The public realm of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is so insistently masculine that the
reader must construe this as a deliberate aspect of the novel's construction. The
wholly male crew of the ship will, later in the first volume, be replicated in the
exclusively male ambience of the University of Ingolstadt and the more narrow and
even sinister magistracy of Geneva. By the second volume the novel's main characters
have committed themselves and the novel to a homosocial bonding of enormous force.

The vast power of a sublime nature returns to the text, preparing us for the reintroduction
of the being animated by and associated with the "vital fluid" of electricity. However,
as with the previous eruption of lightning within the text (I:1:22), what is implicitly
emphasized is not its creative power, but its capacity for destruction.

The reference seems to be to a theatrical representation in which time is telescoped
or to a painting representing different time frames simultaneously. The iconic overlap
of nativity scenes in Christian art would be a common instance of the latter effect.

Walton's polar exploration, with its concern for the secret of magnetism (I:L1:2),
and Victor's experiments with electricity (I:1:23) as vital fluid intersect with one
of the most exciting scientific breakthroughs of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. Although Erasmus Darwin's scientific take on the linkage—that it is somehow
to be explained by basic chemistry rather than the mechanics of physics—is wrong,
what impels it is not. Indeed, though it is pedestrian in manner, the lengthy twelfth
note to The Temple of Nature is nothing short of visionary. There Darwin first extensively
expounds the dynamics of electricity, then turns to the similar processes of magnetism,
bifurcated figuratively between arctic and antarctic poles, and in the end links the
two with a rudimentary conception of atomic physics (only to be expounded by John
Dalton in the decade after Darwin's death), and with the third component of the Grand
Unified Field Theory, gravitation. That Mary Shelley is aware of this conjunction
can be deduced from Walton's hope that his discoveries will help astronomers "regulate
a thousand celestial observations."

Ingolstadt lies almost 500 miles to the northeast of Geneva. The trip there, depending
on how hard the young Victor pushed himself, would have required the better part of
a week. In May 1816 it took the Shelley party six days to make their excursion from
Paris to Geneva, a roughly comparable distance.

The diction will be echoed in Victor's account of the Creature's departure from their
encounter in Volume 2, when he is "quickly lost . . . among the undulations of the
sea of ice" (II:9:18) and again in the final phrase of the novel where he will be
"lost in darkness and distance" (III:WC:48).

The terms become starker and starker, now directly figured as beyond Victor's control,
the operations of a destiny in which he is a mere pawn. Moreover, this force, however
much it may be involved in creation, is on a personal level destructive. As Victor
nears success in his endeavor to create life, it is as if the process directly saps
his own vitality.

Perhaps, however, there is an alternate, less dire, way of reading this condition,
as reflecting Mary Shelley's own experience with motherhood. On some preconscious
mental level, Victor is shown to be replicating the experience of the expectant mother
whose physical being is strongly affected by the second being gestating in her womb.

The reader cannot help noticing how insistently this theme returns to the surface
of the text. In the abstract it is almost an epitome of the way in which Mary Shelley
creates the structure of her novel as a nest of Chinese boxes (or Russian dolls).
Here, Victor Frankenstein begins a narrative about his life by emphasizing his father's
profound affection for another man, an account he gives to a young explorer whose
deepest emotional need is for such a friendship. Walton, in turn, feels he has found
the fulfillment of this need in Victor, and Victor himself tells this narrative out
of a sense of duty to that friendship. Duty likewise drove his father in his attempt
to discover and rescue Beaufort. At the periphery of this replicated order is the
central location in which the narrative unfolds, a ship isolated in treacherous northern
waters where the all-male crew stands on its duty on behalf of one another. In the
end harsh circumstances will force Walton to respond against his will to his own duty
to those men.

Victor seems very much the type of friend for whom Walton was longing in I:L2:2, and
his solicitude for the stranger's welfare clearly changes the dynamics of his shipboard
routine. Nothing will be reported as occuring aboard this ship for almost a month
while Victor through the narration of his life becomes himself a troubling aspect
of Walton's own existence.

The "astonishment" of two paragraphs earlier has transmogrified into a much deeper
suspicion on Walton's part. The reader should take the doubt that is planted here
seriously, since questions concerning Victor Frankenstein's sanity will intensify
as the novel continues, becoming pronounced late in his narrative—which is to say,
in the novel's chronology, only weeks before his rescue.