Quote Analysis

The Creature describes Safie's internal decision-making after her father orders her to abandon Felix and return to Turkey, explaining that both her Christian faith and her personal inclinations made that prospect intolerable to her.

The parallelism of 'her religion and her feelings were alike averse' yokes together two sources of authority—external doctrine and internal emotion—as if they naturally align and reinforce one another. But this tidy pairing actually papers over potential conflict: Safie is able to follow her heart because her religion happens to permit it, a privilege the novel has just shown is denied to women in her father's faith. The symmetry of the syntax makes this convergence seem inevitable rather than contingent.

Support a thesis that Shelley critiques how people naturalize culturally specific values—Safie experiences her choices as authentic self-expression, but the novel's structure reveals they depend on which religious framework she inherited. This applies to the Creature's dilemma: he has feelings but no cultural script that legitimizes them, leaving him unable to make his inner life legible to others.