As at the beginning of the first chapter (I:1:1), the democratic institutions of Switzerland
serve Mary Shelley as a foil to those of her own country. Especially at this time,
under the reactionary rule of its Tory government, "republican" was a pejorative term.
Mary Shelley shrewdly mitigates her affront to the current critical climate at home
by tying the term to the respectable context of Switzerland. Still, in its quiet way,
the word is an affront.

Despite his conversion to the study of modern chemistry, Victor never relinguishes
the agenda of ancient alchemy with which he began his scientific education.

Surely, the reader wonders that Victor's remorse should be at this point so limited
in its focus. Mary Shelley's exposing of his naivete seems intended to plant anticipations
of a dramatic irony, with a concomitant enlargement of the field of Victor's guilt,
yet to be revealed.

This diction may appear strange to modern ears, implying a notion of education as
constriction. Probably, however, it would not have touched a contemporary in such
a way. In Mary Shelley's day such regulation would have been construed as an adherence
to a disciplined, systematic method of education. Still, regulation must be a means
to a perceived end. In this respect, we may take the contrasting image of Victor Frankenstein—"Natural
philosophy is the genius that has regulated my fate (I:1:15)—as quietly but insistently
ironic.

This presents a stark corrective to Walton's earlier tribute to Victor's self-containment
(I:L4:28 and note).

Once again, as in the previous chapter (see I:6:25), the question is raised of how
one can objectively measure sanity in circumstances that are themselves beyond the
ordinary. Insofar as the earlier occasion also reminded us of the precariousness of
Victor's own mental state, this iteration continues to keep that issue before our
eyes.

The language, tinged with eroticism, is suggestive of the narcissistic dimensions
of Victor's preoccupation with his knowledge and the power that might stem from it.
Johnson, in his 1755 Dictionary, becomes loquacious in his definition of the word,
suggesting shadings with implications for the novel's thematic texture:

Ecstasy; transport; violence of any pleasing passion; enthusiasm; uncommon heat of
imagination.

During the summer of 1816, M. G. Lewis, famous in the 1790s as a Gothic dramatist
and novelist, arrived in Geneva from travels in Germany to visit Byron. He brought
with him a copy of the first part of Goethe's Faust, which opens with perhaps the
most famous instance of raising the devil in modern literature. Undoubtedly, Mary
Shelley had the alchemist Johannes Faust in mind in recording the obsessions of Victor
Frankenstein. She probably also had heard from Percy Bysshe Shelley of his own youthful
fantasies toward this end. One example dates from his adolescent years at Eton College:

One day Mr. Bethell, suspecting from strange noises overhead that his pupil was engaged
in nefarious scientific pursuits, suddenly appeared in Shelley's rooms; to his consternation
he found the culprit apparently half enveloped in a blue flame. "What on earth are
you doing, Shelley?" "Please sir," came the answer in the quietest tone, "I am raising
the devil."

-- Edward Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench &
Co, 1886), I, 30.

The poet is at once more circumspect and self-dramatizing in the account of his brushes
with the supernatural in the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," stanza 5, written contemporaneously
with Frankenstein.

Although this appears a sensible maxim, on extended examination it tends to favor
a low level of ambition and to inhibit most attempts to reach beyond a status quo.
The "tranquillity" attained in this way, seeming to forestall the pursuit of excellence
in a particular field of endeavor, or a concentrated exertion to achieve a particular
goal, or, indeed, any real application of genius, rather assumes the appearance of
passivity or inertia. Although certainly, Victor's remark questions the activities
not just of himself but of his auditor, Walton, as well, and thus fits into the overall
moral rationale for his narration, this blanket reversal of both of their strongest
impulses is likely to create a counterthrust of ambiguity in the reader's reaction
to the statement.

Behind the statement and our reaction to it lies the cosmic ambiguity of Milton's
Paradise Lost, which exerts a continuing pressure on Mary Shelley's novel.

As admirable as this observation may seem at first glance, it carries an obverse side
that will soon be borne out to an extreme condition. By the end of this chapter Victor
will begin to ignore everything extrinsic to his scientific inquiry, spurning the
world outside his laboratory and devoting himself to his research there with an abandon
tantamount to a neurotic compulsion.