In explicitly linking in the same sentence the idea of knowledge with a serpent's
venom, Mary Shelley seems to be continuing her allusion to Milton's Paradise Lost
evident in the preceding paragraph. This intertextuality reminds the reader that knowledge
can have psychological and spiritual consequences as well as technical ones, also
that human beings are required to assume responsibility for the results of their intellectual
labors. Both of these are issues of major import for Frankenstein.