Beautiful and Beastly Daemon

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Round 1 a Brief Warning Note on Beauty and Ugliness

This is one of my favourite books. I love the unnamed daemon which Hollywood has us call the monster. The real monster is Victor Frankenstein. As a creation story Victor is a real bastard of a creator. He breathes life into a being only to run away in terror at what he had done. I read this as an interpretation or expansion of William Blake's poem The Tyger:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?


In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?


And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?


What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?


When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?


Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?


The reality of this creation is that Victor abandons a completely innocent being out of fear. This is Bad Parenting 101. Victor had a creative force strong enough to will another being into existence yet he lacked the ability to understand what was right in front of him. Victor is a strange man. We can hardly blame him, considering how he pieced the daemon together and how it looked, it does appear quite hideous...but I blame Victor because I have that liberty.


The monster educates himself. He learns how to be a good person. He learns language rather quickly. He has a naturally compassionate approach to human beings. But he is ugly in appearance. And this is where we can blame society.


We are taught that ugly is bad. Somehow unattractive equals evil. We can blame Hollywood, but really, in the end, we ought to blame ourselves.We did this to ourselves. Nothing throws us off quite as much as a horrible looking person being kind. It is a weird phenomenon of our era. We are not generally attractive beings, and attraction is subjective, so we should really try to change this. Our own ugliness, which we try to impose on the daemon, ought to be motivation enough for a revaluation of values. (Perhaps we need to have more love for the ugly people, give ugly a chance and all that).

We need to stop being such a surface-level herd. But there is some survival instinct backing our quick judgements. Our ability to reason, what we vainly consider higher cognition, should be able to hold the reigns of our instinctual passion long enough to decide if ugly really is evil.


Ultimately, the energy or force driving the daemon toward connecting with other beings does not extinguish when you attempt to annihilate him, instead, and unsurprisingly I think, the energy or force is driven to another goal: revenge. The warning here seems clear: our capacity for what we consider 'good' is matched by our potential for 'bad'. We will will  toward something so choose carefully which goal you dump your energy into.