The public realm of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is so insistently masculine that the
reader must construe this as a deliberate aspect of the novel's construction. The
wholly male crew of the ship will, later in the first volume, be replicated in the
exclusively male ambience of the University of Ingolstadt and the more narrow and
even sinister magistracy of Geneva. By the second volume the novel's main characters
have committed themselves and the novel to a homosocial bonding of enormous force.