Elizabeth's faith that a retreat from the world would allow the two of them a relief
from the buffeting of experience is understandable, if sadly ill-placed. The ensuing
chapters seem deliberately designed to test this hope both in their exemplary tale
of a collective retreat (involving not just the DeLacey's and Safie, but the Creature
as well) and in the very fact that, themselves taking place in an almost inaccessible
retreat, they present Victor Frankenstein with a moral crisis of a kind he has never
known and is unprepared for.

That the Creature proposes to make a virtue out of necessity and embrace his alienation
as a mode of existence indicates what two years of experience have cost him. The pathos
of this declaration does not call attention to itself, but is all the more affecting.

The Creature turns from Goethe's novel of isolated sensibility, where he sees his
own reflection (and we to some extent see Victor's) to contemplate the public and
civic models of Plutarch's biographical accounts, engaging a world of social interaction
and nation-building of which he has no experience whatsoever. Thus the accounts draw
him forth from his own isolation to imagine a larger cultural sphere of action in
which he might participate.

Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of the Young Werter) by Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe (1749-1832) was originally published anonymously in Leipzig in 1774. Almost
instantly it became a best seller, catapulting its young and unknown author into fame
and a major literary career that would span more than half a century. By the end of
the decade the novel had been translated into the other European languages, attaining
a pan-European success that continued well into the nineteenth century: as late as
1892 it afforded Jules Massenet one of his greatest musical triumphs at the Paris
Opera.

The first French translation was published in 1777 as the work of C. Aubry, a pseudonym
for Friedrich Wilhelm Karl, Graf von Schmettau (1742-1806), and it was frequently
reprinted in that language. The first English version, by Daniel Malthus, was published
in 1779 as The Sorrows of Werter, using the French text, rather than Goethe's original,
as its base.

The novel coincided with what has come to be known as the Age of Sensibility, whose
flames it helped to fan. It is an epistolary novel, told in Werther's voice and from
his perspective, and there is little in the way of plot. Charlotte, the oldest of
six children, is left an orphan by the sudden death of her mother, and she marries
the sensible, if somewhat plodding, Albert as a means of holding the family together.
Onto the scene comes the young student Werther who is befriended by the couple but
then falls passionately in love with Lotte. His infatuation progressively deepens
to a point of desperation in which he commits suicide. The novel was said to be responsible
for making suicide fashionable among the young men of Europe.

What the Creature responds to are less the episodes of the plot or even the dynamics
of infatuation than the sense of moral emptiness that Werther finds in the world and
from which he turns for refuge to the somewhat maternal Lotte. Precociously intellectual
with a late-adolescent intensity, Werther too seeks to understand his identity and
to discover his place in a middle-class milieu that cares for little that is not prudent
and sensible, the world represented by Albert. In reference to the particular dynamics
of Mary Shelley's novel, this milieu would appear very much on the order of the temperate
Swiss world of Alphonse Frankenstein and Henry Clerval's father. Thus, curiously enough,
the novel establishes a link to Goethe's fiction both through the intense self-questioning
and bleak alienation of the Creature as well as the obsessive behavior of his creator
Victor Frankenstein, who also turns away from the commonplace Geneva expectations
in which he was raised to fathom a new mode of being.

The phrase echoes words used in the third sentence of this chapter, suggesting that
for Victor there is no imaginable change in his condition.

Even to be able to ask the question suggests the extremity of alienation in which
the Creature exists and the extent to which he internalizes the values by which normative
human culture rejects him. The "then" is a significant index of the force of logic
that excludes the Creature from a recognizable place in the world.

This appears a deliberate echo of Victor's self-exculpating claim, "I had begun life
with benevolent intentions," in the opening paragraph of this second volume.

The Creature knows about the effects of unchecked power through the account of Safie's
father's persecution (II:6:3) and the De Laceys' ruination (II:6:14), and he may have
gleaned something of its underlying assumptions from William Frankenstein's instinctive
reliance on his father's ability to punish arbitrarily (see II:8:27 and note). Yet,
it is to Victor that the Creature speaks, and, since he has used a derivative of "wantonness"
in his earlier condemnation (II:8:1 and note), it is perhaps to that particularized
sense of irresponsibility that he reverts here.

This is the Creature's first observation of human society rather than the life of
nature, and it does not exactly accord with our normative sense of the civilized.
Yet, a wandering beggar himself, he accepts this without wondering why it should be,
leaving that question to the logical instincts of a reader with greater command over
social institutions.

The Creature acknowledges his fall from an original state of grace: "virtues" seems
to be deliberately Miltonic diction, invoking Satan and Adam (and Eve). The Biblical
context aside, this claim to a prelapsarian perfection is intended to remind Victor
of his own high ambition (see I:3:8) and to affirm how well, on an internal if not
external plane, it was realized.