As Chapter 12 opens, the creature has learned all he can learn alone: simply to differentiate his senses from one another, to recognize to his basic bodily needs, and to stay out of sight.  Beyond this lie social development and intellectual development, which by their very nature depend upon interaction with other intelligent beings.  I will treat three topics: learning language, developing virtue, and appearance vs. reality.

Learning Language

         To begin this process the creature requires the tool of language, so Shelley invents Safie, who likewise needs to learn the language of her new companions.  This is probably a good place to discuss how people learn to speak.  Here I am digressing, but this is a matter you need to learn about, and an English course is the most logical place to learn it.  Everyone knows that children learn to speak by speaking with other speakers; children raised by wild animals do not learn to speak.  Occasionally, especially in the case of twins who spend an unusual amount of time alone with each other, they speak mostly to each other, and this can sometimes result in a private language that the adults around them cannot understand.  This is one of the reasons why linguists now believe that up to the age of eleven or twelve children possess a faculty for inventing language, a faculty that later atrophies, but it’s nevertheless very rare for them to invent a private language.  Ordinarily what they do is re-invent the language they hear spoken around them.  There is no doubt that they do in fact re-invent it and do not simply learn to parrot what they hear; their learning is much too fast for that, and they also make certain errors that would not happen if all they did was echo what others said to them.  This is not to deny that children learn words and expressions—and much more—from those around them, but they process it in a more complex way than just storing tape recordings.  Suppose, for example, that a child’s foot goes to sleep.  A parent who notices the symptoms may ask the child, “Did your foot go to sleep?  Does it feel prickly?”  The child learns plenty from this, and she’ll apply it too on another occasion.  Suppose next that both of her feet go to sleep for some reason.  So she says, “My foots goed to sleep.  They’re prickly.”  Now, she never heard anyone say these words, but she did learn certain vocabulary, grammatical rules, and the regular morphological changes that turn singular to plural—house: houses, finger: fingers—and present to past—walk: walked—so “foot” becomes “foots” and “go” becomes “goed.”  The child who says, “My foots goed to sleep” is creating words she has never heard, by applying (linguists say “overextending”) certain rules of linguistic change that she has learned.  She has not completely learned these particular rules, though, so she gets corrected, and little by little she brings her invented language into line with the language spoken around her.  If she learns “leaf: leaves,” she may very well apply this new rule to “loaf” or “half” or “wife” or “knife” without being told to do so, to get “loaves,” “halves,” “wives,” “knives.”  After the age of twelve, though, people simply don’t begin learning a language in this way any longer.  They become much less playful, more cautious.  They must be told the plural of “foot”; they don’t make it up and wait to be corrected.  It’s a much slower process.  Later on, in the more advanced stages of language learning, I think adults do catch up with the children, but children start out being inventive and adventurous.

         I’m oversimplifying, of course, but the point is that anything like a normal learning method is out of the question for the creature because he cannot interact with other speakers.  He must learn privately, and that is why Safie had to be invented.  Only by listening in on her lessons can the creature learn language by the means available to adults, which does not require interaction with other speakers.  It can be done with books and with language lab recordings and by speaking softly to oneself—or by spying on someone else learning the language in an adjacent room.

         Having had to invent Safie, though, Shelley decided to get some more mileage out of her than just language instruction.  For one thing, please recall the scene in which she begs for acceptance by Felix’s father.  She has as yet no knowledge of the family’s language (which, by the way, is French—And why are they living near Ingolstadt, Germany?  Well, we must wait to find out), but she does know the universal language of gesture, for “. . . the young stranger knelt at the old man's feet and would have kissed his hand, but he raised her and embraced her affectionately.”  Remember this tableau because the creature remembers it and uses it when he faces a similar situation.  Saphie also has musical ability, and she helps the creature to develop his aesthetic sense, which so often mingles opposite passions:  She sings “airs so entrancingly beautiful that they at once drew tears of sorrow and delight from my eyes.”  How to find beauty in sorrow is a rather advanced spiritual lesson. 

Developing Virtue

Furthermore, the book from which Felix teaches Safie teaches the creature—and us—important lessons about human nature, history, and social customs.  There is no need to detail them all, but I do want to single out one lesson that seems to recur and which always involves the same word, a word that needs some explanation.  The first time we hear this word is when the book Ruins of Empires tells of the

. . . wonderful virtue of the early Romans—of their subsequent degenerating—of the decline of that mighty empire, of chivalry, Christianity, and kings. I heard of the discovery of the American hemisphere and wept with Safie over the hapless fate of its original inhabitants.

These wonderful narrations inspired me with strange feelings. Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base?  He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle [a son of the Devil, as it were] and at another as all that can be conceived of noble and godlike.

