• monsters thirsting for each other's blood

    The echo here is pronounced. Only two paragraphs earlier Victor had recounted his
    fear "lest the monster whom I had created should perpetrate some new wickedness."
    In Elizabeth's perspective, on the other hand, there is no alien being to consider
    as a scapegoat and in whom to localize and therefore objectify evil. Instead, the
    potentiality for monstrousness exists in all human hearts, and in their collective
    aggregate that is human society, as Justine's fate demonstrates, this monstrousness
    can be institutionalized as an underlying, unrecognized and therefore dangerous formation.
    In other words, the monstrous is not external but within.