In keeping with the tenor of this paragraph, the sentence bears a double freight.
On the one hand, one could see Elizabeth as wishing to hide from the darker realities
of the world and therefore as the embodiment of a kind of bland domesticity. On the
other hand, as we have witnessed in the previous two chapters, a human being can become
so inured to those darker realities as, like Victor Frankenstein, to lose perspective
and a due sense of social responsibility.