The De Lacey household also observes vegetarian principles, which, one assumes, is
why, luckily for the Creature, the pig-stye lies empty.

This is a distinction worth pondering. In general terms throughout the novel we have
been allowed to relax in the notion of sympathy as a private, even domestic virtue,
commensurate with compassion and affection. Questions of justice have been largely
raised within public arenas or as involving the legal rights of individuals. Here,
however, the larger issues of late Enlightenment democratic enfranchisement merge
with private desire, as to an important degree they also do in the Constitution of
the United States of America (1787), particularly as amended by the Bill of Rights
(1789), or the Declaration of Rights of the French Constituent Assembly (1789) or
that proposed by Maximilien Robespierre (1793) or, indeed, the radical Declaration
of Rights written by the young agitator Percy Bysshe Shelley for distribution among
the Irish in 1812. Sympathy thus has a political component to it. In the Creature's
formulation God, or one who would assume the supreme powers of God, implicitly has
an obligation to foster the "pursuit of happiness" of a creation or subject.

With characteristic understatement, Mary Shelley places the two cousins in total contrast:
Elizabeth through her sympathy attempting to assuage the pain Victor feels, and Victor
consumed by his hatred. As the reader would anticipate, it is Elizabeth who makes
the social gesture, "taking [Victor's] hand," and Victor who retreats into self-accusation.
As a tableau vivant this is a very illuminating scene.

The Creature innocently echoes the language of Victor Frankenstein when he first conjectured
who was the murderer of his brother, one of the number of signs of their unconscious
affinity (I:6:28).

A remarkable difference exists, we must realize with something of a jolt, between
the Creature's silent meditations in his hovel and the sudden intrusion of a public
utterance of his conclusions from them. Insofar as it is hard for any reader to conceive
of such sentences as these ever being uttered by an actual human being, it testifies
to the unique existential extremity of the case he poses.

These reflections are of a very different character from earlier occasions where Victor
has used the term, so much so that a reader may feel some sense of disquiet over his
presumption in at last assuming the Olympian detachment of supervisory deity or parent.
Perhaps judgment on this level requires condescension, but the timbres of Victor's
father seem to resonate across this paragraph.

The correction reminds us that this glacier is itself in motion, simultaneously accumulating
new mass and at its lower edge melting, a pure example of the universal mutability
proclaimed in the poem just cited.

Mary Shelley had herself to have been highly conscious of these attributes. Byron,
even if he inherited his title almost by accident, was a member of the House of Lords
and was always addressed as Lord Byron by the Shelleys. Percy Bysshe Shelley, although
somewhat down the hierarchical list of aristocracy, was the elder son of a baronet
and would therefore have expected to inherit the title of his father, Sir Timothy
Shelley. His family had an illustrious "descent," with Sir Philip Sidney being among
his ancestors. On the other side, however, neither William Godwin nor Mary Wollstonecraft
had any pretensions to lineage, and as middle-class radicals they were committed to
a classless society without false hierarchies.

Victor pointedly indulges unbridled emotions with the same abandon we witnessed overcome
the Creature in the previous chapter (II:8:1, II:8:12).

The phrasing essentially repeats the language of the Creature's disappearance across
the Arctic ice in Walton's fourth letter (see I:L4:3).