• none but the devil

    Mary Shelley characteristically complicates the moral lines here. Even as Justine
    is called a "monster," she resorts to her own habitual modes of religious instruction
    to categorize the behavior of the murderer. That she happens to use the same terminology
    as Victor does is a nice irony. But if we then seriously accept his own claim of ultimate
    responsibility for this debacle, Justine's invocation of the devil is tantamount to
    an ironic accusation against Victor, implicitly inverting his earlier (I:3:8) moral
    exoneration of himself as a godlike creator.