Quietly insinuated into the text, England's class system is here firmly condemned.
On the other hand, we will shortly see how much credit is actually accorded a servant
in Switzerland as well, for Justine will be victimized by its prejudices as Elizabeth
stands by helpless to assuage the inherent biases of class.

Mary Shelley's independent comments on the character of servants in republican Switzerland
are contained in a letter of 1 June 1816 that she appended to her History of a Six
Weeks' Tour.

Inevitably, language like this calls to mind the, by now, obligatory laboratory equipment
so characteristic of cinematic versions of the novel. That is all the more reason,
then, for us to recognize that Mary Shelley is deliberately evoking not mere instrumentation
but rather what we would now call a dynamo to infuse the creature with what she called
at the close of the previous paragraph "vital warmth." Since the first successful
electric generators were demonstrated only in the 1860s, Mary Shelley's vagueness
("some") reflects her sense that such an engine is a necessary technological development
of current scientific knowledge but has not yet been invented.

The vernacular idiom, when taken with its full weight, suggests a compulsion equivalent
to that of being possessed: it will be repeated in I:3:10.

Victor's diction here reflects experiences to which we as readers have yet to become
privy, experiences that have forced upon him a psychological condition that conceives
of the world in terms of adversarial struggle. This is an example of the shrewd linguistic
forecasting that we find everywhere in the early chapters of Mary Shelley's revised
1831 text. In this case we are alerted to how much those experiences have warped Victor's
notion of reality into a series of antagonistic states. The "palpable enemy," which
is here figured in spiritual terms, will become objectified in the Creature that he
unleashes upon the world and who becomes dangerous precisely because he is treated
as an enemy.

Mary Shelley underscores the perfect irony of Victor's growing increasingly death-like
as he attempts to impart life to a new being. Similarly, in his attempt to liberate
that being from death into the freedom of life, he voluntarily commits himself to
a prison of his own making.

No critic has ever traced a protoype of the Lavenza surname, which is, in any event,
a highly uncommon one. More immediately problematic to the reader, however, is the
figurative imagery elaborated in this paragraph, which in its comparisons to an insect,
a bird, and a pet animal, implicitly dehumanizes Elizabeth. It is possible, though
the textual support is equivocal, that Mary Shelley intends this diction to be less
laudatory of Elizabeth than self-referential, in terms of his facile sexism, of Victor's
character.

In the 1831 edition Elizabeth Lavenza's consanguinity with Victor Frankenstein has
been removed: she is no longer his cousin. She is also no longer compared by simile
to an insect, a bird, and a pet animal. Yet, Mary Shelley does retain the curiously
dehumanizing figuration of the first edition by having Victor now compare her to a
chamois.

This is a common cultural popularization from the early British empire, voiced, for
instance, by Mary Wollstonecraft, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Chapter
5, Section 4.

Although Mary Shelley finesses the scientific instrumentation of her novel—and she
could hardly do otherwise in allowing Victor to overstep the known boundaries of science—in
this scene she clearly prepares us to understand that the dynamic secret of life Victor
will discover is intimately connected to electricity as a "vital fluid." Her use of
the term "spark of being" at the point of the Creature's coming into existence (I:4:1)
seems intended to follow through on this conceptualization.

Victor's admission of his arbitrarily foolish decision would be almost comic did it
not subsume such tragic consequences. In his very hubris over the "creation of a human
being," Victor unthinkingly excludes the being from a humanity that is defined by
its dependence on shared characteristics, alienating him in advance through a structural
flaw of design. For all his preoccupation with the destiny he thinks controls his
own life, Victor seems quite unconscious of how wholly his assumption of the role
of God will determine the course of this being's existence.