This sudden elevation of language should not be merely dismissed as a facile rhetorical
heightening for effect. What Mary Shelley seems deliberately to be doing here is evoking
a succession of elements and emotional states associated with the Sublime in eighteenth-century
aesthetic theory. As the Creature in his coming to life is associated with the Sublime,
so he is its avatar wherever he appears in the novel, either living within a sublime
landscape (e.g. Mont Blanc or northern Siberia) or terrifying the human beings whom
he encounters by his extra-human size and countenance.

The novel reverts once more to the importance of male bonding, already developed in
Victor's narrative in the warm relationship between Alphonse Frankenstein and his
wife's father, M. Beaufort, represented in its second paragraph (I:1:2 and note),
and before that in the intimacy struck between Walton and Victor aboard ship (I:L4:24).

The first embarkation on a major and, to some critics, puzzling feature of this novel,
its all but exclusive emphasis on male bonding.

If we consider novels that are contemporary with Frankenstein and have been accorded
a similar canonical reputation, we might expect a woman novelist to emphasize the
richness of female relationships (for instance, the sisters of Austen's Sense and
Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice) and a man (the classic example might be Walter
Scott in Ivanhoe) to concentrate on the representation of male competition and loyalties.

Perhaps, however, we are overly conditioned by stereotypes. On the one hand, there
is the fact that Frankenstein was published anonymously and was taken by at least
one critic, Walter Scott himself, to be the work of a male author (see his review
in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine). From this it could be argued that Mary Shelley
might have wished to escape the preoccupation with female experience in contemporary
"lady novelists." And on the other hand, from a feminist perspective it could likewise
be argued that a women might have a very different take on that male competition and
loyalty than a man. Inasmuch as masculine terms might be said to define the boundaries
of a woman's existence, Mary Shelley might have thought an exclusionary male experience
to be a province to which she had every right to demand access. This would have been
particularly the case in 1816, after nearly a quarter century of almost continuous
warfare in Europe.

Elizabeth's candor is exemplary of her virtue and stands in marked contrast to Victor's
resolve of silence.

Candor is an important character trait in the novel, and it is to Walton's credit
that he so naturally evinces it. His openness will elicit a similar frankness from
Victor Frankenstein, who for the first time in his existence will tell his entire
story. But that narration, then, raises a serious problem. Not only are there many
signs of instability in it, the major one being Victor's wish to revise it even as
it goes along (III:WC:4 and note); but his earlier lack of candor with his family
and friends is akin to dishonesty, which, if so common a practice throughout his mature
life, must raise serious doubts about the truthfulness of the narration that comprises
the bulk of this novel.

This feminine ideal stands in sharp contrast to the masculine pursuit of glory (I:L1:6,
I:1:18), and, as marked here, it will continue to resonate through the course of the
novel. In some sense the theme has already been signalled in Walton's attendance on
the exhausted Victor Frankenstein (I:L4:10).

It would appear once more that Victor has read and inculcated the wisdom of one of
his most celebrated countrymen in the eighteenth century, Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801),
whose Physiognomische Fragmente (1775-1778)—translated into English in 1789-1798 as
Essays on Physiognomy— purported to show how character could be inferred from facial
features and proportions. Here "open" carries moral connotations, indicative of the
"frankness of disposition" with which this sentence ends. See I:3:1 and note for an
earlier instance where physiognomy appears to enter into his discourse.

Mary Shelley was aware that her own character had been predicted from her infant physiognomy
by her father's close friend, the scientist William Nicholson.

Nicholson (1753-1815), from an initial meeting in 1786, became one of William Godwin's
closest friends, a major influence on the conception of his Enquiry concerning Political
Justice, and his source during more than a quarter-century for up-to-date knowledge
in the sciences. He and his wife were among the most attentive of friends during the
fatal illness of Mary Wollstonecraft. On the infant Mary Godwin's nineteenth day,
Godwin persuaded Nicholson to write a lengthy prediction of his daughter's character
based on her physiognomy, according to the system popularized by Lavater.

Nicholson's most important contribution to chemistry was the discovery of the process
of electrolysis of water, using the new advances in electricity developed by Alessandro
Volta and others. He discovered that the application of electrical currents to water
causes the water to break into its component elements, hydrogen and oxygen — the first
chemical reaction produced by electricity.

In addition to being a practicing chemist, Nicholson was instrumental in propagating
knowledge in the field. His introduction to Natural Philosophy (1781) was widely known.
He founded The Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and the Arts in 1797, the
first scientific journal not under the aegis of a scientific institution. And in 1809,
he published the British Encyclopedia; or, Dictionary of arts and sciences. Comprising
an accurate and popular view of the present improved state of human knowledge in six
volumes, from which the extracts concerning galvanic experimentation in the first
decade of the nineteenth century, a process of which he was among the major exponents,
are invaluable. This consolidation of the contemporary scientific scene has long been
understood to have been instrumental in making Percy Bysshe Shelley "a Newton among
poets." What should be equally clear is that the acquaintance of Mary Shelley with
this remarkable man, thus begun in infancy, would have amply provided her with a theoretical
understanding of the scientific bases on which her novel purports to rest.

As Nicholson's account emphasizes (C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and
Contemporaries (London, 1876), pp. 289-90), she, too, possessed a "capacious forehead."

This is a first indication that women and men do not generally see eye to eye in this
novel. It will be replicated in Elizabeth's fears for the health and mental stability
of Victor Frankenstein, and, like that analogy, suggests that the domestic tranquillity
over which women conventionally preside is threatened by the sublime overreaching
of male ambition.

The language of necessity here is curious and seems indicative of Victor's almost
instinctive recourse to a sense of destiny to absolve himself of guilt. The theological
implications of this phrase are as serious as are those of the preceding paragraph,
and equally heretical.