I will revenge my injuries: if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear; and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred. Have a care: I will work at your destruction, nor finish until I desolate your heart, so that you shall curse the hour of your birth.

This passage has become one of my favorites in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The battlelines have been drawn, and in the process, the distinction between good and evil has been blurred. Like God abandoning Satan in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Victor Frankenstein has abandoned his most abhorrent creation, leaving him without any hope of salvation. Instead of taking responsibility for the creature, Frankenstein would rather believe that his experiment had never happened. But the creature is ultimately a child, in both temperament and worldview, and like most children, he won’t be ignored. His frustration has reached its peak, and for Victor Frankenstein, the consequences of denial have become almost too much to bear.