NOOSES OVER NICETIES: JUSTINE WITHOUT JUSTICE
By Quillon42
Predestined had it been that the becoming yet bedeviled Justine should be left to wait here now in this featureless, lifeless cell, she losing precious breaths of her own life in such a constrictive space as the confessionals to which she had been confined when she had so much as cussed in front of wards like William. He was out of her sight then for all of a second was the boy, and in that span some unnatural horror came and claimed him, like a jealous suitor stealing a bride on her wedding night after some unfortunate groom similarly quit her for only an instant.
Acting as a servant for the Frankensteins seemed like a nice enough endeavor in the beginning. They received her much more warmly than those of her own blood, including and especially her vindictive mother who had virtually disowned her from the girl's birth up until her progenitor's deathbed. Justine thought at last that this would be a peaceful clan and civilization beyond that, in which she would no longer need to worry about being made the black sheep and cast out from favor for merely fulfilling the role she'd been assigned by those who made her.
Then the accusations had arisen regarding what happened with William. Justine had done all she could in terms of her own due diligence to look for the boy. Aside from some bizarre stranger indeed that could have been born right out of the ether, who could possibly have emerged with the sole purpose of choking the life out of this child who could not possibly have made any offense against anyone in this world now, other than existing, as was true about Justine herself?
Saddened was the serving girl that she could no longer roam around and reflect upon the wonderment of the world natural, as many to whom she attended had so done. Watching men like Victor and his heartful cohort Henry Clerval take a tour of various grandiose glades and shimmering streams, and muse endlessly upon their infinitesimal place in such a luminous universe. Justine, in stark contrast, couldn't even ponder a pond at this point given that she was so shrouded in the synthetic advance of the righteous penitentiary presently.
What a wondrous spectacle it would be beyond even that of Nature itself in a couple mornings to come, though; indeed it would be as undoubtedly gratifying for the local slighted populace to see the lady Justine Moritz be slaughtered in Switzerland, in place of a monster, as it would be certainly so un-double-standardly glorious for Chloe Grace Moretz to slaughter masses of male mobsters in Staten Island on celluloid almost two hundred years later.
For the evidence was undoubtedly direct and not circumstantial in the least regarding Justine's guilt. Certainly even blind old De Lacey could see that; the coupling of Madame Frankenstein's image found in the pocket of the poor maiden, which was indubitably thieved from the estate at some odd hour…so combined with the continual confusion emanating from the waif…there was no question as to Justine's implication in the atrocity after that.
Evident was it that the confusion that would undo the poor peasant had emanated from the mixture of intricate stimuli that would strangle any person far more than any noose ever could. For Justine to have become such jetsam and so early on in her existence, when her own mother had cast her out and then very ambivalently called her back while on a deathbed, and even then vacillating between reconciliation and condemnation of her child. Honestly one could even view the programming of myriad manners and behaviors by Elizabeth's aunt, to the juncture that Justine was almost a carbon copy of the elder matron herself in fact, might have been quite the disservice to anyone who would assay to pursue modicums of individuality.
Far was it from the femme so controlled and so smothered to be able to select and pursue her own destiny on any front, as anyone from that frontiersman Walton to the worldly Frankenstein could attest such heady endeavors at great length would fill a life to the very fullest with meaning and gratification, not to mention uniqueness and agency. Hers was it ever so awfully to live only for others, and to die by them as well.
It was so heartwarming, though, to see quite the quantity of her family emerge to defend the damsel in what is considered in the eyes of society to be a court of fair and just law. Elizabeth most of all was amazing through her appeals to emotion as well as stumping for the character of the lovely live-in that was Justine. None of that, of course, mattered in the end, as despite the presence of any judge or jury what it all came down to was the executioner whom some could call the excommunicator.
Yes, it was under threat of being sent to a prison far worse than the one she occupied that she thereby turned over and confessed. They had to find some culprit, and neither belief nor biology could conjure anyone close to the child other than the one who watched over him.
Yet what kind of creature was invented by the Church, which would coerce such an unholy admission without sufficient evidence, which would shame and guilt a girl into execution when all involved had known of her innocence? What the censer, what the cross, in what furnace was it glossed, that such an awful end should arrive upon such an inoffensive individual as she?
How could it be that a lady given the Christian name sharing the same root of righteousness owned by the term of Justice itself, be ejected so unlawfully from this same religious society?
What had Christ wrought in siring a faith that had only some centuries ago instigated an Insquisition, Crusades, and so many other infernal events which seemed so, dare one utter, ungodly? To have made societies which forced misdemeanants into pillories and stocks and which placed suspected felons onto ducking stools and burning stakes? To have sanctioned covert sexual congress between pastors and pupils of parochial schools, and to have deviously evaded even detection on the same for decades, to say nothing of discipline or even any rebuke at all?
Who had created the most diabolical monster: was it Frankenstein, or Fam Of Christ?