Creation & Abandonment
The Creation Scene
The creation of the Creature in Chapter 5 is the novel’s most iconic scene. Victor describes the moment: “I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.” The language is clinical and detached — “it,” not “he” — immediately dehumanising the being Victor has spent years creating. The “dull yellow eye” is the only physical detail Shelley provides of the moment of animation, focusing on a single unsettling image rather than the grand triumph Victor expected.
Victor’s reaction is immediate and total rejection: “breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” He had imagined creating something beautiful: “His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful.” But the result horrifies him. Shelley uses this gap between expectation and reality to critique Victor’s hubris. He planned creation like an artist but had no plan for what came after. The moment the Creature lives, Victor’s responsibility begins — and he immediately runs away.
Victor abandons the Creature within moments of its creation. He describes “breathless horror and disgust” and flees to his bedroom. This is the novel’s original sin: a creator who refuses to care for his creation. Shelley parallels this with irresponsible parenthood — the Creature is essentially a newborn, abandoned without language, understanding, or love. Every tragedy that follows stems from this moment of rejection.
The Creature as Newborn
Shelley presents the Creature at its creation as a tabula rasa — a blank slate. It has no language, no knowledge of good or evil, and no understanding of why it exists. When it reaches out to Victor in the bedroom — “he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks” — Shelley describes what is essentially a baby’s smile. Victor interprets this as menacing; the reader may see it as desperate affection. This ambiguity is deliberate: Shelley asks whether the Creature is born monstrous or made monstrous by its treatment.
The Rousseau-influenced philosophy is clear: the Creature begins as innocent and becomes violent only after repeated rejection, cruelty, and isolation. Shelley’s argument is that society creates monsters, not nature. If Victor had nurtured his creation, the Creature might have been the Adam it later says it should have been: “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel.” It is corrupted not by its own nature but by the world’s cruelty.
The creation scene is charged with Shelley’s personal experience. Her mother died days after giving birth to her. Her first child died in infancy — she recorded dreaming that she could rub the dead baby back to life by the fire. The creation of the Creature — bringing something dead to life through unnatural means, only to face horror and loss — echoes Shelley’s deepest anxieties about the relationship between birth and death. The novel is, at its heart, about what happens when creation goes wrong.
Victor’s Dream and the Corpse of Elizabeth
After fleeing, Victor falls into a disturbed sleep and has a nightmare that is crucial for exam analysis. He dreams of embracing Elizabeth, but as he kisses her, she transforms into the corpse of his dead mother, with “the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel.” This dream links creation, death, sexuality, and guilt in a single horrifying image. Shelley connects Victor’s act of unnatural creation with the destruction of natural relationships — by trying to conquer death, Victor has brought death into the heart of his most intimate bonds.
The dream also foreshadows Elizabeth’s murder on their wedding night. Victor’s creation will destroy the woman he loves, just as the dream predicts. Shelley uses foreshadowing throughout the novel to create a sense of inevitable doom — Victor set a catastrophe in motion at the moment of creation, and nothing can stop it.
Victor’s nightmare: he embraces Elizabeth, she turns into his dead mother’s corpse. This links creation (the Creature), death (the mother), and love (Elizabeth) into a single image of corruption. It foreshadows Elizabeth’s murder and symbolises how Victor’s unnatural act of creation has contaminated all his natural relationships. Birth and death have become horribly intertwined.
The creation scene raises the novel’s central question: who is the real monster? Victor creates a conscious being and then abandons it. The Creature did not ask to be made; it entered the world with no understanding and was immediately rejected by the one person who should have cared for it. Shelley makes the reader complicit in Victor’s judgement — we, too, are inclined to see the Creature as horrifying. But the text consistently asks us to reconsider: is the Creature monstrous because of what it looks like, or has Victor’s abandonment created the monster it becomes?