Key Quote
“"If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!"”
The Creature · Chapter 17
Focus: “fear”
The Creature's ultimatum — love me or fear me — reveals the psychological mechanism by which rejection transforms potential love into certain violence.
Technique 1 — ANTITHETICAL CONDITIONAL / ULTIMATUM
The conditional structure — 'If... I will' — creates an ultimatum (final demand with consequences): love or fear, acceptance or violence. The antithesis between 'love' and 'fear' is absolute — there is no middle ground, no negotiation. Shelley dramatises the binary logic of the rejected: when compassion is denied, only terror remains as a means of being acknowledged.
The shift from 'inspire' to 'cause' is revealing: love cannot be forced, only inspired — it requires the other's willing response. But fear CAN be caused unilaterally through violence. The lexical shift from passive ('inspire' — hoping for a response) to active ('cause' — forcing one) charts the Creature's movement from supplicant to aggressor.
Key Words
RAD — REGRESS
The Creature regresses from eloquent philosopher (his earlier speeches demonstrate remarkable intelligence and empathy) to violent threat-maker. But Shelley frames this regression as reactive (caused by external forces) rather than innate: the Creature was not born violent — he was made violent by universal rejection. His regression is evidence for Shelley's argument that monstrosity is socially constructed, not biologically predetermined.
Key Words
Technique 2 — EXCLAMATION MARK — EMOTIONAL RUPTURE
The exclamation mark intensifies the threat: this is not a calm statement of intent but an emotional eruption. The Creature's eloquence — his most humanising quality — is overwhelmed by raw feeling. Shelley shows the moment where reasoned argument gives way to affect (raw emotional force): the Creature has tried persuasion and failed; only violence remains. The punctuation performs the emotional breaking point.
The first-person declarations — 'I cannot,' 'I will' — insist on the Creature's subjectivity (his existence as a thinking, choosing being). Even in threatening violence, the Creature asserts his personhood: he is not a mindless monster but a being who has DECIDED to cause fear. This distinction matters: deliberate violence is qualitatively different from instinctive aggression. The Creature's threat is a choice born of despair, not a revelation of innate savagery.
Key Words
Context (AO3)
ROUSSEAU & NATURAL GOODNESS
Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that humans are born naturally good and are corrupted by society. Shelley, whose parents were influenced by Rousseau, applies this theory to the Creature: he begins life with the capacity for love and is driven to violence by social rejection. The Creature's trajectory is Rousseau's nightmare — proof that society destroys what nature creates.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
The Creature's transformation from peaceful to violent mirrors anxieties about the French Revolution (1789): the oppressed masses, denied dignity and justice, eventually turned to violent revolution. Shelley warns that sustained injustice inevitably breeds violent rebellion — the Creature is revolutionary as well as monster.
Key Words
WOW — THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH (Fanon)
Frantz Fanon's *The Wretched of the Earth* argues that colonised peoples, denied recognition and subjected to persistent dehumanisation, may turn to violence as the only remaining means of asserting their existence. Fanon wrote: 'The colonised man finds his freedom in and through violence.' The Creature enacts Fanon's thesis: denied love, refused recognition, treated as sub-human, he discovers that causing fear is the only way to force the world to acknowledge him. Violence becomes not mere aggression but an act of existential assertion — proof that he exists, that he matters, that he cannot be ignored. Shelley, writing 140 years before Fanon, dramatises the same insight: sustained dehumanisation does not produce docile victims — it produces revolutionaries. The Creature's violence is not evidence of his monstrosity but of society's failure.
Key Words