Victor suddenly shows a political consciousness that has not been active up to this
point. The context suggests that the enclosed world of the domestic affections, governed
by a feminine sensibility, is threatened—and through history actually destroyed—by
the masculinist drive for power. This is a sentiment with which both her father William
Godwin and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley would have agreed. In the shadow of the
Napoleonic Wars and the reinstitution of reactionary monarchies across Europe, it
is a sentiment not in accord with the prevailing state of political opinion in England.
It could be argued that Victor simply serves momentarily as mouthpiece for the author's
pointedly liberal views to surface. What would complicate that supposition is the
fact that this series of political failures is identical with those the Creature derives
from the oral reading of Volney's Ruins of Empire by Felix De Lacey (see II:5:14).
If we focus on that identity retrospectively, we are suddenly confronted with the
amazing fact that Victor, whether he registered it or not, will actually learn something
concrete from the Creature's narration in the second volume of the novel.