Bellerive is where the fifteen-year-old Victor witnessed the violent thunderstorm
(I:1:22) that started his obsession with the powers of electricity: thus, it is particularly
appropriate that the "most violent storm" occurs in this area.

The repetition of the adjective "benevolent" three times in as many paragraphs indicates
the stress Mary Shelley places on this as a fundamental attribute of human virtue.
However it may be stressed in Victor's memory, the frequency with which such benevolence
is actually encountered as a motivating force will be tested when the Creature flees
Victor's apartment and attempts to make his way in the world.

Victor's stress on the term marks it as of particular importance to him and indicates
that it is also of concern to the novel. With some pathos, Victor will begin the second
volume by recalling that he had himself "begun life with benevolent intentions" (II:1:1).
At this point we cannot know how far from disinterested benevolence Victor has strayed.
In retrospect, however, the novel's readers can easily comprehend why fervent emotions
would be generated in him by a return to civilized human standards and ethical conduct.

As Walton's first letter opens with an expression of the opposed perspectives of men
and women (I:L1:1 and note), so this initial paragraph of the first chapter accentuates
the concern of the patriarchy with replicating itself. Alphonse Frankenstein's sense
of public purpose is to reproduce himself for the good of the state. By suppressing
the role of the female in this process, he paradoxically voices what will become his
son's obsession with creating a new man without the intervention of woman. With that
creation in mind, however, it does not require of the reader an undue stretching of
the sense to regard the distinctive tone of this language, so abstracted and clinical,
as being more characteristic of Victor than of his father.

Although not the elixir of life per se (which would give the owner perpetual youth),
Victor Frankenstein's discovery is related to that fundamental aim of alchemy and
thus is the culmination of the fascination with the occult sciences that has been
his ruling passion over the past eight years.

The novel slides, seamlessly and without calling attention to itself, from Walton's
nursing Victor Frankenstein back from a state of near-death to Caroline Beaufort's
attendance on her despondent father in his decline. Such nurturing is a continual
necessity in Frankenstein and a measure of a character's capacity for sympathy.

Walton here assumes the position of ministrant that Clerval held during Victor's "nervous
fever" in Ingolstadt (I:4:17), pointedly an inversion of customary gender roles. Healers
are accorded a privileged value in this novel, though by no means in the world that
encompasses its fiction. Justine Moritz's attendance on Victor's mother in her final
illness earns for her no particular credence from her judges (I:7:10), and his mother,
contracting scarlet fever from nursing Elizabeth, dies as a result of her good offices
(I:2:2)

The actual events of the novel, it is surprising to realize, take place within the
next month, with Walton's last letter to Margaret Saville (III:WC:21) being dated
September 7th.

Justine is the third character, after the Creature (I:4:2 and I:4:3) and Victor (I:4:5
and I:6:19), to share this appellation. Perhaps, however, she applies it with a nuanced
difference of meaning from its usage in their circumstances.

These were wooden balls secretly selected by those judging a trial.