Frightful must it be
This sudden elevation of language should not be merely dismissed as a
facile rhetorical heightening for effect. What Mary Shelley seems
deliberately to be doing here is evoking a succession of elements and
emotional states associated with the Sublime in eighteenth-century
aesthetic theory. As the Creature in his coming to life is associated
with the Sublime, so he is its avatar wherever he appears in the novel,
either living within a sublime landscape (e.g. Mont Blanc or northern Siberia) or terrifying the
human beings whom he encounters by his extra-human size and countenance.
