Mary Shelley’s novel raises a question we’ve been too polite to answer honestly.
We’ve been told our whole lives that beauty is only skin deep. What matters is who you are on the inside. That judging someone by their appearance is shallow, primitive, and morally wrong.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein quietly, methodically, and devastatingly dismantles this comfortable lie.
When Victor Frankenstein assembles his creature from the parts of corpses and animates it in a burst of scientific hubris, he intends to create something beautiful. He selects the finest components. He labored for two years.
What emerges is an eight-foot monstrosity — yellow skin stretched thin over visible musculature, watery eyes, features assembled from the dead. So hideous that Victor abandons it immediately upon seeing it breathe.
Here’s the thing that made me stop reading.
The creature, at least in the beginning, is good.
It rescues a drowning girl — and gets shot for its trouble by her guardian who sees only the horror of its face. It secretly performs chores for a family living in the woods — chopping firewood, shoveling snow — falling in love with their warmth from a distance. It waits patiently for the right moment to introduce itself. That moment comes when the family’s blind father is left alone. Unable to see the creature, the father converses with it normally. A friendship begins to form.
Then the children return. They see the creature. They drive it away violently.
It is only after these repeated rejections — after being denied recognition, companionship, and basic humanity — that the creature turns to murder, vengeance, and destruction.
And even then, the creature tells us it feels remorse. Unlike Satan from Paradise Lost, who declares evil be thou my good, or Iago from Othello, who revels in wickedness without a trace of guilt, the creature still carries an ethical compass, however broken. It knows what it does is wrong. It just cannot stop itself.
So, how does ugliness turn an otherwise good soul wicked?
The most intuitive answer is social.
Victor abandoned the creature like an absent father. Society rejected it purely on the basis of appearance. That rejection bred resentment. Resentment curdled into evil. Under this reading, the creature is a victim of lookism — society’s irrational prejudice against the ugly — and if only people had treated it as the blind father was beginning to, it might have lived an entirely different life.
This reading is compelling. It maps almost perfectly onto the modern psychology of incels — men who, unable to receive romantic recognition largely because of their appearance, develop a deep social resentment that occasionally erupts into real-world violence. What the incel wants, and what the creature wants, isn’t purely physical. It’s recognition. It’s to be seen as belonging.
The creature even makes this explicit. When it corners Victor and demands he build a female companion, it specifies: make her as ugly as me. Not beautiful. Ugly. Because only with someone equally excommunicated from society could the creature feel secure that it would not be abandoned again.
Mary Shelley, writing in the Romantic tradition, and daughter of feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft, was naturally drawn to this explanation. Both movements traced the origin of human suffering not to immutable human nature but to the changeable habits, biases, and prejudices of society. The monster is evil because society made it so.
But this reading runs into two serious problems.
The first: even if society’s prejudice against ugliness caused the creature’s evil, what if that prejudice is itself innate and immutable? The creature actually tests this. Reasoning that adults have been corrupted by society’s biases, it decides to befriend a child — someone not yet poisoned by prejudice. It approaches a boy alone.
The boy’s response: Let me go, monster, ugly wretch. You wish to eat me and tear me to pieces. You are an ogre.
No one taught this child to fear ugliness. No cultural conditioning is required. The revulsion appears to be built in.
The second problem is deeper. What if the connection between ugliness and wickedness isn’t external at all?
Enter physiognomy — a discipline so thoroughly discredited today that most people have never heard of it, yet so seriously regarded throughout Western history that Plato held physiognomic views, a treatise on the subject is attributed to Aristotle’s school, and it was considered a legitimate science well into the nineteenth century.
Physiognomy holds that the outer form — particularly the face — reveals the inner character. It does not determine it. Reveals it.
Its eighteenth-century peak came with Johann Lavater, whose Essays on Physiognomy was an international bestseller. Mary Shelley’s father almost certainly read it. Shelley herself almost certainly did too. Its influence on Frankenstein is unmistakable.
The physiognomic reading of Frankenstein is this: ugliness does not cause wickedness through the external mechanism of social rejection. It indicates that the soul was already wicked.
Under this reading, we should be suspicious of how the creature narrates its own story. Victor repeatedly warns us — the creature is eloquent and deceitful. Its claims to have been pure and gentle in the beginning, its expressions of remorse at the end — these may be exactly what a sophisticated, self-aware monster would say.
Shelley gives us two characters who support this reading strongly.
Elizabeth, Victor’s adopted sister, is described in deeply physiognomic terms — golden hair, clear brow, blue eyes expressive of sensibility and sweetness. Lavater believed the eyes and brows most revealed inner character. Elizabeth’s noble appearance maps perfectly onto a noble, gentle, virtuous woman throughout the novel. She eventually turns out to be not a peasant’s child at all, but the abandoned daughter of a Milanese nobleman — the classic literary trope of noble appearance signaling noble blood.
Justine, the maidservant, is also beautiful — and also ethical, gentle, and kind even when wrongfully accused and sentenced to death for crimes she did not commit. Here is the crucial counterpoint: Justine receives no recognition. She is exiled by society. She suffers unjustly. And yet she shows no indication whatsoever of turning toward evil.
The social reading cannot explain Justine.
What about Victor himself — handsome, yet cowardly and selfish? Lavater never claimed moral determinism. He claimed revelation. Essence can be overcome — rarely, but it can. The greatest example in Western philosophy: Socrates, famously ugly, with a soul of extraordinary beauty. Nietzsche recounts the story of a face-reader who visited Athens and told Socrates to his face that he was a monster harboring terrible vices. Socrates answered simply: you know me, sir. He agreed. When young, he had been vicious, lustful, gluttonous. His philosophical practice overcame what his face revealed. His essence, not his destiny.
Frankenstein is usually read as a cautionary tale about scientific hubris, about playing God, about the dangers of abandoning what we create.
But its deeper provocation is this: maybe we are not obsessed enough with appearances. Or at least, we don’t take appearances seriously enough.
By treating the surface as completely disconnected from the soul, we have lost an entire vocabulary for reading the world. The Greeks, the Christians, the early moderns — virtually every tradition in Western intellectual history treated the beauty of something as a genuine indicator of its proper functioning and goodness. We are the historical outliers who insist on the complete separation of form and essence.
I am not arguing that physiognomy is correct. I am arguing that it is significant — that the intuition it points toward, the felt connection between outward form and inward character, has survived across millennia of human experience for some reason. That when the creature is assembled from death and emerges monstrous, Shelley is not just describing a social problem waiting to be solved by more enlightened attitudes.
She may be describing something older and harder than that.
The monster was always the monster.
Its ugliness did not make it so.
It was always already there — waiting, like a latent seed, for the conditions that would let it bloom.
If you want to explore the other side of this argument — how beauty can elevate rather than merely reveal — Plato’s Symposium is the place to go.
