but half made up
Given the erudition of her father and her husband, Mary Shelley would have
known of Aristophanes' account, in Plato's Symposium, of the
origin of love occuring when primitive man was split in two:
thereafter one half was always yearning for the completion of the
self in the other. (P. B. Shelley was to translate the
Symposium in the spring of 1818.) Here she plays
against the myth ironically, for, as we will see in the sequel,
Victor Frankenstein and his Creature will pursue a course of
adversarial antagonism that is as passionately intense as love.
It is frequently figured in the imagery of doubling and
mirroring.
