstein has unleashed on the quiet country around him.
When the monster is finally brought to life Frankenstein’s first and overwhelming feeling are those of horror and disgust of what he has created. He says, “How can I describe emotions of this catastrophe”, and, “Breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. ” This shows he is so disgusted with his years of work it is impossible to describe how he feels.
Words like, “breathless horror”, really make use of the gothic scenery tying in the moral issues of abandoning the creature to the abject disgust the reader thinks of the creature of this point, to confuse the readers’ image of Frankenstein and his awful creation. Victor Frankenstein describes his creation in many ways; however he very often calls it a, “wretch”. This treatment affects the creature greatly, troubling it throughout the play, this is really shown in chapter ten when the creature says, “All men hate the wretched; how then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things?
Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. ” The words, “Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me”, are deep and strong as they are spoken from the monster to the Victor Frankenstein, but revealing the creators true feelings towards the being he created; like a parent creates a child, so however monstrous it is he should still be caring for it.
The other deep meanings are behind the words, “how then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things? ” These words spoken by the creature are the true facts about its life; it is hated by all due to its monstrous appearance, and this makes it a poor, miserable, wretched and shunned by society with no-one to care for it or teach it how to live, and this is no way for what is effectively a small child to live.
This reinforces the hypothesis that Mary Shelly was attempting to show that interfering with nature is not right. Frankenstein compares the creature to itself to make it seem worse than it seems. “His hair of lustrous black, his teeth of pearly whiteness formed a horrid contrast with his watery eyes and shrivelled compression and straight black lips. ” These are some of the things that Frankenstein described about his creation.
The author chose to use words like shrivelled and watery because these types of words are very descriptive and bring vivid images to mind. Just before the creature awakes, Victor Frankenstein says, “His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful! Beautiful – great god! ” This show that Frankenstein was trying to make a beautiful creature, but in his minds eye he thought it was despairingly ugly.
