“Creature” defined

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), I noticed repetition of the word “creature”. For this Lab Notebook I’ll be finding and comparing two different moments in Frankenstein where “creature” is used in different ways. Frankenstein’s Monster is often referred to as “the creature” in the text.  I looked into the definition of creature in the Oxford English Dictionary and the first definition I found was rather fitting, “a created thing or being; a product of creative action; a creature.” (1.a.) This definition is not particularly surprising to me but I am somewhat intrigued because I didn’t expect the definition to include that the creature itself was created.

Gentle Creature

With that OED definition in mind, and my book with me, I opened Voyant Tools and used what I learned this week to paste the contents of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) into TextEdit to create a Text file. I saved the file, uploaded it to Voyant, and searched for my word. I came across many passages about Frankenstein’s monster so I tried to find one that held a different meaning, knowing that if I found an excerpt differing from all the others, then I could find another one that shows juxtaposition. In the first chapter of Frankenstein, when infant Elizabeth is taken into his family, Victor says, “Her person was the image of her mind; her hazel eyes, although lively as a bird’s, possessed an attractive softness. Her figure was light and airy; and, though capable of enduring great fatigue, she appeared the most fragile creature in the world.” (18) One of the first things I notice here is victor using a simile to compare the beauty of her eyes to a bird. A bird is a creature and usually a symbol of beauty but the eyes of a bird are rarely noticed because they are small. Victor is, as is made overwhelmingly clear,  infatuated with the beauty of nature. The way he uses the word “creature” here is almost belittling. He finds Elizabeth so incredibly precious that he describes her as a fragile creature. The only time I would describe something as a fragile creature is if it were a tiny animal or a bug.  It also stands out to me how he says that her “light and airy figure” is “capable of enduring great fatigue”.  His descriptions border on unhinged often in this book, but this one really strikes me.

Horrible Creature

Using Voyant still, I searched for another passage that contained the word “creature”. Voyant allows me to search for all instances any given word is mentioned in the text. I looked for one that would provide contrast to the first example I pulled, in which Victor describes small, lovely Elizabeth. I found a contrasting passage in the very next moment in the book where “creature” is said.  It reads, “It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the flimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.” (41) This scene takes place as Victor brings his creature to life. Giving this passage a closer read, I notice that this scene is much darker in atmosphere than the previous passage I was examining. In this scene, the atmosphere is tense because Victor has been up all night. He describes the detail of his candle being nearly burnt out and the rain “pattering dismally against the panes” a. When the creature awakens and opens his eyes, Victor describes his eye as being a “dull yellow” color. When i think of a dull yellow i think of a greyish egg yolk or the skin of a very sick person. As I discovered before, one definition of creature from the OED is “a created thing or being”, and this is the moment the being is created. On the next page he explains, “…but now that I had finished , the beauty

of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” (42) He then leaves the room because he cannot bear to look at the creature. This passage shows how after all the anticipation and commitment Victor had to creating life, he can not handle the power.  Finally, I used Voyant to create a visualization of the use of creature, creator, and create throughout Frankenstein.  I noticed that there is correlation between them but they don’t always appear in the same place. “Creature” and “Creator” have similar trends in their lines which is interesting considering the definition of creature.