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).

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).

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).

Under the creature's unrelenting accusation, the self-destructive nature of Victor's
hatred and its manifestation in the Creature-as-double are here at last openly admitted
by him. Percy Bysshe Shelley will use the same formula a year later in writing the
first act of Prometheus Unbound, where Prometheus summons the Phantasm of Jupiter,
the specter of his enemy, to repeat the self-enchaining curse Prometheus had once
pronounced upon Jupiter (see 1.258). There, too, the strong echoes of Paradise Lost
suggest a reading of God and Satan in the manner represented in his "Defence of Poetry,"
as co-complicitous doubles.

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).

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.

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 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.

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 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).