As in I:4:15 and note, Victor's imagination produces not a visionary paradise, but
a mental inferno.

This reticence is exactly what friendship is intended to transcend, if we take Walton's
notion of its value as a benchmark. He looks to an ideal friend "to regulate [his]
mind" (I:L2:2). Even Victor, in the revised text, conceives the value of a friend
as being "to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures" (I:L4:23). Victor's reserve,
however, negates this function of friendship, suggesting a limit to how far it is
able to surmount the barriers of what a later time might call ego-defences.

For whatever reason of self-presentation or nostalgia, Mary Shelley here magnifies
her love of and accessibility to an untrammelled natural environment. Her Scottish
experiences occupied less than two years of her early adolescence. Prior to that time
she was brought up in Somers Town, in that day located on the edge of the London metropolis,
where she could divide her interests between the countryside to the north, upon which
her father's house looked out, and the attractions of the city. Godwin's house itself
was anything but rural, maintaining an intensely urban and intellectually sophisticated
ambience throughout Mary Shelley's youth. There, as a child, she came into contact
with dozens of the principal luminaries of British culture at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. One of these was Samuel Taylor, whom she heard recite "The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner," a poem of particular resonance for Frankenstein, where it
is quoted twice—(see I:L2:6 and I:4:7)—and frequently functions allusively.

Even at this remove from the trial Victor unthinkingly puts his own claims to the
fore, reminding us of his skill as a story-teller at the expense of Justine's claims
as a victim of injustice. We cannnot forget that her very lack of eloquence has contributed
to her victimization.

We have already witnessed this physical manifestation of deep psychological conflict
in the cabin of Walton's ship, when Victor is first recovering from exposure to the
arctic elements (I:L4:10). A grieving Victor gnashes his teeth at the mere thought
of the Creature in II:1:6. When we next observe the phenomenon, it will be the Creature
who gnashes his teeth in response to the frustration of all his hopes (III:3:13 and
note). The prototype for this act is the Satan of Paradise Lost: compare VI.340.

Some critics have seen in these symptoms the transference to Victor of a mother's
postpartum physical reactions.

Victor's interruption of his story reminds us of its fictive nature and reintroduces
the problem of belief that will in numerous ways dominate the final pages of this
first volume. It also quietly prepares us for a major shift in the plot. In terms
of the novel's characterization, however, it might be read as Victor's way of reasserting
an urbane control over a narration (as well as a narrator) evidencing signs of dangerous
instability.

This reticence about the Creature will come to have a self-perpetuating momentum that
will cause widespread harm. In the case of Clerval, it would have been as easy for
Victor to narrate his story as, later, it is with Walton. His holding-back is obviously
an important plot device, but within the fiction itself it appears to reveal a deep,
if unarticulated, sense of guilt on his part.

If Mary Shelley's account of her childhood writing suggests affinities with her characterization
of Clerval, the depiction of the Scottish idyll of her adolescence similarly encompasses
her portrait of the young Elizabeth Lavenza, particularly her fondness for the "aërial
creations of the poets" (see both 1818 (I:1:10) and 1831 (I:2:1) texts, and note).

Justine has confessed in order to procure last rites and entry into heaven after death.
Yet, as a false confession cannot truly absolve a sinner, either Mary Shelley's protestant
prejudice is showing, revealing a bias against or actual ignorance of Roman Catholic
theology, or, more probably, she is quietly deepening her social critique to implicate
the immorality of those who, entrusted with the spiritual lives of humanity, sell
them out to the advantage of their own authority or of state power. It is also possible
that she emphasizes the Catholicism of the Moritz household to mark a subtle prejudice
against Justine in the minds of the Frankensteins, who seem to reflect the austere
moralistic Protestantism for which Geneva was noted.