You're listening ad free on Wonderie Plus.

This is the strange and unusual podcast with Allison Horrocks.

And welcome to Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley, part 8. Oh, The Chapter 17 The Being finished speaking and fixed his looks upon me in the expectation of a reply,

but I was bewildered, perplexed, and unable to arrange my ideas sufficiently to understand the full

extent of his proposition.

He continued,

You must create a female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being.

This you alone can do, and I demanded of you as a right which you must not refuse to concede. The later part of his tale had kindled anew in me the anger that had died away while he narrated his peaceful

life among the cottagers.

And as he said this, I could no longer suppress the rage that burned within me.

I do refuse it, I replied, and no torture shall ever extort a consent from me.

You may render me the most miserable of men, but you shall never make

me base in my own eyes. Shall I create another like yourself whose joint wickedness might desolate the world?

Be gone. I have answered you. You may torture me but I will never consent.

You are in the wrong, replied the fiend, and instead of threatening I am content to reason with you.

I am malicious because I am miserable.

Am I not shunned and hated by all my kind?

You, my Creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph.

Remember that.

And tell me why I should pity man more than he pity is me. You would not call

it murder if you could precipitate me into one of those ice riffs and destroy my frame, the

work of your own hands.

...