Felix and Safie have never been married, but neither, for that matter, were Mary Godwin
and Percy Shelley when they lived together at Geneva in the summer of 1816.

At first sight this appears to be an evocation of the imagination more in line with
the normative practices of British Romanticism than earlier ones have been: the Creature
in his isolation takes refuge in an innocent, even utopian world of his own making,
one provided by the creative power of his imagination. This characteristic, almost
more than any other so far encountered in his educational process, testifies to his
fully human sensibility. From a more analytical perspective, however, such a refuge
of the creative imagination shares the main attributes of Victor's introverted retreat
at Ingolstadt, even to the point of opening the way to a sudden, disastrous reversal.

There are occasions in this novel where the subtlety of the verbal patterning may
leave readers shaking their heads. The Creature, alluding to the journal in which
Victor describes the process of his creation, appears deliberately to echo the ugly
language with which Victor had earlier, in marked aversion, recounted that experience
to Walton. We are thus to suppose that Victor has been reusing phrases from that journal
in his narrative. For his "workshop of filthy creation," see I:3:9 and note. For his
further reference to the Creature as "the wretch, the filthy dæmon, to whom I had
given life," see I:6:22. At the end of this interview Victor will revert to the adjective
to characterize him once again (II:9:12), and the word then appears in the penultimate
sentence of the 1818 volume translated into nightmarish proportions (II:9:23).

The Creature at last names Victor as father, forcing upon his unwilling head the entire
range of cultural and literary associations that from his limited experience the term
might carry.

The Creature's growing obsession with revealing himself to the cottagers may lack
an external instrumentation, but otherwise is of a piece with other obsessions in
the novel, both those of Walton and of Victor Frankenstein. His casting his future
in terms of destiny likewise echoes the discourse of the novel's other protagonists.

The Creature's logic is direct and unambiguous, starting from a premise of obligation
that Victor had totally expunged from his mind. Continuing the process by which he
picks up on Victor's language and wholly recontextualizes it, now he asserts his right
to be considered in the place of Adam, not, as Victor had tried to cast him in the
previous paragraph, as Satan.

Here one begins to get a glimmer of the impact of Safie's arrival on the Creature's
thoughts, as he ponders his own need for a mutuality of feeling. The novel powerfully
demonstrates that where there are not such mutual bonds, a form of bondage is substituted
instead. Neither Victor nor his Creature is able to break away from the other, even
if all that holds them together is their antagonism.

The third and fourth stanzas of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem, "Mutability," published
in the Alastor volume in March 1816.

The fairly conventional notions of her husband's poem seem at first to have little
direct linkage with the circumstances into which Mary Shelley has thrust Victor at
this juncture. But if one looks back over the landscape of the first volume, the operations
of mutability as a force of destruction are everywhere evident—from the fearsome movements
of sea and ice in Walton's letters, to the sudden deaths in the Frankenstein and Moritz
households, to the unmerited reversal of Justine's fortunes. But mutability is also
the very stuff of life. Perhaps then, most of all, the subject of the poem applies
to the scientific paradigms that govern the development of the volume—in ancient alchemy
(from the various transmutations it would apply to base metals to its search for a
means of suspending mutability itself in the elixir of life); or in modern chemistry,
which increasingly saw organic changes in terms of chemical transformations; or in
contemporary electrical theory, where dialectical tensions between opposing poles
were held responsible for the essential energy of life. A later poem of Percy Bysshe
Shelley confronts these ambivalences more subtly and more directly, embedding them
in a single symbolic force that is at one and same time both "Creator and Destroyer,"
the "Ode to the West Wind," written in 1819.

Thus, the Creature explicitly remarks what the experience of Justine's trial and execution
had conveyed to Elizabeth, that men are universally "monsters thirsting for . . .
blood" (II:1:8). This is exactly antipathetic to the tenets of disinterested benevolence
Godwin had championed in his public writings (see Political Justice Book IV, Chapter
8 and elsewhere in that treatise) and in the instruction of his children.

Mary Shelley posits the Lockean notion that at first one's natural condition is that
of synaesthesia, an indiscriminate intermingling of sense experience: only when the
intellect begins consciously to analyze sensory data are they broken down according
to the five diverse senses. The physiological basis for this development had been
posited in the mid-eighteenth century by the French materialist philosopher Condillac,
in his Traité des sensations.

Deliberate synaesthesia is an artistic ploy often to be found among the English Romantic
poets, in none more than Percy Bysshe Shelley: see, for instance, his poem of 1818,
"Lines Written among the Euganean Hills," esp. line 285 ff.