Unlike the public and the judges, Justine quietly assumes that only a man could have
committed the murder of a child.

However much Mary Shelley may have known about Ingolstadt, she never visited the town
and thus probably surmised from her general travels in Switzerland and Germany (or
perhaps from her travels down the Rhine two years before in 1814) that it would have
had such a steeple. The various towered constructions of Ingolstadt, however, are
all built in brick. There is a wooden steeple-like construction atop the Hoheschule
(University), but it would not have been visible from afar as a landmark.

Mary Shelley has already used the word "hideous" four times in the Introduction to
refer to both the being who was endowed with life in the novel and her own conception,
"so very hideous an idea" (I:Intro:1). Here they are explicitly conflated. As this
novel of horror is revised, so the Creature that inhabits and terrorizes it is reanimated.

This is a curious imposition on Mary Shelley's novel and one that has raised eyebrows
among critics with a biographical orientation, both because of the death of her mother
Mary Wollstonecraft after giving birth and because of her adversion to her step-mother
Mary Jane Clairmont Godwin.

Although Victor's jumping to conclusions about the guilt of his Creature indicates
how widespread is the temptation to judge without evidence, the fact that Justine
has been convicted in the popular mind before her trial even starts introduces a sinister
element to the social dimensions of the novel. The class issues that will arise in
the trial are highly complicated. The small detail of how the Frankenstein family
was circumvented by its own servants, who were the ones to appeal to the magistrates
(see I:6:34), is telling in its representation of how widespread has been the process
of scapegoating that has eventuated in Justine's arrest. This detail may also suggest
that the Frankenstein family has itself attempted to keep faith with Justine and thus,
in some sense, may serve to mitigate the reader's own temptation to rush to judgment
over the family's complicity in an exercise of injustice.

In Percy Bysshe Shelley's first major poem, Queen Mab (1813), the male friend (and
author-surrogate) who awaits the dreaming Ianthe's awakening is named Henry. Clerval
is at least partly drawn as a portrait of an idealized Shelley.

As the Dante allusion in the previous paragraph suggests, hell is a mental state.
Victor's words make a direct allusion to one of Milton's most famous passages in Paradise
Lost, where Satan comes face to face with the responsibility for his own damnation:

Hadst thou the same free will and power to stand?
Thou hadst: whom hast thou then or what to accuse,
But Heaven's free love dealt equally to all?
Be then his love accursed, since love or hate,
To me alike, it deals eternal woe.
Nay, cursed be thou; since against his thy will
Chose freely what it now so justly rues.
Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell. . . .
-- IV.66-75

As with other of his comments in this passage, readers may sense that what Walton
signifies is conceptually broader than what he actually realizes he is saying: thus
the value of his comment is more in alerting us to a problematic issue than in giving
us a thumbnail sketch that will define Victor Frankenstein forever in our minds. Where
Walton sees a praiseworthy self-containment in his friend's comportment, indeed, many
critics remark the dangers of Romantic solipsism. In Victor's own account his introversion
and obsessiveness will be stressed as character traits that were factors contributing
to his downfall.

Both Elizabeth and Victor, endeavoring to alter the verdict through a rhetoric that
would move the judges' hearts, completely fail in their attempt. Once again, eloquence
is placed at the center of the discourse and in a highly problematic light. Why it
is so problematic might best be gauged by comparing this work to the major poem that
Percy Bysshe Shelley was writing simultaneously with it, The Revolt of Islam. There
the heroine Cythna so moves the hearts of her auditors through her eloquent appeals
to their common humanity as to foment a radical revolution that overthrows the tyranny
that has oppressed them. Although it is a conspicuous feature of Cythna's presence,
Canto 8 of that poem is exemplary since it is entirely devoted to this process.

In the Shelleys' household, then, eloquence holds a privileged place as a tool of
non-violent political reform. Where it fails so grievously as here, the consequences
may be very great. That Mary Shelley is herself aware of this dimension may be inferred
from her letter of June 1 1816 where she calmly notes of the French "liberation" of
Switzerland in 1798 that all "the magistrates . . . were shot by the populace during
that revolution." It may give the reader pause to realize that one of those actual
magistrates, were he still himself among the living, would have been Alphonse Frankenstein.

Like so much of the diction in this chapter the phrase can be read in two senses:
first, as laughter without cause, as though Victor's heart is not in it; second, as
a cold, self-obsessed, or unfeeling discharge of nervous energy. Although the first
meaning is the natural way to construe the diction, the second remains behind, like
a sour aftertaste, to affect our later judgments. It is allied to the intimation of
madness expressed by the wildness of Victor's eyes.