Devil!
This is the first word that Victor utters to his Creature. Perhaps, as
the allusions to Satan in the previous paragraph suggest, it is already in
his mind. But, there is a dimension to this epithet beyond its
effectiveness as an index to Victor's mental state, a timeless and mythic
dimension. Although rigorously suppressed wherever organized Christendom
extended its arms into secular society, the writings of heretical
theology, particularly from Gnostic sects, continually revert to the
concurrence of creation and the fall as two aspects of a single event.
Thus to create is to cast out, on a universal level as well as, literally
so, in childbirth. The cast-off in this case functions as Satan in a dual
sense -- as a disrupter of the putative unity of God and his coextensive
creation, and -- from the Hebrew root -- as the accuser, who here
immediately upbraids Victor Frankenstein for not doing his duty by his
creature.
Note how carefully Milton embeds this coincidence, without heretically
stressing a linkage, in the moment where God divides himself so as to
function on a second level, as a Creative Word, the Logos that will render
God's conceptual blueprint for the universe into a workable reality
(Paradise Lost, V.594-617).
