for no misdeed
The Creature delivers a sudden telescoping and radical interpretation of the mythic
text that stands behind this entire narrative, Milton's Paradise Lost. The point behind
the Creature's distinction is that Adam fell by knowingly commiting a sinful deed,
whereas Satan, in contrast, in this reading was intended to fall from heaven as an
intrinsic part of the conception of God's new creation. Most readers of Milton's epic
would not countenance a reading of Satan as more sinned against than sinning, but
it is the general interpretation that Percy Bysshe Shelley offers in the famous passage
of his "Defence of Poetry" devoted to the poem. Since that document dates from 1821,
five years after the beginning of Frankenstein, however well it glosses the antagonism
of Victor and his Creature, it ought not to be read in retrospect as explaining this
usage. One might, however, wish to argue that the representation in Mary Shelley's
novel either influenced her husband's interpretation or was worked out as a reading
in tandem with him. Whatever the case, the emphasis is unmistakeable here, that the
Creature sees himself as like Satan, "irrevocably excluded" from bliss, which—although
Milton (in Satan's soliloquy on Mount Niphates, IV.32ff.) tries to finesse the issue—is
how received theology forced him to represent the fallen archangel in his epic.