In Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein's Creature stands about eight feet tall. His yellow skin is a thin cover over the muscles and arteries beneath it, his hair is black and flowing, his teeth are pearly white, his eyes are watery and his lips are straight and black. Victor Frankenstein selected every one of those features as beautiful. Together they horrified him.
The picture most readers carry is different. The passages quoted below come from the 1818 text of the novel, and none of them mentions bolts, green skin or a flat head. Those details come from cinema. What the book offers is more specific and harder to look at.
How does Victor describe the Creature the moment he comes to life?
Victor describes a body built from parts he chose for their beauty, put together into a face he cannot bear. In Volume I, Chapter IV, the passage runs:
His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. 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.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Volume I, Chapter IV (1818)
The horror sits in small mismatches. The skin is too thin. The eyes are almost the colour of the sockets that hold them. The hair and the teeth are handsome, and next to those eyes they sharpen the effect. The passage names no scar and no seam. It names a complexion.
What colour is Frankenstein's Creature in the book?
Yellow. That is the novel's word for his skin, and it appears in the passage above. Black belongs to the hair and the lips, pearly white to the teeth, and a dull dun white to the eye sockets. The description contains no green.
How tall is Frankenstein's Creature, and why did Victor make him that size?
The Creature is about eight feet tall, and Victor chose that height to speed up his work. In Volume I, Chapter III he explains the decision:
As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature; that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionably large.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Volume I, Chapter III (1818)
Small parts slowed him down, so he enlarged the whole. The size begins as a workshop shortcut and stays with the Creature for the rest of the book. The Mont Blanc scene and Walton's letters both return to it.
What does the Creature look like when Victor meets him on the glacier?
Victor sees a figure whose stature seems to exceed that of a man, with a face that joins bitter anguish to disdain and malignity. The meeting takes place in Volume II, Chapter II, with Mont Blanc rising "in awful majesty" over the scene. Victor watches the figure come toward him:
his stature also, as he approached, seemed to exceed that of man.
Volume II, Chapter II (1818)
Then he sees the face:
his countenance bespoke bitter anguish, combined with disdain and malignity, while its unearthly ugliness rendered it almost too horrible for human eyes.
Volume II, Chapter II (1818)
The Creature then uses his body as an argument. He tells Victor:
Remember, thou hast made me more powerful than thyself; my height is superior to thine; my joints more supple.
Volume II, Chapter II (1818)
He claims strength, height and agility over his maker. In the same speech he says that misery made him a fiend, a line we return to when we look at how the novel ends.
How does the Creature see his own face?
He sees it in a pool of water, and the sight frightens him. Describing that moment in Volume II, Chapter IV, the Creature says:
how was I terrified, when I viewed myself in a transparent pool! At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror;
Volume II, Chapter IV (1818)
He starts back from his own reflection. The face Victor fled is the face the Creature finds in the water, and at first he cannot accept it as his own.
How does Walton describe the Creature?
Walton, the polar expedition captain whose letters frame the story, sees the Creature twice: as a distant figure of gigantic stature on a sledge, and up close in his cabin, with one vast hand extended. His first sighting, in Letter IV, is brief:
a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature, sat in the sledge, and guided the dogs.
Letter IV (1818)
Near the end of the novel Walton sees him in the cabin:
gigantic in stature, yet uncouth and distorted in its proportions. As he hung over the coffin, his face was concealed by long locks of ragged hair; but one vast hand was extended, in colour and apparent texture like that of a mummy.
Volume III, Chapter VII (1818)
Walton adds two terms to the portrait: the Creature is uncouth, and his proportions are distorted. His simile gives the only comparison for the skin in the passages quoted here, a hand whose colour and texture resemble a mummy's.
Why does the Creature's size matter in the story?
His size shapes how everyone reacts to him and what he can claim for himself. Victor builds him large to save time. Walton calls him gigantic when he first sees the sledge, and again in the cabin. On the glacier the Creature turns his height into a point in his favour, telling Victor that his height is superior and his joints more supple.
A practical choice, a figure seen from a distance and a body used as an argument: in all three scenes the physical description carries part of the plot.
Does the 1831 edition describe the Creature differently?
Barely. The birth passage differs from the 1818 text by one comma, after "shrivelled complexion". The revised edition numbers its chapters continuously, so the birth falls in Chapter V and the decision about size in Chapter IV. A quotation from either edition gives the reader the same Creature.
Where do the flat head, the bolts and the green skin come from?
From the cinema, and above all from the 1931 film directed by James Whale, with Boris Karloff as the Creature. The make-up was the work of Jack Pierce, and it gave the Creature the look that most people now call Frankenstein's monster.
The flat head follows a kind of surgical logic. Victor is a scientist, not a surgeon, and the idea was that he would have sawn off the top of the skull to reach the brain. The bolts in the neck work as electrodes, a visual shorthand for reanimation by electricity.
The green came later. The 1931 film is in black and white, so the colour is a later interpretation, carried by posters and colour reproductions. The book says yellow. Our history of Frankenstein in cinema follows how that image grew.
How does the Studio Everart Frankenstein statue show the Creature?
The statue sets the Creature's enormous bulk beside Mary Shelley, and that contrast defines the piece. Mary Shelley in her white dress stands against his weight, and that difference in size is the statue's central image.
It is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Creators Edition, Chapter II of the Masters of Madness series. It stands 32 cm tall, in hand-painted polystone, a composite of resin and stone powder (our guide compares polystone and resin), and is limited to 100 numbered pieces.
Two interchangeable heads come with it. One shows the Creature as an indifferent body. The other shows him as a poor existence condemned to suffering. You choose which of the two the statue wears.
For what the Creature says in his own defence, see our piece on the Creature as a tragic hero.
