Muslim women of the period were kept sequestered from the outside world and in the
high ranks of Ottoman culture were kept in harems. Safie wishes to have the freedom
of movement and independence of mind putatively enjoyed by women in Western societies.

Since the issue of enslavement arises in a number of contexts in the novel, this instance
of it in the innermost narrative should not go unnoticed.

A sirocco is a dry hot wind from Africa that descends upon Mediterranean countries
from the south. It is scarcely appropriate to the region of Mont Blanc, but, if one
reads the reference generically to a violent storm, that is probably all that Victor
means.

Although the rhetoric is overloaded, one should not miss the significance of the Creature's
being first defined as the actual embodiment of the sublime landscape out of which
he emerges. Taller and stronger than any normal human being and created out of the
essential dynamic forces of nature, he seems deliberately to embody the Power that
Percy Bysshe Shelley located in the mountain itself:

. . . awful scene,
Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down
From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne,
Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame
Of lightning through the tempest.
("Mont Blanc," 15-19)

The shutting of these gates at the time of Victor's return to his family home (I:6:19),
it will be remembered, allowed for his midnight sighting of his Creature. The same
precaution also necessitated Justine Moritz's passing the fateful night of William
Frankenstein's death in a barn in the environs of Geneva (I:7:6).

The crucial place of language in the Creature's education and in his growing sense
of identity is a significant sign of the importance Mary Shelley attaches to it as
a professional writer and, however herself inexperienced at the age she began the
novel, as the child, wife, and associate of other major authors of the age. And yet
it is always shadowed by the dark irony of another "monster" accorded the use of language,
Shakespeare's Caliban, who tells Miranda: "You taught me language, and my profit on't/
Is, I know how to curse" (The Tempest, I.ii.363-64).

Poverty-stricken though they are, they have managed to replace the loaf of bread purloined
by the Creature that morning (paragraph 13 above).

Although this is an important plot device by which the Creature is allowed to advance
in his education, it is more than simply that. What the Creature in his enforced solitude
thought of as a "godlike science" (II:4:9) and "the art of language" (II:4:18) is
an acquisition essential for his claim to true humanness. As Safie is enfolded by
the De Lacey family through acquiring their language, so, the Creature hopes, he can
likewise break down the barriers of Otherness in which he is compelled to live. If
language has up to now been used as an instrument for his self-knowledge (note), with
Safie's arrival it will become the actual means by which he will endeavor to secure
a place in a human community.

If he departed the hut at noon, then the Creature would have had some five hours to
travel further before dusk fell.

As is manifest in the previous chapter (see I:7:13 and note), for Victor remorse has
a physical and mental effect akin to that of poison. Already worn down constitutionally,
Victor will feel its debilitating effects from this point forward.