• dread, and yet be pleased The delicacy with which Elizabeth recognizes Victor's possible ambivalence to an
    eroticized relationship with her has the paradoxical effect of alerting us to its
    rougher corollary in events of the novel of which she is ignorant. Translated from
    the level domestic plane in which she is centered to the sublime heights where Victor
    and his Creature struggle, this ambivalence might seem strangely akin to the intense
    love-hate dynamic in which that homosocial relationship plays itself out.