Plot Summary
Chapter 20 marks one of the most pivotal moments in Frankenstein. Victor sits in his island laboratory in the Orkney Islands, nearing completion of the female creature he promised to build for his creation. As the moon rises, he pauses to contemplate the consequences of his work. He realizes with mounting horror that the new creature could be even more malevolent than the first, that she might refuse the pact made before her existence, or that the two creatures could produce offspring — a "race of devils" that would threaten all humanity.
When Victor looks up and sees the Creature grinning through the window, watching his progress, he is seized by revulsion and fury. In a decisive act, he tears the half-finished female creature to pieces before the Creature's eyes. The Creature howls in despair and retreats, only to return hours later to confront Victor directly. Their exchange is fierce: the Creature accuses Victor of breaking his promise, while Victor refuses to yield, declaring he will never create another being capable of such wickedness. The Creature delivers his most chilling threat — "I shall be with you on your wedding-night" — before fleeing by boat into the darkness.
Victor spends a tormented night replaying the Creature's words, misinterpreting the threat as a promise to kill him rather than Elizabeth. The next morning, he resolves to leave the island. He gathers the remains of the destroyed female creature into a basket weighted with stones, sails out under cover of moonlight, and sinks the evidence into the sea. Exhausted, he falls asleep in the boat and awakens to find himself adrift, driven far from shore by strong winds. After hours of terror on the open water, he spots land and steers toward a small Irish town. Upon arriving, he is met not with hospitality but with suspicion and hostility — the townspeople inform him he must appear before a magistrate to answer for a murder committed the previous night.
Character Development
Victor undergoes a profound moral transformation in this chapter. For the first time, he exercises genuine ethical reasoning rather than acting from emotion or compulsion. His decision to destroy the female creature reflects a newfound sense of responsibility toward humanity, even as it stems partly from fear and revulsion. He acknowledges that his earlier compliance with the Creature's demands was driven by "sophisms" and cowardice, and he now sees clearly that creating a second being would be "an act of the basest and most atrocious selfishness."
The Creature, meanwhile, reveals the full depth of his rage and desperation. His confrontation with Victor strips away any remaining sympathy the reader might hold. His declaration — "I am your master; obey!" — exposes the power dynamic between creator and creation as fundamentally broken. Yet his anguished cry that every man and beast has a mate while he remains alone retains a core of genuine pathos, complicating the reader's moral response.
Themes and Motifs
The chapter crystallizes the novel's central tension between creation and responsibility. Victor's destruction of the female creature is simultaneously an act of moral courage and a betrayal of his promise, raising the question of whether one wrong can be corrected by committing another. The theme of isolation pervades the chapter: Victor is physically stranded on a desolate island, emotionally severed from his loved ones, and spiritually adrift after his confrontation with the Creature. The motif of the sea recurs as both barrier and grave — Victor regards it as "an insuperable barrier" between himself and civilization, and later nearly perishes upon it. The Creature's wedding-night threat introduces dramatic irony that will propel the novel's tragic conclusion, as Victor fatally misreads it as a threat to his own life rather than Elizabeth's.
Literary Devices
Shelley employs dramatic irony masterfully through the wedding-night threat: the reader suspects what Victor cannot — that the Creature intends to destroy Elizabeth, not Victor himself. Pathetic fallacy underscores the chapter's emotional arc, as the moonlit calm of the opening gives way to clouded skies and threatening seas that mirror Victor's inner turmoil. The Gothic imagery of the Creature's face at the window, grinning in the moonlight, is one of the novel's most iconic moments, evoking classic horror while symbolizing the inescapable consequences of Victor's ambition. Shelley also uses foreshadowing extensively — the Creature's threat, Victor's drift toward Ireland, and the hostile reception at the harbor all point toward the catastrophes ahead. The chapter's structure mirrors Victor's psychological state, moving from agonized deliberation to violent action to exhausted drift.