Murder of Elizabeth

The murder of Elizabeth Lavenza, Victor Frankenstein's bride, on their wedding night is the culminating atrocity of the monster's campaign of revenge, an event that shatters Victor's last hope for happiness and drives him irrevocably toward a life of obsessive pursuit. It is the final, most personal blow in a series of killings that includes Victor's brother William, the innocent Justine Moritz, and his dearest friend Henry Clerval, and it transforms Victor from a haunted man into a single-minded avenger.

The Wedding Night and the Attack

Victor and Elizabeth are married in Geneva, and immediately after the ceremony they depart by boat for Evian, where they plan to spend the first night of their marriage before continuing their journey to Villa Lavenza on Lake Como. The day is fair and the wind favorable, but Elizabeth is melancholy, and Victor is consumed by the monster's threat: "I will be with you on your wedding-night." He carries pistols and a dagger, determined to defend himself. At the inn in Evian, as night falls and a storm rises, Victor becomes increasingly agitated. He urges Elizabeth to retire to their room while he searches the house for any sign of his enemy. Finding no trace of the monster, he begins to hope that some fortunate chance has prevented the attack. Then he hears a shrill and dreadful scream from Elizabeth's room. Rushing in, he finds her lifeless, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down and her pale, distorted features half covered by her hair. The murderous mark of the fiend's grasp is on her neck. Victor falls senseless to the ground.

The Monster's Taunt and Escape

When Victor recovers, he finds himself surrounded by the terrified people of the inn. He escapes them and returns to the room where Elizabeth's body lies, now arranged as if she were asleep, with a handkerchief thrown across her face and neck. As he hangs over her in the agony of despair, he looks up and sees at the open window the hideous figure of the monster, grinning and pointing with his fiendish finger toward the corpse. Victor draws a pistol and fires, but the monster eludes the shot, leaps from his station, and runs with the swiftness of lightning, plunging into the lake. The report of the pistol brings a crowd into the room. Victor points to where the monster disappeared, and the people follow the track with boats and cast nets, but in vain. After several hours they return hopeless, most of Victor's companions believing the figure to be a form conjured up by his fancy.

Aftermath and Victor's Collapse

Victor attempts to join the search parties but soon collapses in a state of utter exhaustion, his head whirling and his skin parched with fever. He is carried back to the inn and placed on a bed. After an interval, he crawls by instinct into the room where Elizabeth's corpse lies, joining the weeping women. His thoughts ramble confusedly over his misfortunes: the death of William, the execution of Justine, the murder of Clerval, and now his wife. The realization that his remaining friends—his father Alphonse and his brother Ernest—might still be in danger rouses him to action. Unable to procure horses, he hires men to row him back across the lake to Geneva, though the wind is unfavorable and rain falls in torrents. The journey is agonizing; he sees the same scenes he had contemplated the day before with Elizabeth, and the contrast between past happiness and present desolation overwhelms him.

Thematic Significance

Elizabeth's murder is the event that completes Victor's destruction as a social being. She was the last person who could draw him from his fits of despair, whose gentle voice could soothe him when transported by passion. Her death extinguishes all possibility of domestic peace and happiness, the very things Victor had hoped to reclaim through their union. The monster's choice of the wedding night as the moment of attack is a deliberate perversion of the marriage bond, transforming what should be a celebration of love and new life into a scene of death and mourning. This event also marks the point of no return in Victor's psychological trajectory: from this moment forward, he is possessed by a single, devouring passion for revenge, abandoning all other ties and purposes. The murder of Elizabeth, like the earlier killings, is a direct consequence of Victor's initial abandonment of his creature and his subsequent refusal to create a female companion, demonstrating how each failure of responsibility compounds the tragedy.