The Creature picks up the name Victor has just hurled at him and subtly recasts its
point. From the first Victor has looked upon his Creature as essentially depraved,
that is to say, evil in his very nature. The same issue hovers over the treatment
of Justine Moritz, particularly by members of the Frankenstein household, in Chapters
6 and 7 of Volume 1. The Creature's rejoinder is constructivist: which is to say,
that a sentient being is molded by material conditions. It is a position stoutly argued
by William Godwin throughout Political Justice (1793). In terms of contemporary criticism
of Frankenstein, this issue has a high visibility in all gender criticism. Beyond
literary criticism per se, the terms in which the novel casts this debate are highly
resonant for modern social and critical theory.

This is a step in the Creature's education, related to his encountering pain and pleasure
from a single source in fire (paragraph 6 above), by which he learns the complex doubleness
of emotional experience. Such ambivalent emotions, it is safe to say, were unknown
in prelapsarian Eden.

Like his brother, William immediately names the Creature as an outcast. If we take
the issue of family relationship seriously, however, we must realize that the Creature
is actually young William's nephew.

The echo here is pronounced. Only two paragraphs earlier Victor had recounted his
fear "lest the monster whom I had created should perpetrate some new wickedness."
In Elizabeth's perspective, on the other hand, there is no alien being to consider
as a scapegoat and in whom to localize and therefore objectify evil. Instead, the
potentiality for monstrousness exists in all human hearts, and in their collective
aggregate that is human society, as Justine's fate demonstrates, this monstrousness
can be institutionalized as an underlying, unrecognized and therefore dangerous formation.
In other words, the monstrous is not external but within.

Montanvert is a subsidiary height of 6303 feet situated to the north of Mont Blanc.
It rises above the Mer de Glace and by the later eighteenth century had become the
tourist perspective of choice on this natural phenomenon. The Shelleys visited the
Sea of Ice in a driving rain on 24 July 1816, then returned in better weather the
next day, leaving an account of their experiences in Letter 4 of A History of a Six
Weeks' Tour.

That is to say, several months.

Like his Creator, the Creature is highly conscious of rhetorical effect. By this locution
he may mean that he will now explain the ways in which his emotional involvement with
the cottagers intensified, but he is also setting a signpost for our own engagement
as readers with his text, as Victor has done before him (I:3:13) and will again attempt
to do after completing his narrative (III:Walton:4). Through his contemplation of
his effect, he raises anew the questions concerning truth and eloquence that are never
far from from the novel's surface.

Mary Shelley posits the Lockean notion that at first one's natural condition is that
of synaesthesia, an indiscriminate intermingling of sense experience: only when the
intellect begins consciously to analyze sensory data are they broken down according
to the five diverse senses. The physiological basis for this development had been
posited in the mid-eighteenth century by the French materialist philosopher Condillac,
in his Traité des sensations.

Deliberate synaesthesia is an artistic ploy often to be found among the English Romantic
poets, in none more than Percy Bysshe Shelley: see, for instance, his poem of 1818,
"Lines Written among the Euganean Hills," esp. line 285 ff.

Thus, the Creature explicitly remarks what the experience of Justine's trial and execution
had conveyed to Elizabeth, that men are universally "monsters thirsting for . . .
blood" (II:1:8). This is exactly antipathetic to the tenets of disinterested benevolence
Godwin had championed in his public writings (see Political Justice Book IV, Chapter
8 and elsewhere in that treatise) and in the instruction of his children.

The third and fourth stanzas of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem, "Mutability," published
in the Alastor volume in March 1816.

The fairly conventional notions of her husband's poem seem at first to have little
direct linkage with the circumstances into which Mary Shelley has thrust Victor at
this juncture. But if one looks back over the landscape of the first volume, the operations
of mutability as a force of destruction are everywhere evident—from the fearsome movements
of sea and ice in Walton's letters, to the sudden deaths in the Frankenstein and Moritz
households, to the unmerited reversal of Justine's fortunes. But mutability is also
the very stuff of life. Perhaps then, most of all, the subject of the poem applies
to the scientific paradigms that govern the development of the volume—in ancient alchemy
(from the various transmutations it would apply to base metals to its search for a
means of suspending mutability itself in the elixir of life); or in modern chemistry,
which increasingly saw organic changes in terms of chemical transformations; or in
contemporary electrical theory, where dialectical tensions between opposing poles
were held responsible for the essential energy of life. A later poem of Percy Bysshe
Shelley confronts these ambivalences more subtly and more directly, embedding them
in a single symbolic force that is at one and same time both "Creator and Destroyer,"
the "Ode to the West Wind," written in 1819.