No Victory
Although a variety of popular media translations and transformations have been inspired by Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, they do not tend to depict the Creature as evil in most cases. Misunderstood, poorly socialized, driven by alien biology and desires, or perhaps just a lack of role models and parenting. Film and television tend to portray Frankenstein’s Creature as the victim because of Victor’s and human society’s general rejection.
Even when he commits harm, even murder, we look away. The act is resisted or explained away, as in the instance of William’s murder, to a understandable if not forgivable momentary rage — a transference of the Creature’s anger and hate better directed toward Victor.
However, this does not explain the Creature framing Justine for the murder. The Creature describes seeing a woman pass nearby:
“She was young, not indeed so beautiful as her whose portrait I held, but of an agreeable aspect, and blooming in the loveliness of youth and health. Here, I thought, is one of those whose smiles are bestowed on all but me; she shall not escape: thanks to the lessons of Felix, and the sanguinary laws of man, I have learned how to work mischief. I approached her unperceived, and placed the portrait securely in one of the folds of her dress.”
He sees her only briefly, from enough concealment that she doesn’t notice our eight-foot tall revenant. Just the fact that she is attractive and young angers him; no, this is not momentary rage but smouldering resentment. Given Justine’s story, that she wandered until exhausted, and then collapsed in a shed, the Creature tracked her…stalked her. And then, once she was asleep, crept up on her and placed the curio in her clothes. This was not justified anger — she never even saw him — it was petty, childish, and mean, done just because he *knew* she would never smile at him. He knew that had he approached her, she, as with everyone else, would have fled.
It is true that the Creature had little or no mentoring or parenting. He follows a Rousseau-inspired “child of nature,” a painful experience, augmented by a select library that provided models he could never follow and roles he could not perform, beyond perhaps those of Satan or Adam after his ejection from the Garden. But he came to believe that he deserved more and that his creator owed him a mate.
“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.”
Frankenstein’s Creature really is one of the first Incels in literature. He effectively kills a woman who he has not even the courage to approach.