“One thing cannot be denied: the creature is exceedingly ugly” (Gigante 565)
More than anything else Frankenstein’s Creature has become known for his beauty, or indeed his lack thereof. In Denise Gigante’s “Facing the Ugly: The Case of Frankenstein” she writes, “despite the fact the Victor specifically chose each feature for its beauty…the combined form cannot aesthetically contain its own existence” (570). The dichotomy placed on the Creature from the very beginning between the beautiful and the ugly is a debate that every author, reader, and interpreter of Frankenstein has had to wrestle with and each one from Mary Shelley onwards has played into this debate in an entirely different way.
Mary Shelley had only words to work with when she described the Creature and in the creation scene writes Victor’s words as both playing to the beautiful and ugly as “I had selected his features as beautiful” yet once that creature had come alive “no mortal could support the horror of the countenance” (Robinson 81-82). Gigante echos that change in opinion as she states, “it is important to remember that the Creature’s ugliness did not bother Victor…before he came to life” (566). This interpretation suggests that the aesthetics of the Creature are not what Frankenstein sees as beautiful or ugly, but the visuals and the ugliness of the Creature is what has become important in the retellings of the story that I have been focusing on. The Creature begins to represent that “the ugly is universally offensive” so much so that to most people that is all that he represents (Gigante 567).
In Presumption, the 1823 play, Richard Peake gave the audience two different versions of the Creature, the one that they heard about, and the one that they saw. The words spoken about the Creature describe him as monstrous, from the assistants exclamations of “hobgoblin” and the description of him being 27 feet tall, to Frankenstein’s “dreadful spectre of a human form – no mortal could withstand the horror of that countenance – a mummy endued with animation could not be so hideous as the wretch I have endowed with life” (143). Those descriptors give a menacing, ugliness to the character of the Creature yet through the paintings we have of T.P. Cooke who portrayed the Creature we see instead the beautiful face of a boy. (See Comparison Image Gallery)
Much work was put in to making the Creature in James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein as ugly and hideous as could be. The descriptors in Shelley’s work were pushed to the extreme with the addition of the flattened head, bolts in the neck, droopy dead eyes, and shuffling walk and through this the Creature is diminished down to just his appearance. There are no words in the script used to describe the Creature so all description is done through the visual appearance. Because of the lack of description and words the audience never knows that the Creature was indeed meant to be beautiful as is shown through all of the other adaptions that have the element of text behind them.
Robert, or the Creature in Frankenstein M.D. isn’t being pushed to the ugly side of the spectrum as easily as some of the others. Though his appearance is marred by the bruising and scars across his chest, those do not overlook his features which can be said to be beautiful. This also can be because the creators of this adaptation chose to not include some of the less appealing descriptions of the Creature including the black lips and yellow eyes. Right away this takes away some of the fear and loathing surrounding the creature showing that ugliness has a massive impact on how this Creature is seen.
While Frankenstein M.D. chose to focus on the beautiful descriptions of the Creature, Gris Grimly went the opposite route focusing on the horrifying and grotesque. Even the “hair of a lustrous black and flowing” which is meant to be a thing of beauty is turned into something ugly (Robinson 81). Grimly presents in all aspects “the miserable monster whom I had created” and because of this ugliness and fear surrounding the Creature the opinion one has on him completely changes (Grimly 44).
Because of their differences, especially in aesthetic qualities, I have a difficult time seeing all of the Creatures as the same being. Instead, in my mind there is Peake’s Creature, Whale’s Creature, Frankenstein M.D.’s Creature, and Grimly’s Creature all existing in separate forms entirely on what they look like. This shows that the difference between beauty and the ugly really is that important, especially as that has become all the the Creature is about.
It is the contrast of beauty and ugly within the Creature that truly gives the Creature an ugliness as “these luxuriances only form more horrible contrasts with the deformities of the monster” (Peake 143). We do not know what to do with this thing, what was once so beautiful and now is so ugly, and by relegating it to the ugly and horrifying we create a monster who is little else. I have found that the more beauty given to the Creature in his visual appearance, the easier it is to see him as more than just an evil monster.
The Image of the Creature 