The major contrast 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.

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.

Another example of an unexpectedly dark context in which to encounter a word so generally
privileged in English Romanticism: see I:3:7 and I:3:11. Victor's imagination appears
to lack restraint, common morality, and the instinct for self-preservation. It even
subverts the essential principles of his education, substituting fantasy for reason.

Frankenstein's inclusion of distillation among the "processes of which my favourite
authors were utterly ignorant" is surprising, for distillation was central to many
alchemical processes. The eighteenth century did, however, see a number of important
scientific developments involving both distillation and the use of steam, culminating
in Watt's steam engine.

Here Victor is explicit about his dependence on the anatomical theater of the University
of Ingolstadt. Although nowhere in Mary Shelley's writings does she refer to her knowledge
of the actual university facilities in Ingolstadt, which in the eighteenth century
included a state-of-the art anatomy theater and dissecting table, this detail does
appear to indicate an awareness of the exact particulars of the institution.

The first such disciple of Albertus Magnus was his student Thomas Aquinas, who was
the greatest medieval systematizer of knowledge in the Aristotelian mode of division
and subdivision and by no means a proselytizer for alchemy. Albertus Magnus, it should
be noted, was for a time the bishop of Regensburg, the nearest principal medieval
city on the Danube to the north of Ingolstadt, the university city to which Victor
travels in the next chapter (I:2:8). Though he attributes the choice of university
to his parents (I:2:1), perhaps Victor's sense of discipleship to the bishop contributed
to his acquiescence.

In her revision Mary Shelley seems conscious of the uncanny freight this word carries
from beyond the novel. It is, we recall, the first noun we encounter in the fiction,
a word uttered by Margaret Saville before Walton's departure from London and repeated
by him in writing her (I:L1:1)

From the French for "speed," and pronounced as if French: a public stagecoach. The
Swiss diligence would likely emanate from Zurich, passing through Munich on its way
to Ingolstadt.

Once again, as in the previous chapter (I:1:15), Victor suggests that the course of
his development is not of his own making, but was necessitated by his professional
commitment. His linking of his destiny to scientific knowledge has the effect of transferring
the systematic logic of the discipline to the random events of his life, an inductive
leap that, however much it may lack a rational base, will bear profound consequences.

If we revert to the actual chronology of Frankenstein, we realize that it was only
the day before that Victor had told Walton that his "fate [was] nearly fulfilled"
(I:L4:32 and note), but left the reasons for that assurance totally unarticulated.
In the present narration he will slowly begin to explore the range of determinants
of his "destiny," starting a few paragraphs earlier by acknowledging that it ought
to have been tied to his patriarchal inheritance as a set of understood family obligations
(I:1:1), a duty that is here to be set in opposition to a self-absorbed obsession
with scientific discovery, which is the evil "genius" he will now delineate.