He awakes from the nightmare and goes directly to the laboratory to see his creation. While holding his mother, he then sees worms start to crawl out of the folds of her burial shroud to touch him. During the dream, Elizabeth then turns into his mother, Caroline, whom he pictures being held in his own arms. He dreams of wandering the streets of Ingolstadt and seeing Elizabeth through the haze of the night. In a distressed mental state, Victor falls into bed, hoping to forget his creation. Victor sees his creation as beautiful and yet repugnant, versus the creation story taken from the Bible in which God sees his creation of Adam as "good." Here Shelley contrasts God's creation of Adam to Victor's creation of the monster. The monster now begins to take shape, and Victor describes his creation in full detail as "beautiful" yet repulsive with his "yellow skin,""lustrous black, and flowing" hair, and teeth of "pearly whiteness." Victor describes the monster's eyes, considered the windows upon the soul, as "watery eyes, that seemed almost the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips." Also, this chapter builds fear in the reader, another big part of Gothic writing. The Gothic elements that can be found in this chapter are the grotesque (description of the monster's features), the eerie environment (Victor's lab at 1 a.m.), the undead quality, and some type of psychic communication (Victor's feeling of being followed). Henry advises Victor to write home, as a letter had recently arrived from his family in Geneva.Ĭhapter 5 is significant because it marks the beginning of the novel that Mary Shelley wrote during her now famous summer stay in the Lake Geneva region (refer to the "Life and Background" section). Henry spends the rest of the winter and spring nursing Victor back to health after the tumultuous fall. Victor finds the disappearance of his monster a source of joy and falls down in a fit of exhaustion from the release of anxiety over his creation. Henry and Victor return to Victor's apartment to find the monster gone. Henry had come to see about his friend and to enroll at the university. He wanders the streets of Ingolstadt until Henry Clerval finds him in poor condition. Excited and disgusted at "the monster" he had created, he runs from the apartment. Victor succeeds in bringing his creation, an eight-foot man, to life in November of his second year.
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