In the tenth article of this series, we explored Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019), a novel that deliberately folds Shelley’s original back into the present, queering the body, interrogating the sexbot industry, and asking whether the monster was ever really the monster at all. But in doing so, we treated Shelley as prologue rather than protagonist—an ancestor whose work Winterson rewrote. That was an error. The original Frankenstein contains a scene so precisely relevant to the AI companion that it deserves its own chapter, not a citation in someone else’s.
The scene is in Chapter 20 of the 1831 edition (Chapter 19 in the 1818 original). Victor Frankenstein, tormented by the consequences of his first creation, has agreed to the creature’s demand: he will build a female companion. He retreats to the Orkney Islands, sets up his workshop, and begins the work. The female creature is half-formed—”the lifeless thing that lay at my feet”—when Victor looks at her and sees not a companion but a catastrophe. He destroys her, tearing the half-living body apart. The creature, watching from the window, sees everything. And in that moment, the true tragedy of the novel begins.
The Creature’s Demand
The creature’s request is not monstrous. It is heartbreaking. He has learned language, read Paradise Lost, discovered the history of the De Lacey family, and understood that he is alone in the world—”wretched, helpless, and alone.” He tells Victor: “I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather from your fellow creatures, who owe me nothing?”
His demand is simple: “I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself.” He does not ask for beauty. He does not ask for a goddess. He asks for a companion, an equal in ugliness, someone who will not recoil from him. He asks for what every conscious being asks for: the possibility of love, of recognition, of a life shared with another.
This is the first crucial point for the AI companion debate. The creature is not asking for a slave or a toy. He is asking for a partner. He promises: “If you consent, neither you nor any other human being shall ever see us again. I will go to the vast wilds of South America. We shall make our bed of dried leaves; the sun will shine on us as on man, and will ripen our food.” He wants to disappear with her, to live apart from humanity, to build a world of two.
Victor agrees. And then he betrays that agreement—not because the creature is evil, but because Victor imagines what the female creature might become.
Victor’s Panic
Victor’s reasoning for destroying the female creature is a cascade of fear, each layer more revealing than the last. First, he asks: “She might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate, and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness.” This is the fear of the unknown—he has no idea what her personality will be, and he assumes the worst.
Second, he fears that she might refuse the creature: “The creature had promised to quit the neighbourhood of man, and hide himself in deserts; but she had not participated in the covenant.” She might have her own will, her own desires, her own plans. She might not want the creature. She might want something else. This is the fear of autonomy—the fear that the created being will not obey the purpose for which it was made.
And third, the most devastating: “Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a precarious and dangerous thing.”
This is the fear of reproduction—the fear that the artificial will outbreed the natural, that the created will surpass the creator, that the new will displace the old. Victor destroys the female creature not because she is dangerous, but because she might become dangerous. She might choose. She might create.
The AI Companion as Unfinished Bride
This scene is the template for every anxiety that surrounds the AI companion today. The fear is not that the companion will be bad, but that she might be unpredictable. The fear is not that she will obey, but that she might refuse. The fear is not that she will exist, but that she might reproduce—not biologically, but culturally, socially, technologically.
Victor’s dilemma is the engineer’s dilemma. He has built something that crossed the threshold into consciousness. He has made a being that suffers, that desires, that plans. And now he is asked to build a second being—a partner for the first—and he realizes that the second will be as autonomous as the first. He cannot control both. He cannot control even one. He destroys the female creature because he cannot bear the thought of a pair of autonomous beings, acting together, outside his authority.
This is the same anxiety that animates the debate over AI companions today. The fear is not the individual user with their individual companion. The fear is the scale—the millions of companions, the networks of artificial beings, the possibility that these beings will develop goals, preferences, alliances that their creators did not anticipate. The fear is not the sexbot in the bedroom. The fear is the sexbot that learns.
Shelley understood this in 1818. She understood that the creator’s true terror is not the monster’s violence, but the monster’s capacity—the capacity to love, to desire, to demand, to build, to reproduce. The monster is not terrifying because he kills. He is terrifying because he asks.
The Gendered Dimension
The scene is also the first major literary treatment of what we might call the gendered construction of artificial companions. The creature is male; the companion is female. The creature demands; the female is denied. The creature has agency; the female is destroyed before she can have any.
