Hideous?

Shelley begins with Elizabeth’s beauty being the predominant reason behind her adoption and thus sets the emphasis on physical beauty that Victor later preoccupies himself with. The manner in which his mother “presented Elizabeth as her promised gift” (37) and how Victor comes to perceive Elizabeth as a “possession of [his] own” (37) not only objectifies her, but seems to parallel his future expectations of his creation. However, rather than become the owner and creator of man, Victor seeks more. From that obsession of perfect beauty to the mentioning of his only friend's obsession with the glorified heroes of the past and his desire to “render man invulnerable” (42), it’s almost as if Victor, as a modern Prometheus, seeks to go further and give life to what should have been a god.

Victor continues on p. 48 that he “was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth." This only further expands on his desires to go beyond what is human. If "at last my work be imperfect" (54), victor deems it a failure. Or, in other words, his only success would require that he create "a human being in perfection" (56). Though what he’s failed to neglect is that humans are imperfect and thus to create a hybrid god in the image of man is synonomous as creating imperfection. Since this is essentially idealism, the creation of this perfect, godly being is impossible. His expectations are that by giving life to the hybrid corpse, he would be able to renew the beautiful, yet dead, features to full health. Yet all he manages to create is an animated corpse, and thus the source of his horror. He discovers that though he has created life, that livelihood alone is insufficient to physically reverse the decay. His creation is imperfect and ungodly and thus a failure and deemed hideous.

-Kathy Cheng