1138

  • the glimmer of two eyes This is an unmistakeable reference to "Alastor," the poem Percy Bysshe Shelley published
    in March 1816 a few months before the excursion to Lake Geneva. The protagonist of
    that poem is haunted by the two eyes of a "veilèd maid" (line 151) of whom he dreamed
    and whom he subsequently pursues to the end of his life. As he dies his last glimpse
    is of "two lessening points of light [that] / Gleamed through the darkness" (lines
    654-55), an all-consuming ideal that is the ironic cause of his destruction.

    • 1137

  • in giving the life and spirit There is no little irony in this phrase, since Victor has already in a material sense,
    given "life and spirit" to his Creature and even to his Creature as "enemy." Given
    his manifest failure on the level of the actual, his desire to succeed on the level
    of the merely textual may be understandable, but it is no less morally problematic.
    Having the last word must be a poor substitute for acting with foresight and responsibility
    in the first place.

    • 1136

  • a gigantic monster As this paragraph suggests ("the fiend" . . . "the fiend" . . . "a gigantic monster"),
    the creation of an abnormal identity through naming has become wholly habitual on
    Victor's part. We have here, however, one last indication that, wherever the Creature
    goes, he is immediately accorded the status of monster by the human beings he encounters.

    • 1135

  • A ghastly grin This is only the second occasion in which the Creature is perceived smiling (the
    first is in I:4:3), and in each case Victor interprets an expression of pleasure and
    anticipation as alien, even diabolical.

    • 1134

  • I, the native of a genial and sunny climate The atmosphere of the third volume of the novel, with the exception of the honeymoon
    excursion along Lake Geneva, has been so far from genial that the reader is enjoined
    at this point to recall the original balancing of the novel, in which the civilized
    bourgeois world of the Frankenstein household represents the beautiful against the
    sublime of Mont Blanc and the Creature whom Victor encounters there in the second
    volume (II:2:5).

    • d30e9549

  • to curse; to execrate; to doom to destruction

    • d30e9547

  • to dedicate; to consecrate; to appropriate
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