This chapter begins with a remarkable series of linguistic echoes in which the Creature
echoes the language of Victor Frankenstein, in part to indicate that comparable experiences
have produced comparable misery, but also to underscore the affinity of creator and
creation. The first element is this imprecation, a repetition of the curse Victor
pronounced on himself at their meeting on the Mer de Glace (II:2:14 and note).

The reference is to Inferno 23.58ff. Here at the end of the volume we are recalled
to the "hell of intense tortures" with which it began (II:1:1).

The moral power of this verb stands out against Victor's ineffectual name-calling,
reminding us that in some sense "curiosity" (a word with considerable resonance in
the first volume) is sport, as are all open-ended intellectual endeavors associated
with the imagination. The pejorative sense of the word as used here against Victor
is, appropriately, the sense invoked by Victor himself in silently indicting the Creature
during the trial of Justine (I:7:11).

Unlike his son (or, for that matter, Robert Walton), Alphonse Frankenstein shares
Justine Moritz's sense, uttered as her last words (I:7:31 and note), of the value
embodied in a humble, quotidian usefulness.

The emphasis here is on the psychology of alienation, as centered in the antagonism
between Satan and God in Paradise Lost (I.105-24). There, as Mary Shelley interprets
the emotional dynamics, a cycle of destruction results from God's rejection of Satan.

The language seems intended to invoke both hell and the grave as being synonymous
with Victor's sense of himself, in the previous paragraph, as an "evil spirit." Behind
this language a reader may sense the solitude of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, won
by Life-in-Death and obsessively reenacting his guilt.

On an uncomplicated psychological plane Mary Shelley is representing the simple dynamics
of the Creature's alienation. With no other presence to balance or feel for this injustice,
in his solitude he works himself into a confirmed opposition to the world that has
rejected and threatened him. The Enlightenment virtues of benevolence and sympathy,
were they ever to be encountered by the Creature, would by their very nature undercut
his introverted and exclusionary mental state and enforce a social communion. Once
again, as in Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude," published
in March 1816, we recognize that solitude constitutes an evil spirit leading one to
ill. The opening paragraph of Volume 2, in which Victor Frankenstein reveals himself
similarly introverted and plotting revenge as a means of assuaging his self-hatred
is, indeed, an appropriate introduction to this dynamic that arches across the volume
(see II:1:1 and note).

As at the beginning of this chapter, so at its end the Creature is willing to repress
his own desires to accord with the normative expectations of humanity. Although human
beings cannot endure his sight, he will inure himself to make ugliness aesethetically
acceptable to his eyes.

The marmoreal cast of this sentence throws the emphasis on the family unit. Whereas
before the Creature had seen a patriarchal family as nurturing civilized values (II:7:6),
here he has reason to interpret it from a contrasting perspective, as harboring the
equivalent of ethnic prejudices on a small, tightly formed, and exclusionary scale.
With that perspective in mind one might return to the family unit that Victor Frankenstein
left a few hours back to consider how little different is its underlying ethos (II:1:3).

None of the cottagers, of course, has as yet to lay sight on the Creature. It is a
mark of how self-alienated his education has made him that he can presume such a reaction
without having to put it to the test.