• Cursed (although I curse myself) be the hands that formed you

    Under the creature's unrelenting accusation, the self-destructive nature of Victor's
    hatred and its manifestation in the Creature-as-double are here at last openly admitted
    by him. Percy Bysshe Shelley will use the same formula a year later in writing the
    first act of Prometheus Unbound, where Prometheus summons the Phantasm of Jupiter,
    the specter of his enemy, to repeat the self-enchaining curse Prometheus had once
    pronounced upon Jupiter (see 1.258). There, too, the strong echoes of Paradise Lost
    suggest a reading of God and Satan in the manner represented in his "Defence of Poetry,"
    as co-complicitous doubles.