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.

If it occurs to a reader to wonder why the De Lacey family did not hear of such a
fearsome apparition in the nearby village, the reason is that they are, in their poverty
and separation, self-sufficient. They have no money to spend in that German community
and are likewise isolated from it by the fact that they appear to speak only French.

Justine's last injunction to Elizabeth—"Live, and be happy, and make others so" (I:7:31)
resonates as well for Victor, except that he is unable yet to see that his withdrawal
from basic human interaction, whether at Ingolstadt or after his return to Geneva,
has been the very act that has forestalled a true utility to his fellow beings.

The Creature's education in and through the simultaneity of contraries (see II:3:6
and note) leads him to a large political and social realm that is difficult for him
to assess. He is hardly the first to have such a reaction. This sentence resonates
with the same sense of frustration with the contradictions of the human condition
expressed by Byron's Manfred (Manfred was begun in the summer of 1816) in a similar
Alpine setting to that in which the Creature speaks.

          Beautiful!
How beautiful is all this visible world!
How glorious in its action and itself;
But we, who name ourselves its sovereigns, we,
Half deity, half dust, alike unfit
To sink or soar, with our mix'd essence make
A conflict of its elements, and breathe
The breath of degradation and of pride,
Contending with low wants and lofty will
Till our mortality predominates,
And men are—what they name not to themselves,
And trust not to each other.
—I.ii.36-47

Percy Bysshe Shelley was passionately fond of boats. During the previous summer, which
he and Mary spent at Marlow near Windsor, he would drift in a small boat on the Thames
while he wrote. Mary, Claire, and he had a boat on Lake Geneva during the 1816 summer,
in which they sailed out most evenings. Later in the summer Byron and Shelley undertook
a two-week excursion by boat around the lake stopping at the various sites of interest
reachable from its shores. During this venture Mary Shelley stayed home to look after
her infant boy and write.

This is intended as an indication of poverty not class. The Creature in these paragraphs,
adjusting to his first observation of human beings and their social codes, reveals
himself to be a quick study.

The Creature is an adept rhetorician, countering Victor's supposition about his original
sin with a strict causality: evil passions arise solely from a lack of sympathy. The
argument between them is scarcely academic, since these are the grounds over which
western criminology has been suspended for centuries.