Frankenstein Justice Quotes

During the whole of this wretched mockery of justice I suffered living torture. It was to be decided, whether the result of my curiosity and lawless devices would cause the death of two of my fellow-beings: one a smiling babe, full of innocence and joy; the other far more dreadfully murdered, with every aggravation of infamy that could make the murder memorable in horror. Justine also was a girl of merit, and possessed qualities which promised to render her life happy: now all was to be obliterated in an ignominious grave; and I the cause!

– Mary Shelley

Frankenstein, Chapter 8. Victor’s shock and regret as the monster strangles his youngest brother William in order to hurt Victor for abandoning him. And Justine, a young girl adapted by the Frankenstein household, is framed by the monster and condemned to death for the murder.

And on the morrow Justine died. Elizabeth’s heart-rending eloquence failed to move the judges from their settled conviction in the criminality of the saintly sufferer. My passionate and indignant appeals were lost upon them. And when I received their cold answers and heard the harsh, unfeeling reasoning of these men, my purposed avowal died away on my lips. Thus I might proclaim myself a madman, but not revoke the sentence passed upon my wretched victim. She perished on the scaffold as a murderess!

– Mary Shelley

Frankenstein, Chapter 8. Victor on Justine’s execution for a murder she did not commit. And he knows he cannot tell the truth without revealing his own guilt.

“I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.”

– Mary Shelley

Frankenstein, Chapter 24. The monster tells Robert Walton that even the enemy of God, Satan, had friends and companions. But he was created by Victor to be alone and without a companion.

“I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he lies, white and cold in death. You hate me, but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself.”

– Mary Shelley

Frankenstein, Chapter 24. Part of the monster’s final monologue to Robert Walton, after the death of his creator Victor Frankenstein on the ship. Despite taking revenge, he has found no sense of justice.
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