That is to say, several months.

Montanvert is a subsidiary height of 6303 feet situated to the north of Mont Blanc.
It rises above the Mer de Glace and by the later eighteenth century had become the
tourist perspective of choice on this natural phenomenon. The Shelleys visited the
Sea of Ice in a driving rain on 24 July 1816, then returned in better weather the
next day, leaving an account of their experiences in Letter 4 of A History of a Six
Weeks' Tour.

The echo here is pronounced. Only two paragraphs earlier Victor had recounted his
fear "lest the monster whom I had created should perpetrate some new wickedness."
In Elizabeth's perspective, on the other hand, there is no alien being to consider
as a scapegoat and in whom to localize and therefore objectify evil. Instead, the
potentiality for monstrousness exists in all human hearts, and in their collective
aggregate that is human society, as Justine's fate demonstrates, this monstrousness
can be institutionalized as an underlying, unrecognized and therefore dangerous formation.
In other words, the monstrous is not external but within.

Like his brother, William immediately names the Creature as an outcast. If we take
the issue of family relationship seriously, however, we must realize that the Creature
is actually young William's nephew.

This is a step in the Creature's education, related to his encountering pain and pleasure
from a single source in fire (paragraph 6 above), by which he learns the complex doubleness
of emotional experience. Such ambivalent emotions, it is safe to say, were unknown
in prelapsarian Eden.

The Creature picks up the name Victor has just hurled at him and subtly recasts its
point. From the first Victor has looked upon his Creature as essentially depraved,
that is to say, evil in his very nature. The same issue hovers over the treatment
of Justine Moritz, particularly by members of the Frankenstein household, in Chapters
6 and 7 of Volume 1. The Creature's rejoinder is constructivist: which is to say,
that a sentient being is molded by material conditions. It is a position stoutly argued
by William Godwin throughout Political Justice (1793). In terms of contemporary criticism
of Frankenstein, this issue has a high visibility in all gender criticism. Beyond
literary criticism per se, the terms in which the novel casts this debate are highly
resonant for modern social and critical theory.

In her customary way Mary Shelley plays on two meanings of the word. Victor uses it
in a derogatory manner, denoting the creature as inferior, but will be answered with
its meaning transformed as the Creature begins to recount his life of misery.

The Creature echoes his memories of his first day of existence (II:3:1), which may
suggest that, however much he has learned since, his essential condition as existential
being has not changed in the least.

Following his reappropriation of "wretch," the Creature picks up on this derogatory
term just employed by Victor and transforms its signification. In effect, it is recast
as a term demanding the sympathy of any humane being, whether Victor or the reader.

The Creature is an adept rhetorician, countering Victor's supposition about his original
sin with a strict causality: evil passions arise solely from a lack of sympathy. The
argument between them is scarcely academic, since these are the grounds over which
western criminology has been suspended for centuries.