1177

  • the strangest tale that ever imagination formed There may be an element of self-puffery by Mary Shelley in this statement, yet it
    is surprisingly prescient in its sense of the cultural impact her novel was to have.
    Moreover, it is entirely consistent with the way both she and her husband represented
    the work to its public. Percy Bysshe Shelley, writing the Preface to the original
    edition of Frankenstein, distanced this novel from any attempt at "merely weaving
    a series of supernatural terrors," insisting on its adherence to the higher aims of
    the "imagination." Similarly, Mary Shelley, in writing the Introduction to the third
    edition, stresses how in its initial conception her "imagination, unbidden, possessed
    and guided" her. That all these statements are congruent with one another and with
    an exalted notion of the Romantic imagination, however, cannot alter the ironic context
    in which this particular phrase is uttered. In the previous paragraph we have been
    observing Victor Frankenstein, who was once swept along by his imagination to create
    a deformed and alienated being, revising with soberly rational care his account of
    that act and its consequences. The actual context for this phrase in the novel would
    thus appear to offset its perhaps expected paean to the imagination.

    • 1176

  • imagination was dreadful

    This is a further example of the dark tones in which the Romantic imagination is painted
    in this novel, resembling earlier cases where an isolated mind is confronted with
    a radical uncertainty. For earlier instances pertaining to Victor, see I:4:18 and
    note; II:1:8 and note; for a similar construction on the part of the Creature, see
    II:4:17 and note.

    • 1175

  • I had been conversing with several persons in the island The episode remembered by Victor is not noted in the previous chapter. There, the
    events of the night before Victor departed "[b]etween two and three in the morning"
    (III:3:24) are wholly unremarked. Clerval's body was discovered approximately four
    hours earlier, some time after 10 o'clock.

    • 1174

  • ignorant This is a word with considerable resonance by this point in the novel. Victor has
    carefully kept Walton ignorant of the process by which he created life, and, moreover,
    excoriates him when he suspects Walton of wanting to penetrate his secret (III:Walton:3).
    He dies clearly wishing that he had himself remained in a state of innocent ignorance.
    Although it is likely that, upon reflection, Walton will broaden the range under which
    he construes knowledge to embrace a moral education, here he limits its conception
    wholly to scientific discovery. In his dejection he seems to have gone out of his
    way to miss the point of Victor Frankenstein's narration, which is itself truly a
    mark of his ignorance.

    • 1173

  • I curbed the imperious voice of wretchedness

    "By the utmost self-violence": Victor lacks the modern vocabulary that would term
    this act mere repression. He likens it to suicide, an active, even extreme, assertion
    of violence against the self. Yet again, the reader may wish to ask, which self is
    it that he would destroy, that of the Creator or of his extension who has destroyed
    those whom Victor loves? The doubling of selves is insistent even where, as here,
    it is merely insinuated.

    • 1172

  • I could send . . . illness The normative expression of sympathy by which Mr. Kirwin reestablishes connections
    that Victor has all but severed emphasizes the extremity of Victor's withdrawal from
    the society of those who have loved him.

    • 1171

  • I called on him to stay In their monosyllabic simplicity these words constitute the moral center of Mary
    Shelley's novel. Against all his prejudices as Victor's friend, against his repugnance
    to face a multiple murderer, against his basic human instincts that revolt from such
    sublime ugliness, Robert Walton wills himself into a state of ethical selflessness
    that is truly benevolent. The Creature's "wonder" at this unique experience in his
    existence is only to be expected. He has never before been confronted by human inclusiveness.

    • 1170

  • a husband, and lovely children Until this very late point in the novel we have only been able to assume that Margaret
    Saville, because of the difference in her surname, has a husband. With this confirmed,
    we discover as well that she has children. One reason Mary Shelley may be supplying
    this information now would be to justify the emotional intensity of this outpouring
    in which Walton in solitude and dire straits reaches out to his only family connections.
    But by the same token, that connectedness contrasts pointedly with the situation in
    the Frankenstein household, where when the novel ends only Ernest, who would seem
    to have little to recommend him beyond being a dull and regular fellow, will survive
    its events.

    • 1169

  • human sympathies This sentence carries an interestingly pointed balance. Everywhere in the novel,
    in accord with Enlightenment values, human sympathy is marked as the foundation for
    personal and social happiness. Here one infers that Mary Shelley recognizes that even
    this virtue can lead to a measure of self-absorption in the merely human, at the expense
    of an external reality principle embodied in nature.

    • 1168

  • how many days have passed Victor has gone from a collapse of time distinctions (as in III:7:4) to an inability
    to differentiate time itself. The entrance onto the ice field seems to remove him
    from all normative structures of human life.
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