Cursed (although I curse myself) be the hands that formed you
Under the creature's unrelenting accusation, the self-destructive nature of
Victor's hatred and its manifestation in the Creature-as-double are here at
last openly admitted by him. Percy
Bysshe Shelley will use
the same formula a year later in writing the first act of Prometheus Unbound, where
Prometheus summons the Phantasm of Jupiter, the specter of his enemy, to
repeat the self-enchaining curse Prometheus had once pronounced upon
Jupiter (see 1.258). There, too,
the strong echoes of Paradise Lost suggest a reading of God and
Satan in the manner represented in his "Defence of Poetry," as co-complicitous
doubles.
