The Creature at last names Victor as father, forcing upon his unwilling head the entire
range of cultural and literary associations that from his limited experience the term
might carry.

At first sight this appears to be an evocation of the imagination more in line with
the normative practices of British Romanticism than earlier ones have been: the Creature
in his isolation takes refuge in an innocent, even utopian world of his own making,
one provided by the creative power of his imagination. This characteristic, almost
more than any other so far encountered in his educational process, testifies to his
fully human sensibility. From a more analytical perspective, however, such a refuge
of the creative imagination shares the main attributes of Victor's introverted retreat
at Ingolstadt, even to the point of opening the way to a sudden, disastrous reversal.

Felix and Safie have never been married, but neither, for that matter, were Mary Godwin
and Percy Shelley when they lived together at Geneva in the summer of 1816.

The first definitions are of discrete things, which happen also to be the necessities
of life. The Creature's education places him in the condition of Adam, who named the
animals of Eden. See Genesis 2:18-20:

Then the LORD God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make
him a helper fit for him."

So out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of
the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever
the man called every living creature, that was its name.

The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast
of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper fit for him.

The last phrase of the Genesis text we will soon see applies to the Creature as much
as it does to all of God's creation.

Milton's litany of the creatures whom Adam named comes in his account of the Creation
in Paradise Lost, Book VII, 493ff.

The Creature responds to spring with the same "sentiments of joy and affection" (I:4:19)
experienced simultaneously by Victor in his convalescence at Ingolstadt.

Although Victor is thinking solely in personal terms, Johnson's 1755 Dictionary emphasizes
in a valuable way the social, and particularly the political, dimensions of this noun.
Given the fact that the novel will soon move directly to include such a framework
of human institutions, it is important to recognize that the Creature's perspective
on such diction might be quite different from, perhaps even more knowing than, Victor's.

1. The commonwealth; the body politick.
2. Common possession; the state contrary to property or appropriation.
3. Frequency, commonness.

For all Alphonse's attempt to console Victor, his being exactly wrong about the source
of Victor's grief must be indicative of some narrowness or shortsightedness of his
own. His son William is his only concern, and he assumes the same family priorities
for Victor; but Victor knows that Justine has been murdered, too, and that more than
tribal loyalty is at stake. That the father's commitment to the "public situations"
(I:1:1) in which he has passed his mature years extends so little into actual social
benevolence must in some sense affect how we take his counsel and assess his notion
of virtue.

Victor's habitual passivity reasserts itself with a sharp irony that reminds one of
the physical deterioration he suffered in giving life to his creation (I:3:9). His
argument is that the Creature, empowered by Victor with life, has so used that power
that it has robbed Victor of his own ability to act independently.

Given the novel's insistence on sympathy as an essential moral attribute of an individual
human being and a just society, Victor's drawing away so wholly from normative family
intercourse is an alarming event. That he is scarcely able to speak to his family
suggests a psychological condition that in modern parlance would seem to border on
psychosis. It is ironic that the Creature's passionate demand for an end to his solitude
should result in Victor's own recoil into a solitude almost as utter and just as fraught
with danger to himself and to others.

As this sentence might suggest, Mary Shelley was opposed to all forms of capital punishment,
a sentiment she shared with her father and husband. Perhaps, the true significance
of this statement, however, is the contrast it offers to the violent retribution Victor
would inflict on the Creature, whom, we must remember, he has as yet no evidence whatsoever
to connect with the murder of William or the framing of Justine.