lifeless body had been ugly, but once life had been infused and the creature’s creature began to move the image completely changed. Lifeless, the creature poses no threat. Now that he has been given life, the creature threatens to upset society. The creature is now something that is as even Dante could not “such have This is of course referring to Dante Inferno. In conceived”. Alighieri’s Inferno, Dante travels through the levels of hell and encounters numerous monsters and horrors. Yet Victor is saying that even Dante, who can conceive all of these monstrous things, could not have envisioned the creature. That is an extreme jump from merely being just a moment before. It is the fact that “ugly” the creature is now alive that is so horrifying. The creature is so horrifying because there is no other being similar to him. People are unequipped to deal with the sight of the creature. Victor made the creature, he is not something naturally occurring in nature. Therefore people cannot deal with him naturally. The reaction is to reject what one is seeing, because it should not exist. People have a visual prejudice against him; they assume he is a monster because he is ugly. People relate to each other due to having things in common, but visually the creature cannot relate to humans. There is no other being like him, so the creature cannot start his own community in which to exist. He is forced to look for one to assimilate into. But the humans are unwilling to accept something that looks the way he does physically. Maureen McLane, in her essay Literate Species: Populations, "Humanities," and Frankenstein, writes that As both Foucault and Frangois Jacob note, species was defined in this era according to the persistence of the visible structure. For the creature, to be
creature’s lifeless body had been ugly, but once life had been infused and the creature began to move the image completely changed. Lifeless, the creature poses no threat. Now that he has been given life, the creature threatens to upset society. The creature is now something that is “such as even Dante could not have conceived”. This is of course referring to Dante Alighieri’s Inferno. In Inferno, Dante travels through the levels of hell and encounters numerous monsters and horrors. Yet Victor is saying that even Dante, who can conceive all of these monstrous things, could not have envisioned the creature. That is an extreme jump from merely being “ugly” just a moment before. It is the fact that the creature is now alive that is so horrifying. The creature is so horrifying because there is no other being similar to him. People are unequipped to deal with the sight of the creature. Victor made the creature, he is not something naturally occurring in nature. Therefore people cannot deal with him naturally. The reaction is to reject what one is seeing, because it should not exist. People have a visual prejudice against him; they assume he is a monster because he is ugly. People relate to each other due to having things in common, but visually the creature cannot relate to humans. There is no other being like him, so the creature cannot start his own community in which to exist. He is forced to look for one to assimilate into. But the humans are unwilling to accept something that looks the way he does physically. Maureen McLane, in her essay Literate Species: Populations, "Humanities," and Frankenstein, writes that As both Foucault and Frangois Jacob note, species was defined in this era according to the persistence of the visible structure. For the creature, to be
Webster_Thesis.docx