The word virtue in this context is not synonymous with goodness.  It means something more like worth or capacity—the capacity for doing good, or for doing evil.  Satan—if you believe in Satan—had virtue in this sense.  An angel with less virtue could never have pulled off such a coup in heaven as he did or have fallen so low.  Anniken Skywalker has virtue in this sense, and so does his son Luke; it’s what makes them so desirable to those on the other side.  People have to have some considerable substance to be of any use after being “turned,” since the Dark side of the Force drains them, and they get used up far too rapidly to be of any use unless they have a tremendous store of virtue, in the sense of substance, to begin with.  Let me end the illustrations with a quip of Francis Bacon’s that the founders of great families are “commonly more virtuous than their descendants but less innocent.”  He meant that the first member of a family to gain a vast fortune and a reputation had to have a good deal of virtue in the sense of grit, probably more than his weakling descendants, but he also probably had to do a lot of back-room wheeling and dealing (the antithesis of virtue in the moral sense), thereby enabling his heirs to live well and keep their hands clean.

 On the other hand, later on in this chapter the word virtue is used also in its common, moral sense:  “I admired virtue and good feelings and loved the gentle manners and amiable qualities of my cottagers. . . .”  In this context virtue means little more than a love of goodness, but I’d like to linger just a moment more to put a little more of an edge to the word than that.  In discussions of morality, virtue is more than a love of goodness.  It means goodness put to the test and having passed the test—tempered goodness, if you like—as opposed to innocence, which is untested goodness.

Now let’s apply these words to the story.  The author makes us aware that the creature possesses virtue to excess in its original, non-moral sense, for even though “deformed and loathsome,” the creature says rightly of itself, “I was more agile than they and could subsist upon coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded theirs.”  As a result of being very well made, the creature has vast potential, “virtue”—for either good or evil—and one might even say that he also possesses virtue in the loose, common moral sense of a natural inclination toward goodness, for he lacks any trace of malice or lust or even envy, for which I think he might be excused even if he did have it.  He has learned that theft is wrong because it inflicts pain and hardship on others, and so he has spontaneously ceased stealing and begun instead to do kind offices for the cottagers.  Still, he does not possess virtue in the more precise moral sense I have specified.  He is innocent only, not truly virtuous because his goodness has never yet faced any serious test.

We must view this creature as a precocious child whose mind is developing at lightning speed but whose moral character has yet to be crystallized.  He does seem to love goodness, and so there is hope for him, but the histories of past nations of human beings serve as a warning that early promise is no guarantee of later success.  After all, we must remember that, like all of us, the creature is as yet unfinished, “but half made up,” and cannot graduate to the next level of development unless some wiser, better friend, dearer to him than himself, enters his life to “lend his aid to perfectionate” the work that Victor started in his laboratory.  And, unfortunately, as the creature learns about human families, he becomes increasingly aware of how little chance there is of his ever finding such a friend.  He hears of fathers, mothers,

. . . of brother, sister, and all the various relationships which bind one human being to another in mutual bonds.

But where were my friends and relations?  No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing.  From my earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion.  I had never yet seen a being resembling me or who claimed any intercourse with me.  What was I?  The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans.

More and more he pins his hopes on these good people in the cottage, to serve as his social network, his finishers, so to speak, but what if instead of a friend to finish the work of creation, an enemy should enter at this critical moment?   Wouldn’t the process of creation be distorted, perverted?  

Appearance vs. Reality

         Unfortunately, what the creature is has yet to be determined by what happens next in his interaction with mankind, and the direction this development takes will depend on his appearance.  Previous episodes in the novel have made us acutely aware that human beings judge far too readily on externals—appearance or circumstantial evidence.  We have seen how innocent were the creature’s motives in his early encounters with human beings and how unjustly his ugliness aroused their fear and hatred.  Just before we met him ourselves, Justine’s trial and death carefully prepared us to distrust appearances and to refrain from making snap judgments based on them.  This lesson cannot be taught too often, although there are periods in history that may have needed it more than others.  The creature has been learning to distinguish one thing from another, and now he comes to the ultimate distinction, appearance and reality.

In Geneva, where our story was written and where it is set, Calvinism had flourished since John Calvin founded it in the sixteenth century.  According to Calvinism it was almost axiomatic that if you were healthy and prosperous, you were among the elect, favored by God, and destined for salvation, while if you were deformed or poor and didn’t own a nice white house on the hill, you were not.  I mention Calvinism only because this notion was built into its doctrine, but Calvinism has no monopoly on trust accorded to respectable-looking people.  Now, it doesn’t require a Ph.D. to see that some of the biggest crooks look respectable, but by the same token, if it were not that many people really did believe the myth, literary men would not have had so much fun in exploding it.  And did they ever have fun exploding it!  Every single witch in sixteenth-century romance-epics is drop-dead gorgeous—Armida, Acrasia, Duessa—gorgeous, that is, until she is unmasked, and then she turns out to be old, gray, toothless, and ugly, with maybe a fox’s tail befouled with filth.  Just relax and listen to how Ariosto describes the false beauty of the witch Alcina in Orlando Furioso.  The translation is that of Queen Elizabeth’s godson Sir John Harington:

Her hair was long and yellow to the same,

As might with wire of beaten gold compare;

Her lovely cheeks with show of modest shame,

With roses and with lilies painted are;

Her forehead, fair and full of seemly cheer,

As smooth as polished ivory doth appear.

