Like his brother, William immediately names the Creature as an outcast. If we take
the issue of family relationship seriously, however, we must realize that the Creature
is actually young William's nephew.

This is a step in the Creature's education, related to his encountering pain and pleasure
from a single source in fire (paragraph 6 above), by which he learns the complex doubleness
of emotional experience. Such ambivalent emotions, it is safe to say, were unknown
in prelapsarian Eden.

The Creature picks up the name Victor has just hurled at him and subtly recasts its
point. From the first Victor has looked upon his Creature as essentially depraved,
that is to say, evil in his very nature. The same issue hovers over the treatment
of Justine Moritz, particularly by members of the Frankenstein household, in Chapters
6 and 7 of Volume 1. The Creature's rejoinder is constructivist: which is to say,
that a sentient being is molded by material conditions. It is a position stoutly argued
by William Godwin throughout Political Justice (1793). In terms of contemporary criticism
of Frankenstein, this issue has a high visibility in all gender criticism. Beyond
literary criticism per se, the terms in which the novel casts this debate are highly
resonant for modern social and critical theory.

In her customary way Mary Shelley plays on two meanings of the word. Victor uses it
in a derogatory manner, denoting the creature as inferior, but will be answered with
its meaning transformed as the Creature begins to recount his life of misery.

The Creature echoes his memories of his first day of existence (II:3:1), which may
suggest that, however much he has learned since, his essential condition as existential
being has not changed in the least.

Following his reappropriation of "wretch," the Creature picks up on this derogatory
term just employed by Victor and transforms its signification. In effect, it is recast
as a term demanding the sympathy of any humane being, whether Victor or the reader.

The Creature is an adept rhetorician, countering Victor's supposition about his original
sin with a strict causality: evil passions arise solely from a lack of sympathy. The
argument between them is scarcely academic, since these are the grounds over which
western criminology has been suspended for centuries.

This is intended as an indication of poverty not class. The Creature in these paragraphs,
adjusting to his first observation of human beings and their social codes, reveals
himself to be a quick study.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was passionately fond of boats. During the previous summer, which
he and Mary spent at Marlow near Windsor, he would drift in a small boat on the Thames
while he wrote. Mary, Claire, and he had a boat on Lake Geneva during the 1816 summer,
in which they sailed out most evenings. Later in the summer Byron and Shelley undertook
a two-week excursion by boat around the lake stopping at the various sites of interest
reachable from its shores. During this venture Mary Shelley stayed home to look after
her infant boy and write.

Readers might think of this sentence as heavily ironic, given the encounter that is
immediately to ensue. Yet, it may be intended to operate on a subtler level than just
that of forcing us and Victor to contemplate the truth of his relations with his Creature.
It is almost as if Victor's mental state, once he has been transposed into the sublime,
has transformed him, preparing him, unlike other members of his family, to look full
into the face of brute nature and experience at once its otherness and its symbiosis
with humanity.