knowledge
In explicitly linking in the same sentence the idea of knowledge with a
serpent's venom, Mary Shelley seems to be continuing her allusion to
Milton's Paradise Lost evident in the preceding paragraph. This
intertextuality reminds the reader that knowledge can have psychological
and spiritual consequences as well as technical ones, also that human
beings are required to assume responsibility for the results of their
intellectual labors. Both of these are issues of major import for
Frankenstein.
