ABSTRACT

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), there is a moment when the scientist, engaged in making a female version of the monster he has already created, for the first time speculates on the possible consequences of this, wondering whether she may not turn out to be something other than the perfect companion and mate that he intends. His misgivings extend to several paragraphs, and are worth elaborating in some detail:

Three years before, I was engaged in the same manner and had created a fiend whose unparalleled barbarity had desolated my heart and filled it forever with the bitterest remorse. I was now about to form another being of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness. He had sworn to quit the neighbourhood of man and hide himself in deserts, but she had not; and she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation.1