NOTES

enthusiasm

Like "ardent curiosity" in the previous paragraph (I:L1:2), "enthusiasm" bears a double sense, both good and bad, throughout the novel. It will be taken over by Victor Frankenstein, who is gripped as a student by what he calls "an almost supernatural enthusiasm" (I:3:3), which he likens to the force of a hurricane (I:3:8). In the retrospect of years and their incumbent disasters he terms it first an enthusiastic frenzy (III:2:21) and, more starkly in the last moments of his existence, an enthusiastic madness (III:WC:28).