ABSTRACT
In Mary Shelley’s story, Victor Frankenstein, like the Christian god of creation, generates his Monster apart from the feminine. This exclusion of woman occurs again when in a fit of frenzy he destroys the mate he promised to make for the Monster and scatters her pieces in the deep, frigid waters of a Scottish lake where she is un-named and un-mourned. But, as the putative companion of the Monster, who sees himself as a new Adam, she is a new Eve, and like the first Eve she is blamed for spoiling the work of creation. Mate of the Monster, she lives on with him in exile, an emblem of the condemned, discarded, silenced, sacrificed feminine that runs though the underground waters of Mary Shelley’s story. Aborted by Frankenstein, she is a mirror of Elizabeth Lavenza, who, as Frankenstein’s bride to be, is murdered by the Monster on her wedding night. Tracking the Monster and his mate as the shadow doubles of Victor Frankenstein and Elizabeth Lavenza, the story comes full circle. The melting polar ice is one example of the discarded feminine emerging from the shadows as the dying of nature as we have created it in our own image.
