Was alike ignorant she might become ten thousand

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 neighborhood 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.
They might even hate each other; the creature who already lived
loathed his own deformity, and might he not conceive a greater
abhorrence for it when it came before his eyes in the female form?
She also might turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty
of man; she might quit him, and he be again alone, exasperated
by the fresh provocation of being deserted by one of his own
species.
Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of
the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for
which the daemon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils
would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very
existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of
terror. Had I a right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon
everlasting generations? ... I shuddered to think that future ages
might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated
to buy its own peace at the price perhaps of the existence of the
whole human race. (p. 163)
What does Victor Frankenstein truly fear, which causes him to end his
creation of a female? First, he is afraid of an independent female will,
afraid that his female creature will have desires and opinions that
cannot be controlled by his male creature. Like Rousseau’s natural
6
ANNE K
.
MELLOR

man, she might refuse to comply with a social contract made before
her birth by another person; she might assert her own integrity and the
revolutionary right to determine her own existence. Moreover, those
uninhibited female desires might be sadistic: Frankenstein imagines a
female “ten thousand times” more evil than her mate, who would
“delight” in murder for its own sake. Third, he fears that his female
creature will be more ugly than his male creature, so much so that
even the male will turn from her in disgust. Fourth, he fears that she
will prefer to mate with ordinary males; implicit here is Frankenstein’s
horror that, given the gigantic strength of this female, she would have
the power to seize and even rape the male she might choose. And
finally; he is afraid of her reproductive powers, her capacity to gener-
ate an entire race of similar creatures. What Victor Frankenstein truly
fears is female sexuality as such. A woman who is sexually liberated,
free to choose her own life, her own sexual partner (by force, if neces-
sary). And to propagate at will can appear only monstrously ugly to
Victor Frankenstein, for she defies that sexist aesthetic that insists that
women be small, delicate, modest, passive, and sexually pleasing—but
available only to their lawful husbands.