Victor is originally described by Walton as having a powerful feeling for nature (I:L4:28),
which is certainly not the case here; nor is it, indeed, at many crucial points in
his narrative. Although in this novel turning away from nature may be indicative of
a moral lapse, it is true that in the present instance Victor is circumventing nature
in his creation of another sentient being. Thus, it might be said that his insensitivity
to the natural is perfectly in keeping with his commitment to a creative act independent
of its limitations.

This strange intensity of gaze seems to combine the fixated obsessiveness in which
Victor has passed the previous two years with an ominous foreshadowing of the destiny
that he will come to feel has driven him to his destruction.

Victor's account of his life, we should recall, begins with the pedigree of the male
Frankensteins in the public life of the state (I:1:1). In his youth he was clearly
inculcated with his obligation to follow in this family tradition. The issue bears
as well for Walton's sense of purpose on his expedition (I:L1:2).

An exotic Johnson, in his 1755 Dictionary, defines simply as "A foreign plant." In
modern parlance it would designate a tropical, or non-hardy, botanical specimen. As
the succeeding sentences suggest, Caroline Frankenstein's fragile health, which will
lead to her early death, justifies such care. Today's reader is likely to find such
language offensive since intrinsically patronizing, but it was a common occurence
in the fiction, and the society, of Mary Shelley's day and would have drawn no particular
attention to itself. Yet, since gender roles are of continuing significance in the
development of the novel, this early emphasis on the traditional frailty of the female
physique is noteworthy.

We will learn the reason for this rhetorical heightening through the vocative case
as we move into the next chapter. This is the last serene moment that Victor will
experience in his entire existence, but the address to Clerval in the past tense immediately
shadows its expression of joy. In retrospect, the reader may consider Victor's happiness
during this year as purchased by a willful blindness to the potential consequences
of his actions.

This point is reemphasized two paragraphs on. Given the events subsequent to this
chapter, one should stress the significance of this statement. Justine Moritz has
been so fond of Victor's mother Caroline that she imitates her tones and gestures
and to Elizabeth seems like her embodiment. That Victor can remain silent at her persecution
will thus be a signal moral failing.

Ernest is at this juncture in his seventeenth year, the same age that Victor was when
he left his home to study in Ingolstadt. Although a young man of simple decency, as
the subsequent conversation will indicate, he is lacking both the sophistication and
the probing intellect of his older brother.

On March 18th of the year before Elizabeth noted that Ernest was "now nearly sixteen"
(I:5:1). At the time of William's death a year and two months later, presumably he
is seventeen.

In revising her novel Mary Shelley totally changed Ernest's state of health but added
nothing that would give him a reason for existing in the novel except to carry on
the family name in obscurity. In both texts, however, Ernest serves as a foil to the
overly abstract and abstracted mind of his brother Victor. As a farmer (1818) or a
mercenary keeper of the peace (1831), Ernest's concern would be with the given order
of things rather than with what underlies it conceptually. In both texts (but paradoxically
more pronounced in the third edition, many years after Byron provided an immediate
context for her writing), Ernest bears a striking similarity to the Chamois Hunter
of Manfred, which Byron began after the Shelleys' departure in 1816 and is also set
in Switzerland. See Act I, scene ii, and Act II, scene i.

That the inveterate Roman collector of superstitious lore could be thought by Victor
to be as useful for the modern student as the man who, perhaps more than any other,
stood as the foremost elaborator of Enlightenment natural science suggests that the
level of this youth's scientific conceptions has yet to mature. In the next chapter
he will embark upon his advanced education as an enthusiastic greenhorn.