9/29 Response

Gilbert and Gubar look to Shelley’s biography, specifically her relationship or rather lack of relationship with her parents claiming that “books appear to have functioned as her surrogate parents, pages and words standing in for flesh and blood” (Gilbert and Gubar 228). Victor’s monster matures as a being by learning language and then by reading books later explaining to Victor that he read from Paradise Lost and “other volumes” (Shelley 87). The monster in essence matures with the aid of literature. Victor too reads many books; his father appears within the text mostly to chastise him for reading disproved. If Gilbert and Gubar are correct in their assessment, how do the results of Victor and the Monster, reared by books, explain Shelley’s childhood, or at least her perception of parenthood?

Kant explains there are two forms of beauty: free beauty and adherent beauty. Free beauty requires detachment from preconceived definitions that are “not grounded on any kind of perfection, any internal purposiveness to which the composition of the manifold is related” (Kant 426). Victor serves as the narrator to the story, relating his adventure to the sea captain. How does his diction when describing the creation of the monster and the monster himself suggest how he assessed the beauty of the monster? Is he presupposing that his monster should be something it is not, that he has a “concept of its perfection” (Kant 426) before levying judgment?