As a result of his suffering, first with the De Lacey’s rejection and then after he is nearly shot following his rescue of a young girl, the Creature reveals a wrathful temperament:
“My daily vows rose for revenge – a deep and deadly revenge, such as would alone compensate for the outrages and anguish I had endured.”
The creature tries to talk to William because:
“This little creature was unprejudiced, and had lived too short a time to have imbibed a horror of deformity. If, therefore, I could seize him and educate him as my companion and friend, I should not be so desolate in this peopled earth.”
Yet William struggles against the Creature, calling him an ‘ogre’ and urging his captor to let him go because he believes the Creature wishes to “eat me and tear me to pieces”. As he grows increasingly desperate, young William announces that his father is “a syndic – he is M. Frankenstein – he will punish you”. This sees the Creature fly into a mad rage and the Creature resolves that William will be his first victim:
“Frankenstein! you belong then to my enemy – to him towards whom I have sworn eternal revenge; you shall be my first victim.”
Entering a barn which he believes to be empty, the Creature comes across the sleeping figure of Justine. He notes her “loveliness of youth” and bitterly realises that her “joy-imparting smiles are bestowed on all but me”. Resentful of this, the Creature decides to frame Justine for the murder:
“Not I, but she, shall suffer; the murder I have committed because I am forever robbed of all that she could give me, she shall atone. The crime had its source in her: be hers the punishment!”
This leads to Justine’s death because the locket which the Creature leaves in her pocket, along with the fact that “she had been out the whole of the night the murder had been committed” seem to incriminate her. It is revealed that Justine confesses to the murder upon being pressed to by a churchman:
“He threatened and menaced until I almost began to think that I was the monster that he said I was.”
In this way, Justine fulfils the role of the weak female character, a typical feature of the Gothic genre. She is the victim of the Creature’s ‘mischief’ and by extension, Frankenstein’s ambition, as well as the clergyman’s persistence.
There is no doubt in the mind of the reader that Justine and William are innocent; it is this certainty which makes their untimely deaths so much harder to process and Frankenstein's transgression so devastating.
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