Gender Retribution and the Chase

Frankenstein’s marriage to Elizabeth is not a ceremony of desire—we see Victor’s ambivalence in multiple scenes, and the emotional effect that his fickle interest has on Elizabeth—but what Butler would call a “performance” meant to solidify the groom’s gender. The actual ceremony of marriage and the ensuing physical appropriation of the female body, the consummation of the marriage, are “ritual social dramas” that are reenacted and experienced to reproduce “a set of meanings already socially established” (Butler 2552). This “ritual” is an inevitable social experience that Victor must complete in order to fulfill the ‘male’ identity he was endowed with at birth. Elizabeth’s tears may not actually be rooted in grief over Victor’s tenuous love for her, but could be caused by the fear that she will forever be kept from fulfilling her own gender expectations: she needs to wear the costume of the bride in order to reach what society has deemed a pinnacle of femininity.
These are the stakes when the creature threatens to intervene on the couple’s wedding night. The creature’s promise is not vengeance for stealing a loved one—the creature’s revenge after Frankenstein destroyed a female ‘monster’—it is retribution for denying the creature’s role in the gender performance. While watching the cottagers exist within the confines of a culture that was still altogether alien(ating), the creature became a spectator to the gender performance: the scene is a textual embodiment of what Butler deems a “a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief” (2552). In the absence of an actress, the creature will forever be a spectator—ungendered and incapable of accessing the social power that society has made inherent within masculinity.
By murdering Elizabeth, the creature is able to engage with Frankenstein at the “polluted” (2545) margins of social normatives. Both are denied their female actresses, denied the ultimate performance of masculinity, and denied a role in the hegemonic heterosexual value system (2544-5). Two males engaged with only one another have to exist literally at world’s edge, chasing one another across a landscape in hopes of a climactic encounter that does not occur—and perhaps the possibility for another meeting was never possible, for there is no script for such an act to follow, no performance that these two can knowingly duplicate. All that exists is their chase.
My question is this: what kind of performance does their chase produce? The creature’s reaction to Victor’s death is not what you’d expect of a victorious rival—was this chase a quest for an impossible love? Or was it two beings deprived of their gender roles engaged in a battle out of sympathetic frustration?