Emphasized here and twice repeated in the succeeding paragraph, the notion of duty
will assume a problematic but highly important position throughout Frankenstein. Its
characters are repeatedly cited in terms of the obligations for which they are held
responsible, and on occasion they even find themselves confronted with a disturbing
conflict when multiple duties interact or appear to contradict one another.

The phrase demonizes the Creature, lending him the aura of an otherworldly existence.
The overwrought language of this paragraph, appropriate as it may be to Victor's hysterical
condition, is one of the few times in the novel where Mary Shelley indulges in the
stock properties of the Gothic. By its melodramatic indulgence it testifies, if only
in contrast, to the general stylistic restraint with which Mary Shelley vests her
novel.

Drawing was a customary component of a standard gentlewoman's education in the late
eighteenth century: cf. Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication, Chapter 12. The oddity
of its being here singled out as Elizabeth's concern is that it was not a component
of Mary Shelley's Godwinian education. On the other hand, perhaps we are to understand
that this is Victor speaking, not Mary Shelley. This, then, could be another aspect
of the inherently sexist categorizing in which he engages.

A prime example of what Blake, in "London," called "mind-forg'd manacles." Victor's
emblem for himself reveals at once his sense of isolation, of being enslaved by his
obsession, and of being cut off from the natural world.

Here Mary Shelley introduces another theme that will continually surface through the
course of the novel, what Percy Bysshe Shelley in his preface to the first edition
termed "the amiableness of domestic affection" (I:Pref:3). Later, when Victor must
confront how far as a student he strayed from bring content in his family circle,
he will inveigh against his folly and even link it politically to the imperialistic
exploitation of unoffending innocent peoples (I:3:12). As with a number of elements
in this novel, however, the further one pursues the central value of the domestic
affections in Frankenstein, the more ambivalent appears their representation. For
example, there is no small irony in the fact that what makes Victor Frankenstein and
Robert Walton interesting as characters and helps to bond their friendship is their
inability to find satisfaction within such narrow limits of endeavor. And the same
might be said in 1816 for the unsanctioned alliance of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The repetition of this phrase (I:1:13 and note) calls attention to what would appear
an ideal family: close-knit, affectionate, mutually acculturating. Does it do so to
establish such an ideal as a retreat from the sublime terrors of the novel? or to
suggest that even such a model family could not be protected from ruination? or, with
an underlying sense of irony, to stress that for all his nostalgia Victor never inculcated
the values he honors as projected by the family? Similar questions surround the other
"ideal" domestic scene of the novel, the De Laceys' cottage (II:3:15).

Although no reader of Frankenstein, if asked to list its chief concerns, would be
likely to narrow the range to the value of domesticity and virtue, we can discern
in this emphasis a veiled attempt to steer potential critics away from an attack on
the novel's political or religious implications. At the same time, the domestic affections
are certainly of import for the novel, yet like many other themes encountered in its
progressive development, their value becomes increasingly ambiguous.

This phrase carries rich connotations in Mary Shelley's time. The Domestic Affections,
for instance, is the title of the first mature volume of poetry by Felicia Hemans
(1812), a volume in which she first laid claim to speak as the central female voice
of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. The mythos of the enclosed domestic space presided
over by the "Angel of the House" had a compelling power for the new order that came
into place after the defeat of Napoleon. Quietly, in the first two chapters of this
novel, Mary Shelley has inscribed it as a nurturing space for the growth of the Frankenstein
children and even for their neighbor Henry Clerval. A similar enclosed circle animated
by the "domestic affections" will form the nuclear center of the Creature's narrative
in the second volume. Much critical literature has concentrated on these seeming ideals,
some seeing a counter to the male Romantic quest, some questioning just how far Mary
Shelley actually goes in endorsing them.

