left childless
Frankenstein is a novel haunted by the spectre of death. Not
yet a quarter of the way through the novel, the reader will encounter
in Justine the fifth orphan (after Walton and his sister, Caroline, and
Elizabeth). Beyond this repeated pattern, death has touched each chapter
of the novel, first as Walton recounts how he inherited a fortune upon the
death of an unnamed cousin (Letter 1.3
and note), the decline of Alphonse
Frankenstein's friend Beaufort (1.1.2),
the sudden demise of Caroline Frankenstein
(1.2.2), Victor's nocturnal visits to
vaults and charnel houses (1.3.3),
his association of his Creature with mummies and ghouls (1.4.3), and the death of Justine's
three siblings and mother in this paragraph. The actual context for this
narrative should, of course, not be forgotten, an unexplored reach of the
Arctic wilderness where the sight of another human being (Letter 4.2) provokes "unqualified wonder."
