If, as Mario Praz has claimed, ‘an anxiety with no possibility of escape is the main theme of the Gothic tales’,43 then Frankenstein certainly qualifies for the genre, since both antagonists in the book are ‘inescapably’ doomed to pursue each other to the death: Frankenstein in order to expiate the guilt arising out of his presumptuous ‘act of creation’, the Creature to avenge his absolute rejection by all.
