1337

  • the shadow of a human being Although this phrase is meant to underscore the precarious state of Victor's physical
    health, it resonates within a psychological and moral construction as well, once again
    reminding us of how like the state of his Creature Victor's has become. The Creature
    functions as a shadow, not just in the modern sense of trailing Victor wherever he
    goes, but also in his incapacity ever to assume a full human dimension. Victor, in
    his isolation and his chronic sense of undiscriminating guilt, has also forsaken that
    dimension. In the late chapters of the novel Victor's physical condition is, as here,
    a measure of his psychic state.

    • 1336

  • the latter days of The text printed in 1818 has "latter days of December," which is clearly a compositor's
    error unnoticed in the Shelleys' proofreading of the text for the first edition. The
    mistake, once in print, went unnoticed in all later editions of the novel. In Mary
    Shelley's draft, however, the word is unmistakably "September." She would have had
    every reason to adhere to this timeline since, just a few weeks earlier than her fictional
    schedule, in 1814, it took the Shelley party nine days to cover the distance between
    Basel and Rotterdam (30 August-7 September) travelling exactly as do Victor Frankenstein
    and Henry Clerval and, even when adverse conditions delayed their departure from Holland,
    a three days' crossing brought them to London on 13 September (see Six Weeks' Tour
    for Switzerland and Holland).

    The attenuated journey of the 1818 text is whittled to three months in the shifting
    of the original departure date in 1831, which, as indicated earlier, may have been
    done to accommodate the timespan after Victor's return from Mont Blanc rather than
    his arrival date in England. In the next chapter, as recorded in both the 1818 and
    1831 texts, the chronology reverts to a normative calendar and Victor observes that
    he and Clerval "had arrived in England at the beginning of October" (III:2:5).

    • 1335

  • September 9th

    In 1818 the compositor, evidently reading this as one in a series of journal entries,
    surmised that it could not follow "September 12th" and added an integer to make it
    "September 19th." But, of course, what the text intends us to understand by its idiom
    is, "On September 9th the ice began to move." Since this is the date in the manuscript
    and it is restored in 1831, the text has been emended here.

    • 1334

  • September 2d A week has elapsed since Walton's last entry in the letter to his sister, a notable
    absence in a time frame that has been previously so overcharged with event. The dating
    makes comparison almost inevitable, and the reader thus becomes conscious of the curious
    fact that the entirety of Victor's narration of his life took one day less than this
    week-long lacuna in which the late-summer ice has slowly but inexorably been heaved
    by the pressures of wind and sea into threatening mountains. The natural landscape,
    as is so often the case with Mary Shelley's treatment of the sublime Arctic wilderness,
    has a corollary in the psychological development of her characters, particularly in
    the nexus of guilt and destiny driving Victor.

    • 1333

  • sentence Officially exonerated as he has been by his trial in the previous chapter, Victor
    nonetheless carries a profound psychological sense that he has been convicted in the
    court in which his destiny has been plotted and that there is no escaping the sentence.
    That he totally misreads the result, however, is sufficient commentary on the "necessity"
    under which he feels he labors.

    • 1332

  • sensibility Victor is here being characterized as the ideal "man of feeling," in accord with
    Enlightenment cultural standards of a kind associated with the writings of Rousseau
    and, in English, Adam Smith. With the latter, see particularly The Theory of Moral
    Sentiments, 3.2-3.3, 5.2, and 6.3.

    • 1331

  • the lessons of my Seneca

    Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 BCE — 65 CE). A leading philosopher and statesman of the
    mid-first century, Seneca was also a playwright, whose nine tragedies celebrate stoic
    resignation. As a statesman, his practice was anything but what such a philosophical
    stance might indicate, for he was an activist not a conservative. He was Nero's tutor
    and later acted behind the scenes to secure the emperor's power. He retired from the
    court in the year 62 to devote himself to philosophy, but three years later he was
    denounced as taking part in the conspiracy of Piso against the emperor. Ordered by
    Nero to commit suicide, Seneca took his own life with stoic resignation and fortitude.
    It is not, it would appear, in Seneca's writings but in his example that Walton looks
    for comfort in his peril.

    • 1330

  • my selfish despair If the terms in which Victor recounts his regaining a sense of responsibility cannot
    easily be reconciled with a disinterested ethics, one senses in this phrase a tone
    of self-accusation reflecting a more mature understanding of his own implication in
    the catastrophic events he has unleashed. This acceptance of responsibility is not
    uniform, returning only sporadically in the later chapters of the novel, but it testifies,
    perhaps, to a measure of moral growth; or, if Victor's vindictive diction places that
    conclusion in some doubt, at least to a sharper sense of the price that has been paid
    for his solitary ambition and withdrawal from normative human interactions. Still,
    suspecting that Victor's self-important posture as family protector will only eventuate
    in great calamities, a reader may find it hard not to cast an ironic eye upon what
    continue as usual to be good intentions never sufficiently thought through.

    • 1329

  • scent of flowers and hay As this is June, the air is suffused with the scent of Alpine wildflowers and freshly
    cut grass: this would appear a memory of Mary Shelley's from the 1816 summer.

    • 1328

  • what a scene has just taken place Characteristic of the structural ingenuity of Frankenstein, its final scene is a
    recollected flashback. Chronologically speaking, this brief paragraph, with its self-reflexiveness
    about its own artistic imperatives and capacities, constitutes something of a final
    bow, the last words of a novel that, from end to end, has held a mirror up to its
    own operations as a primary example of the creation that is its theme.
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