Throughout Frankenstein, the roles of Satan, Adam, and God fluctuate with dangerous consequences. The monster remarks on his relation to Victor, “I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel” (72). The monster plays both the role of Adam and Satan at the same time, to different people. Victor, however, strives to play God and instead fails. He, in contrast, seems to attempt to be God and instead dooms himself to a role more like Satan’s. Like Satan, he rejects what is considered ‘godly’ in favor of his own self-confidence. Yet, similar to Satan in Paradise Lost, after ‘falling’ he harbors great internalized self-doubt. By the time the monster has been fully realized, Victor desperately wants to undo his actions, yet cannot.
Like The Fallen Angel, my photo positions Victor to be watching the viewer (in this case, implied to be the monster) over an arm raised for protection. Victor, having just come from the creation of his monster, is sleeping with his dissection tools in his clothes, (Shelley writes that Victor “threw [himself] on the bed in [his clothes]” (38)), and is clutching a pair of scissors in anticipation of an attack. Shelley writes, “by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window-shutters, I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me” (38). Eyes play a prominent role in my photograph, Shelley’s writing, and Cabanel’s painting. Canabel’s Lucifer is depicted as crying at his banishment, and the monsters eyes are the source of Victor’s terror. In my photograph, I utilized light coming through a crack in the door to illuminate a small section of the face. Out of the many photographs I ended up taking, this was the only one in which I believe failure to operate the shutter properly caused my (and by extent, Victor’s) eyes to become blacked out. I found this type of effect helpful. Victor is staring at his own nightmare come to life as it stares back at him, and his sins become very physically apparent.
By adapting Victor in this way I was able to better situate both the monster and Victor in a type of Paradise Lost structure, and build upon the discussions we had been having in class relating to God, Satan, Adam, and Frankenstein. However, it almost feels reductive to classify Shelley’s complex characters as just their archetypes, and by leaning into The Fallen Angel I may have lost some of the nuance that they all possess.
The combination of the focus upon eyes along with using light to highlight the object of obsession also reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Tell-Tale Heart," in which the old man’s ‘vulture’ eyeball is a source of great anxiety for the unreliable narrator. Using a lamp to pinpoint a ray of light at his sleeping victim, the man eventually kills his old neighbor. However, this act plagues the narrator until he eventually reveals his crimes in a fit of terror. Though my Victor is in the position of the old man instead of the narrator, both main characters experience a type of overwhelming guilt at their actions, although they’ve both technically ‘gotten away with it.’ Notably, however, the narrator of Poe’s story confesses, while Victor remains secretive for most of the novel, despite his shame.