The supposition is that the Creature has been able to remain within the general confines
of woodlands during this three-day passage. Now, he comes out into the open—which
is to say, into arable ground. Unwittingly, he is stumbling upon his first contacts
with human society.

To compare the creature's sense of his original identity with that contained in the
opening sentence (I:1:1) of Victor Frankenstein's narrative is to mark a dramatic
contrast in self-conception and cultural endowment. Also, as has often been noted,
a second and striking context exists between these first memories and those of Adam
in representing himself to the Archangel Raphael in Paradise Lost (VIII.250-96).

The various relations of intercourse within normative family structures are a new
category of experience that the creature studies without being able to enact.

It was here, at the family's country house, that Victor had witnessed lightning strike
the ancient oak when he was fifteen (I:1:22).

These are the first words that the Creature has ever uttered. As with the unexpected
control of his opening remark to Victor (II:2:7), one is taken aback by their sophistication.

"Partly from curiosity" Victor wandered into Professor Waldman's lecture and thence
into the scientific career that culminated in the birth of his Creature (I:2:14).
As this instance may indicate, the import of this essential human attribute for good
and bad—other examples will be found in I:L1:2, I:L4:11, I:L4:31, I:1:22, and I:7:1—has
been emphasized throughout the first volume of Frankenstein.

This spring appears to wipe the slate clean for Victor in Ingolstadt as well (I:4:19).
For the Creature, no less than for Victor Frankenstein, however, the past cannot be
so easily forgotten.

The Creature here quotes back to Victor a line from Percy Shelley's "Mutability" that
Victor had mused over that morning in ascending Montanvert (II:2:3). Although this
does stretch the imagination, it is indisputably another instance of the mirror effects
we discern in the relations of Creator and Creature.

That is, a family where seniority is honored for its wisdom and the generations respect
and support each other provides a model for a civilized community.

Although we have no guide to Mary Shelley's thought processes as she wrote this passage,
it is probable that the stanza from Percy Shelley's poetry she quotes at the end of
the paragraph caused her to think of another from the volume in which it was published
(or the causality might have been reversed, with that other passage first coming to
mind and prompting the remembrance of this stanza): whatever the case, this description
of mountain conifers strongly resembles the desolate final scene, actually drawn from
Shelley's experiences in Wales before he met Mary, of his poem "Alastor" (see lines
550-70). An early sketch of this same subject is contained in a poem in the early
notebook known as the Esdaile Notebook, a poem Shelley wrote in 1811 and never published,
called after its first line "Dark spirit of the desart rude."

On the other hand, the scenery of Switzerland, far more sublime than that of Wales,
afforded ample opportunity for Mary Shelley to observe the desolation that alpine
storms and glacial movement could visit on the pine forests of the mountains. There
is a description of such shattered trees in Letter 4 of A History of Six Weeks' Tour.
Byron offers another such passage in the second scene of Manfred, I.ii.66-74, which,
though begun later than Frankenstein, indicates at many points a common conceptual
origin.