Victor's instinctive aesthetic sense has already allowed him to misjudge his teacher,
Professor Krempe (I:2:12). Now it operates to overpower any sense of shared humanity
with the Creature. In respect to the master categories of eighteenth-century aesthetics,
the Creature is exactly the opposite of the Beautiful: he is the embodiment of the
Sublime, at once awesome and terrifying. If most of our experience with sublimity
is mediated through art and literature, the Creature in all his encounters forces
it with stunning immediacy into normative human life, always with disastrous consequences