Within two arches of most curious fashion

Stand two black eyes that like two clear suns shine’d,

Of steady look but apt to take compassion,

Amid which lights, the naked boy and blind

Doth cast his darts that cause so many a passion

And leave a sweet and cureless wound behind;

From thence the nose in such good sort descended

As [even] envy knows not how it may be mended;

Conjoined to which in due and comely space

Doth stand the mouth, stained with vermilion hue;

Two rows of precious pearl serve in their place

To show and shut a lip right fair to view;

Hence come the courteous words and full of grace

That mollify hard hearts and make them new;

From hence proceed those smilings sweet and nice

That seem to make an earthly paradise.

Her breast as milk, her neck as white as snow;

Her neck was round, most plump and large her breast;

Two ivory apples seemed there to grow,

Full tender, smooth, and fittest to be pressed. . . .

And so forth.  Later, however, when the witch’s spells have been broken, all this beauty proves to have been illusory.  This is how she appears in reality:

Her face was wan, a lean and wrinkled skin;

Her stature scant three horseloaves did exceed;

Her hair was gray of hue and very thin;

Her teeth were gone, her gums served in their stead;

No space was there between her nose and chin;)

Her noisome breath contagion would breed;

In fine, of her it might have well been said,

In Nestor's youth she was a pretty maid.'. . .

The beheading of Mary Queen of Scots, the historical counterpart of one of these literary witches, turned out to be a real-life lesson of this same kind.  Like her cousin Elizabeth, Mary had laid claim to great beauty for many years (too many actually), and like Elizabeth’s, her red hair was one of her best features.  Mary dressed defiantly for her beheading and also wisely, all in red, as Catholic martyrs were always represented (but also, I have always thought, so the stains wouldn’t show).  However, it’s pretty hard to prevent all possible damage to one’s appearance when having one’s head cut off, so, after the three terrible strokes of the axe that were required to actually sever her head from her body, the show climaxed in her red wig’s coming off in the executioner’s hand, and when he reached down again and pulled up her head covered with thin gray hair, there was laughter.  Yes, people knew that appearance and reality didn’t always agree, and they were always delighted to see hypocrisy unmasked, but it was always a novel idea anyway.  In America during the seventeenth century, perhaps the most exciting thing about the Salem witch trials was that the supposed witches were not limited to the drunken and sluttish old women of the town, who were the first to be accused, but increasingly included persons of good reputation who had previously been believed to have led blameless lives.  The failure of appearance to jibe with the supposed reality was a surprise and therefore riveted the attention of  the public, and the learned judges, by not trusting appearance, posed as imaginative men capable of thinking outside the box.  Unfortunately, while priding themselves on shrewdly penetrating the imagined hypocrisy of the accused, they indulged in blind trust in the accusers because they could not believe that children could lie or seek to hurt people, so appearance won after all.

         In my own lifetime, we used to accept without question that good guys in Westerns always wore white hats and bad guys wore black ones.  You laugh at this now, and so do I, but tell me, didn’t it seem to you perfectly natural that the evil Emperor in Star Wars should be ugly and wrinkled while the good characters are well-fleshed and attractive?  On the other hand, you also took delight in violations of the cliché like Yoda, whose appearance gives no clue to his true nature.  So what Shelley is doing in this novel is to give to her readers a lesson that every age must be taught afresh—that appearance is not a reliable indication of reality—and if the chapter on Justine’s trial was a lesson aimed mainly at us the readers, Chapters 12 through 15 show us the creature grappling with this same lesson, and it gives him some trouble.

         Initially he finds it natural that since he is ugly he ought to be miserable (Chapter 12, ¶ 4):  “I saw no cause for their unhappiness,” he says of the cottagers, “but I was deeply affected by it.  If such lovely creatures were miserable, it was less strange that I, an imperfect and solitary being, should be wretched.”  Later he reaffirms his equation of beauty with worthiness: “the gentle manners and beauty of the cottagers greatly endeared them to me. . . .”  And predictably, when he sees his own image, he is himself as horrified by his looks as all the humans he has met have been, since he knows his looks just don’t match his soul:

I had admired the perfect forms of my cottagers—their grace, beauty, and delicate complexions; but how was I terrified when I viewed myself in a transparent pool! At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification. Alas! I did not yet entirely know the fatal effects of this miserable deformity.

Don’t you worry, though; Shelley means to let us all see together what horrible damage can be done by allowing appearance to guide us in responding to fresh experiences.  Justine’s condemnation on circumstantial evidence will seem like small potatoes before Shelley is finished with us.