In the last paragraph of the preceding entry (I:L4:23), written eight days earlier,
Victor had still been a "stranger." Mary Shelley seems deliberately to be marking
an intensification of Walton's affection for Victor Frankenstein.

This seemingly strange shift in Victor's autobiography, without parallel in the account
of his early education in the first edition, may be intended by Mary Shelley in her
emendations to prepare us for, and make a logical link to, Victor's mental state just
before he is rescued by Walton and his crew. In the last chapter of his narration
(III:7:5) he accounts himself under the special protection of guiding spirits who
guide his vengeance against the Creature.

Coming as it does at the end of this chapter on his formative influence, this strong
commitment to a guiding destiny testifies to a belief system through which Victor
filters his entire existence, thus in effect rewriting it. Where a reader might wish
to observe in Victor's behavior a normal adolescent lethargy or an understandable
lack of assurance about the future course of his preparation for adulthood, Victor
sees the hand of Providence.

A heavy sea with large waves. Although they are still ice-bound, the sailors can hear
the sound of waves breaking in the distance and know that the ice surrounding them
will soon crack. The novel will return to this point, as at the very end of his narrative
Victor Frankenstein recounts the same phenomenon from his dangerously vulnerable position
on the ice in III:7:20 and note. See also III:7:24 and note.

Prussia and Austria would be the obvious surrounding context for Switzerland, but
two sentences later the reader is given pre-revolutionary France and England as natural
referents (and thus implicit allies), a sly but penetrating political thrust on Mary
Shelley's part. The defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo had occured in June 1815, a little
over a year before the novel was begun, and the "Holy Alliance" of autocracies had
through the Congress of Vienna reinstated itself in firm control of the continent
of Europe.

The major dissimilitude in this description is between highly conventional notions
of essential masculine and feminine attributes. Whether this is Victor's mode of categorizing,
Mary Shelley's, or that conventional to her age is a moot issue. For readers concerned
with Mary Shelley's feminist commitment or with the way gender destinctions are reflected
by early nineteenth-century novels, Elizabeth's lack of self-assertiveness and her
easy acquiescence in a traditional female role have generally posed unsettling questions.

It appears from this paragraph that the only avocation in Geneva is getting married.
Victor's lack of desire to fit the pattern of his friends stands out in sharp contrast.

William Godwin, 1756-1836, political philosopher and novelist, husband of Mary Wollstonecraft,
and father of Mary Shelley.

Godwin's works, including works of political philosophy (most importantly An Enquiry
concerning Political Justice) and several novels (including Caleb Williams and St.
Leon), advocate intellectual self-development through the rule of reason, personal
freedom bordering on political anarchy, the dismantling of inherited institutions,
religious liberalism, and disinterested justice.

Political Justice emphasizes the deleterious impact of all systems of government on
the ethical and intellectual development of individual human beings. In this systematically
argued critique Godwin posits the ultimate perfectibility of mankind if freed from
repressive social structures. In his novels Godwin obliquely underscores these same
philosophical and social issues, adding to them a continuing gallery of portraits
of male figures whose obsessions and self-regard are supported by the patriarchal
institutions of modern civilization. Both his philosophical and fictional concerns
are, in turn, strongly reflected in the characterization and the events of Frankenstein.

In her revisions Mary Shelley somewhat mitigates the picture of institutional injustice
so starkly presented in the first edition. In particular, she pulls back sharply from
her earlier representation of the Church's place in this inhumane structure. The Justine
of 1831 becomes much more conventionally pious and more tranquilly submissive to what
she conceives to be the will of heaven.

The reasons for this shift in tone may be many and complicated. One obvious one is
that England was on the brink of the passage of the Great Reform Bill when her novel
was republished in 1831, and the prelude to that sweeping legislation, the repeal
of the Corporation and Test Acts in 1828, had opened an era of religious freedom and
toleration in which such attacks would have seemed truly of another age and ungenerous,
if not intolerant, in and of themselves.

If the reader can free this action of its melodramatic trappings, its intense physicality
testifies to how seriously agitated is Victor Frankenstein. It is secondarily an action
traditionally associated with Milton's Satan (e.g., Paradise Lost, VI.340).

The lieutenant's driving ambitions mirror those of Walton: the ambivalence that surrounds
Walton's invocation of glory in his initial letter (I:L1) must thus apply to him as
well.