Alphonse Frankenstein's complacency stems from his sense of a professional brotherhood
with these men, for, it must be remembered from the beginning (I:1:1) of Victor's
narrative, that Alphonse too has sat in the syndic's chair, as had his ancestors before
him. Mary Shelley stresses not only the tight-knit patriarchy of Genevan society,
but also, more narrowly, the ease with which the system can implicate all its members
in an act of injustice, even when, as is the case with the Frankenstein family, they
are convinced of the innocence of the accused.

We are to recall that the Frankenstein family tradition has been to enter into public
service, most particularly acting in the capacity of syndics, or magistrates (I:1:1).
Thus Alphonse Frankenstein's sense of rectitude may be advanced here as a standard
whereby to measure that of his son, also that of his society. At the same time, as
a man who is so completely bound by the system he has served that he cannot conceive
that it might act wrongly, or who is so unprepared to recognize injustice as a potential
outcome of the weighing of purely circumstantial evidence, Alphonse Frankenstein,
the representative citizen of Geneva, may have so narrow a perspective on truth that,
even were it to appear self-evident, it might still never be wholly just.

The summer months will allow Walton to proceed north with expedition under the midnight
sun and with less fear of obstruction by ice masses than might be the case at an earlier
point in the year. As we are soon aware, however, if Walton in his romantic enthusiasm
hopes for easy passage he has radically miscalculated the treacherous conditions of
the Arctic.

This inconspicuous detail seems carefully planted by Mary Shelley to reveal how closely
tied-in Alphonse Frankenstein is to what will soon reveal itself to be a corrupt system
of justice in Geneva. It also subtly suggests how the governing elite in the patriarchal
Genevan society protects itself, a situation already alluded to at the beginning (I:1:1)
of Victor's narrative.

In the courtroom (I:7:7) Justine had surmised that she had no enemies on earth. After
a verdict that is untrue to her character and her actions, she sees nothing but enemies
around her. The norms of her world are now wholly upended. The diction accentuates
the extent to which the social constructions upon which we depend for our well-being
are arbitrary and at the same time fragile.

Victor's account of himself in these paragraphs testifies to a person on the brink
of becoming unhinged—almost paralyzed, needing two days at Lausanne to recover a sense
of purpose, invoking his native landscape in effusive tears. Such immature behavior
could be a sign of the fears he has repressed for a year and a half, and certainly
for the reader their emotional heightening portends some new disaster about to reveal
itself. At the same time, if we wish to assume that this is a novel with pretensions
to being realistic, and not merely gothic in its representation, we might wish here
to turn our attention from the ominous to the psychological. These are all symptoms
of a personality that has barely survived its breakdown. The year of convalesence
has offered tranquillity, but does not appear to have altered the essential trauma
Victor has suffered in the Creature's birth. Throughout the rest of the novel, Mary
Shelley adroitly poises her protagonist on the edge of madness, and the readers of
his behavior (a class that should include Walton as well as us) can never be quite
sure on what side of the line he stands.

A sentence with an ominous sound, resonating throughout the novel, back to Walton's
sense of isolation in Archangel, (I:L2:2), his ice-bound ship (I:L4:2), the discovery
of Victor marooned on an ice-floe (I:L4:6 and note) and to the enforced isolation
in which his Creature is forced to pass his entire existence (II:3:1 and II:8:4).
Of particular weight in this diction is its reflection of famous lines in Coleridge's
"Rime of the Ancient Mariner" to which Walton has already referred suggestively.

Victor's choice of language—passive verbs—suggests once again that he believes (or
hopes to convince Walton) that some force other than his own volition guides his investigation.

The connotations of wretchedness for Victor are markedly different than they are for
Justine, who has similarly called herself a wretch five paragraphs earlier (I:7:29).

This is the opening of the fourth chapter (I:4:1) in the original edition, which lends
weight to one's sense that what Mary Shelley describes as her "waking dream" bridges
the room in which she conceived her horror story with the bedroom in which Victor
encounters his living Creature in terror.