How well Victor Frankenstein fulfills what he considers his obligation by Elizabeth
will unfold in the sequel. To some extent Mary Shelley is playing to a sentimental
conception of elective affinity in this portrayal, and certainly she is attempting
from the start to strengthen the romantic attachment Victor feels for Elizabeth. At
the same time, the extreme possessiveness of Victor's attitude is a characteristic
from which, in her personal life, she would have recoiled; and it is therefore no
unusual stretching of the rhetoric that would lead a reader to see in Victor's sense
of duty an implicitly demeaning condescension that reinforces an inherently masculinist
notion of power.