The stress on mathematics seems curious, given Victor's interests in occult and magical
lore. Still, Albertus Magnus was best known as a mathematician, and his disciple could
be expected to follow the master's bent. Perhaps Mary Shelley also wishes to direct
our attention to an underlying inclination to abstraction in Victor that will account
for his tendency to isolate himself from family obligations.

Just such an event happened early on in the expedition of Sir John Ross, as the Victory
was dismasted in a gale on 14 June 1829. An engraving of this appears opposite page
32 in Sir John Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a north-west passage
and of a residence in the Arctic Regions, during the Years 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832,
and 1833 (London: Webster, 1835).

Mary Shelley has already prepared for Walton's receptivity to Victor's story, since
in the narrative he acknowledges to his sister, "there is a love for the marvellous,
a belief in the marvellous, intertwined in all my projects" (I:L2:6). In the context
in which Mary Shelley was writing, an apt synonym for the word would be "romantic."

Here the geographical contrast is made sharply clear: east and west divide along a
rigid gender demarcation. That Mary Shelley so conspicuously calls attention to Victor's
gender stereotyping here allows the reader to be sensitive to it elsewhere in his
discourse without feeling that the text is being stretched to support a feminist interpretation
foreign to it.

The lieutenant, earlier introduced by Walton as a person who "retains some of the
noblest endowments of humanity" (I:L2:4), perhaps naturally thinks of the Creature
within a conventional human framework, twice referring to him as a "man." This nomenclature
will change radically as Victor seizes the discourse and begins to define its categories.

The aspirations to happiness of all the major characters of the novel take very different
paths. Although less effectual than the principal male characters in bringing their
dreams to reality, it might be said that the women characters are all more directly
engaged in increasing the actual store of happiness in the world, whereas the men
in general attach themselves to a theoretical concept that rules their destiny with
often destructive results. Justine's emphasis on a practical ethics may also go beyond
conventional gender roles, reflecting the down-to-earth necessities of a servant who
has no choice but to work for and with others to increase human comfort.

A major hazard of navigation in polar regions was a wholesale distortion of magnetic
instruments caused by the proximity of the pure magnetic impulse. Walton seems to
expect that once the actual pole is reached, one could learn the principles by which
to adjust for such distortion. In 1831 Sir John Ross for the first time located the
magnetic pole, which is distinct from the actual geographical pole, in the far northern
reaches of Canadian territory. His account of his supposed discovery bears an enthusiasm
and rhetorical inflation little different from the tone Walton adopts here. From the
evidence gathered in the Parry and Ross expeditions of 1827 and 1829-31, respectively,
Michael Faraday was, indeed, to do just that, as promulgated in what became known
as Faraday's Law. A different desire seems to be drawing the novel's second searcher
for the north pole, and the one who will presumably discover its exact site a full
century before Commodore Parry, Victor Frankenstein's Creature. In Walton's fourth
letter to his sister (I:L4:3) he innocently recounts being passed by this figure on
his way to the pole. See also "wondrous power" above.

The "astonishment" of two paragraphs earlier has transmogrified into a much deeper
suspicion on Walton's part. The reader should take the doubt that is planted here
seriously, since questions concerning Victor Frankenstein's sanity will intensify
as the novel continues, becoming pronounced late in his narrative—which is to say,
in the novel's chronology, only weeks before his rescue.

Victor seems very much the type of friend for whom Walton was longing in I:L2:2, and
his solicitude for the stranger's welfare clearly changes the dynamics of his shipboard
routine. Nothing will be reported as occuring aboard this ship for almost a month
while Victor through the narration of his life becomes himself a troubling aspect
of Walton's own existence.

The reader cannot help noticing how insistently this theme returns to the surface
of the text. In the abstract it is almost an epitome of the way in which Mary Shelley
creates the structure of her novel as a nest of Chinese boxes (or Russian dolls).
Here, Victor Frankenstein begins a narrative about his life by emphasizing his father's
profound affection for another man, an account he gives to a young explorer whose
deepest emotional need is for such a friendship. Walton, in turn, feels he has found
the fulfillment of this need in Victor, and Victor himself tells this narrative out
of a sense of duty to that friendship. Duty likewise drove his father in his attempt
to discover and rescue Beaufort. At the periphery of this replicated order is the
central location in which the narrative unfolds, a ship isolated in treacherous northern
waters where the all-male crew stands on its duty on behalf of one another. In the
end harsh circumstances will force Walton to respond against his will to his own duty
to those men.