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.

This is one of the two clearly identifiable but irreconcilable dates in the novel.
The other is supplied by the letter of Alphonse Frankenstein to Victor at Ingolstadt
recounting the death of his brother (I:6:2).

Alphonse's sister, by the conventional arrangements of the time, would have been provided
by her father with a dowry of some size that legally became the property of her husband
to do with as he willed. In this case the entire sum has been set aside as her personal
"fortune" and is now returned for the education and welfare of her daughter. This
is an exceedingly generous act on the part of Signore Lavenza, one beyond any legal
necessity on his part.

Why Mary Shelley should begin the chapter by deliberately obliterating all suspense
is a good question not easily answered. Certainly, Victor's remark asks us to scrutinize
how this court conducts itself as a social institution and as a microcosm of the polity
of Geneva. Since Geneva's republican government (I:1:1 and note) and its softening
of class hierarchies (I:5:3 and note) have already been admiringly stressed, we might
expect from Mary Shelley's political allegiances to witness a trial conducted in ideal
circumstances. But that is far from being the case. Instead of a jury of peers, a
panel of male magistrates decides Justine's lot, and to exonerate a verdict reached
by only circumstantial evidence they employ the coercive power of the church to extort
a false confession. Victor's private denunciation of these proceedings does not indict
his own society or consider the extent to which his own family, that long line of
syndics, is complicit in an injustice that is all but institutionalized. It will be
left for his Creature, who is likewise victimized, to articulate the more radical
implications of such a society (see II:5:15).

Having quoted from Byron 's writings of the summer of 1816, here Mary Shelley seems
also to allude to the poem that same summer's experiences prompted from Percy Bysshe
Shelley, "Mont Blanc," 76-83.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," line 134, repeated in
lines 378 and 403 (1798: lines 383, 408). In the 1818 edition, the allusion is noted
only through quotation marks, allowing the knowing reader to make the connection between
Coleridge's sublime tale of moral transgression and the events to unfold in the novel.
No effort is made to affect the time frame of the novel. In the 1831 text (I:L2:6),
on the other hand, Walton self-consciously attributes his own thirst for adventure
partly to the influence of this poem, presumably encountered among the volumes of
poetry he read after exhausting Uncle Thomas's library of discovery. This forces an
impossible chronology on the novel, since Coleridge's poem was published, as Walton
dates his letters, only fifteen months before the 17--s became the 18--s.

That the forward-looking and sunny Elizabeth harbors such gloom within her reinvokes
the dark tones that have been insistently arising in what has seemed at times a text
promoting the happiness of domestic enclosure. Mary Shelley brings the first volume,
the first third, of her novel to a close with her central characters in something
approaching complete despair over the efficacy of political and social systems.

Invented by Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) in 1674 and continually refined thereafter.
By the end of the eighteenth century this instrument had assumed the shape familiar
to modern science.