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The Monster In John Milton's Paradise Lost

2568 Words11 Pages

“The creature is bitter and dejected after being turned away from human civilization, much the same way that Adam in “Paradise lost was turned out of the Garden of Eden. One difference, though, makes the monster a sympathetic character, especially to contemporary readers. In the biblical story, Adam causes his own fate by sinning. His creator, Victor, however, causes the creature’s hideous existence, and it is this grotesqueness that leads to the creature’s being spurned. Only after he is repeatedly rejected does the creature become violent and decides to seek revenge” (Mellor 106). This creation allegory is made clear from the beginning with the epigraph from John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), which begins the novel. In an attempt to further …show more content…

So while the laws are able to condemn the creature, they do not allow the creature to be a victim of a crime. The laws that show the creature as a criminal can apply to embodied subjects, but to be a victim you must have a specifically human body. Despite all the creature’s efforts, the fact that his body appears the way it does makes it so that he will never be recognized as a human, and is therefore outside of society norms created by them …show more content…

He has spent almost two years of his life completely focused on his task, even at the expense of his own personal well being. Yet his beautiful dream is now completely gone and all Victor sees is horror. With the same amount of intensity that he desired to complete his task, he now desires to take back and forget the experience. Victor is “unable to endure the aspect of the being [he] had created”. He genuinely cannot stand the sight of the creature. If there was a person who should be able to overcome the creature’s physical presence, it is Victor. Not only is Victor the creator, but he also put so much of his own time and effort into the creature. But the creature’s body is too hideous. Furthermore, Victor attributes his change in feeling to “human nature”. This contrasts with the horrifying description that the reader is just given of the creature. Here Victor is explaining the creature’s disgusting body, and explaining his reaction to it as human nature. Victor goes on to tell Walton the following: Oh! no mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch. I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then; but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived. Shelley

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