NOTES

I curbed the imperious voice of wretchedness

"By the utmost self-violence": Victor lacks the modern vocabulary that would term this act mere repression. He likens it to suicide, an active, even extreme, assertion of violence against the self. Yet again, the reader may wish to ask, which self is it that he would destroy, that of the Creator or of his extension who has destroyed those whom Victor loves? The doubling of selves is insistent even where, as here, it is merely insinuated.