A curious, unusual vocative, but one indicating the Creature's continual association
with natural forces.

This is only the second occasion in which the Creature has shed tears, the other being
on the first night of his existence (II:3:2). Yet how different is this repetition,
another sign of the growing refinement of his emotional life. His oxymoronic response
to music (and perhaps to Safie as well) is a further example of how his education
proceeds by encompassing opposites (see II:3:6 and note).

Compare to II:3:7 and note.

As the preceding paragraphs have made clear, the more the Creature reads the more
he becomes conscious of alternate plot possibilities, of disparities between the worlds
conjured up by desire and the imagination and the inescapable reality of his condition.
Rather than find solace in his imaginative life, he experiences an increasing desperation.

This suggests a different kind of determinism from that continually evoked by Victor
Frankenstein, a social and economic form of destiny, what Marx was to denominate as
wage slavery.

Johnson's 1755 Dictionary offers us the appropriate definitions for this period, definitions
virtually lost to modern English usage:

To addict; to give up to ill.
To curse; to execrate; to doom to destruction.

For the second meaning Johnson helpfully cites the Satanic legions in Paradise Lost,
V.890.

The phrase "devoted head" is so common a usage as to appear to be a customary eighteenth-century
idiom.

This is the first word that Victor utters to his Creature. Perhaps, as the allusions
to Satan in the previous paragraph suggest, it is already in his mind. But, there
is a dimension to this epithet beyond its effectiveness as an index to Victor's mental
state, a timeless and mythic dimension. Although rigorously suppressed wherever organized
Christendom extended its arms into secular society, the writings of heretical theology,
particularly from Gnostic sects, continually revert to the concurrence of creation
and the fall as two aspects of a single event. Thus to create is to cast out, on a
universal level as well as, literally so, in childbirth. The cast-off in this case
functions as Satan in a dual sense—as a disrupter of the putative unity of God and
his coextensive creation, and—from the Hebrew root—as the accuser, who here immediately
upbraids Victor Frankenstein for not doing his duty by his creature.

Note how carefully Milton embeds this coincidence, without heretically stressing a
linkage, in the moment where God divides himself so as to function on a second level,
as a Creative Word, the Logos that will render God's conceptual blueprint for the
universe into a workable reality (Paradise Lost, V.594-617).

That is, reserved for destruction, the same usage as in the encounter with Victor
on the Mer de Glace (II:2:11 and note.)

None of the cottagers, of course, has as yet to lay sight on the Creature. It is a
mark of how self-alienated his education has made him that he can presume such a reaction
without having to put it to the test.

Desolation is, indeed, the appropriate term for a condition in which the Creature
is so alienated from his original state that he feels the rebirth of spring as an
ironic counterforce to his internal degeneration. Mary Shelley carefully marks the
inherent "unnaturalness" and thus self-destructiveness of such a psychological condition.