“How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe...?”

Frankenstein, Walton and the Monster

Abstract

This essay reiterates the importance of Captain Robert Walton in Shelley’s novel. Walton is the addressee of Frankenstein’s story and drawing attention to his presence helps with unravelling the complexity of the creation scene. The focus is on physiognomical creation, i.e. not only on Frankenstein’s body-making but also his aesthetic response to both the immobile and animated body. Though the Creature’s physical ugliness may be a matter of degree, Frankenstein contradicts himself in his description of its effects. He also appears to have expected that animation would not substantially have interfered with the anticipated reality of the animated Creature. But it does. Shelley, it has been argued, revised Adam Smith’s ideas about sympathy, suggesting that—if a person inspires terror compensatory sympathy can be achieved through narrative. Is Walton able to handle the monster because he knows it? The essay discusses the dynamic between the visual and the auditory in Frankenstein to argue that Shelley responds to Johann Caspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy (1789–98).