The doppelgänger or double is a feature of gothic tales throughout the eighteenth
and nineteenth century. As a literary type, however, the double can have more than
sensational uses. Within a year of Frankenstein's publication, for instance, Percy
Bysshe Shelley incorporated the figure within the first act of Prometheus Unbound,
where the Earth tells Prometheus of a second realm of potentiality that shadows the
actual world:

     Ere Babylon was dust,
The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Met his own image walking in the garden.
That apparition, sole of men, he saw.
-- I.191-95

Mary Shelley, too, is concerned with potentiality, both its development and its thwarting,
which she pursues on a number of different levels in this novel, projecting the doubling
on moral and psychological, but also on mythic and theological, grounds. Up to this
point in the novel the theme of doubling has been only hinted at in the intensities
of male friendship we have encountered. Here, in directly introducing doubling as
a psychological condition, her basic stress is on the self-division and resulting
self-destructiveness that, we may now begin to realize, is the driving force behind
the arctic pursuit that initiates Victor's narrative.

This is the exact denotation of the Greek roots that form the word "catastrophe,"
used by Victor to describe his initial reaction upon imparting life to the Creature
(I:4:2).

Doubtless, Alphonse Frankenstein is right. At the same time, the stern condescension
of this parting admonition is suggestive of the distance between father and son that
continually surfaces in the novel.

In the novel's structuring it is not coincidental that Walton is an orphan and, at
this point in his life, so is Victor Frankenstein. Victor's Creature, in a related
sense, will be a virtual orphan from the moment of his coming to life.

The hero of Ariosto's Renaissance epic-romance, Orlando Furioso (1516-32). Dramatic
adaptations from this work were common in the Renaissance: Robert Greene's was revived
on a number of occasions. By Mary Shelley's time the work had become a classic, and,
as translated by John Hoole in 1783, was frequently republished in a full English
version.

Walton refers to his second letter, specifically I:L2:4.

When the Creature was spotted from the ship the day before, it was noted that his
"sledge [was] drawn by dogs" (I:L4:3), suggesting that he was able to cope with the
conditions of ice-travel without danger to himself or his team of dogs. The fact that
Victor says nothing whatsoever about his lost dogs is a subtly pointed, if silent,
comment on his self-absorption. That he has only one dog remaining would have made
his continuation across the ice, even if it had remained stable, almost impossible.

A reference to Charles Lamb's haunting personal poem about nostalgia for an unreachable
past and the harsh costs of experience, "The Old Familiar Faces" (1798). Lamb was
a close friend and coadjutor of Mary Shelley's father William Godwin: the details
of his poem recall his mother's murder and Lamb's sense of distance from various friends,
probably Charles Lloyd in the first reference and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the second.

Where are they gone, the old familiar faces?

I had a mother, but she died, and left me,
Died prematurely in a day of horrors—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have been laughing, I have been carousing,
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I loved a Love once, fairest among women.
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man:
Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly;
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.

Ghost-like, I paced round the haunts of my childhood.
Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse,
Seeking to find the old familiar faces.

Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother,
Why wert not thou born in my father's dwelling?
So might we talk of the old familiar faces—

How some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

Ortelius' map of the world in 1570 marked a clear passage from west to east across
the top of Siberia. Although the northern bourdaries of Siberia have been mapped with
certainty, a perpetual icefield blocks the northeast passage to the Bering Sea. On
this map the White Sea and its port Archangelsk are located at the far left.

Victor here unconsciously slides between the terms "subject" and "object," that is,
between what would possess a substantive being and what is merely a thing upon which
an action is committed. The odd inversion of the question, with its verb placed at
the end, likewise contributes to an effect of syntactical estrangement. This brief
moment of panic is thus highly illuminating, employing a linguistic shorthand to reveal
how Victor's thought processes characteristically distance and demonize his Creature.