This phrase stands with a startling contradictory purity against the elder De Lacey's
amiable platitudes concerning "brotherly love" (paragraph 25 above). Even worse, it
undercuts all the ideals for which Felix has stood as well as the intellectual command
by which he has restored his family's happiness and tranquillity. In a pinch Volney's
ideal of an open, accepting humanity gives way to an unthinking recidivism, a protective
and brutal tribalism, a masculinist belligerence, that is the moral equivalent of
war.

Compare Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Mont Blanc," lines 104-14.

That is, the Mer de Glace, the Sea of Ice, which is the horizontal glacial field fed
by three glaciers (including Montanvert) on the sides of Mont Blanc.

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.

Muslim women of the period were kept sequestered from the outside world and in the
high ranks of Ottoman culture were kept in harems. Safie wishes to have the freedom
of movement and independence of mind putatively enjoyed by women in Western societies.

In accordance with Enlightenment social thought, notably the writings of the Earl
of Shaftesbury and his many followers, sympathy is the means by which the Creature
becomes educated both physically and morally. It has a dual private and public dimension,
making the Creature aspire to higher personal goals, as well as fostering in him a
desire for civilized human relations.

The logic of desire is played out through this paragraph to such an extent that, in
the abstract at least, the answer to the question is already implicit in the disparity
the Creature feels between himself and the De Lacey household. The thirst for perfection
and incumbent awareness of personal inadequacy is a theme often encountered in the
poetry of Lord Byron (e.g. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Canto 4, 122ff.) and Percy Bysshe
Shelley (e.g. "Lines Written among the Euganean Hills") during this period.

The freshness of the Creature's emotional response to nature and to beauty, which
operates as a signal testimony to his unambiguous humanity and his inner capaciousness,
carries an increasingly ironic import where no one else will acknowledge his claims
to be human.

Felix's daring to right an injustice in which he is in no way personally involved,
and to do so by himself transgressing legal strictures, in retrospect recalls to us
the contrasting silence and inaction of Victor Frankenstein and the bland acquiescence
of his father before the similar injustice of Justine's condemnation.

The reiteration of this epithet, which has been applied to Justine (see I:7:29 and
note) but also, in the sense that Elizabeth here means, to Victor (I:7:33 and note)
as well as, from the first, his Creature, allows Elizabeth's unknowing accentuation
of the word to bear an explosive charge.