The crucial place of language in the Creature's education and in his growing sense
of identity is a significant sign of the importance Mary Shelley attaches to it as
a professional writer and, however herself inexperienced at the age she began the
novel, as the child, wife, and associate of other major authors of the age. And yet
it is always shadowed by the dark irony of another "monster" accorded the use of language,
Shakespeare's Caliban, who tells Miranda: "You taught me language, and my profit on't/
Is, I know how to curse" (The Tempest, I.ii.363-64).

Poverty-stricken though they are, they have managed to replace the loaf of bread purloined
by the Creature that morning (paragraph 13 above).

Although this is an important plot device by which the Creature is allowed to advance
in his education, it is more than simply that. What the Creature in his enforced solitude
thought of as a "godlike science" (II:4:9) and "the art of language" (II:4:18) is
an acquisition essential for his claim to true humanness. As Safie is enfolded by
the De Lacey family through acquiring their language, so, the Creature hopes, he can
likewise break down the barriers of Otherness in which he is compelled to live. If
language has up to now been used as an instrument for his self-knowledge (note), with
Safie's arrival it will become the actual means by which he will endeavor to secure
a place in a human community.

If he departed the hut at noon, then the Creature would have had some five hours to
travel further before dusk fell.

As is manifest in the previous chapter (see I:7:13 and note), for Victor remorse has
a physical and mental effect akin to that of poison. Already worn down constitutionally,
Victor will feel its debilitating effects from this point forward.

Whether or not this must necessarily be the case, it is a premise of Mary Shelley's
novel that normative aesthetic categories are, indeed, the instrument for ostracizing
the Creature from all human society.

The self-deceit is, indeed, painful, since in his continual awareness that there is
no reality underlying his imaginings, the Creature testifies to the split existence
in which he lives. Here, the imagination is decidedly not a boon.

The Creature refers to the numerous philosophical speculations of Werter.

This not only makes sense in the context of the De Laceys' civilized demeanor, which
for many months now has served as the Creature's behavioral model, but also specifically
in respect to the elder De Lacey's explicit understanding of the dynamics of alienation
just witnessed in the Creature's night-time rampage. The use of political terminology
reminds us of the Creature's reading matter (particularly of the education furnished
him by Volney's Ruines), but also suggests that he still thinks it possible to negotiate
a place for himself within the human polity.

The Mer de Glace, the great glacier decending from Mont Blanc: a popular tourist site
in 1816, when the Shelley party visited it that July, described in A History of a
Six Weeks' Tour, Letter IV. It was taken to be the very epitome of Nature's sublime
(and perhaps antihuman) power.