This is the second time (see also I:3:10) that Victor uses this phrase in the chapter
to indicate the totality of his commitment to his program of research.

Given the erudition of her father and her husband, Mary Shelley would have known of
Aristophanes' account, in Plato's Symposium, of the origin of love occuring when primitive
man was split in two: thereafter one half was always yearning for the completion of
the self in the other. (P. B. Shelley was to translate the Symposium in the spring
of 1818.) Here she plays against the myth ironically, for, as we will see in the sequel,
Victor Frankenstein and his Creature will pursue a course of adversarial antagonism
that is as passionately intense as love. It is frequently figured in the imagery of
doubling and mirroring.

Once again, Victor yields his will to his passion. But the terms he uses seem to invoke
something beyond the question of free will and determinism. Victor at this point recognizes
that his imagination, the creative power of fantasy, is driving his pursuit of the
unknown, which tends to implicate a faculty ordinarily privileged in British Romanticism.
Something of the same order happened four paragraphs earlier, when the imagination
was likewise cited (I:3:7).

Mary Shelley, though an only child, did not grow up like one, since there were four
different parental configurations for the five children of the Godwin household. Yet,
the venerated memory of her father's approach to her education is surely implicit
in this "silken cord" by which Victor, led insensibly on for his own betterment, comes
to enjoy his education.

In her revisions Mary Shelley strengthens the similarities between Victor Frankenstein
and Robert Walton. In this case, although Victor is about to undergo a systematic
education, the 1831 text leaves him virtually as lacking in discipline as Walton represented
himself to be in writing to his sister (1831:I:L1:2 and note). In the context provided
by the terms of Walton's letter, where he remarks how much he needs a friend to help
regulate his mind, Victor's lack of a close associate in these early weeks spent almost
in solitude is ominous.

In the last paragraph of the preceding entry (I:L4:23), written eight days earlier,
Victor had still been a "stranger." Mary Shelley seems deliberately to be marking
an intensification of Walton's affection for Victor Frankenstein.

This seemingly strange shift in Victor's autobiography, without parallel in the account
of his early education in the first edition, may be intended by Mary Shelley in her
emendations to prepare us for, and make a logical link to, Victor's mental state just
before he is rescued by Walton and his crew. In the last chapter of his narration
(III:7:5) he accounts himself under the special protection of guiding spirits who
guide his vengeance against the Creature.

Coming as it does at the end of this chapter on his formative influence, this strong
commitment to a guiding destiny testifies to a belief system through which Victor
filters his entire existence, thus in effect rewriting it. Where a reader might wish
to observe in Victor's behavior a normal adolescent lethargy or an understandable
lack of assurance about the future course of his preparation for adulthood, Victor
sees the hand of Providence.

A heavy sea with large waves. Although they are still ice-bound, the sailors can hear
the sound of waves breaking in the distance and know that the ice surrounding them
will soon crack. The novel will return to this point, as at the very end of his narrative
Victor Frankenstein recounts the same phenomenon from his dangerously vulnerable position
on the ice in III:7:20 and note. See also III:7:24 and note.

Prussia and Austria would be the obvious surrounding context for Switzerland, but
two sentences later the reader is given pre-revolutionary France and England as natural
referents (and thus implicit allies), a sly but penetrating political thrust on Mary
Shelley's part. The defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo had occured in June 1815, a little
over a year before the novel was begun, and the "Holy Alliance" of autocracies had
through the Congress of Vienna reinstated itself in firm control of the continent
of Europe.

The major dissimilitude in this description is between highly conventional notions
of essential masculine and feminine attributes. Whether this is Victor's mode of categorizing,
Mary Shelley's, or that conventional to her age is a moot issue. For readers concerned
with Mary Shelley's feminist commitment or with the way gender destinctions are reflected
by early nineteenth-century novels, Elizabeth's lack of self-assertiveness and her
easy acquiescence in a traditional female role have generally posed unsettling questions.