In Percy Bysshe Shelley's first major poem, Queen Mab (1813), the male friend (and
author-surrogate) who awaits the dreaming Ianthe's awakening is named Henry. Clerval
is at least partly drawn as a portrait of an idealized Shelley.

As the Dante allusion in the previous paragraph suggests, hell is a mental state.
Victor's words make a direct allusion to one of Milton's most famous passages in Paradise
Lost, where Satan comes face to face with the responsibility for his own damnation:

Hadst thou the same free will and power to stand?
Thou hadst: whom hast thou then or what to accuse,
But Heaven's free love dealt equally to all?
Be then his love accursed, since love or hate,
To me alike, it deals eternal woe.
Nay, cursed be thou; since against his thy will
Chose freely what it now so justly rues.
Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell. . . .
-- IV.66-75

As with other of his comments in this passage, readers may sense that what Walton
signifies is conceptually broader than what he actually realizes he is saying: thus
the value of his comment is more in alerting us to a problematic issue than in giving
us a thumbnail sketch that will define Victor Frankenstein forever in our minds. Where
Walton sees a praiseworthy self-containment in his friend's comportment, indeed, many
critics remark the dangers of Romantic solipsism. In Victor's own account his introversion
and obsessiveness will be stressed as character traits that were factors contributing
to his downfall.

Both Elizabeth and Victor, endeavoring to alter the verdict through a rhetoric that
would move the judges' hearts, completely fail in their attempt. Once again, eloquence
is placed at the center of the discourse and in a highly problematic light. Why it
is so problematic might best be gauged by comparing this work to the major poem that
Percy Bysshe Shelley was writing simultaneously with it, The Revolt of Islam. There
the heroine Cythna so moves the hearts of her auditors through her eloquent appeals
to their common humanity as to foment a radical revolution that overthrows the tyranny
that has oppressed them. Although it is a conspicuous feature of Cythna's presence,
Canto 8 of that poem is exemplary since it is entirely devoted to this process.

In the Shelleys' household, then, eloquence holds a privileged place as a tool of
non-violent political reform. Where it fails so grievously as here, the consequences
may be very great. That Mary Shelley is herself aware of this dimension may be inferred
from her letter of June 1 1816 where she calmly notes of the French "liberation" of
Switzerland in 1798 that all "the magistrates . . . were shot by the populace during
that revolution." It may give the reader pause to realize that one of those actual
magistrates, were he still himself among the living, would have been Alphonse Frankenstein.

Like so much of the diction in this chapter the phrase can be read in two senses:
first, as laughter without cause, as though Victor's heart is not in it; second, as
a cold, self-obsessed, or unfeeling discharge of nervous energy. Although the first
meaning is the natural way to construe the diction, the second remains behind, like
a sour aftertaste, to affect our later judgments. It is allied to the intimation of
madness expressed by the wildness of Victor's eyes.

This is the second time (see also I:3:10) that Victor uses this phrase in the chapter
to indicate the totality of his commitment to his program of research.

Given the erudition of her father and her husband, Mary Shelley would have known of
Aristophanes' account, in Plato's Symposium, of the origin of love occuring when primitive
man was split in two: thereafter one half was always yearning for the completion of
the self in the other. (P. B. Shelley was to translate the Symposium in the spring
of 1818.) Here she plays against the myth ironically, for, as we will see in the sequel,
Victor Frankenstein and his Creature will pursue a course of adversarial antagonism
that is as passionately intense as love. It is frequently figured in the imagery of
doubling and mirroring.

Once again, Victor yields his will to his passion. But the terms he uses seem to invoke
something beyond the question of free will and determinism. Victor at this point recognizes
that his imagination, the creative power of fantasy, is driving his pursuit of the
unknown, which tends to implicate a faculty ordinarily privileged in British Romanticism.
Something of the same order happened four paragraphs earlier, when the imagination
was likewise cited (I:3:7).

Mary Shelley, though an only child, did not grow up like one, since there were four
different parental configurations for the five children of the Godwin household. Yet,
the venerated memory of her father's approach to her education is surely implicit
in this "silken cord" by which Victor, led insensibly on for his own betterment, comes
to enjoy his education.

In her revisions Mary Shelley strengthens the similarities between Victor Frankenstein
and Robert Walton. In this case, although Victor is about to undergo a systematic
education, the 1831 text leaves him virtually as lacking in discipline as Walton represented
himself to be in writing to his sister (1831:I:L1:2 and note). In the context provided
by the terms of Walton's letter, where he remarks how much he needs a friend to help
regulate his mind, Victor's lack of a close associate in these early weeks spent almost
in solitude is ominous.