In Geneva Mary Shelley hired a local nursemaid for her son William named Louise Duvillard,
who would remain with the Shelley family until 1818, when she left them to marry in
Naples. William Frankenstein's sweetheart bears her first name, and this rich banker
her second. To some extent Justine Moritz may be modeled on her.

Victor has been laid up by his illness for some five to six months and feels himself
reborn by the season. In the meantime, his Creature has been through a similarly confining
experience and reacts to the arrival of his first spring with a like elation: see
II:4:19.

Victor's education to this point reveals him to be a strong but indulgent student,
well-trained in languages and mathematics, undirected in the sciences (I:1:26).

Mary Shelley is so insistent on this point that she has Walton repeat it to Victor
Frankenstein (I:L4:6), whose formal education, by contrast, is extensive. It could
be that she is trying to make a point about the primacy of moral education or the
essential importance, in a novelistic tradition one associates with Henry Fielding,
of a good heart. But it is more likely that she is establishing a perspective by which
to engage larger questions concerning the means and ends of education. Victor Frankenstein's
Creature is also self-educated and likewise has his identity strongly molded by what
he happens to read.

That is, in the morning.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.