Transformation (short story)

Guido, the narrator, tells the story of his encounter with a strange, misshapen creature when he was a young man living in Genoa, Italy, around the turn of the fifteenth century.

In those days, Guido says, he was reckless and profligate, determined to live a life of pleasure, especially after his father's death left him the master of his family fortune.

He became engaged to his childhood playmate Juliet, the beautiful and virtuous daughter of his father's lifelong friend Torella.

Paris was a place of dissipation at this time, during the reign of Charles VI, but the political turmoil that followed the murder of the Duke of Orleans changed this.

Suddenly, a storm appeared over the water, and Guido watched in horror as a ship was wrecked on the nearby rocks.

They lived a long, happy life together, but Guido never fully recovers from his injuries, and is haunted by his memory of the encounter with the strange creature.

Others include "Ferdinando Eboli" (1829), "The Evil Eye" (1830), "The Invisible Girl" (1832), "The Dream" (1833), and "The Mortal Immortal" (1834).

Like "Ferdinando Eboli" and Shelley's novel Frankenstein, "Transformation" explores the Gothic motif of the double, or doppelgänger.

This motif is common in nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, including, for example, James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).