This, the second death in as many paragraphs, almost slips by without notice. But
surely Walton might have been left a patrimony by his father and thus need not have
been granted freedom from financial constraints by the death of a youth whom we may
assume was of an age comparable to his. This unexpected source of his independence,
means sufficiently ample to allow him to hire a crew and outfit an ocean-going vessel
for a lengthy voyage, testifies to the instability of fortune, the constant threat
of mortality, and even to how important are extended families in this narration. It
also rather foreshadows later events in the novel, since Victor Frankenstein's cousin
Elizabeth will also bear the cost of his success.

The caveat about Walton's boasting of his courage in the opening letter (I:L1:6),
and at the beginning of the second (I:L2:1) his insisting on the same attribute in
his crew, must extend here as well. Although certainly it is hard to see in this tribute
to his lieutenant any trace of diabolic lineaments, still, the combination of terms
driving him are inherently those of Milton's Satan.

In evoking traditional martial virtues Walton unwittingly echoes Milton's Satan who
stresses this and other such heroic virtues throughout Paradise Lost. The strongest
echo is to a passage whose dynamics will come to dominate the relationship between
Victor Frankenstein and his Creature in the novel, an attachment based more and more
on passionate revenge.

     What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?
That glory never shall his wrath or might
Extort from me.
-- I.105-111 Later in Book I Satan's vengeful courage is reinforced by Milton:      his
face
Deep scars of thunder had intrencht, and care
Sat on his faded cheek, but under brows
Of dauntless courage, and considerate pride
Waiting revenge.
-- I.600-604

If one reads back from this point into the previous paragraph, it is evident that
Victor has attempted in some sense to change the subject. His first vocative, set
in the past tense of his return to his native land, is fraught with excess, even deranged,
emotion. Victor quickly displaces it with a new, contemporary, seemingly spontaneous
effusion that, being conventionally patriotic, has the virtue of concealing the all-too
bared soul of his past self and repressing its neurotic symptoms.

An old form, synonymous with county—or, in the case of Switzerland, with canton.

This nightmare, where the Creature mutates into Elizabeth and then into Victor's mother
Caroline, offers a fascinating insight into the extremity of Victor's psychological
state. It has provided psychoanalytic critics with rich material for sometimes highly
imaginative interpretations.

Coppet, a northern suburb of Geneva, and in 1816 the home of both Germaine de Staël
and August Wilhelm Schlegel.

Ordinarily in the writings of the English Romantics, and particularly in the contemporaneous
poems of Byron (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto III) and Percy Shelley ("Mont Blanc"),
a world of never-ending process is held up as far preferable to one of known or dogmatic
limitation—in the succinct formulation of Wordsworth, "The budding rose above the
rose full blown" (The Prelude, XI.121). Here Mary Shelley quietly signals the dangers
of engaging oneself totally in such a realm of "discovery and wonder."

Mary Shelley seems to understand with acuity a phenomenon that could only have just
come into general awareness in her time. We now recognize that a paradigm shift had
occured in the previous generation, one forcing the "life sciences" into a disciplinary
partnership with the physical sciences. From that point forward all notions of distinct
animistic or quasi-magical differences separating them disappear. Furthermore, under
this conceptual format nineteenth-century scientific inquiry increasingly reduces
the processes of life themselves to merely chemical reactions.

Questions of communication that have been playing on the periphery of the novel on
several levels suddenly here move to the center in a stark form. Justine, unlike Victor
(or Walton?), does not tell her story well enough to ensure its belief.