Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
Chapter 5 · Victor Frankenstein
Context
Victor attempts to describe the creature's appearance immediately after it comes to life, listing individual features he had selected as beautiful but now sees as grotesque.
Analysis
Victor's exclamation "Beautiful! Great God!" breaks his own sentence in two, the syntax enacting his mental recoil—he cannot finish the thought that the creature is beautiful because the reality contradicts it. He then lists conventionally attractive features (pearly teeth, lustrous black hair) but uses the word "luxuriances" to describe them, a term suggesting excess and unnaturalness, so that even the creature's objectively fine features become repulsive when placed on this assemblage of parts.
Essay Tip
Use this to argue that the creature's ugliness is not inherent but constructed by Victor's perception—the same features could be beautiful on a human, but Victor's horror makes him reframe every detail as monstrous, revealing more about his own prejudice than about the creature itself.