creature ” ( Morton 56 ). The Being is a sensitive creature who seeks to undo all his misdeeds through “ the love of another ”:
If I have no ties and no affection , hatred and vice must be my portion ; the love of another will destroy the cause of my crimes , and I shall become a thing of whose existence every one will be ignorant . My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor ; and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal . I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being , and become linked to the chain of existence and events , from which I am now excluded . ( 106 )
Mary Shelley ’ s Being , nevertheless , is born in Victor ’ s laboratory , metaphorically a male womb for him , without either a memory or a family history and background , after two years of unremitting study , which seems like a longer pregnancy than women ’ s . Succeeding in his prolonged labor , Victor refers to his product as a “ catastrophe ” ( 35 ) from whom he flees . Thus , Frankenstein is defeated in creating a perfect being without the presence of a woman in the public sphere . Victor touches on his “ mother ’ s tender caresses and my father ’ s smile of benevolent pleasure ” from his earlier “ recollections ” ( 16 ) while he has not been able to create such a memory for the Being , whose mother and father are summed up in but one pseudo-mother . As such , Victor is eventually defeated in taking the prime role of a woman from the domestic sphere to the public one .
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