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.

However this veneration of an ideal to which he might aspire testifies to the underlying
human sensibility of the Creature, the awareness to which his logic carries him, that
he is not part of the human family, places it within another and more pernicious construction.
In effect, he is internalizing a sense of profound alienation, becoming the Other
that society would make him.

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.

East of Eden a bare sufficiency may be all one can ask for: the Creature's experiences
test just how much -- or little -- that may be.

The Creature refers to Adam's almost instant demand of God after his creation that
he be given a mate (VIII.357-451).

The diction here is quite similar to that of Percy Shelley in "Mont Blanc," lines
60-66, the poem he wrote from the experience of visiting these scenes with Mary in
the summer of 1816.

Victor refers to Ernest, now 17 years old. That he thinks it his duty to "protect"
his father and brother has an ironic edge to it, since his own continuing presence
and actions are what pose the immediate threat to their well-being.

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.

Although the later writings of Percy Bysshe Shelley cannot be cited as indicating
his influence here, still his Defence of Poetry is continually concerned with the
moral impact of literature on its readers. There is one passage, in particular, that
appears to gloss the psychological operations the Creature is experiencing in this
first endeavor to enlarge his existence through books: "The great instrument of moral
good is the imagination. . ."

The Creature's experiences have given a nuanced sense of the meaning of sympathy.
It is not a superficial kindness or momentary expression of compassion, but an essential
aspect of what it is to live as a human being, a necessity.