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If Dr. Frankenstein was so horrified by the monster's appearance, wouldn't common sense say make a better looking monster before it comes to life?
  • "His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful." Frankenstein did deliberately set out to create a good looking creature and chose the limbs to be in proportion, but when he was given the spark of life, he looked hideous. In a way, it's like creating what you think is the best looking animatronic model and then seeing how bad it looks on screen.
    • Why doesn't it click in Dr. Frankenstein's head that he's creating a body that's covered with stitches and bone-thin (which will look unattractive) and doesn't try and put extra layers of skin to cover the stitches/bones or a much more simpler approach: Take a whole, recently dead person and attempt to reanimate him/her. There were plenty of dead beggars in the streets if he didn't want to upset the upper class for zombifying their loved ones.
    • It doesn't actually say how Frankenstein created the monster in the book. Moreover, the point is that the monster should have been beautiful- perfectly in proportion, lustrous hair etc., except because of the monster's eyes (and the fact it's an artificial human) it fell so deep into the Uncanny Valley it was seen as hideous.
    • Maybe he was so absorbed in the awesomeness of his project that he didn't see the horror of it? He did forget to eat and sleep.
    • Frankenstein did try bringing a dead person back to life. It didn't work. He mentions that while he can revive dead flesh, he at that time had not discovered how to resurrect a whole person.
    • It's implied that the process that Victor used to bring the Creature to life is what turned it hideous. As stated above, Victor chose for the Creature's features to be beautiful, but it became ugly once animated. This is why the novel frames the act of creation as inherently evil: the Creature was "cursed" to live a life of suffering, an outcast due to his grotesque appearance, because of the unnatural way he was created. Victor tried to play God (remember: this was the Romantic era, informed by Christian ideas of morality), but didn't actually have God's power, so his attempt to create life was inept compared to God's. The Creature is called "dæmon" because he was created against the will of God. Hence the Creature's line, "I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel..."
    • That does invite the question, though: why would bringing a whole corpse to life be any more difficult than bringing an assorted collection of bits and pieces to life?
  • That's the route taken in Young Frankenstein, where the good Doctor and Eyegore make off with an oversized corpse.
  • Also in Branagh's version, where the monster is built from the base of recently-executed Robert De Niro and given the dead brain of John Cleese. What a weird movie.
  • Well, there aren't really that many "intact" corpses since you usually either die of injury or die of old age. If Frankenstein doesn't want his creation to have an elderly the body his only option is to find young ones, hence the injuries and need for stitching. And he probably knows better than to handle corpses of people who died of diseases.
  • In the book, he doesn't stitch pieces together. He constructs a man completely from scratch, albeit with raw materials taken from cadavers. He cites the minuteness of the parts as his chief difficulty, so he increases everything in size, right down to the veins.
  • Its actually explicitly stated that, "In time, he might be able to grant life after it had already left the body." Meaning that The Monster's body wasn't pre-owned.
  • Some adaptations justify his building a body piece by piece as him wanting to create a new life, not reactivate a pre-existing one.
  • Note that Frankenstein's second attempt to create life, before he abandoned the notion of providing a bride for the creature and destroyed it un-animated, was performed on a tiny island in the Orkneys with only five inhabitants and no reliable fresh water supply. If he'd been using stolen corpses for his work, whole or otherwise, he certainly wouldn't have picked a place that isolated and devoid of graveyards or gibbets.
    • If the monster is really as big as described then it was easier for Victor to work with his body in a time when microscopes didn't exist. He did more than just expose the body to an electric storm as seen in most movies.
    • Microscopes were invented in the mid-seventeenth century (i.e. about a century and a half earlier). That said, it would still be easier to work with larger body parts.
  • Aside from the points above, it's also a metaphor for giving birth, influenced heavily by Shelley's own stillbirth. The creature's construction takes nine months, during which Frankenstein is utterly single-minded and optimistic in his goal. When the creature is brought to life, he specifically cites its jaundiced, transparent skin and watery yellow eyes (much like a typical newborn) when describing its hideousness. It mirrors post-partum depression and the experience of a mother expecting her infant to be a beautiful little copy of her and her husband, and after the ordeal of childbirth seeing a tiny discolored troll covered in blood, shit and amniotic fluid.
  • One might also consider that Frankenstein was doing something that nobody had ever done before. He had no previous body of work or research he could learn from, and was self-taught entirely from scratch, when it came to making the Creature. It's not surprising that his first attempt had an Uncanny Valley look. Frankly, it's astonishing that Frankenstein got so much right the first time, given how quickly the Creature learns and adapts. Realistically, Frankenstein's first few attempts would probably have been weak and sickly, dying after a short period of time, and/or so mentally stunted that they couldn't take care of themselves, and would be Too Dumb to Live.
  • We may be overthinking this a bit. It's clearly established that Victor did indeed try to create a beautiful form of life, but it's implied that the Creature Came Back Wrong somehow to reflect its unnatural birth and Victor's hubristic meddling in forces he was supposed to leave well alone. There's just something fundamentally wrong about the Creature.

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