A famous early Athenian poet and author of its constitution, Solon is credited with
the maxim, "Count no man happy until he is dead." His life appears in Plutarch.

Romulus and Theseus are also the subject of comparative treatment but, unlike the
first three figures mentioned by the Creature, one that is essentially negative. Romulus
murdered his brother, Theseus his father, and both were likewise violent toward women.
The Creature thus testifies to his essentially pacific nature and his admiration for
gentle and socially conscious figures.

In his brief course of reading the Creature has encountered a surprising number of
examples of alienation, martyrdom, and victimization. These are states, however uneviable
they may be, that at least testify to social and political relationships. His solitude,
in contrast, has been utter.

In returning us to the sublime Alpine landscape in which she sets the second volume
of her novel, Mary Shelley makes us realize how deeply internalized as psychological
reality, for both Victor and his Creature, its sublimity has become.

Felix's daring to right an injustice in which he is in no way personally involved,
and to do so by himself transgressing legal strictures, in retrospect recalls to us
the contrasting silence and inaction of Victor Frankenstein and the bland acquiescence
of his father before the similar injustice of Justine's condemnation.

The freshness of the Creature's emotional response to nature and to beauty, which
operates as a signal testimony to his unambiguous humanity and his inner capaciousness,
carries an increasingly ironic import where no one else will acknowledge his claims
to be human.

Muslim women of the period were kept sequestered from the outside world and in the
high ranks of Ottoman culture were kept in harems. Safie wishes to have the freedom
of movement and independence of mind putatively enjoyed by women in Western societies.

Since the issue of enslavement arises in a number of contexts in the novel, this instance
of it in the innermost narrative should not go unnoticed.

A sirocco is a dry hot wind from Africa that descends upon Mediterranean countries
from the south. It is scarcely appropriate to the region of Mont Blanc, but, if one
reads the reference generically to a violent storm, that is probably all that Victor
means.

Although the rhetoric is overloaded, one should not miss the significance of the Creature's
being first defined as the actual embodiment of the sublime landscape out of which
he emerges. Taller and stronger than any normal human being and created out of the
essential dynamic forces of nature, he seems deliberately to embody the Power that
Percy Bysshe Shelley located in the mountain itself:

. . . awful scene,
Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down
From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne,
Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame
Of lightning through the tempest.
("Mont Blanc," 15-19)

The shutting of these gates at the time of Victor's return to his family home (I:6:19),
it will be remembered, allowed for his midnight sighting of his Creature. The same
precaution also necessitated Justine Moritz's passing the fateful night of William
Frankenstein's death in a barn in the environs of Geneva (I:7:6).