Key Quote
“"I beheld the wretch — the miserable monster whom I had created"”
Victor Frankenstein · Chapter 5
Focus: “monster”
Victor's first response to his creation is disgust — not the proud joy of a parent but the horror of someone who has unleashed something they cannot face.
Technique 1 — DEHUMANISING LEXIS / DISTANCING LANGUAGE
The nouns 'wretch' and 'monster' are dehumanising (removing human qualities through language): Victor refuses to call the Creature a person, a being, or even an 'it' — he immediately categorises it as sub-human. This linguistic violence precedes and enables physical abandonment: by labelling the Creature a monster, Victor gives himself permission to abandon it. Shelley shows how naming shapes moral responsibility.
The dash between 'the wretch' and 'the miserable monster' creates a pause — a moment of horror where language fails and then restarts with even more revulsion. The dash performs Victor's psychological process: he looks, recoils, grasps for words, and finds only terms of disgust. Shelley uses punctuation to dramatise the gap between experience and expression.
Key Words
RAD — REGRESS
Victor regresses catastrophically at the moment that should be his greatest triumph: the animation of the Creature should be the crowning achievement of scientific genius, but Victor experiences it as horror. His regression is moral — he goes from dedicated scientist to terrified coward in an instant. Shelley suggests that ambition without moral preparation leads not to glory but to collapse.
Key Words
Technique 2 — POSSESSIVE SHAME — 'WHOM I HAD CREATED'
The relative clause 'whom I had created' is a reluctant admission of responsibility: Victor acknowledges authorship of the Creature even as he recoils from it. The past perfect tense — 'had created' — distances the act into the past, as if Victor is already trying to separate himself from his deed. But grammar betrays him: 'I' and 'created' are linked, and no amount of temporal distancing can break the connection between creator and creation.
The verb 'beheld' is elevated, almost archaic — a word from Biblical or epic literature rather than everyday speech. By using this heightened register, Victor unconsciously frames himself as a figure in a grand narrative — a God appalled by his own creation. Shelley's word choice reveals Victor's self-dramatisation: even in horror, he sees himself as the protagonist of a cosmic drama.
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Context (AO3)
GALVANISM
Luigi Galvani's experiments with galvanism (using electrical current to stimulate dead tissue) showed that electricity could make dead frog legs twitch. This discovery fuelled speculation that science might reanimate the dead. Shelley was aware of these experiments, and Victor's project reflects the era's genuine belief that science was approaching the boundary between life and death.
THE BIRTH METAPHOR
Many scholars read the creation scene as a birth metaphor: Victor, like a parent, brings a being into the world but recoils from its appearance. Shelley, who experienced the death of her first child shortly before writing the novel, may have embedded maternal anxieties — the fear of producing something 'wrong,' of failing as a creator.
Key Words
WOW — THE GAZE & MONSTROSITY (Foucault / Mulvey)
Foucault's concept of the clinical gaze — the medical/scientific way of looking that objectifies bodies and reduces persons to specimens — illuminates Victor's 'beholding.' He does not see a person; he sees a product, an experiment, a failure. Laura Mulvey's theory of the scopophilic gaze (the pleasure of looking) adds another dimension: Victor's gaze is the opposite of scopophilia — it is scopophobia (the horror of seeing). The Creature terrifies because it returns Victor's gaze — it LOOKS BACK. Shelley dramatises the moment when the objectified being refuses to remain an object and becomes a subject with its own perspective. The true horror is not the Creature's appearance but the fact that Victor is SEEN by his creation — forced to confront himself through the eyes of his abandoned child.
Key Words