This addition to the text seems motivated by a wish to make Margaret Saville a less
shadowy presence behind it. The implicit suggestion is that she is sufficiently older
than her brother to have cared for him when they were orphaned, though, considering
the twin facts that she has children in her own family and Robert is now 28 years
old, we must assume that the difference in age would amount to something like a decade
(III:WC:11). The added phrase also emphasizes the role of feminine nurturer assumed
by all the prominent women of the novel.

Age is always relative. Mary Shelley was some two months shy of her twentieth birthday
when she began writing Frankenstein and well past twenty-one when the novel appeared
in print. Moreover, before she began the novel toward the end of June 1816, she had
registered experiences highly unusual for a young woman in the constrained environment
of Britain, including eloping with a married man and twice giving birth. That said,
it is true that the author was in years yet an adolescent when she wrote this novel
and that, historically speaking, most of its readers have been struck by a range of
knowledge, maturity of conception, and intellectual ambition unusual in one so young.

Here what had been ambiguous in the earlier use of the word "wretch" (I:4:2) hardens
into monstrosity, a condition beyond the realm of the human. By the end of the paragraph
the Creature, in Victor's view, will once more transmogrify into a further dimension
of estrangement, the supernatural.

Here we encounter the first, ironic sign of Victor's bonding with his Creature. He
first called him a "wretch" in the second paragraph of this chapter (I:4:2), and has
just reiterated the epithet two sentences before this. Victor's adverb may seem innocent
enough, but when juxtaposed with the many instances later in the novel in which he
and his Creature will exchange places or nomenclature, it functions as a clear opening
signal of the complex narrative patterning to come.

The Creature has been "named" once before by Victor, in the prologue, as "daemon"
(I:L4:16). The nomenclature in which he is vested confers an initial identity upon
him that will shift overnight from this enigmatic term of alienation—meaning either
being unhappy or vile (from the Old English word for "exile")—to the wholly out of
bounds, the monstrous (I:4:3).

However odd this may sound to contemporary ears, it is certainly true that Percy Bysshe
Shelley deeply romanticized Mary's origins, seeing her as singled out by her birth
for great literary accomplishment. He pays tribute to her in these terms in his Dedication
to The Revolt of Islam, the epic-romance he wrote simultaneously with her composition
of Frankenstein. Although some commentators have seen the pressures to write to which
her lover/husband subjected Mary Shelley as pernicious, it did not originate with
him so much as in the milieu in which Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was raised. There,
writing (William Godwin) and publishing (Mary Jane Clairmont, his second wife) was
what one did.

This phrase recurs with frequency in the critical literature about the novel, partly
because it stands in such contrast to the almost divine attributes with which Victor
has up to now been honoring himself and his discovery. In the phrase there is not
only a sense of the irreducibly brute physical reality of what would have actually
constituted a butcher-shop but as well a decided undertone of self-loathing.

The "wondrous power" is magnetism. Mary Shelley, working within the accepted scientific
discourse of her time, in this second paragraph of her novel, is carefully establishing
a conceptual—the term in her time would have been "philosophical"—base for it in physics.
The key is provided by Percy Bysshe Shelley's citation, in the opening sentence of
the Preface (I:Pref:1), of Erasmus Darwin, to whom the reader may turn for further
elucidation of the scientific grounding of the novel.

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 (Walton, 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.

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.