The sexist stereotypes in which this tribute is expressed can be (as they have been)
laid at Mary Shelley's doorstep. But it is, after all, Victor who is speaking, and
his monologue is telling the reader a great deal about him that he does not seem to
realize. Since this is a technique by which fictional characterization is traditionally
accomplished, perhaps the reader will want to hold him as a character fully responsible
for his own sentiments. The Preface, we will remember, went out of its way to separate
the author from her characters (I:Pref:2).

Leaving Victor's perspective to the side, we may, as readers, surely honor the affectionate
warmth with which Elizabeth assumes her nurturing domestic role and melds her small
community together. We might wish, however, to suspend judgment on its absolute value
until later events can confirm that it profits her as much as it does those she so
selflessly serves.

Walton's polar exploration, with its concern for the secret of magnetism (I:L1:2),
and Victor's experiments with electricity (I:1:23) as vital fluid intersect with one
of the most exciting scientific breakthroughs of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. Although Erasmus Darwin's scientific take on the linkage—that it is somehow
to be explained by basic chemistry rather than the mechanics of physics—is wrong,
what impels it is not. Indeed, though it is pedestrian in manner, the lengthy twelfth
note to The Temple of Nature is nothing short of visionary. There Darwin first extensively
expounds the dynamics of electricity, then turns to the similar processes of magnetism,
bifurcated figuratively between arctic and antarctic poles, and in the end links the
two with a rudimentary conception of atomic physics (only to be expounded by John
Dalton in the decade after Darwin's death), and with the third component of the Grand
Unified Field Theory, gravitation. That Mary Shelley is aware of this conjunction
can be deduced from Walton's hope that his discoveries will help astronomers "regulate
a thousand celestial observations."

The reference seems to be to a theatrical representation in which time is telescoped
or to a painting representing different time frames simultaneously. The iconic overlap
of nativity scenes in Christian art would be a common instance of the latter effect.

The vast power of a sublime nature returns to the text, preparing us for the reintroduction
of the being animated by and associated with the "vital fluid" of electricity. However,
as with the previous eruption of lightning within the text (I:1:22), what is implicitly
emphasized is not its creative power, but its capacity for destruction.

Victor has fainted. The word "lifeless" had a broader range of signification in Mary
Shelley's day than it does now. Johnson's 1755 Dictionary offers three meanings for
the adjective, only the first, which is the modern definition, being inappropriate
to Victor's state.

1. Dead; deprived of life.
2. Unanimated; void of life.
3. Without power, force, or spirit.

Letter IV actually contains the entirety of the subsequent action of the novel, which
returns to an openly epistolary form near its end (III:WC:1).

Victor had in retrospect characterized the nature of his cloistered and obsessive
study at Ingolstadt "unlawful," which he then defined as "not befitting the human
mind," in I:3:12. Here, one senses that the emphasis is less on social or antisocial
behavior than on what an individual human being has the right to do: "devices" implies
a means by which actions are performed.

Lausanne, on the northern shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, is the capital of the
Vaud canton and an ancient cultural center to rival Geneva, located some fifty miles
away. Built on the Jorat hills, the city offers a prospect of the entire Lake, as
well as of the Alps to the south beyond it.

It was conquered by the Protestant Reformers the Bernese in the sixteenth century.
In 1798, however, Lausanne fell to Napoleon, who made the city the capital of the
Vaud canton of the new Helvetic Republic in 1803. Its pre-Napoleonic political structure
is described in the 4th edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica (1797). For a time
in the eighteenth century, Lausanne was home to Voltaire, Rousseau, and Edward Gibbon
(who wrote most of his Decline and Fall there).

Percy Bysshe Shelley recounts the associations of Lausanne with Gibbon in the third
letter of A History of a Six Weeks' Tour.

In other words, Victor rejects the possibility of creating unlimited gold in the interest
of discovering the root laws of life. As the complicated mix of his character begins
to take shape, Mary Shelley stresses from the outset that Victor Frankenstein is motivated
not by greed but by a pure impulse of scientific discovery.

These languages are considerable accomplishments for an adolescent, though both Percy
Bysshe Shelley and William Godwin could assert similar claims. More important, with
the exception of German, by this time in her life so could Mary Shelley. Within the
fictional ambience itself, the reader can imagine how rekindled, in listening to this
account, would have been Walton's retrospective guilt over his undereducated, undirected
adolescence (I:L2:2).