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You must create a female for me, with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being.
In Chapter 17, the monster pleads with Victor to create a female counterpart, which would fulfill his need for companionship as well as link him further to Adam in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Read more about this quote in Quotes by Character: The Monster.
His words had a strange effect upon me. I compassionated him and sometimes felt a wish to console him, but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred. I tried to stifle these sensations; I thought that as I could not sympathise with him, I had no right to withhold from him the small portion of happiness which was yet in my power to bestow.
This Chapter 17 passage occurs after the creature demands that Victor create a companion for him, and it captures Victor’s profound moral conflict as he feels both pity and revulsion for the creature. Although he recognizes the creature’s suffering and feels a responsibility to help lessen it, he is so disgusted by the creature’s appearance that he’s unable to sustain his sympathy for him. The sharp contrast between compassion and “horror and hatred” exposes the limits of Victor’s empathy, but his “wish to console” the creature also reveals that he feels an obligation (for a few minutes, at least) to bring some comfort and kindness to the being he created.
