he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled
There is something irresistibly amusing and at the same time grotesque in
this image of an eight-foot baby muttering nonsense syllables and sweetly
smiling. That our first image of the Creature is with a grin on his face,
however, is highly suggestive philosophically and politically. The "pursuit of happiness" is a moral
and political premise to the late eighteenth-century world into which the
Creature comes as new-born.
As for the Creature's first interaction with a human being, a reader may
well wonder whether it registers upon Victor -- or upon Mary Shelley -- that
this initial close encounter comes via the German word for the mother he
lacks, Mutter.
