In his pain and anger the Creature imitates the actions of Victor Frankenstein twice
noted in the first volume (I:L4:10 and note; I:7:27 and note) and again at the beginning
of the second (II:1:6 and note). The Creature will again be portrayed as gnashing
his teeth in the third volume (III:3:13). The prototype for this behaviour remains
the Satan of Milton's Paradise Lost, VI.340.

It is of some use to the design of Frankenstein that Victor go onto the Mer de Glace
by himself. At the same time, his rationale, that another human being would "destroy"
what he considers its "solitary grandeur," is characteristic of his constitutional
withdrawal into a contemplative introversion.

This seems another connection with legendary associations of Prometheus. In Percy
Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Asia, the Titan's consort, credits him with responsibity
for our access to language: "He gave man speech, and speech created thought,/ Which
is the measure of the universe" (II.iv.72-73).

The power of the Creature's rage is shocking, perhaps as well to himself after having
spent an entire year in isolation and under a regimen of strict and carefully enforced
self-control. The infinitive, however, reminds us how severely that control has been
earlier exercised by him. It might likewise call to mind the lack of restraint with
which Victor Frankenstein pursued the researches that resulted in the Creature's birth
(I:3:3).

Such incongruity of tone can have its value (though Mary Shelley did decide in the
third edition to remove the family presence altogether from Victor's excursion to
Mont Blanc). We will shortly be reminded that there is another part of Victor's family
he has assiduously avoided and to whom, unlike his conventional family, he has given
no solicitude whatsoever. The oddity of tone here, quickly rectified by the gloomy
weather of the next morning, almost unconsciously prepares us for the conversation
so feared and so long postponed but now, given the state of Victor's psychological
condition, clearly urgent.

The naming of the cottagers depends not just on their individual identities but also
on their family, i.e., their social, relations. That they thus have several different
names, depending on which aspect is being emphasized, constitutes a new level of awareness
on the Creature's part.

The nouns here are all associated with Satan and the Satanic in Paradise Lost: e.g.
"anguish" (II.568; VI.340); "disdain" (I.98; II.680; V.666); "malign" (III.553; IV.503;
VII.189). And yet, the framing language forces us to consider perspective: "bespoke"
is not the same as "constitutes" in its implicit representation of reality; and if
Victor, even as he articulates it, openly remarks that he "scarcely observed this,"
where, then, might his terms come from? As we will learn from the Creature himself
(II:7:7), it is easy to insert oneself (or others) into the mythic texture of Paradise
Lost: thus it might appear, as it were, that Victor does so first, here defining the
Creature as Satanic not from sharp empirical observation but from literary—that is
to say, cultural—convention.

The change in verb form to a command is rhetorically powerful, but it also signals
a shift in, broadly speaking, the political dynamics of the novel. Victor's power,
a symbolic extension of that of his father and family, is no longer absolute, but
can be successfully challenged by the figure who stands in the position of his son
and who can command superior strength and tenacity.

Along with his acknowledgement of justice, Victor appears at last to have recognized
what a masterpiece of work he created only to abandon. Even if he is not reminded
of his original ambition to create "a new species," we certainly may be (see I:3:8).

This is the first word that Victor utters to his Creature. Perhaps, as the allusions
to Satan in the previous paragraph suggest, it is already in his mind. But, there
is a dimension to this epithet beyond its effectiveness as an index to Victor's mental
state, a timeless and mythic dimension. Although rigorously suppressed wherever organized
Christendom extended its arms into secular society, the writings of heretical theology,
particularly from Gnostic sects, continually revert to the concurrence of creation
and the fall as two aspects of a single event. Thus to create is to cast out, on a
universal level as well as, literally so, in childbirth. The cast-off in this case
functions as Satan in a dual sense—as a disrupter of the putative unity of God and
his coextensive creation, and—from the Hebrew root—as the accuser, who here immediately
upbraids Victor Frankenstein for not doing his duty by his creature.

Note how carefully Milton embeds this coincidence, without heretically stressing a
linkage, in the moment where God divides himself so as to function on a second level,
as a Creative Word, the Logos that will render God's conceptual blueprint for the
universe into a workable reality (Paradise Lost, V.594-617).