The circulation of the blood was established by William Harvey, 1578-1657.

That the power that Victor will use to create life is initially associated with destruction
is significant for the symbolic course of the novel. The Creature thus empowered will
ultimately be responsible for three murders.

Erasmus Darwin explains the destructive force of lightning as resulting from the emission
of light and heat through the admixture of what he calls the vitreous and resinous
ethers, in modern terms essentially positive and negative electrical charges (though
he is arguing against Benjamin Franklin's mechanical model of electricity). See Note
XII, sections 2.7, 8.1, and 11.2 of the Additional Notes to his Temple of Nature.

That the forces of nature are equally devoted to creation and destruction is an issue
whose dynamics are central to Byron's conception in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto
3, and one, likewise, that Percy Bysshe Shelley will later explore in such poems as
"The Cloud" and the "Ode to the West Wind," poems dating from 1819. In those latter
poems one can sense the influence of Indian sacred texts like the Bhagvat-Gita. It
is by no means far-fetched to suggest their applicability to Mary Shelley's large
framing conception of this novel.

Although Mary Shelley surely exaggerates the time it took her to begin her novel as
well as the anxious writer's block that inhibited her starting forth, there is a more
serious aspect to this account than her personal uncertainties. Questions concerning
the circumstances of and responsibility for creativity, the attitude with which intellectual
ambition approaches the unknown, and the moral neutrality of the human imagination,
are deeply inlaid within the structure of Frankenstein. There is thus a sense in which
this personal account in her Introduction seems intended to focus attention on such
larger, more public concerns with which the reader will soon be asked to grapple.

What is odd about this statement is not the sense of guilt embedded in it—Victor,
we will learn, has much to acknowledge on that score—but how unpenitent is the language
that expresses it. Victor's "not . . . altogether" phrase so strongly hedges the confession
that it calls attention to his rhetoric as self-serving, less than candid, and perhaps
not to be wholly trusted.

Mary Shelley calls it "the dark frowning Jura" in a letter of 1 June 1816 quoted in
The History of a Six Weeks' Tour.

The same noun is employed by Alphonse Frankenstein in the previous chapter (I:6:37).
The word conveys a sense of obligation and therefore of class difference. Again and
again it is emphasized that Justine has been raised above her rank in life by the
active interest of the Frankenstein household in her welfare. But has she really altered
her condition? Not just the family but the whole of Geneva society condescend to her
as having less than full rights to her supposedly respectable condition. The ease
with which her claims to equity are abrogated implicitly places her on a par with
Victor's Creature, named a wretch and denied the claim of human sympathy.

This would appear to be an in-joke among the writing friends, since Lord Byron's name,
in Geneva, would have been pronounced in the same French manner as this young friend
of Elizabeth's would be, bee-ROHN. Byron intended to give Allegra, the illegitimate
daughter Claire Clairmont bore in January 1817, the name of Biron.

Although not the elixir of life per se (which would give the owner perpetual youth),
Victor Frankenstein's discovery is related to that fundamental aim of alchemy and
thus is the culmination of the fascination with the occult sciences that has been
his ruling passion over the past eight years.

As Walton's first letter opens with an expression of the opposed perspectives of men
and women (I:L1:1 and note), so this initial paragraph of the first chapter accentuates
the concern of the patriarchy with replicating itself. Alphonse Frankenstein's sense
of public purpose is to reproduce himself for the good of the state. By suppressing
the role of the female in this process, he paradoxically voices what will become his
son's obsession with creating a new man without the intervention of woman. With that
creation in mind, however, it does not require of the reader an undue stretching of
the sense to regard the distinctive tone of this language, so abstracted and clinical,
as being more characteristic of Victor than of his father.

Victor's stress on the term marks it as of particular importance to him and indicates
that it is also of concern to the novel. With some pathos, Victor will begin the second
volume by recalling that he had himself "begun life with benevolent intentions" (II:1:1).
At this point we cannot know how far from disinterested benevolence Victor has strayed.
In retrospect, however, the novel's readers can easily comprehend why fervent emotions
would be generated in him by a return to civilized human standards and ethical conduct.