William Frankenstein is some seven years old. Infancy thus here means "childhood."

The Creature's imagery tends to be poetic and generally, as is the case here or in
his description of Safie's singing three paragraphs before, where he compares her
to a nightingale, his imagery is drawn from nature. In his temperament he seems, interestingly,
to be something of a cross between Elizabeth, with her love of nature, and Clerval,
with his refined poetic sensibility. Victor, of course, does not intrude upon the
narrative he is recounting to note such linkages nor, indeed, the irony of the internal
delicacy of the figure he so brutishly names.

The reference is to the famous last lines of Paradise Lost in which Adam and Eve forever
depart Eden (XII.646-49). That the Creature speaks in these elegiac tones suggests
that, for him, this is the moment in which he can no longer define himself, as he
did in his appeal to the elder De Lacey (II:7:26), as a being of innocent and benevolent
disposition. A second Adam, he has experienced his fall.

Here one senses the imprint of Godwin's method of progressively discriminating the
necessary components of abstract ethical concepts. Virtue, and to a less degree vice,
are repeatedly used as markers for social justice in the Enquiry concerning Political
Justice, whose extended title continues as "and Its Influence on General Virtue and
Happiness." Particular attention is paid to these concepts in Book I, Chapter 3 ("The
Moral Characters of Men Originate in their Perceptions"), Book 4, Chapter 6 ("Inferences
from the Doctrine of Necessity"), Book 4, Chapter 8 ("Of the Principle of Virtue"),
Book 4, Chapter 9 ("Of the Tendency of Virtue"), and Book 5, Chapter 2 ("Of Education").

This phrase carries a significant freight. Although it might be read as one more occasion
in which Victor yields up his distinctive identity, substituting an obscure destiny
in the process of fulfillment for his innate responsibility for events, in fact this
necessity is driven by his own remorse, which is so acute that it can never be assuaged.
Although he seems unaware of what he is doing, he is actually claiming responsibility
for that destiny.

The issue of self-control that has been an undercurrent throughout this volume here
near its end surfaces as an important component of its pattern of complex ambivalences.
Even as such discipline appears a principal aim of the emphasis on education, it also
directly counters the natural values elsewhere generally honored.

However unthreatening such language may sound today, in 1818, with England racked
by unrest and governed by reactionaries, these were what we might today call fighting
words. They certainly signaled the anonymous author's radical sympathies to readers—and
reviewers. This is the point in the novel where discerning readers, not knowing who
the author was, would comprehend the significance of the dedication to William Godwin,
whose Enquiry Concerning Political Justice of 1793 remained the most radical analysis
of "the strange system of human society" for the generation of his daughter. This
work, rather than the more tempered redaction of 1798, when the extreme antiestablishment
perspective of the original might have been taken for treason, in many respects underlies
the Creature's sense of alienation, his understanding of the structured injustice
that allows him no place in human society, and his recognition of endemic restraints
upon individual self-fulfillment.

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.

In a boating accident during the summer Percy Bysshe Shelley, who could not swim,
fell overboard and sank to the bottom of Lake Geneva, from which he had to be rescued.
Speculative biography has discovered an urge toward suicide in the event and has connected
it with these ruminations of Victor's.

The capacity to name, or abuse by naming—and to judge, or misjudge—are intimately
allied throughout this novel. This is even truer of the stance one takes to the object
of naming and judging. As William confidently assures the Creature, his father has
been accorded the power to punish by this society: William adopts the same tone and
attitude of natural superiority. Perhaps it was implictly present from the family
expectations underscored in the first sentence of Victor's narrative (I:1:1) as well.
Given the emotional chords that have resonated from William's death for eleven chapters
and the epithets with which he has been honored ("little darling William" by Elizabeth
[I:5:7], "that sweet child . . . who was so gentle, yet so gay" by Alphonse [I:6:3],
"dear angel" by Victor [I:6:25]), his sheer childish nastiness surprizes us and, though
it does not justify his murder, makes the Creature's bumbling attempt to quiet him
comprehensible.