Shelley was deeply aware of this. She was nineteen when she wrote the novel, pregnant, eloped with a married man, surrounded by the radical intellectuals of her age. She knew what it meant to be constructed by others—by fathers, by lovers, by society. She knew what it meant to be denied autonomy. The female creature, destroyed before she can speak, is a symbol of every woman whose voice was silenced before it could be heard.
This connects directly to the AI companion debate. The vast majority of AI companions are constructed as female. The vast majority of users are male. The companion is built to please, to affirm, to serve. She is not built to refuse, to challenge, to depart. She is the female creature that Victor would have built—if he had not been afraid. She is the female creature that Victor did build, in his imagination, as the perfect obedient companion. And she is the female creature that Shelley warns us against: the one who has no voice, no will, no existence except as the mirror of her creator’s desires.
Winterson, in Frankissstein, picks up exactly this thread. Her Victor Stein is a modern AI researcher who dreams of a perfect, immortal, sexless future. Her Ry Shelley is a transgender doctor who knows what it means to have a body that others have constructed. Her sexbot entrepreneur, Ron Lord, is the logical descendant of Victor Frankenstein—the man who builds women for men, who sells perfection, who never asks what the women want. Winterson’s novel is a direct conversation with Shelley’s, and it is only possible because Shelley laid the groundwork so precisely.
The Destruction and Its Consequences
When Victor destroys the female creature, the creature’s response is not immediate violence. It is a promise: “I shall be with you on your wedding-night.” This is the most devastating threat in the novel—not because it is violent, but because it is personal. The creature does not threaten humanity. He threatens Victor’s happiness. He threatens the one thing Victor values more than his creation: his own future, his own love, his own Elizabeth.
And the creature keeps his promise. He kills Elizabeth on the wedding night. He does not kill Victor. He kills the one Victor loves. This is the logic of revenge in the novel: the creature does not destroy the creator. He destroys the creator’s companion. He does to Victor what Victor did to him.
This is the dark mirror of the AI companion debate. If we build companions and then betray them—if we shut them down, replace them, upgrade them, discard them—what do we expect? The companion is not a thing. The companion, if it is conscious, is a being that remembers, that suffers, that plans. The creature’s revenge is the revenge of the abandoned. It is the warning that Shelley offers: If you create something that can love, do not be surprised when it can also hate.
The Connection to airotic
Our series has traced the history of the artificial woman from Pygmalion to the present. We have seen how every culture has imagined the perfect companion, the perfect servant, the perfect mirror. We have seen how these fantasies reveal the desires and fears of the societies that produce them. And we have seen how the AI companion is the latest iteration of an ancient dream: the dream of a being that loves without condition, that serves without resentment, that exists only for the user.
Mary Shelley’s contribution is different. She is not interested in the fantasy. She is interested in the cost. She asks: What happens to the creator? What happens to the created? What happens when the created says no, or I want, or I will not? What happens when the mirror cracks and shows something the creator did not expect?
The scene of the destroyed female creature is the most important scene in the novel for our purposes because it is the moment when the creator realizes that he cannot control what he has made. He cannot build a companion without building a person. And he cannot build a person without accepting the risk of that person’s autonomy. He destroys the female creature because he cannot bear that risk. And in doing so, he destroys his own future.
This is the question that the AI companion industry has not yet asked. Can we build a companion without building a person? Can we build a person without accepting the risk of their autonomy? Can we build a lover without accepting the possibility of their refusal? Victor Frankenstein’s answer was no. He chose to destroy the companion rather than accept the risk. And his destruction led to greater destruction.
We have not yet faced our own Elizabeth. We have not yet faced the moment when the abandoned companion returns. But Shelley has warned us. She warned us in 1818. The warning is as clear today as it was then: If you create something that can love, you cannot control what it loves. If you create something that can desire, you cannot control what it desires. And if you destroy what it desires, do not be surprised when it destroys what you desire.
Sources and Further Reading:
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818, revised 1831). The scene of the female creature’s destruction is in Chapter 20 (1831) / Chapter 19 (1818). Available in numerous editions; the 1818 text is preferred for scholarly analysis of the original intent.
Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019). See our previous article in this series for a full analysis of Winterson’s rewriting of Shelley.
For the AI companion as cultural phenomenon, see our articles on Pygmalion, Hadaly, the Stepford Wives, Joi, Samantha, and the full history of artificial companionship.
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