Frankenstein Chapter 17 Summary: The Creature Demands a Mate

The being finishes and waits. Victor cannot arrange his ideas around the demand: a female, the interchange of sympathies, a right the maker must not refuse. Rage returns with the last part of the tale. I do refuse it. No torture shall extort consent. Shall I create another whose joint wickedness might desolate the world.

The creature chooses reason, then both reason and threat. He is malicious because he is miserable. If he cannot inspire love he will cause fear, and chiefly toward the arch-enemy who made him. Then the milder picture: a creature of another sex, as hideous as himself; the vast wilds of South America; acorns and berries; a bed of dried leaves. Victor is moved, then hardens. How can a being who longs for human sympathy keep that exile. The creature swears by the earth and by the maker: with a companion, evil passions will have fled.

Victor calculates ice-caves and precipices, a power no man can hunt. Justice due to the creature and to mankind, he tells himself, demands compliance. He consents on a solemn oath to quit Europe and every neighbourhood of man. The being swears by the sun and the blue sky, then descends the mountain faster than an eagle. Night at the halfway fountain: stars, dark pines, a broken tree. Victor weeps and asks the winds to crush sensation. Morning at Chamounix; home to Geneva without answering a question. He loves the family to adoration, and to save them he takes up the most abhorred task as the only fact that still feels like life.