858

  • the path of my departure was free

    The Creature here quotes back to Victor a line from Percy Shelley's "Mutability" that
    Victor had mused over that morning in ascending Montanvert (II:2:3). Although this
    does stretch the imagination, it is indisputably another instance of the mirror effects
    we discern in the relations of Creator and Creature.

  • 857

  • the past was blotted from my memory

    This spring appears to wipe the slate clean for Victor in Ingolstadt as well (I:4:19).
    For the Creature, no less than for Victor Frankenstein, however, the past cannot be
    so easily forgotten.

  • 856

  • partly urged by curiosity

    "Partly from curiosity" Victor wandered into Professor Waldman's lecture and thence
    into the scientific career that culminated in the birth of his Creature (I:2:14).
    As this instance may indicate, the import of this essential human attribute for good
    and bad—other examples will be found in I:L1:2, I:L4:11, I:L4:31, I:1:22, and I:7:1—has
    been emphasized throughout the first volume of Frankenstein.

  • 855

  • Pardon this intrusion

    These are the first words that the Creature has ever uttered. As with the unexpected
    control of his opening remark to Victor (II:2:7), one is taken aback by their sophistication.

  • 854

  • a paradise

    Mary Shelley manages a quiet pathos from the simple satisfactions that for the new
    Adam constitute Eden. The reader may at this point reflect, in contrast to the epithets
    by which Victor has abused the Creature for a number of chapters in succession, how
    naturally drawn to human society he is.

  • 853

  • our house at Belrive

    It was here, at the family's country house, that Victor had witnessed lightning strike
    the ancient oak when he was fifteen (I:1:22).

  • 852

  • Other lessons were impressed upon me even more deeply

    The various relations of intercourse within normative family structures are a new
    category of experience that the creature studies without being able to enact.

  • 851

  • the original æra of my being

    To compare the creature's sense of his original identity with that contained in the
    opening sentence (I:1:1) of Victor Frankenstein's narrative is to mark a dramatic
    contrast in self-conception and cultural endowment. Also, as has often been noted,
    a second and striking context exists between these first memories and those of Adam
    in representing himself to the Archangel Raphael in Paradise Lost (VIII.250-96).

  • 850

  • open country

    The supposition is that the Creature has been able to remain within the general confines
    of woodlands during this three-day passage. Now, he comes out into the open—which
    is to say, into arable ground. Unwittingly, he is stumbling upon his first contacts
    with human society.

  • 849

  • an entire revolution

    In other words, the Creature is now a year old. During this revolution of the year
    he has learned to speak and read French, has read four books and an account of his
    creation, and has awakened to intellectual and emotional desire. The anniversary of
    his creation suggests to him that he is now ready to start out on life.