Isabel Baxter became Mary's close friend almost by accident. Mary's early adolescence
had been troubled, particularly fractious where her stepmother was involved; and Godwin
decided that some distance would have a salutary effect on her rebelliousness. He
contacted a radical acquaintance from the 1790s, Richard Baxter, a Scotsman who was
a good friend of his own friend David Booth, who agreed to accept Mary into his family
in Dundee. There at the age of fourteen she took up a happy residence that, as this
account indicates, combined a closeness to nature with a warm affection for the Baxters'
middle daughter Isabel. With this family she resided from June to November 1812, and
from June 1813 to March 1814. Her elopement with the married Percy Bysshe Shelley
not long after her return from this second residence ruptured her friendship, since
David Booth, who had married Isabel in the meantime, refused to allow his wife to
continue her intimacy with a woman who had so abandoned customary propriety.

Although this novel is written very strongly from a male perspective, the accentuation
of female bonding here is an importance balance to that established between Walton
and Victor, between Victor and Clerval, between Victor and his Creature.

Again this resonant word (see I:L1:2, I:3:1, I:3:9, etc.).

There is something irresistibly amusing and at the same time grotesque in this image
of an eight-foot baby muttering nonsense syllables and sweetly smiling. That our first
image of the Creature is with a grin on his face, however, is highly suggestive philosophically
and politically. The "pursuit of happiness" is a moral and political premise to the
late eighteenth-century world into which the Creature comes as new-born.

As for the Creature's first interaction with a human being, a reader may well wonder
whether it registers upon Victor—or upon Mary Shelley—that this initial close encounter
comes via the German word for the mother he lacks, Mutter.

It is impossible to know for certain what tone—whether it is shock or relief—that
Mary Shelley intends to be conveyed by this exclamation of Victor's. In both the 1818
and 1831 texts he almost gives himself away, then recovers before his younger brother's
incomprehension and his father's subsequent imperious self-assurance and, rather than
be open with his family members in their crisis, closes off his knowledge and himself
from their confidence.

Mary Shelley comments on such a play of lightning on Mt. Jura in her letter of 1 June
1816. In his own response to the powerful thunder storms experienced that summer,
Percy Bysshe Shelley characterized the summit of Mont Blanc as the "home" of the "voiceless
lightning": "Mont Blanc," lines 136-37.

Victor suddenly reminds us that this is a first-person narrative that may inscribe
a personal agenda. It is obviously of some value for Mary Shelley to keep her tale
"interesting," but Victor's recurrent concern with its impact raises questions about
his disinterestedness and his reliability as a narrator.

Mary Shelley emphasizes the extent to which Elizabeth Lavenza not only has her feet
on the ground, but with her keen eyes surveys its opportunities as well. If her horizons,
in comparison with Victor's (or Walton's), seem limited by her expectations as a woman,
the drift of this sentence would suggest that they are also insistently humane. On
a biographical level the passage may reveal Mary Shelley's independent distrust of
the legal profession brought on by the problems Percy encountered from his father's
attorney as he attempted to secure the annuity promised him.

In distinguishing so sharply between scientific and moral arenas of thought, or between
metaphysics and ethics as branches of philosophy, Victor unconsciously begins to raise
what is perhaps the major issue of the novel, a human being's responsibility for knowledge.
His abstract nouns are themselves revealing: he is engaged by the "substance" or the
"spirit," whereas what impels Clerval are the "relations" of things. Clerval implicitly
looks at the universe in terms of communities, which is to say, in the largest sense,
as political relations; Victor concentrates on individual matters in isolation. In
respect to this dialectic it is interesting to contemplate how intrinsically committed
to both its sides is Walton. That dual commitment will in the end become contradictory,
leaving Walton on the horns of a dilemma, having to choose between pure science and
moral obligation.

As in the initial paragraphs of this chapter (I:4:3), Victor immediately renames the
"creature" of the preceding sentence as a "monster." On this occasion, however, the
succession of his namings will end by adding a new, more sinister dimension to Victor's
relation with the being he created.