As the subsequent paragraph will bear out, here begin conflicting claims of duty that
Victor will be unable to sort out.

Suddenly Elizabeth has her gender role thrust upon her, and the reader cannot but
be conscious that it is a subordinate one. At the same time, the discipline with which
she reacts to this family crisis clearly elicits Victor's respect, and with his follows
the reader's.

Emphasized here and twice repeated in the succeeding paragraph, the notion of duty
will assume a problematic but highly important position throughout Frankenstein. Its
characters are repeatedly cited in terms of the obligations for which they are held
responsible, and on occasion they even find themselves confronted with a disturbing
conflict when multiple duties interact or appear to contradict one another.

The phrase demonizes the Creature, lending him the aura of an otherworldly existence.
The overwrought language of this paragraph, appropriate as it may be to Victor's hysterical
condition, is one of the few times in the novel where Mary Shelley indulges in the
stock properties of the Gothic. By its melodramatic indulgence it testifies, if only
in contrast, to the general stylistic restraint with which Mary Shelley vests her
novel.

Drawing was a customary component of a standard gentlewoman's education in the late
eighteenth century: cf. Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication, Chapter 12. The oddity
of its being here singled out as Elizabeth's concern is that it was not a component
of Mary Shelley's Godwinian education. On the other hand, perhaps we are to understand
that this is Victor speaking, not Mary Shelley. This, then, could be another aspect
of the inherently sexist categorizing in which he engages.

A prime example of what Blake, in "London," called "mind-forg'd manacles." Victor's
emblem for himself reveals at once his sense of isolation, of being enslaved by his
obsession, and of being cut off from the natural world.

Here Mary Shelley introduces another theme that will continually surface through the
course of the novel, what Percy Bysshe Shelley in his preface to the first edition
termed "the amiableness of domestic affection" (I:Pref:3). Later, when Victor must
confront how far as a student he strayed from bring content in his family circle,
he will inveigh against his folly and even link it politically to the imperialistic
exploitation of unoffending innocent peoples (I:3:12). As with a number of elements
in this novel, however, the further one pursues the central value of the domestic
affections in Frankenstein, the more ambivalent appears their representation. For
example, there is no small irony in the fact that what makes Victor Frankenstein and
Robert Walton interesting as characters and helps to bond their friendship is their
inability to find satisfaction within such narrow limits of endeavor. And the same
might be said in 1816 for the unsanctioned alliance of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The repetition of this phrase (I:1:13 and note) calls attention to what would appear
an ideal family: close-knit, affectionate, mutually acculturating. Does it do so to
establish such an ideal as a retreat from the sublime terrors of the novel? or to
suggest that even such a model family could not be protected from ruination? or, with
an underlying sense of irony, to stress that for all his nostalgia Victor never inculcated
the values he honors as projected by the family? Similar questions surround the other
"ideal" domestic scene of the novel, the De Laceys' cottage (II:3:15).

Although no reader of Frankenstein, if asked to list its chief concerns, would be
likely to narrow the range to the value of domesticity and virtue, we can discern
in this emphasis a veiled attempt to steer potential critics away from an attack on
the novel's political or religious implications. At the same time, the domestic affections
are certainly of import for the novel, yet like many other themes encountered in its
progressive development, their value becomes increasingly ambiguous.

This phrase carries rich connotations in Mary Shelley's time. The Domestic Affections,
for instance, is the title of the first mature volume of poetry by Felicia Hemans
(1812), a volume in which she first laid claim to speak as the central female voice
of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. The mythos of the enclosed domestic space presided
over by the "Angel of the House" had a compelling power for the new order that came
into place after the defeat of Napoleon. Quietly, in the first two chapters of this
novel, Mary Shelley has inscribed it as a nurturing space for the growth of the Frankenstein
children and even for their neighbor Henry Clerval. A similar enclosed circle animated
by the "domestic affections" will form the nuclear center of the Creature's narrative
in the second volume. Much critical literature has concentrated on these seeming ideals,
some seeing a counter to the male Romantic quest, some questioning just how far Mary
Shelley actually goes in endorsing them.