dread, and yet be pleased
The delicacy with which Elizabeth recognizes Victor's possible ambivalence
to an eroticized relationship with her has the paradoxical effect of
alerting us to its rougher corollary in events of the novel of which she
is ignorant. Translated from the level domestic plane in which she is
centered to the sublime heights where Victor and his Creature struggle,
this ambivalence might seem strangely akin to the intense love-hate
dynamic in which that homosocial relationship plays itself out.
