The Creature's education in and through the simultaneity of contraries (see II:3:6
and note) leads him to a large political and social realm that is difficult for him
to assess. He is hardly the first to have such a reaction. This sentence resonates
with the same sense of frustration with the contradictions of the human condition
expressed by Byron's Manfred (Manfred was begun in the summer of 1816) in a similar
Alpine setting to that in which the Creature speaks.

          Beautiful!
How beautiful is all this visible world!
How glorious in its action and itself;
But we, who name ourselves its sovereigns, we,
Half deity, half dust, alike unfit
To sink or soar, with our mix'd essence make
A conflict of its elements, and breathe
The breath of degradation and of pride,
Contending with low wants and lofty will
Till our mortality predominates,
And men are—what they name not to themselves,
And trust not to each other.
—I.ii.36-47

Justine's last injunction to Elizabeth—"Live, and be happy, and make others so" (I:7:31)
resonates as well for Victor, except that he is unable yet to see that his withdrawal
from basic human interaction, whether at Ingolstadt or after his return to Geneva,
has been the very act that has forestalled a true utility to his fellow beings.

This is the strongest feminist statement in a novel that seems obsessed with masculine
perspectives. Yet, embedded in the core narrative, it may in some sense be intended
to radiate out through the other narrative lines, informing other episodes of the
novel with the ambitions of a liberated woman.

See Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman 2.2.

Fittingly, as the curse Victor visits upon himself acknowledges his doubling in his
Creature, so here he essentially repeats the formulation—"miserable beyond all living
things"—that the Creature uttered in the second sentence of their colloquy (II:2:7).

Although it may be a relatively small point, nonetheless it is worth observing how
differently the underlying patriarchal structure operates in the De Lacey household
from that to be discerned among the Frankensteins. At the same time, the mutual love
of the De Lacey family, with its emphasis on the sufficiency of the domestic affections,
repeats motifs from the early chapters of Victor's narration (see, for instance, I:3:12
and note).

The Creature insists upon his full humanity, also upon his fellow-feeling as a human
being.

See Paradise Lost, IV.358-92 and IV.505-35, for the psychological effects felt by
Satan as a voyeur surreptitiously watching Adam and Eve in Paradise.

If the scene were less highly charged emotionally, this repeated challenge would bear
comic undertones. That Mary Shelley would run the risk of so undermining the solemn
tone of this exchange must indicate how important it was in her mind to exhibit Victor
falling back upon a conventional posture of masculinist belligerence.

The Creature means that the story of Felix's efforts on behalf of Safie's father and
the ruination suffered by the De Laceys as a result have taught him how to manipulate
the judicial system. Thus, his framing of Justine Moritz is deliberate. There is a
further sense in which he has also framed the magistrate Alphonse Frankenstein to
become complicitous in a grave injustice, but that solid upright citizen is never
aware of it.

A particularly brutal aspect of the "sanguinary laws of man" that the Creature did
not learn from Felix but has discovered on his own is how to victimize women. In the
1831 text (II:16:35) Mary Shelley stresses that Justine is framed because she represents
the type of Safie who fled in fear from his presence. In the revised text, then, the
planting of the picture is a symbolic form of rape.

Livorno, in Italian. Leghorn was the major port of Tuscany, with a large and thriving
English community of traders; hence the anglicized name. It would be a logical refuge
for someone looking to book passage to the eastern Mediterranean.