has been associated almost entirely with Victor Frankenstein's disturbed mental state.
This small shift in rhetoric for the 1831 edition, coming as it does eight paragraphs
after Victor's impassioned questioning of Walton's naive desire to know "the particulars
of his creature's formation" ("Are you mad, my friend . . . ?"—see III:Walton:3 and
note), suggests that, for this novel, madness may be less a matter of actual derangement
than it is a kind of violation of accepted codes of social conduct whereby the individual
becomes isolated from the community and communal obligations. Its closest synonymn
might then be "solipsism," which is an issue with deep roots within Romanticism and
one that is stressed in these final pages of Frankenstein.