Victor will exactly echo this language at the very end of Volume 2 (Chapter 17 in
the 1831 edition), in II:9:23.

As he is superior to other human beings in stature and endurance, and finely tuned
both emotionally and intellectually, perhaps we should not be surprised at the sublimity
of the Creature's emotional outburst. Or, at least we should be no more surprised
than we are at the inarticulate ranting of Victor Frankenstein when they meet on the
Mer de Glace (II:2:6) or at the fury of Felix De Lacey (II:7:38), both of whom are
the products of cultivated families and refined educations.

There is a qualitative difference between this sense of injustice and what the Creature
has felt earlier. Here, after doing a good deed, he has been been judged undesirable
in a preemptive manner and physically punished. Thus, what festers mentally as well
as physically is that a simple action to save a life has been met with a violent,
life-threatening reaction from the larger society of human beings. He feels no longer
merely rejected by this world but actively menaced.

The Creature and Safie alike bemoan the conquering of native Americans of both the
Northern and Southern hemispheres by the various European imperial powers, who in
many cases reduced the natives to a condition of slavery. The Creature's emotional
identification with their fate is unself-conscious at this point, but the progress
of his education is leading him to understand an fundamental similarity with their
abjectness (see, for instance, II:9:5 and note).

The Creature once again echoes the opening soliloquy of Byron's Manfred (1817) (see
II:5:18 for the earlier instance).

The Creature, who appears to educate himself by a process of progressive binary distinctions,
here broaches his master categories, nature and humanity, both of them, given the
season of his birth and the shock of his first human encounters, seemingly inhospitable
to him.

Although Victor cannot know yet what is fully involved in his philosophical opinings,
the questions of what constitutes human identity and how humans may be free will turn
out to be major concerns of this second volume of the novel. As with the previous
sentence, Victor is here in the process of unconsciously setting the stage for a major
development in his education.

This is a nice detail in itself but not wholly devoid of further import. However boastful
the Creature may be about his advancement, the important point, and one that has been
slowly dawning on the reader, is that he is extremely intelligent. Like his "father,"
he is superior to his fellow-students (I:3:2). With his great stature, his exquisitely
fine feelings, and his mental quickness, he should have been equipped, in Victor's
early aspiration, to be a "new species" (I:3:8) of superhuman being. Instead, he has
been spurned.

The Creature's enforced loneliness has been physically brought home to him, but that
he should already conceive of himself at this early stage of his experience as flawed
seems to involve progress through social rejection to a new and not exactly liberating
stage of self-consciousness.

The reader observes a carefully registered journey from the beautiful into the sublime,
from what Elizabeth has proposed as a domestic enclosure, warding off the unimaginable
and protecting the family unit from threat, into another confrontation, at least for
Victor, with elemental nature, with destruction and with fresh creation. The transitional
point of this rite of passage is marked by the village of St. Martin in the Shelleys'
account of their excursion to Chamonix in History of a Six Weeks' Tour.

As has already been evident in earlier chapters, in Mary Shelley's perspective the
imagination is a power at once of great dynamic force and ethically neutral in its
operations, leading to good or evil ends depending on the psychological framework
in which it exists. The darker side of this mental attribute has been especially invoked
as events in the novel have taken a tragic turn: see, for instance, I:3:7 and note,
I:4:18 and note, I:6:27 and note.