The Creature as Eve: Liminality in Shelley’s Frankenstein

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Creature famously aligns himself with Satan from Milton’s Paradise Lost, lamenting his fall from grace and social rejection. Yet a closer reading reveals him as more akin to Eve, as he is created into dependence, deprived of companionship, and condemned for the most seemingly innocent pursuit of knowledge. This repositioning highlights the Creature’s liminal identity, a feature prevalent in the Gothic genre, and marks Shelley’s work as anticipatory of modernist concerns, particularly those embodied in James Joyce’s exploration of fragmented selfhood. This essay will argue that the Creature’s likeness to Eve and his resultant liminality anticipate modernist textual strategies of multiplicity, internal plurality, and identity dislocation.

Both Eve and the Creature are brought into existence by a superior being. These being God and Victor respectively. Neither creation is granted full autonomy at the outset. The Creature declares “I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel,” implicitly recalling Eve’s derivative status to Adam in Genesis, and stressing his secondary origin. He laments further “no Eve soothed my sorrows nor shared my thoughts; I was alone,” emphasizing not only redundancy but emotional deprivation, a condition parallel to Eve’s reflective solitude prior to creation. The Creature’s post‑creation exclusion and lack of companion echo Eve’s relational ecosystem, making Eve a more precise intertextual analogue than Satan. The traditional parallel with Adam or Satan overlooks the Creature’s originating passivity and need for relational wholeness.

Yet, the Creature is right to point out his similarities to Satan. His persuasive charisma proves as a dangerous weapon as the story unfolds. The Creature holds another personality trait that resonates dangerously with Satan, his pride. The Creature’s hope of integration reflects not hubristic pride, but a tragic naivety, one that later curdles into a Satanic drive for revenge. Then he sets himself the grand aim of mastering his creator through psychological torment, just like Satan. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

Eve’s consumption of the forbidden fruit is motivated by a desire for knowledge and agency. This act that transforms innocence into alienation. In similar vein, the Creature’s intellectual awakening through reading Paradise Lost, Plutarch, and Goethe brings a human, painful awareness and despair. He reflects “Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition; for often... the bitter gall of envy rose within me.” Yet unlike Satan’s conscious rebellion, the Creature’s fall is not volitional; instead, it is shaped by rejection and lack of guidance. He becomes what he is largely through denial of nurture, echoing Eve’s fall as tragic ignorance rather than malevolence. He seeks companionship, not rebellion, until such refusal corrupts his identity. The Creature is shaped by the villainy of society and the lack of nurture from his creator. While Eve does engage with God, she is still positioned as secondary, derivative, and less autonomous, qualities that resonate with the Creature’s own marginalisation.

By synthesizing disparate physical parts and remaining fundamentally unrooted in conventional identity categories, the Creature embodies physical and psychological fragmentation. Shelley’s novel uses Gothic form and multiple narrative framing to produce a dislocated sense of self. Nothing is delivered directly, everything is filtered through an intermediary. Scholars argue that Shelley deliberately “undermines the persuasiveness of Paradise Lost and Milton’s monstrous myth,” opening ontological space for alternative self‑conceptions.

There is no doubt that the Creature’s identity is unstable. He is at once intelligent and bestial, compassionate and violent, innocent and monstrous. Gilbert & Gubar note he “occupies a border territory between the characteristics that typically define protagonists and antagonists,” dismantling fixed ontologies of self and morality.

Such ambiguity anticipates modernist narrative techniques. This potentially foreshadow that of Joyce’s interior monologues, his characters’ internal conflict, and his sense of identity as inherently fragmented and relationally defined. Indeed, Joyce’s interest in scientific discourse, his references to galvanism and physiology, signals an ideological connection to Shelley’s Romantic disenchantment with Enlightenment rationality.

Frankenstein challenges the authoritative identity structures epitomized by Miltonic myth and bourgeois individualism. Milton’s text operated as a “cultural repository of restrictive patterns of self‑identification,” which Shelley undermines via Gothic experimentation and narrative decentring. The Creature becomes Shelley’s tool to question monolithic subjectivity and to foreground a self constituted by relation, otherness, and social exclusion.

This orientation resonates with modernism’s inward turn: Joyce’s Ulysses features protagonists whose identities evolve through inward trial, moral ambivalence, and narrative fragmentation. Joyce, like Shelley, exposes the limits of fixed identities suggesting instead that selfhood is emergent, relational, conflicted.

By positioning the Creature as more Eve-like than Satanic, Shelley enriches her critique of mythic authority and opens Frankenstein to deeper psychological and moral complexity. The Creature’s liminal status, in physical form and social identity, transcends Romantic alienation and prefigures the interior fragmentation that modernism would foreground. Through multiple narration layers and the dissolution of normative identity categories, Frankenstein becomes not only a Romantic masterpiece, but also a proto-modernist exploration of selfhood