| Romantic Circles

1279

offspring of solitude and delirium Walton is taking very seriously the notion of the living dead whom Victor accounted
a "guiding spirit" (III:7:26 and note) as he embarked on the Arctic ice fields. Yet
what he appears to be telling his sister and her readers here is that Victor's only
solace is in madness, and that for so deeply alienated a creature madness is preferable
to sanity. If by this statement he is recognizing that Victor is actually mad, it
raises considerable questions about what constitutes the truth contained by either
narrative—Victor's, certainly, but also his own which relies exclusively on Victor's
for its authority.

1278

Daniel Nugent Catherine Nugent was the landlady with whom Percy Bysshe Shelley and his first wife
Harriet resided during their short visit to Dublin in the spring of 1812. Both the
Shelleys maintained a correspondence with her thereafter. The fact that Harriet, not
Percy Shelley, informed Catherine Nugent of the rupture of their marriage suggests,
perhaps, that of the two she felt the closer ties. Mary Shelley, however, never met
Catherine Nugent, and there is no reference to her anywhere in her writings or in
her husband's correspondence with her. Thus, the presence of the surname Nugent in
this novel comes as something of a surprise that has never been explained.

1277

I am not mad Mary Shelley's concentration on this issue brings the reader to an awareness that,
where an entire culture refuses to believe in the truth of the aberrant, it may appear
mad even when it is not technically so. Or, as the British psychoanalyst of the 1970s,
R. D. Laing, tried to argue, it is possible to believe that those we call mad are
merely reacting sanely to the inherently mad stresses forced upon them by modern civilization.
It is those who have no awareness of them who truly constitute the mad. In this case
the public position of those who seem to value Victor's intellectual integrity but
dismiss his self-accusations, first Mr. Kirwin and then his own father, allows us
to read them as representatives of a reigning cultural establishment that, however
well-meaning it may be, may at the same time appear willfully blind.

1276

You will not hear It goes without saying that if Margaret Saville hears nothing of her brother's fate,
we will never read this novel. Thus, even as Walton is apprehensive about his future,
we know that he will survive. This is something more, however, than a conventional
expression of fear or a plea for pity, being rather another instance of Mary Shelley's
accentuating the instability of her text and the innumerable contingencies surrounding
all authorship, whether we think of the result as her novel or Victor's Creature.

1275

you do not credit my narrative Mary Shelley here achieves a fine balance herself between crediting and subverting
the narrative. On the one hand, her readers (not to exclude Walton) have been at the
mercy of this autobiographical account for the better course of the novel. Its "connectedness"
is in great part what keeps them reading on. Yet there is the lingering hint of madness
threading its way through the narrative and impinging on its claims to reliability.
That Victor manages to convince Walton of its truth before the actual evidence appears
is, in the face of the skepticism he arouses here, rather an achievement. But then,
we might wish to remind ourselves that Walton is an habitué of adventure stories and
was wont to believe the North Pole a "region of beauty and delight" (I:L1:2).

1274

I shall seek the most northern extremity of the globe Mary Shelley gives her Creature the honor of discovering the North Pole over a century
before the first human explorer reached it. She does so, however, not just for the
sake of irony, but to complete a figurative line that has spanned the novel from Walton's
first letter (I:L1:2) on and has underscored the linkage of Walton and Victor Frankenstein.
The Creature, who was brought to life by a fiery electric charge, intends through
fire to resign his being into the pure electromagnetic field of the pole.

1273

I would not lead them further north

The association of the north with the realm of Satan is deeply embedded in Christian
mythology, perhaps justifying Dante's depiction of the lowest circle of Hell, in which
Satan is trapped, as ice-bound. Certainly, in Paradise Lost Milton knowingly exploits
this association, as at the very moment in which Satan's revolt against God materializes
he retreats to the north:

Assemble thou
Of all those myriads which we lead the chief;
Tell them, that by command, ere yet dim night
Her shadowy cloud withdraws, I am to haste,
And all who under me their banners wave,
Homeward, with flying march, where we possess
The quarters of the north; there to prepare
Fit entertainment to receive our King,
The great Messiah. (V.683-91)

1272

for the guilty there is no peace Victor's self-conviction is once again expressed with neither mitigating excuses
nor any sense of possible future exoneration. For him, truly, guilt has become a constant
state of mind.

1271

no creature . . . history of man Victor's lot is doubtless a hard one, but the hyperbole by which he inflates it to
a unique status in human annals is surely self-serving, the more so as this summary
comes at so determined a break in the narrative thread.

1270

I had no choice but to adapt my nature As the Creature laments over Victor, he unwittingly uses language with which we have
become familar through Victor's own usage. Here, it is the terminology of destiny.
There is, however, an added recognition on his part that the course he embarked on
was "willingly chosen," which is an acknowledgement that Victor would have been wont
to suppress.