Walton's Ideal Friend Analysis

The second letter begins the exact way readers might guess: more complaining (and this is not a chastisement: he describes his own words as being complaints). Walton becomes more unrelenting in detailing his desire for a friend. It is peculiar to read how he envisions friendship. He has only one “want” that he hasn’t yet been able to “satisfy.” He specifies that his “desire” is for “the company of a man who could sympathize” with him and whose “eyes would reply” to his (8). In a later passage he tells Margaret that his ideal friend would “not despise [him] as romantic” and he would have enough “affection” for Walton that he would help Walton keep his mind clear (9). Many of these word choices seem less than appropriate for talk of friendship.
He asserts that if anyone on their journey will make it worth the danger by making life-changing discoveries, it will be him (6). We also learn that it was his father’s “dying injunction” that he would not become a seafarer, yet his increasing guilt over this fact does not hinder him (6). As a poet he saw himself as a god creating a paradise. He believed he would one day become akin to the master writers of antiquity, Homer and Shakespeare, but even that failure and its subsequent disappointment didn’t stop him (7). Similarly, despite being trapped in their icy passage to the north, in a “dreadfully severe” winter, Walton assures his sister that he is like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, but that he will be wise enough to “kill no albatross” on his journey (10). Thus he places himself in the lofty position of the messenger of a grave and terrible warning, but it won’t be because he sabotaged himself into living through the terrible ordeal. With every literary reference or Biblical comparison Shelley makes she shows that she is just as well-learned as any of her male peers and she can match, if not surpass, any of them in literary skill. This also allows her narrators (Walton, Frankenstein, and the monster) to each prove themselves to be perfect representations of the inflated male ego of the Romantic era (and every other era, for that matter). This inflated ego makes them think they can do no wrong and they deserve every reward life has to offer and they will accept nothing less than perfection. "Pathologically isolated selfhood" is what defines the Gothic subgenre of Romanticism for University of Texas professor Thomas Schmid. He quotes Fred Botting as arguing that "it is at the level of the individual that Romantic-Gothic writing takes its bearings. The individual in question stands at the edges of society and rarely finds a path back into the social fold" (19). For Walton and other characters