Frankenstein Revisions – Percy Shelley Really Hated the Word ‘Handsome’
In Draft Notebook A, on the first page of chapter seven, Percy Shelley made very few corrections to Mary’s original draft. This page describes Victor’s initial animation of the creature and how, despite his attempts at collecting attractive body parts, the creature turned out hideous and terrifying. In comparison to the published version of Frankenstein there are very few differences; the only noticeable difference is the fact that Mary changed the first line to “that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils” instead of “that I beheld my man completed”. She also did not include the line that Victor had begun writing, “the frame on whic”, most likely because he himself changed his mind about it and crossed it off.
We think Percy’s revisions, which include changing both occurrences of the word ‘handsome’ to ‘beautiful’, makes the creature seem less specifically male and less human, since personally we think ‘handsome’ almost exclusively refers to men, while ‘beautiful’ refers to all sexes and inanimate objects alike. If we were in the position of editor, we would keep Percy’s alterations because dehumanizing the creature is a vital part of Victor’s thought process throughout the novel. His addition of adjectives to describe the creature, contributing the phrase “of lustrous black” in reference to the creature’s hair, we think is also a good edition, for both the purpose of better reading and to emphasize that the creature was supposed to be Victor’s life work, his crowning glory, a beautiful human… but it turned out as a mash-up of corpses that was as terrifying as it was destructive. Although there weren’t very many comments Percy wrote, the ones he did write were useful and made their way into the final copy.
Hannah Guetschow & Amy Hanson
Shelley, M. S. (1816). “Frankenstein – Frankenstein, Draft Notebook A”, in The Shelley-Godwin Archive, MS. Abinger c. 56, 21r. Retrieved from http://shelleygodwinarchive.org/sc/oxford/frankenstein/notebook/a#/p45