1222

  • I am your master Portending a reversal of the father-son roles both Victor and the Creature have implicitly
    relied on, this assertion of the Creature's power contrasts markedly with Victor's
    chronic indecision and impotence. From this point on, as this language intimates,
    both are locked in the embrace of their mutual anatagonism.

    • 1221

  • the martyrs of old Once again Victor's sense of his own heroism intrudes on the discourse to transform
    what could be construed as unfeeling, sordid, or insane into a grand and self-exculpating
    gesture. Martyrs, we may remind ourselves, however their acts may be justified, are
    by their nature suicidal.

    • 1220

  • the mark of the fingers Victor recalls the account of William's death contained in his father's letter of
    May 12th in the previous year (I:6:6).

    • 1219

  • call on the manes The Oxford English Dictionary nicely captures the rationale for Victor's use of this
    Latinism, defining the term in the plural, as the deified souls of departed ancestors
    (as beneficent spirits; opposed to larvæ and lemures, the malevolent shades of the
    Lower World). Also, the spirit, `shade' of a departed person, considered as an object
    of homage or reverence, or as demanding to be propitiated by vengeance. The manes
    Victor lists here have in the aggregate constituted the guiding spirits that throughout
    this chapter he has invoked as demanding his intercession to avenge their deaths.
    Upon his own death he foresees himself joining their number. If Walton is expected
    to pick up the family cause, perhaps in thinking of Victor as "the brother of [his]
    heart" (I:L4:22) he has got much more than he bargained for.

    • 1218

  • maladie du pays Home-sickness. Why Victor should lapse into his native tongue here, the single such
    instance in his lengthy account to Walton, is a mystery. Perhaps it is meant as another
    instance of his euphemisms, suggestive of an essential insincerity in his representation
    of his motives.

    • 1217

  • I can make you so wretched Resuming the earlier play on the meanings of "wretch" and "wretched," the Creature
    once again turns Victor's own terminology back on him.

    • 1216

  • its majestic assemblage of towers, and spires, and domes

    Oxford is famous for the way in which the structures of the university rise above
    other features of the landscape to dominate the horizon. In the late nineteenth century
    Thomas Hardy paints an enduring picture of the young Jude Fawley, the hero of Jude
    the Obscure who has mythicized what is there denominated Christminster, venturing
    far out of his village and climbing a ladder at sunset with the hope of making out
    this far-off object of all his desires:

    Some way within the limits of the stretch of landscape, points of light like the topaz
    gleamed. The air increased in transparency with the lapse of minutes, till the topaz
    points showed themselves to be the vanes, windows, wet roof slates, and other shining
    spots upon the spires, domes, freestone-work, and varied outlines that were faintly
    revealed. It was Christminster, unquestionably; either directly seen, or miraged in
    the peculiar atmosphere.

    The spectator gazed on till the windows and vanes lost their shine, going out almost
    suddenly like extinguished candles. The vague city became veiled in mist. (I.iii)

    • 1215

  • the main land The Orkney Islands begin just north of John O'Groats, the point of Caithness that
    is commonly considered the northernmost point in the United Kingdom. There are several
    small islands between this village and Pomona, the largest of the Orkneys. Exactitude
    is impossible here, however, because Pomona is itself popularly known as Mainland.

    • 1214

  • magistrate . . . benevolent man As a magistrate, Mr. Kirwin, who treats all people with equity and compassion, contrasts
    with the Geneva judges who condemned Justine Moritz to death (I:7:14) as well as the
    rigged Paris tribunal that pronounced a like sentence on Safie's father (II:6:3).
    There is likewise to be observed here a curious symmetry, since at the other end of
    Victor's trip to the British Isles is another magistrate who, in effect, authorized
    it, Alphonse Frankenstein.

    • 1213

  • my mad schemes are the cause The notion of madness, encountered frequently in the late chapters of the novel,
    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.
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