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.

With characteristic understatement, Mary Shelley places the two cousins in total contrast:
Elizabeth through her sympathy attempting to assuage the pain Victor feels, and Victor
consumed by his hatred. As the reader would anticipate, it is Elizabeth who makes
the social gesture, "taking [Victor's] hand," and Victor who retreats into self-accusation.
As a tableau vivant this is a very illuminating scene.

Although Mary Shelley puts no extra emphasis on this point, still it is significant
that Safie, a woman with ambition and a mind of her own, is up to this point the best-traveled
figure in the novel. On some level of consciousness Mary Shelley must be aware of
her implicit links to Cythna, the liberated feminist heroine of Percy Shelley's contemporary
Revolt of Islam, published simultaneously with Frankenstein in 1818.

The resemblance to Satan stems at first from the Creature's sense of having no place
in the universe, of being designed for alienation in the fulfillment of the Genesis.
This is, indeed, the ground upon which his colloquy with Victor Frankenstein began:
see II:2:7 and note. The Satanic prototype will extend, however, to the point of having
external not simply psychological ramifications: as Satan's only acts are reactions,
attempts to undo the perfection of God's universe, so the Creature will claim Victor's
attention by destroying what he most values.

However important language is as an instrument to knowledge of the world and the self,
its compression to coherent meaning in literature is what affords the Creature his
true education.

The Mer de Glace, the great glacier decending from Mont Blanc: a popular tourist site
in 1816, when the Shelley party visited it that July, described in A History of a
Six Weeks' Tour, Letter IV. It was taken to be the very epitome of Nature's sublime
(and perhaps antihuman) power.

This not only makes sense in the context of the De Laceys' civilized demeanor, which
for many months now has served as the Creature's behavioral model, but also specifically
in respect to the elder De Lacey's explicit understanding of the dynamics of alienation
just witnessed in the Creature's night-time rampage. The use of political terminology
reminds us of the Creature's reading matter (particularly of the education furnished
him by Volney's Ruines), but also suggests that he still thinks it possible to negotiate
a place for himself within the human polity.

The Creature refers to the numerous philosophical speculations of Werter.

The self-deceit is, indeed, painful, since in his continual awareness that there is
no reality underlying his imaginings, the Creature testifies to the split existence
in which he lives. Here, the imagination is decidedly not a boon.

Whether or not this must necessarily be the case, it is a premise of Mary Shelley's
novel that normative aesthetic categories are, indeed, the instrument for ostracizing
the Creature from all human society.