The Female, Destroyed

On a bare island in the Orkneys, Victor tears the half finished female creature to pieces and sinks the remains in a basket at sea. Charlotte Gordon calls it what the prose keeps whispering it is: a murder, down to the gurgle of the basket going under. What the destruction exposes is the book's real couple, creator and creature, jealous as lovers, while Elizabeth waits offstage. And when the sea hands Victor back with his friend's corpse waiting at the dock, Gordon watches the narration itself start to dissolve into laudanum and as ifs.