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.

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.