The Creature unconsciously echoes the very language Victor (II:1:6 and note) had used
to express his violent aversion to him earlier in the chapter before their encounter
in the mountains.

There is an unmistakeable erotic charge to the language of these paragraphs, but it
is almost metaphysical in its conception. The Creature suggests that the rage awakened
within him, which is fired by his rejection and desperate solitude, can only be slaked
by being converted into a psychologically and socially constructive alternative, which
is to say love. There are ramifications here as well for the "ardent" pursuits of
both Walton and Victor Frankenstein.

Although the notion of channeling libidinous forces into socially beneficial relationships
might be thought particularly suited to a woman's perspective on modern culture, the
conventions of the age kept most women authors from a direct engagement with issues
of sexuality and its repression or displacement. A notable exception is Mary Wollstonecraft.
Here one senses a true family resemblance.

As Alphonse Frankenstein continually speaks from the vantage of patriarch of the family,
asserting an almost tribal sense of bonded attachment, so the Creature confronts Victor
with his unique equivalence to those blood-ties, a bond Victor has from the first
spurned.

The novel's continuing self-reflexiveness is quietly underscored here, but so is the
idea of a personal library. A further step in the Creature's education and his exploration
of his identity, reading books, rather than just overhearing them being read, frees
him from another's tutelage, increasing his own sense of responsibility and maturity.
Whether such books can make him happier is another question entirely.

This is the third time this phrasing has been heard in the volume. The first is at
its very beginning where Victor confesses that he "ardently wished to extinguish that
life which [he] had so thoughtlessly bestowed" (II:1:6). The second occurence takes
place during the encounter on the Mer de Glace, where under the intensity of the experience
Victor adds to his weight of guilt, vowing to "extinguish the spark that I so negligently
bestowed" (II:2:8). The Creature thus taunts Victor with his own words and desires,
but stresses the character of the negligence involved: his life, he asserts, has been
"wantonly bestowed," which returns him to his earlier line of attack: "How dare you
sport thus with life?" (II:2:7).

Although it might seem eccentric to some readers, a crucial aspect of the Creature's
bonding with the De Lacey family comes from the shared benevolence they practice to
the natural world. Their mutual vegetarian nourishment is stressed in these adjacent
paragraphs.

The Creature has been repeating this adjective (and the noun "benevolence") in seeming
insistence on the unquestionable virtues of the cottagers. Now, the intrusion of the
ensuing phrase ("I persuaded myself") and a next sentence in the form of a question
artfully raises the doubts his narrative has suspended. The entire paragraph, indeed,
evokes a litany of the high ideals of Enlightenment virtue gleaned by the Creature
from his reading and quietly interrogates their efficacy for "a wretched outcast."

In this paragraph the Creature skillfully assembles the conclusions to be abstracted
from his treatment by the cottagers, touching on each of the themes so woven through
the fabric of his discourse.

It is a remarkable achievement of Mary Shelley's that by this point in the Creature's
narrative, this word (and its derivatives) have become fully ironized. Continually
repeated as it is (see, for instance, II:7:2 and II:7:9), this Enlightenment concept
stands in a kind of verbal isolation, unsupported by any examples that might convince
us of its dynamic, positive value, or even (outside the Creature's own actions) that
active benevolence exists. Thus the Creature's ironic conclusion seems altogether
appropriate.

It is fair to say that Victor's intentions almost always outstrip his ability to realize
them.