Victor suddenly reminds us that this is a first-person narrative that may inscribe
a personal agenda. It is obviously of some value for Mary Shelley to keep her tale
"interesting," but Victor's recurrent concern with its impact raises questions about
his disinterestedness and his reliability as a narrator.

Mary Shelley comments on such a play of lightning on Mt. Jura in her letter of 1 June
1816. In his own response to the powerful thunder storms experienced that summer,
Percy Bysshe Shelley characterized the summit of Mont Blanc as the "home" of the "voiceless
lightning": "Mont Blanc," lines 136-37.

It is impossible to know for certain what tone—whether it is shock or relief—that
Mary Shelley intends to be conveyed by this exclamation of Victor's. In both the 1818
and 1831 texts he almost gives himself away, then recovers before his younger brother's
incomprehension and his father's subsequent imperious self-assurance and, rather than
be open with his family members in their crisis, closes off his knowledge and himself
from their confidence.

There is something irresistibly amusing and at the same time grotesque in this image
of an eight-foot baby muttering nonsense syllables and sweetly smiling. That our first
image of the Creature is with a grin on his face, however, is highly suggestive philosophically
and politically. The "pursuit of happiness" is a moral and political premise to the
late eighteenth-century world into which the Creature comes as new-born.

As for the Creature's first interaction with a human being, a reader may well wonder
whether it registers upon Victor—or upon Mary Shelley—that this initial close encounter
comes via the German word for the mother he lacks, Mutter.

Again this resonant word (see I:L1:2, I:3:1, I:3:9, etc.).

Although this novel is written very strongly from a male perspective, the accentuation
of female bonding here is an importance balance to that established between Walton
and Victor, between Victor and Clerval, between Victor and his Creature.

Isabel Baxter became Mary's close friend almost by accident. Mary's early adolescence
had been troubled, particularly fractious where her stepmother was involved; and Godwin
decided that some distance would have a salutary effect on her rebelliousness. He
contacted a radical acquaintance from the 1790s, Richard Baxter, a Scotsman who was
a good friend of his own friend David Booth, who agreed to accept Mary into his family
in Dundee. There at the age of fourteen she took up a happy residence that, as this
account indicates, combined a closeness to nature with a warm affection for the Baxters'
middle daughter Isabel. With this family she resided from June to November 1812, and
from June 1813 to March 1814. Her elopement with the married Percy Bysshe Shelley
not long after her return from this second residence ruptured her friendship, since
David Booth, who had married Isabel in the meantime, refused to allow his wife to
continue her intimacy with a woman who had so abandoned customary propriety.

Here Victor has not only demonized his Creature but has cast him in an adversarial
role, not acknowledging at this point that hatred can be as powerful a passion as
love and that antagonism can define a relationship with as enduring bonds as those
produced through affection. That this most distant of objectified namings coincides
with an almost hysterical sense of relief, indeed of liberation, for Victor suggests
the subtlety of Mary Shelley's psychological understanding. This is a moment of major
moral significance for the development of the novel.

Alphonse Frankenstein in the last sentence of the previous chapter admonished the
members of his household to rely on the court's impartiality (see I:6:44). Now that
the court has decided against Justine, he acquiesces in its pronouncement of her guilt
and sees the family suffering as brought to its term. It is hard not to see such a
compartmentalizing of human behavior as having some effect on Victor's habitual distancing
of himself from his emotional obligations and his duties to his Creature.

Victor's language, after so many months of silence, is transparently insincere. Since
Clerval does not seem to notice, perhaps Victor does not either. Victor, however,
has himself already expressed the terms of his own indictment for such neglect of
his loved ones: see I:3:10.