The Concept of Beauty and Ugliness in Mary Shelleys Frankenstein

Throughout the novel, the action fulfilled by the monster is based on the struggle between ugliness and beauty. The monster’s ugliness represents the revenge and evil actions whereas his beauty represents the actions of sincere feelings, goodness, and morals. This paper will aim at analyzing the various instances of beauty and ugliness in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as well as contrasting the concepts of beauty and ugliness as brought out in the novel and the film versions of Frankenstein. Various authors have written to share their thoughts and ideas on the beauty and ugliness topic in Frankenstein’s narration. Studying the Frankenstein narrative cast in movies results in a conclusion that the evolution or production of a film is a Frankensteinian exercise itself (Schor 72). In her book, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley makes a statement to refer to beauty which she portrays one of her characters as aesthetically ugly.

This ugliness attributes to the characters’ exclusion from the society, which is a primary component of the plot resulting from their grotesque physical attributes (Britton). As the story becomes more and more understandable and the character develops, a more internal beauty unravels, and the individual’s perspective of the awareness of the internal beauty of the character in the story is contrasted with the characters who judge others in the plot based entirely on their aesthetic attributes. This, therefore, leads to the question of whether or not the process through which we identify beauty is effective and gives room for the engagement with other paths of interpretation. The creature involved in this aesthetic struggle of identity in Frankenstein is one that, despite human, it was created by a scientist who wanted to create out of inanimate material a living being.

Victor became disgusted with his creation when he looked at it since he could not see the beauty he put into his monster. Instead, all he could see was an ugly, horrible visage of a hideous monster which caused him to admit that the monster was like himself reluctantly. Victor ends up turning his back on his monster just like the society turns their back on individuals with little or no physical beauty and in so doing, he instilled a feeling of ugliness and solitude inside the monster. Victor’s abandonment of the monster brought out the ugliness that he created rather than fortifying the beauty that was possessed by the monster. This is because the monster was not brought up within the society which rendered it impossible for Victor to bring out the monster’s inner beauty.

Their seductiveness may excite panic of uncontrolled female power which is simply a thing to swift agitation, a reaction inherent to a single ugliness definition. Umberto incorporates several excerpts that illustrate the depth of this fear. The notion that ugly is as ugly swayed some people when it was argued that a when a pretty face was exposed to extramarital gaze became ugly. Tertullian, in his “Women, Wear A Veil,” criticized against hair coloring, lipstick, and rouge, telling the matrons not to worry because no female is ugly to her partner since it means she was attractive enough to be picked. Generally, illness and poverty render some people to avert their eyes, as is the case to those whose dress or ethnicity may position them in a marginal place in society.

The assumption that ugly is all that the beautiful is not appears as an ordinary redundancy. In as much as Burke’s twofold of the beautiful and the sublime doesn't affirm a contrast amongst the two modes of aesthetic, it assumes divided concepts that are later employed by Kant in her work on ‘the critique of judgment. ’ However, although Kant’s critique significantly alters Burke’s realist aesthetics, it remains within his primary theory on the ugly, which is the opposite form of the beautiful (Küplen). Therefore these infinite aesthetic theory concepts do not serve as a hermeneutic approach to justify the affirmative ugliness of Mary Shelley’s character. For instance, if the ugly creature lacks attractiveness, like Frankenstein’s aesthetic object, it simply works more enthusiastically than lack. Both the ugly and the uncanny fall under what is fearful but the primary distinction between them is that one thing may be uncanny for one individual and not for another whereas the ugly is comprehensively offensive.

On the one hand, nothing is intrinsically uncanny since it finds its existence in any object that works to prompt interference of repressed complexes in childhood into the thoughts of the subject. On the other hand, the ugliness of a creature institutes a return of the represses rather than being associated with any specific childhood complex. The creature, therefore, seems like a return of that which is universally suppressed or that which is considered as awful at the center of all being ((&, et al. Consequently, the main concern is not in the psychoanalysis of the specific subject so much but rather in the ugliness itself and therefore the task lies in finding out how Shelley extracts the creature in the aesthetic theory of the eighteenth century from the crack opened up by the ugly so as to posit it as that aesthetic impossibility, that is, the positive manifestation of ugliness.

Victor fails to embrace his creation, and this brings out the bitterness and vengeance in the monster which ends up killing victor’s family in efforts to make victor the pain it endured out of abandonment and disregard in the society. Throughout the novel, the action fulfilled by the monster is based on the struggle between ugliness and beauty. The monster’s ugliness represents the revenge and evil actions whereas his beauty represents the actions of sincere feelings, goodness, and morals. Tertullian criticizes against hair coloring, lipstick, and rouge, telling the matrons not to worry because no woman is ugly to her husband since it means she was pleasing enough to be chosen. Works Cited (&, Caroline J. James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters:James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters.

 Film Quarterly, vol.  58, no.  4, 2005, pp. Eco, Umberto, and Alastair McEwen.  Write Essay with Us. Free Essays Base. Read and Write Yours, write-essay. info/5146-free-essay-5146. html. Küplen, Mojca.  Beauty, Ugliness and the Free Play of Imagination: An Approach to Kant's Aesthetics. Schor, Esther. Frankenstein and film.  The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, pp.