This nightmare, where the Creature mutates into Elizabeth and then into Victor's mother
Caroline, offers a fascinating insight into the extremity of Victor's psychological
state. It has provided psychoanalytic critics with rich material for sometimes highly
imaginative interpretations.

An old form, synonymous with county—or, in the case of Switzerland, with canton.

If one reads back from this point into the previous paragraph, it is evident that
Victor has attempted in some sense to change the subject. His first vocative, set
in the past tense of his return to his native land, is fraught with excess, even deranged,
emotion. Victor quickly displaces it with a new, contemporary, seemingly spontaneous
effusion that, being conventionally patriotic, has the virtue of concealing the all-too
bared soul of his past self and repressing its neurotic symptoms.

In evoking traditional martial virtues Walton unwittingly echoes Milton's Satan who
stresses this and other such heroic virtues throughout Paradise Lost. The strongest
echo is to a passage whose dynamics will come to dominate the relationship between
Victor Frankenstein and his Creature in the novel, an attachment based more and more
on passionate revenge.

     What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?
That glory never shall his wrath or might
Extort from me.
-- I.105-111 Later in Book I Satan's vengeful courage is reinforced by Milton:      his
face
Deep scars of thunder had intrencht, and care
Sat on his faded cheek, but under brows
Of dauntless courage, and considerate pride
Waiting revenge.
-- I.600-604

The caveat about Walton's boasting of his courage in the opening letter (I:L1:6),
and at the beginning of the second (I:L2:1) his insisting on the same attribute in
his crew, must extend here as well. Although certainly it is hard to see in this tribute
to his lieutenant any trace of diabolic lineaments, still, the combination of terms
driving him are inherently those of Milton's Satan.

This, the second death in as many paragraphs, almost slips by without notice. But
surely Walton might have been left a patrimony by his father and thus need not have
been granted freedom from financial constraints by the death of a youth whom we may
assume was of an age comparable to his. This unexpected source of his independence,
means sufficiently ample to allow him to hire a crew and outfit an ocean-going vessel
for a lengthy voyage, testifies to the instability of fortune, the constant threat
of mortality, and even to how important are extended families in this narration. It
also rather foreshadows later events in the novel, since Victor Frankenstein's cousin
Elizabeth will also bear the cost of his success.

Many other elements that Victor does not mention might restrain such inquiry, from
fear of divine retribution to worry over the possible ethical consequences of scientific
intervention. Upon a closer look, the reader may wish to recognize an abiding egotism
underlying Victor's exclusive concentration on the efficacy of an individual scientist's
endeavor, without regard for its extrinsic contexts or its social impact.

The undertone of narcissism here has less motivated critical attention than has Victor's
anticipation of reproducing himself in an issue without female intervention.

Elizabeth is represented here as having a strong sensibility and an artistic temperament,
conventional attributes of early nineteenth-century notions of femininity. However,
the emphasis on her "mind" in the previous paragraph (of 1818, excised in 1831) may
suggest the tempering influence of Mary Wollstonecraft.

In conventional human terms a child is the offspring of two parents. Victor, in absolute
contrast, contemplates being—like God—the sole source of his creation.