Victor here unconsciously slides between the terms "subject" and "object," that is,
between what would possess a substantive being and what is merely a thing upon which
an action is committed. The odd inversion of the question, with its verb placed at
the end, likewise contributes to an effect of syntactical estrangement. This brief
moment of panic is thus highly illuminating, employing a linguistic shorthand to reveal
how Victor's thought processes characteristically distance and demonize his Creature.

Nursing in this novel defines a character's capacity for sympathy and selfless affection:
Victor's mother Caroline has come to her death from the act of nursing Elizabeth (I:2:2),
and Victor himself has already been the subject of Walton's concerned ministrations
after being brought aboard ship and, as here, fainting (I:L4:9).

The stress on forgiveness in this paragraph will stand ironically against the adversarial
bond developed between Victor and his Creature.

Walton credits Victor with retaining some of the power of sympathy that, in the early
chapters of his narration, Victor will portray himself as having felt in his youth.

Victor does jump to the right conclusion, yet without any discernible grounds for
it. He thus encapsulates the false justice within social institutions that will proceed
in the next chapter to claim an innocent victim.

Neither the Creature nor members of the De Lacey family hunt for food (II:4:5). Similarly,
for the most part, the Shelley household existed on a vegetarian regimen. It is unlikely
that such a pronounced abstinence from a meat diet can be discerned in any other major
novel in English.

In 1812, three years before the summer in which Frankenstein was conceived, Percy
Bysshe Shelley published the first of this couple's reinterpretations of the Prometheus
myth, suggesting that the significance of the titan's carrying fire to earth was as
a means of introducing flesh-eating to humanity. From that point on the pristine human
civilization was ravaged by disease. This seventeenth of the sometimes very long endnotes
to his "philosophical poem" Queen Mab (a note to VIII.211) was republished as a pamphlet
called A Vindication of Natural Diet in 1813.

Modern pedagogy might admiringly term this a wholly noncompetitive educational environment.
Even that description, however, might be too bland for the usage of Mary Shelley's
day. Johnson's 1755 Dictionary defines "emulation" in a surprisingly harsh manner:

• Rivalry; desire of superiority
• Envy; desire of depressing another; contest; contention; discord

The terms have grown increasingly self-centered, until here Victor casts himself in
an absolute posture, anticipating a never-ending gratitude by the very function of
his bestowing animation on his creation. As usual, Paradise Lost presents the complementary,
though ironic text, in Satan's desire to escape what he considers a necessitated,
automatic response to God's genesis of spiritual and corporeal being:

     lifted up so high
I sdeined subjection, and thought one step higher
Would set me highest, and in a moment quit
The debt immense of endless gratitude,
So burdensome still paying, still to owe. . . .
--IV.49-53