This is intended as an indication of poverty not class. The Creature in these paragraphs,
adjusting to his first observation of human beings and their social codes, reveals
himself to be a quick study.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was passionately fond of boats. During the previous summer, which
he and Mary spent at Marlow near Windsor, he would drift in a small boat on the Thames
while he wrote. Mary, Claire, and he had a boat on Lake Geneva during the 1816 summer,
in which they sailed out most evenings. Later in the summer Byron and Shelley undertook
a two-week excursion by boat around the lake stopping at the various sites of interest
reachable from its shores. During this venture Mary Shelley stayed home to look after
her infant boy and write.

Readers might think of this sentence as heavily ironic, given the encounter that is
immediately to ensue. Yet, it may be intended to operate on a subtler level than just
that of forcing us and Victor to contemplate the truth of his relations with his Creature.
It is almost as if Victor's mental state, once he has been transposed into the sublime,
has transformed him, preparing him, unlike other members of his family, to look full
into the face of brute nature and experience at once its otherness and its symbiosis
with humanity.

The Creature's education in and through the simultaneity of contraries (see II:3:6
and note) leads him to a large political and social realm that is difficult for him
to assess. He is hardly the first to have such a reaction. This sentence resonates
with the same sense of frustration with the contradictions of the human condition
expressed by Byron's Manfred (Manfred was begun in the summer of 1816) in a similar
Alpine setting to that in which the Creature speaks.

          Beautiful!
How beautiful is all this visible world!
How glorious in its action and itself;
But we, who name ourselves its sovereigns, we,
Half deity, half dust, alike unfit
To sink or soar, with our mix'd essence make
A conflict of its elements, and breathe
The breath of degradation and of pride,
Contending with low wants and lofty will
Till our mortality predominates,
And men are—what they name not to themselves,
And trust not to each other.
—I.ii.36-47

Justine's last injunction to Elizabeth—"Live, and be happy, and make others so" (I:7:31)
resonates as well for Victor, except that he is unable yet to see that his withdrawal
from basic human interaction, whether at Ingolstadt or after his return to Geneva,
has been the very act that has forestalled a true utility to his fellow beings.

This is the strongest feminist statement in a novel that seems obsessed with masculine
perspectives. Yet, embedded in the core narrative, it may in some sense be intended
to radiate out through the other narrative lines, informing other episodes of the
novel with the ambitions of a liberated woman.

See Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman 2.2.

Fittingly, as the curse Victor visits upon himself acknowledges his doubling in his
Creature, so here he essentially repeats the formulation—"miserable beyond all living
things"—that the Creature uttered in the second sentence of their colloquy (II:2:7).

Although it may be a relatively small point, nonetheless it is worth observing how
differently the underlying patriarchal structure operates in the De Lacey household
from that to be discerned among the Frankensteins. At the same time, the mutual love
of the De Lacey family, with its emphasis on the sufficiency of the domestic affections,
repeats motifs from the early chapters of Victor's narration (see, for instance, I:3:12
and note).

The Creature insists upon his full humanity, also upon his fellow-feeling as a human
being.

See Paradise Lost, IV.358-92 and IV.505-35, for the psychological effects felt by
Satan as a voyeur surreptitiously watching Adam and Eve in Paradise.