My evil passions will have fled, for I shall meet with sympathy! My life will flow quietly away, and in my dying moments, I shall not curse my maker.” Promising to forsake Europe for South America with his Bride, the Monster pledges that he will “quit the neighborhood of man and dwell, as it may chance, in the most savage of places. It is in this vein that when the Creature finally demands he’s procured a mate-one of the “same species” and “one as deformed and horrible as myself”-that he also imagines a future Eden that seems quite reasonable. After all, the desire for love and companionship drives almost all men, and the prospect of there being a woman that can share his joy-or likely many sorrows in the Monster’s case-is a seductively persuasive argument that Shelley’s prose would convince anybody of, save for Victor himself. Perhaps too preoccupied with the romantics’ view of Genesis, the Creature has a desire to become Milton’s Adam, rather than Victor’s personal Lucifer, and he desires only an Eve to make him whole. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.” I was benevolent and good misery made me a fiend. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I am irrevocably excluded. “But I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. “I ought to be thy Adam,” the Creature tells Frankenstein before even recounting his sad journeys. Indeed, the only thing the Creature loved more than finding contrasts between his life and his favorite work of literature (Milton’s Paradise Lost) was to lament his damnable loneliness: a nightmare that only his deadbeat father could fix by giving life to another.ĭuring their first encounter since Victor abandoned his creation on the night of its birth, the Monster’s sorrow is so great that Victor can be swayed to momentarily forget that this was also the man who murdered his young brother and framed an innocent girl for his actions. Rather, protagonist Victor Frankenstein is a man of both old world alchemy and romantic enlightenment when in the 18 th century (the novel is set decades prior to its 1818 publication), he gives mysterious life to an amalgamation of corpses and assorted dead flesh.īut one of the great curiosities that drove the entire narrative was the unnamed Monster-called only “daemon” by his life-giving father-and his pitiable search for a mate. Far surpassing her fabled company of Lord Byron and Percy during their Swiss lake house competition for the best ghost story, Mary’s work of fiendish horror tells a tale of creation and genesis with no God, angels, or explicitly supernatural events.
Almost inadvertently, Shelley, who began writing the story at only 18 years of age, invented the science fiction genre by accident. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus remains one of the most important works of literature. But to see how she has reached such a point, one must also revisit the cultural heritage that has led to such a moment. This Bride of Frankenstein, conceivably in more senses than one for this turn of phrase, is going far past her literary and even cinematic history to become a fully formed character with the incoming of Penny Dreadful season 3. That is until this undead Eliza proved she could talk a great deal more than about the rains in Spain.īut now the die has really been cast and lightning has finally struck. For the Penny Dreadful bride was been one of season 2’s many slow burns waiting to leave its mark-a macabre distortion of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion for the gothic set, with Rory Kinnear’s ever-tragic Caliban monster acting as Pickering in a play where he imagines himself Higgins. For Shelley, the creation of the Monster’s Mate was a plot point of vast moral ambiguity, but for nearly every Frankenstein admirer since, it has been an unknowable query that needs an answer. Indeed, Lily seems like the potential fulfillment of a question mark that has haunted the Frankenstein legend ever since Mary Shelley put pen to page.
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