There is something irresistibly amusing and at the same time grotesque in this image
of an eight-foot baby muttering nonsense syllables and sweetly smiling. That our first
image of the Creature is with a grin on his face, however, is highly suggestive philosophically
and politically. The "pursuit of happiness" is a moral and political premise to the
late eighteenth-century world into which the Creature comes as new-born.
As for the Creature's first interaction with a human being, a reader may well wonder
whether it registers upon Victor—or upon Mary Shelley—that this initial close encounter
comes via the German word for the mother he lacks, Mutter.