This essay reads the recurrence of the trope of the face in Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. It bring the face into dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas' writings on the subject of the face. Moreover, it argues for a strong link between the Critique of Practical Reason by Immanuel Kant and Mary Shelley's treatment of morality: just as in Kant, monstrosity would be a empirical union of happiness and beauty, in fact only imaginable at the level of the transcendental (i.e., fiction), so, too, in Shelley, the monster is fiction's exposition of transcendental synthesis, and the domestic scene, true horror.