The fiend’s plan of revenge
The fiend had grown emotionally attached to this family that he was watching – when they were unhappy, he felt depressed; when they were happy, he was full of joy. Soon he formed a plan to win their favor.
“I formed in my imagination a thousand pictures of presenting myself to them, and their reception of me. I imagined that they would be disgusted, until, by my gentle demeanour and conciliating words, I should first win their favour and afterwards their love.”
The fiend didn’t believe that he was unworthy of their sympathy. And why would they turn him away with disdain and horror. After all, the poor that stopped at their door were never driven away.
His plan was to enter their cottage when the blind old man was all alone, and in the absence of the children, he would gain the trust of the old man, and through him, he might be tolerated by his children.
That plan seemed to be going tolerably well, until the children arrived back home, and to their horror, saw the fiend clinging to the knees of the old man. The daughter fainted, and the son threw him to the ground and beat him violently with a stick, until the fiend fled from the cottage.
“I continued for the remainder of the day in my hovel in a state of utter and stupid despair. My protectors had departed and had broken the only link that held me to the world. For the first time the feelings of revenge and hatred filled my bosom, and I did not strive to control them, but allowing myself to be borne away by the stream, I bent my mind towards injury and death.”
The family had left the cottage, never to return, and with his fantasy of becoming part of the family gone, and with these feelings of rage and revenge growing inside his heart, he destroyed everything left in the garden and burned down the cottage.
“From that moment I declared everlasting war against the species, and more than all, against him who had formed me and sent me forth to this insupportable misery.”
“Unfeeling, heartless creator! You had endowed me with perceptions and passions and then cast me abroad an object for the scorn and horror of mankind. But on you only had I any claim for pity and redress, and from you I determined to seek that justice which I vainly attempted to gain from any other being that wore the human form.”
Now, the fiend decided to journey to Geneva, to seek out Victor to demand his justice! Or to inflict his revenge!
After arriving at Geneva, he rested in a hiding place among the fields, until he was woken by the sounds of a young child playing. Suddenly, the fiend thought that perhaps this child was too young to be horrified by his appearance, and that he could take him and educate him to be his friend. But when he approached the child, he struggled to escape and screamed at the fiend:
“Hideous monster! Let me go. My papa is a syndic—he is M. Frankenstein—he will punish you. You dare not keep me.”
The fiend heard the name Frankenstein:
“Frankenstein! you belong then to my enemy—to him towards whom I have sworn eternal revenge; you shall be my first victim.”
This was Victor’s young brother, William, and the fiend grasped his throat to silence him, and he soon lay dead.
“I gazed on my victim, and my heart swelled with exultation and hellish triumph; clapping my hands, I exclaimed, ‘I too can create desolation; my enemy is not invulnerable; this death will carry despair to him, and a thousand other miseries shall torment and destroy him’.”
When the fiend had finished telling this story to Victor, he then made his demand:
“We may not part until you have promised to comply with my requisition. I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species and have the same defects … You must create a female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being. This you alone can do, and I demand it of you as a right which you must not refuse to concede.”
At first, Victor was defiant:
“I do refuse it, and no torture shall ever extort a consent from me. You may render me the most miserable of men, but you shall never make me base in my own eyes. Shall I create another like yourself, whose joint wickedness might desolate the world? Begone! I have answered you; you may torture me, but I will never consent.”
And the fiend replied:
“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 … Oh! My creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit! Let me see that I excite the sympathy of some existing thing; do not deny me my request! … If you consent, neither you nor any other human being shall ever see us again; I will go to the vast wilds of South America.”
Victor again refused his entreaties:
“You propose to fly from the habitations of man, to dwell in those wilds where the beasts of the field will be your only companions. How can you, who long for the love and sympathy of man, persevere in this exile? You will return and again seek their kindness, and you will meet with their detestation; your evil passions will be renewed, and you will then have a companion to aid you in the task of destruction. This may not be; cease to argue the point, for I cannot consent.”
The fiend kept arguing:
“I swear to you, by the earth which I inhabit, and by you that made me, that with the companion you bestow, I will quit the neighbourhood of man and dwell, as it may chance, in the most savage of places. 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.”
Since Victor could not sympathize with him, he instead pitied him, and agreed to his demand:
“His words had a strange effect upon me. I compassionated him and sometimes felt a wish to console him, but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred. I tried to stifle these sensations; I thought that as I could not sympathise with him, I had no right to withhold from him the small portion of happiness which was yet in my power to bestow … I thought of the promise of virtues which he had displayed on the opening of his existence and the subsequent blight of all kindly feeling by the loathing and scorn which his protectors had manifested towards him … After a long pause of reflection I concluded that the justice due both to him and my fellow creatures demanded of me that I should comply with his request.”
At this the fiend suddenly fled – fearful, perhaps, of any change in Victor’s sentiments.