This diction may appear strange to modern ears, implying a notion of education as
constriction. Probably, however, it would not have touched a contemporary in such
a way. In Mary Shelley's day such regulation would have been construed as an adherence
to a disciplined, systematic method of education. Still, regulation must be a means
to a perceived end. In this respect, we may take the contrasting image of Victor Frankenstein—"Natural
philosophy is the genius that has regulated my fate (I:1:15)—as quietly but insistently
ironic.

This presents a stark corrective to Walton's earlier tribute to Victor's self-containment
(I:L4:28 and note).

Once again, as in the previous chapter (see I:6:25), the question is raised of how
one can objectively measure sanity in circumstances that are themselves beyond the
ordinary. Insofar as the earlier occasion also reminded us of the precariousness of
Victor's own mental state, this iteration continues to keep that issue before our
eyes.

The language, tinged with eroticism, is suggestive of the narcissistic dimensions
of Victor's preoccupation with his knowledge and the power that might stem from it.
Johnson, in his 1755 Dictionary, becomes loquacious in his definition of the word,
suggesting shadings with implications for the novel's thematic texture:

Ecstasy; transport; violence of any pleasing passion; enthusiasm; uncommon heat of
imagination.

During the summer of 1816, M. G. Lewis, famous in the 1790s as a Gothic dramatist
and novelist, arrived in Geneva from travels in Germany to visit Byron. He brought
with him a copy of the first part of Goethe's Faust, which opens with perhaps the
most famous instance of raising the devil in modern literature. Undoubtedly, Mary
Shelley had the alchemist Johannes Faust in mind in recording the obsessions of Victor
Frankenstein. She probably also had heard from Percy Bysshe Shelley of his own youthful
fantasies toward this end. One example dates from his adolescent years at Eton College:

One day Mr. Bethell, suspecting from strange noises overhead that his pupil was engaged
in nefarious scientific pursuits, suddenly appeared in Shelley's rooms; to his consternation
he found the culprit apparently half enveloped in a blue flame. "What on earth are
you doing, Shelley?" "Please sir," came the answer in the quietest tone, "I am raising
the devil."

-- Edward Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench &
Co, 1886), I, 30.

The poet is at once more circumspect and self-dramatizing in the account of his brushes
with the supernatural in the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," stanza 5, written contemporaneously
with Frankenstein.

Although this appears a sensible maxim, on extended examination it tends to favor
a low level of ambition and to inhibit most attempts to reach beyond a status quo.
The "tranquillity" attained in this way, seeming to forestall the pursuit of excellence
in a particular field of endeavor, or a concentrated exertion to achieve a particular
goal, or, indeed, any real application of genius, rather assumes the appearance of
passivity or inertia. Although certainly, Victor's remark questions the activities
not just of himself but of his auditor, Walton, as well, and thus fits into the overall
moral rationale for his narration, this blanket reversal of both of their strongest
impulses is likely to create a counterthrust of ambiguity in the reader's reaction
to the statement.

Behind the statement and our reaction to it lies the cosmic ambiguity of Milton's
Paradise Lost, which exerts a continuing pressure on Mary Shelley's novel.

As admirable as this observation may seem at first glance, it carries an obverse side
that will soon be borne out to an extreme condition. By the end of this chapter Victor
will begin to ignore everything extrinsic to his scientific inquiry, spurning the
world outside his laboratory and devoting himself to his research there with an abandon
tantamount to a neurotic compulsion.

Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley began the Standard Novels series as a way to restore
to the public popular works of fiction that were either out of print or only available
in expensive multi-volume formats. A crucial aspect of their editorial procedure was,
where possible, to have the author revise the novel sufficiently so that a fresh copyright
could be drawn upon the new publication. Given the opportunity, Mary Shelley was happy
to have the chance to polish and, in some cases, expand upon her earlier production.
Unwittingly, however, in assigning the copyright of her work to the Standard Novels
series, she forestalled the novel's reappearance for a generation, with the consequence
that Frankenstein was not republished in England until the 1860s.

Victor unwittingly emphasizes the strong social conscience and sense of duty of his
father and other members of his family. Within a few chapters, in contrast, we will
witness his own abnegation of both qualities as he is seized by an obsession with
scientific pursuits that impels a withdrawal from all his social obligations.

Prometheus, in one strand of the myth, created human beings from clay, animating them
with fire stolen from Zeus. In another strand he stole fire in order to free humanity
from dependence upon the gods and was punished by Zeus by being chained to a peak
in the Caucasus mountains; there as an emblem of human frustration an eagle daily
tore at his liver, which was restored by night. Mary Shelley's father, William Godwin,
to whom she dedicated her first novel, stressed the second of these strands in the
section on Prometheus he wrote for his children's book, The Pantheon, or, Ancient
History of the Gods of Greece and Rome, which he published under the pseudonymn Edward
Baldwin in 1806. Mary Shelley's novel unifies all strands of the myth in a complex,
multifaceted form. Its "modernity" for the second decade of the nineteenth century
may apply broadly to revolutionary developments in political and scientific arenas
over the previous generation that transformed the intellectual landscape of Europe.
Although in the years intervening since the initial publication of Frankenstein, those
terms may be thought to have changed radically, the novel's modernity seems to have
remained curiously unaffected by such shifts in its local application.

Mary Shelley's husband Percy Bysshe Shelley began his own modernization of the Prometheus
legend barely nine months after the publication of Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus.
His Prometheus Unbound was published in 1820.