Destruction of the Female Creature

The destruction of the female creature is the pivotal moment in Victor Frankenstein's moral collapse and the point of no return in his conflict with the monster. Having reluctantly agreed to create a female companion under the monster's threat of vengeance, Victor labors in a remote hut on one of the Orkney Islands, but as the work nears completion, he is seized by a cascade of fears that overwhelm his earlier resolve. In a fit of revulsion and terror, he tears the unfinished being to pieces, thereby breaking his solemn promise and unleashing the monster's most devastating retaliation.

The Setting and the Work

Victor had chosen the most desolate of the Orkney Islands as the scene of his labors, a barren rock whose high sides were continually beaten upon by the waves, with only three miserable huts on the whole island. He hired one of these, a squalid two-room dwelling with a fallen thatch, unplastered walls, and a door off its hinges, and set about his task. The work itself was a filthy process, and unlike his first creation, which had been driven by an enthusiastic frenzy that blinded him to its horror, he now went about it in cold blood, his heart often sickening at the work of his hands. He grew restless and nervous, every moment fearing to meet his persecutor, sometimes sitting with his eyes fixed on the ground, afraid to raise them lest they should encounter the object he so dreaded to behold.

The Moment of Decision

One evening, as Victor sat idle in his laboratory with the sun set and the moon just rising from the sea, a train of reflection led him to reconsider the effects of what he was doing. Three years earlier he had created a fiend whose unparalleled barbarity had desolated his heart, and now he was about to form another being whose dispositions he was equally ignorant of. She might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate and delight in murder and wretchedness for its own sake. He realized that she had not sworn to quit the neighborhood of man, and might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation. The two creatures might even hate each other, or she might turn with disgust from the monster to the superior beauty of man, leaving him alone again and exasperated by the fresh provocation. Even if they were to leave Europe and inhabit the deserts of the new world, one of the first results of their sympathies would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, making the very existence of the human species precarious and full of terror. For the first time, the wickedness of his promise burst upon him, and he shuddered to think that future ages might curse him as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price of the whole human race.

The Destruction and the Monster's Response

As Victor looked up, he saw by the light of the moon the monster at the casement, a ghastly grin wrinkling his lips as he gazed on the progress of the work. The creature's countenance expressed the utmost extent of malice and treachery. Victor, trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which he was engaged. The wretch saw him destroy the creature on whose future existence he depended for happiness, and with a howl of devilish despair and revenge, withdrew. Victor then locked the door, made a solemn vow never to resume his labors, and sought his own apartment, alone with the sickening oppression of terrible reveries. Later that night, the monster entered his room and confronted him, demanding to know why he had broken his promise. When Victor declared himself firm in his refusal, the monster gnashed his teeth in impotent anger and pronounced the fateful words: "I shall be with you on your wedding-night." He then departed, shooting across the waters in his boat with arrowy swiftness.

Consequences and Aftermath

The destruction of the female creature set in motion the final, catastrophic phase of Victor's tragedy. The monster's wedding-night threat was no empty boast; immediately after enunciating it, he murdered Henry Clerval, whose strangled body was found on the Irish shore where Victor had landed. Victor himself was imprisoned for the crime, fell into a delirious fever, and for two months lay on the point of death, raving that he was the murderer of William, Justine, and Clerval. After his release and return to Geneva, he married Elizabeth, but on their wedding night the monster fulfilled his threat by killing her in her bridal chamber. Victor's father, Alphonse, died of grief shortly afterward. Victor then devoted himself entirely to pursuing the monster across the globe, a chase that ended only with his own death aboard Walton's ship in the Arctic. In his final moments, Victor reflected that he had done right in refusing to create a companion, for his duties toward his own species had greater claims than his duty to the monster, who had shown unparalleled malignity and selfishness in evil.