Properly Chamonix, this valley lies in France at the northern approach to Mont Blanc.
Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, along with Claire Clairmont, made an excursion to this
valley of almost a week from 21 to 27 July, 1816, while Mary was deep in the writing
of her novel. A long description of the excursion, written by Shelley to Thomas Love
Peacock, was included in A History of a Six Weeks' Tour (see Letter 4).

The last word of Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Mont Blanc" is vacancy. In that poem the
mountain is a "blank" slate upon which the mind writes the nature of reality. The
present scene, we must recall, takes place not in the hovel attached to the De Lacey
cottage, but rather in a hut above the Sea of Ice on Mont Blanc. It is here, fittingly,
that the Creature, another blank slate, lives removed from humanity and where he appeals
to his creator for identity, to be written upon.

He means this in a literal sense: there is no one who feels with or for him, who accepts
him as a fellow human being.

As with her earlier treatment of Justine Moritz, Mary Shelley seems unable to keep
a certain class bias from entering her discourse. In the case of Alphonse Frankenstein
(I:6:36 and note) this may be something of a key to his character; but the Creature's
emphasis on gentility after six weeks of existence might seem ill-conceived to some
readers. It would appear, however, that the author is trying to suggest the Creature's
own natural gentility rather than an innate snobbery in him.

Himself victimized on account of his religion (II:6:3), the wily Turk is as bigoted
as those who persecute him. He is likewise a type of Turkish villain frequently found
on the early nineteenth-century stage, in England and across Europe, so there is another
level of bigotry being appealed to here as well.

This is not the first time that Victor has been thought "heartless": he levels the
charge at his own behavior after Clerval's arrival in Ingolstadt (I:4:13 and note).

This is the Creature's first sense of how he appears as a figure within a natural
order. It is not a pleasant discovery to find oneself a discordant presence, but,
as the ensuing paragraph relates, a kind of natural logic helps this eight-foot anomalous
being not to feel himself divorced from the natural order. On the contrary, he seems
instinctively able to recognize his affinity with it, even down to what he shares
with beings as tiny as sparrows.

The sense of the momentous responsibility he has assumed seems for the moment to have
made Victor into a new being. In a curious way, by recognizing what it is to be God,
he becomes more like the sober and fearful Adam setting out from Eden at the end of
Paradise Lost, a moral being for whom, as the Creature himself has acknowledged in
reference to Byron's Manfred (II:5:18 and note, II:7:10 and note), knowledge is commensurate
with sorrow.

The Creature has not yet learned the concept of fictionality: from his naive perspective
all narratives are alike dutiful representations of reality.

Although only mentioned here in passing, this is the novel's third unjust trial. All
its circumstances—from involvement of the elder De Lacey and Agatha, who had no part
in Felix's machinations, to the five-month pre-trial incarceration, to the confiscation
of the family fortune and their banishment—suggest an arbitrary and tyrannical abuse
of power by the state.