This interpolation in the 1831 text seems innocent enough, perhaps designed to show
that the young Victor Frankenstein is on the path to a mature respect for a scientific
discipline and those who practice it. On closer examination, however, this seemingly
innocent remark begins to build a foundation for a vexing issue in the novel: the
extent to which Victor's attempt to condition his rhetoric to the interests of his
listener is merely manipulative and thus, whatever its appearance, not wholly to be
trusted. As the novel progresses, this narrative indeterminacy will touch most of
its major characters.

Mathematics is the one area of the scientific disciplines in which Victor already
excels (I:1:26 and note).

The stress on mathematics seems curious, given Victor's interests in occult and magical
lore. Still, Albertus Magnus was best known as a mathematician, and his disciple could
be expected to follow the master's bent. Perhaps Mary Shelley also wishes to direct
our attention to an underlying inclination to abstraction in Victor that will account
for his tendency to isolate himself from family obligations.

Just such an event happened early on in the expedition of Sir John Ross, as the Victory
was dismasted in a gale on 14 June 1829. An engraving of this appears opposite page
32 in Sir John Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a north-west passage
and of a residence in the Arctic Regions, during the Years 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832,
and 1833 (London: Webster, 1835).

Mary Shelley has already prepared for Walton's receptivity to Victor's story, since
in the narrative he acknowledges to his sister, "there is a love for the marvellous,
a belief in the marvellous, intertwined in all my projects" (I:L2:6). In the context
in which Mary Shelley was writing, an apt synonym for the word would be "romantic."

Here the geographical contrast is made sharply clear: east and west divide along a
rigid gender demarcation. That Mary Shelley so conspicuously calls attention to Victor's
gender stereotyping here allows the reader to be sensitive to it elsewhere in his
discourse without feeling that the text is being stretched to support a feminist interpretation
foreign to it.

The lieutenant, earlier introduced by Walton as a person who "retains some of the
noblest endowments of humanity" (I:L2:4), perhaps naturally thinks of the Creature
within a conventional human framework, twice referring to him as a "man." This nomenclature
will change radically as Victor seizes the discourse and begins to define its categories.

The aspirations to happiness of all the major characters of the novel take very different
paths. Although less effectual than the principal male characters in bringing their
dreams to reality, it might be said that the women characters are all more directly
engaged in increasing the actual store of happiness in the world, whereas the men
in general attach themselves to a theoretical concept that rules their destiny with
often destructive results. Justine's emphasis on a practical ethics may also go beyond
conventional gender roles, reflecting the down-to-earth necessities of a servant who
has no choice but to work for and with others to increase human comfort.

A major hazard of navigation in polar regions was a wholesale distortion of magnetic
instruments caused by the proximity of the pure magnetic impulse. Walton seems to
expect that once the actual pole is reached, one could learn the principles by which
to adjust for such distortion. In 1831 Sir John Ross for the first time located the
magnetic pole, which is distinct from the actual geographical pole, in the far northern
reaches of Canadian territory. His account of his supposed discovery bears an enthusiasm
and rhetorical inflation little different from the tone Walton adopts here. From the
evidence gathered in the Parry and Ross expeditions of 1827 and 1829-31, respectively,
Michael Faraday was, indeed, to do just that, as promulgated in what became known
as Faraday's Law. A different desire seems to be drawing the novel's second searcher
for the north pole, and the one who will presumably discover its exact site a full
century before Commodore Parry, Victor Frankenstein's Creature. In Walton's fourth
letter to his sister (I:L4:3) he innocently recounts being passed by this figure on
his way to the pole. See also "wondrous power" above.

The "astonishment" of two paragraphs earlier has transmogrified into a much deeper
suspicion on Walton's part. The reader should take the doubt that is planted here
seriously, since questions concerning Victor Frankenstein's sanity will intensify
as the novel continues, becoming pronounced late in his narrative—which is to say,
in the novel's chronology, only weeks before his rescue.