Walton credits Victor with retaining some of the power of sympathy that, in the early
chapters of his narration, Victor will portray himself as having felt in his youth.

Victor does jump to the right conclusion, yet without any discernible grounds for
it. He thus encapsulates the false justice within social institutions that will proceed
in the next chapter to claim an innocent victim.

Neither the Creature nor members of the De Lacey family hunt for food (II:4:5). Similarly,
for the most part, the Shelley household existed on a vegetarian regimen. It is unlikely
that such a pronounced abstinence from a meat diet can be discerned in any other major
novel in English.

In 1812, three years before the summer in which Frankenstein was conceived, Percy
Bysshe Shelley published the first of this couple's reinterpretations of the Prometheus
myth, suggesting that the significance of the titan's carrying fire to earth was as
a means of introducing flesh-eating to humanity. From that point on the pristine human
civilization was ravaged by disease. This seventeenth of the sometimes very long endnotes
to his "philosophical poem" Queen Mab (a note to VIII.211) was republished as a pamphlet
called A Vindication of Natural Diet in 1813.

Modern pedagogy might admiringly term this a wholly noncompetitive educational environment.
Even that description, however, might be too bland for the usage of Mary Shelley's
day. Johnson's 1755 Dictionary defines "emulation" in a surprisingly harsh manner:

• Rivalry; desire of superiority
• Envy; desire of depressing another; contest; contention; discord

The terms have grown increasingly self-centered, until here Victor casts himself in
an absolute posture, anticipating a never-ending gratitude by the very function of
his bestowing animation on his creation. As usual, Paradise Lost presents the complementary,
though ironic text, in Satan's desire to escape what he considers a necessitated,
automatic response to God's genesis of spiritual and corporeal being:

     lifted up so high
I sdeined subjection, and thought one step higher
Would set me highest, and in a moment quit
The debt immense of endless gratitude,
So burdensome still paying, still to owe. . . .
--IV.49-53

In contrast to the shared grief and affection of Elizabeth and Justine, Victor has
immured himself in a barricaded isolation, unable to attract sympathy and, through
his lack of candor, unable also truly to offer it. That "misery" is the last noun
of Volume I, as "disaster" was the first (I:L1:1), brings the reader full circle within
that sense of perilous enclosure.

Mary Shelley characteristically complicates the moral lines here. Even as Justine
is called a "monster," she resorts to her own habitual modes of religious instruction
to categorize the behavior of the murderer. That she happens to use the same terminology
as Victor does is a nice irony. But if we then seriously accept his own claim of ultimate
responsibility for this debacle, Justine's invocation of the devil is tantamount to
an ironic accusation against Victor, implicitly inverting his earlier (I:3:8) moral
exoneration of himself as a godlike creator.

The trip home, as Victor testified in the preceding chapter (I:2:8), would doubtless
be long and arduous, but his passing two years without concern for his family indicates
the obsessiveness of his scientific pursuits and a concomitant retreat from normative
social ties.