It is hard for a reader not to think that such inflated phrasing was intended by Mary
Shelley to be read ironically. Yet even if these terms do call attention to themselves
in that way, their context would appear to be complicated, even ambiguous, and thus
not simply productive in the reader's mind of a countering deflation. For Mary Shelley
the most immediate resonance would be of a work written during the same summer in
which Frankenstein was begun, Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto 3. Stanza
70 of that poem contrasts the solitary Romantic impulse with the debilitating contentions
of society denounced in its opening lines.

There, in a moment, we may plunge our years
In fatal penitence, and in the blight
Of our own soul turn all our blood to tears,
And colour things to come with hues of Night;
The race of life becomes a hopeless flight
To those that walk in darkness: on the sea,
The boldest steer but where their ports invite,
But there are wanderers o'er Eternity
Whose bark drives on and on, and anchor'd ne'er shall be.

This honoring of infinite mental freedom is of a piece with the thrust of major texts
of European Romanticism, from Goethe's Faust to Wordsworth's Prelude, and nowhere
moreso than in Byron's celebration of the artist's endeavors throughout his mature
verse. Byron, however, is well aware—indeed, fashions Childe Harold's Pilgrimage around
the supposition—that the rootless searcher for an infinitely receding ideal has an
inverse double, which earlier in Canto III he had specifically demarcated, calling
his antihero Harold "The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind" (III.20).

As these terms might suggest and as his knowing quotation of Paradise Lost in Stanza
70 indicates, Byron is himself deliberately playing against an archetype he would
expect his readers immediately to recognize. It is Satan's cohort Belial who ironically
pays fulsome tribute to divine wandering, which is to say, the angelic intellectual
inquiry he has unknowingly forfeited with his fall:

     for who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated Night,
Devoid of sense and motion?
-- II.146-51.

Throughout the second book of his epic Milton plays upon the idea of wandering, equating
it with the lost condition of all the Satanic legions. After Satan leaves Hell to
scout out the new world, they are depicted as wholly unsettled in their new home:

     the ranged Powers
Disband; and, wandering, each his several way
Pursues, as inclination or sad choice
Leads him perplexed, where he may likeliest find
Truce to his restless thoughts . . .
-- II.522-26

As one group of fallen angels retires into philosophical discussion, they find their
once divine assurance replaced by a fundamental uncertainty, expressed as "wandering
mazes" of the mind.

Others apart sat on a hill retired,
In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high
Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate—
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.
Of good and evil much they argued then,
Of happiness and final misery,
Passion and apathy, and glory and shame:
Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy!—
-- II.557-65

In the meantime, their epitome Satan, reaching the gates of hell, confronts his daughter
Sin and describes himself as on a "wandering quest" (II.830) across space in search
of the newly created earth. Then, breaking out of hell and encountering the surrounding
realm of Chaos, he again characterizes himself as "Wandering this darksome desert"
(II.973). Satan's self-portrait may thus be seen to complete this series of references
that connect the "wanderers o'er Eternity" celebrated by Byron and Belial with the
darker Byronic avatar, the essentially Satanic "wandering outlaw of his own dark mind."
Knowledgeable readers of Paradise Lost (and Mary Shelley proves herself such through
out this novel's engagement with that prior text) might want, however, to recall the
terms of its very end, where Adam and Eve depart Paradise "with wandering steps and
slow" (XII.648), reminding us of how closely implicated in the idea of a fallen universe
is the human condition we share with our mythic forebears.

Of course, Mary Shelley's novel can stand on its own independent of such an elaborate
literary cross-referencing. When we finally hear from Victor Frankenstein of the vicissitudes
and despondency he has experienced in his arctic wanderings (III:7:21), we will have
another, more immediately ironic context against which to view Walton's enthusiastic
apostrophe to his new friend.

Mary Shelley is insinuating an irony whose burden will not be clear to the reader
for several chapters. Although the officers and crew of Walton's ship react with instinctive
curiosity and sympathy at the sight of what they suppose is another human being, this
particular being has never in his existence been the object of either human identification
or sympathy.