How does the monster learn to speak and read?

In Frankenstein, the monster learns to speak and read by secretly observing the De Lacey family from a hiding place beside their cottage. After being rejected everywhere because of his appearance, he avoids direct contact with people and watches Felix, Agatha, and the blind old De Lacey as they work, speak, and care for one another.

At first, he realizes that the family communicates through sounds, and he begins teaching himself their language by listening. His education becomes much faster when Safie arrives at the cottage. Because Safie does not know the family’s language, Felix teaches her, and the monster learns alongside her from his hidden position. As Felix instructs Safie from a history book, the monster gains both words and ideas: he learns about human society, history, and morality, and he becomes troubled that humankind can seem noble while also being capable of cruelty.

Once he can read, the monster’s education deepens through books he finds in the woods, especially Paradise Lost. That book gives him a way to understand himself through Adam and Satan: like Adam, he has a creator; like Satan, he feels rejected and alone. He also reads Victor’s journal entries, which he accidentally took when he fled Victor’s apartment, and those pages teach him the painful facts of his own creation.

This education makes the monster eloquent, thoughtful, and painfully self-aware. After learning about human society, he asks, “When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, a monster, a blot upon the earth from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?” In Frankenstein, language gives the monster the power to explain his suffering, while reading gives him the knowledge that makes his isolation feel permanent.