Mat Gilson

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein exists in a world where sex is only conceptual, and even the act of creation is free of intimacy. The Creature’s asexual creation is thus doomed; this mockery of Adam has no counterpart to call a mate or wife. Both the Monster and Frankenstein admit that living is the worst horror, but it is living without sex that truly tortures both creatures, and leads to their mutual destruction.

Frankenstein describes that he came to understand how to bestow animation to lifeless matter by mocking the true process of natural labor: “After so much time spent in painful labour, to arrive at once at the summit of my desires, was the most gratifying consummation of my toils.” The term consummation here could certainly be read as the simple finalization, or completion of Frankenstein’s work, but a later quote suggests that this word is extremely intentional. 

When the Monster threatens Frankenstein, who has refused to build him a wife, he states “I will be with you on your wedding night!” Frankenstein thinks, in response, “Such was my sentence, and on that night would the deamon employ every art to destroy me, and tear me from the glimpse of happiness which promised partly to console my sufferings. On that night he determined to consummate his crimes by my death.” The use of the word “consummation” in the context of a wedding night is inarguably referential to sex: the consummation of the marriage. But there is no such sex to be had, nor is there the finalization of the Monster’s plot which Frankenstein suspected. Rather than attempting to kill Frankenstein, the Monster instead kills his wife, before any consummation of any kind could take place. By removing Frankenstein’s lifelong love, and only “glimpse of happiness,” the Monster has effectively subjected Frankenstein to his own wretched fate, of a life void of love or intimacy.

The Monster, having been subjected to any number of horrors at the hands of man, asks only one thing of Frankenstein: a mate. The magnitude of this offering cannot be overstated. The Monster believes that it is “the only benefit that can soften my heart, and render me harmless.” He goes on to say that “ If I have no ties and no affections, hatred and vice must be my portion; the love of another will destroy the cause of my crimes… My vices are 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.” Here, the Monster articulates that sex would provide him with humanity, which he lacks due to his unnatural creation. Sex would provide him and his kind with history and a connection to it, with affection, with love. The true horror of the Monster is that all of these things are inaccessible to him. 

The genius of the Monster’s revenge, then, is that he effectively subjected Frankenstein to the same sexless fate. By murdering Frankenstein’s wife, one of few remaining relations, the Monster removed the possibility of love and intimacy from both of their lives, leaving only revenge and hatred. In the absence of sex, the driving force of both creature’s lives becomes the destruction of the other. Their travel to the infertile north is only too fitting a place for both to expire, cursed to be horny, and sexless, until death.