763

  • interchange of kindness

    That the Creature's argument is wholly based on Englightenment premises about the
    function of virtue makes them practically irresistible. Here he invokes the golden
    rule as the single desire of his existence.

  • 762

  • an instrument

    This will be named as a guitar (II:5:3), when the Creature is sufficently educated
    in human ways to know the word for it.

  • 761

  • She instructed her daughter . . . religion

    As with the condescension to Justine's Catholicism (I:5:6, I:7:21), this ostensible
    religious bias needs to be placed within the conventions of English publishing and
    religious attitudes. It is unlikely that Mary Shelley herself subscribes to them.
    Indeed, if in this chapter one reads in the attitudes of Turks to women some sense
    of reflection on contemporary English attitudes, then, Mary Shelley would appear to
    be playing something of her mother's game. And the mother-daughter relationship here
    certainly testifies to that which Mary Shelley derived from the frequent perusal of
    her mother's writings, an inculcation of ideals of independence on which, like, Safie
    she was not afraid to act.

  • 760

  • instinctively, finding myself so desolate

    In contrast to Victor, who through his intellectual obsession at Ingolstadt virtually
    sequestered himself from both family and associates, the Creature, born into a natural
    humanity, feels oppressed by his solitude.

  • 759

  • a kind of insanity

    Victor will exactly echo this language at the very end of Volume 2 (Chapter 17 in
    the 1831 edition), in II:9:23.

    As he is superior to other human beings in stature and endurance, and finely tuned
    both emotionally and intellectually, perhaps we should not be surprised at the sublimity
    of the Creature's emotional outburst. Or, at least we should be no more surprised
    than we are at the inarticulate ranting of Victor Frankenstein when they meet on the
    Mer de Glace (II:2:6) or at the fury of Felix De Lacey (II:7:38), both of whom are
    the products of cultivated families and refined educations.

  • 758

  • injustice

    There is a qualitative difference between this sense of injustice and what the Creature
    has felt earlier. Here, after doing a good deed, he has been been judged undesirable
    in a preemptive manner and physically punished. Thus, what festers mentally as well
    as physically is that a simple action to save a life has been met with a violent,
    life-threatening reaction from the larger society of human beings. He feels no longer
    merely rejected by this world but actively menaced.

  • 757

  • the hapless fate of its original inhabitants

    The Creature and Safie alike bemoan the conquering of native Americans of both the
    Northern and Southern hemispheres by the various European imperial powers, who in
    many cases reduced the natives to a condition of slavery. The Creature's emotional
    identification with their fate is unself-conscious at this point, but the progress
    of his education is leading him to understand an fundamental similarity with their
    abjectness (see, for instance, II:9:5 and note).

  • 756

  • Increase of knowledge . . . was

    The Creature once again echoes the opening soliloquy of Byron's Manfred (1817) (see
    II:5:18 for the earlier instance).

  • 755

  • the inclemency of the season, and still more from the barbarity of man

    The Creature, who appears to educate himself by a process of progressive binary distinctions,
    here broaches his master categories, nature and humanity, both of them, given the
    season of his birth and the shock of his first human encounters, seemingly inhospitable
    to him.

  • 754

  • If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free

    Although Victor cannot know yet what is fully involved in his philosophical opinings,
    the questions of what constitutes human identity and how humans may be free will turn
    out to be major concerns of this second volume of the novel. As with the previous
    sentence, Victor is here in the process of unconsciously setting the stage for a major
    development in his education.