In the courtroom (I:7:7) Justine had surmised that she had no enemies on earth. After
a verdict that is untrue to her character and her actions, she sees nothing but enemies
around her. The norms of her world are now wholly upended. The diction accentuates
the extent to which the social constructions upon which we depend for our well-being
are arbitrary and at the same time fragile.

Victor's account of himself in these paragraphs testifies to a person on the brink
of becoming unhinged—almost paralyzed, needing two days at Lausanne to recover a sense
of purpose, invoking his native landscape in effusive tears. Such immature behavior
could be a sign of the fears he has repressed for a year and a half, and certainly
for the reader their emotional heightening portends some new disaster about to reveal
itself. At the same time, if we wish to assume that this is a novel with pretensions
to being realistic, and not merely gothic in its representation, we might wish here
to turn our attention from the ominous to the psychological. These are all symptoms
of a personality that has barely survived its breakdown. The year of convalesence
has offered tranquillity, but does not appear to have altered the essential trauma
Victor has suffered in the Creature's birth. Throughout the rest of the novel, Mary
Shelley adroitly poises her protagonist on the edge of madness, and the readers of
his behavior (a class that should include Walton as well as us) can never be quite
sure on what side of the line he stands.

A sentence with an ominous sound, resonating throughout the novel, back to Walton's
sense of isolation in Archangel, (I:L2:2), his ice-bound ship (I:L4:2), the discovery
of Victor marooned on an ice-floe (I:L4:6 and note) and to the enforced isolation
in which his Creature is forced to pass his entire existence (II:3:1 and II:8:4).
Of particular weight in this diction is its reflection of famous lines in Coleridge's
"Rime of the Ancient Mariner" to which Walton has already referred suggestively.

Victor's choice of language—passive verbs—suggests once again that he believes (or
hopes to convince Walton) that some force other than his own volition guides his investigation.

The connotations of wretchedness for Victor are markedly different than they are for
Justine, who has similarly called herself a wretch five paragraphs earlier (I:7:29).

This is the opening of the fourth chapter (I:4:1) in the original edition, which lends
weight to one's sense that what Mary Shelley describes as her "waking dream" bridges
the room in which she conceived her horror story with the bedroom in which Victor
encounters his living Creature in terror.

This was the first line Mary Shelley wrote in the composition of the novel, according
to the account she gave of its gestation in the preface of 1831 (I:Intro:13). Everything
earlier in its exposition was added later.

The shadowy presence of Italy behind this narrative has not been explained. It may
reflect discussions about moving there that Mary and Percy Shelley were having while
she was writing the novel: shortly after its publication they did, indeed, emigrate
to Italy. On a less personal note, however, the presence of Italy does extend the
geographical bounds of the pan-European setting to the south, just as the opening
in Russia extends them far to the north. Safie, it should be noted, also travels north
from Italy (Leghorn-Livorno), to the De Lacey's cottage in Germany, but without male
protection (II:6:19).

What is it Mary Shelley sees? The plural suggests that the antecedent is "realities."
But the realities she remarks are those of Victor's bedchamber as well as her own.
Like hers it is described as barely illuminated "by the dim and yellow light of the
moon, as it forced its way through the window-shutters" (see I:4:3). As in the previous
paragraph, the novelist seems deliberately to conflate her experiences with those
of her fictional protagonist.

Victor's highly conscious sense of the effect of his narrative, from now on, will
become a continuing motif (see also, for instance, I:3:13). That he is self-conscious
as an artist may be thought a normal attribute of Romantic texts. But Mary Shelley
may have a more specific object in mind that that of fitting smoothly into her culture's
expectations. Victor's conscious manipulation of his reader (Walton and, beyond Walton,
us) continually intrudes on the supposition of its truth.