Beautiful!
Victor's instinctive aesthetic sense has already allowed him to misjudge
his teacher, Professor Krempe (1.2.5).
Now it operates to overpower any sense of shared humanity with the
Creature. In respect to the master categories of eighteenth-century
aesthetics, the Creature is exactly the opposite of the Beautiful: he is
the embodiment of the Sublime, at once awesome and terrifying. If most
of our experience with sublimity is mediated through art and literature,
the Creature in all his encounters forces it with stunning immediacy into
normative human life, always with disastrous consequences.
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