Mathematics is the one area of the scientific disciplines in which Victor already
excels (I:1:26 and note).

This interpolation in the 1831 text seems innocent enough, perhaps designed to show
that the young Victor Frankenstein is on the path to a mature respect for a scientific
discipline and those who practice it. On closer examination, however, this seemingly
innocent remark begins to build a foundation for a vexing issue in the novel: the
extent to which Victor's attempt to condition his rhetoric to the interests of his
listener is merely manipulative and thus, whatever its appearance, not wholly to be
trusted. As the novel progresses, this narrative indeterminacy will touch most of
its major characters.

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.

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."

The sexist stereotypes in which this tribute is expressed can be (as they have been)
laid at Mary Shelley's doorstep. But it is, after all, Victor who is speaking, and
his monologue is telling the reader a great deal about him that he does not seem to
realize. Since this is a technique by which fictional characterization is traditionally
accomplished, perhaps the reader will want to hold him as a character fully responsible
for his own sentiments. The Preface, we will remember, went out of its way to separate
the author from her characters (I:Pref:2).

Leaving Victor's perspective to the side, we may, as readers, surely honor the affectionate
warmth with which Elizabeth assumes her nurturing domestic role and melds her small
community together. We might wish, however, to suspend judgment on its absolute value
until later events can confirm that it profits her as much as it does those she so
selflessly serves.

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.