1293

  • my heart was poisoned with remorse This may seem a strange usage, but it accords with the primary meaning of "remorse"
    in Mary Shelley's day. Johnson's Dictionary (1755) lists the following two definitions:
    • Pain of guilt
    • Tenderness; pity; sympathetick sorrow

    In both cases, but particularly in the first, remorse involves a passionate suffering
    that could be likened to the action of poison.

    • 1292

  • plans of my father Alphonse, we realize, controls the purse-strings, and Victor and Elizabeth are conspicuously
    dependent upon his largess for their future welfare.

    • 1291

  • a considerable change in the physiognomy After the various kinds of mental deterioration Victor has suffered in the later
    chapters, it may come as something of a relief to acknowledge that he is still as
    scientifically alert to the representations of physiognomy as he was shen he dismissed
    Dr. Krempe's credentials on that basis (see I:2:12).

    • 1290

  • Perth

    An ancient city of Scotland, Perth was the Scottish capital until the mid-fifteenth
    century, when Edinburgh succeeded it: the old parlimentary building was not, in fact,
    razed until the year of Frankenstein's publication. The city is located on the river
    Tay some twenty miles southwest of Dundee, where Mary Shelley spent nearly two years
    -- from June 1812 to March 1814 -- at the home of the Baxter family.

    • 1289

  • a person A subtle irony attends this instinctive assignment of humanity where the status of
    "personhood" is what is most at issue.

    • 1288

  • perished Victor's digression, although it moves at last into the uncertainties of question
    marks, foreshadows the plot with a heavy ominousness. We perhaps have forgotten by
    this point that on this issue there has been a much earlier foreshadowing, as in I:L4:26.

    • 1287

  • That then was the period The "then" reveals Victor distancing himself from the sense that there will be any
    immediate consequences to his act. His susceptibility to dismiss, or just miss, the
    logical point, however, is not so much the result of chronic thick-headedness as it
    is the effect of the egotism through which he filters all experience. His characteristic
    assignment of a "destiny" to himself likewise testifies as much to his sense of self-importance
    as to the determinism by which he attempts to deflect moral responsibility for his
    actions from himself.

    • 1286

  • the most perfect solitude

    If the reader regards this phrase ironically, it would seem commensurate (or nearly
    so) with death. The last third of Frankenstein is dominated by the withdrawal of its
    protagonists behind psychic barricades that wall them off increasingly from the forces
    of life. Again, one senses the context of P.B. Shelley's recently-published Alastor;
    or, The Spirit of Solitude behind Mary Shelley's text.

    • 1285

  • the peasant The powerless of this unlanded peasant before the forces of state power probably
    reflects the devastation of Europe during the last phase of the Napoleonic Wars. However
    self-serving or self-pitying we may find Victor's comparison, its political edge is
    unmistakable and is perhaps intended by Mary Shelley, like other incidental political
    observations in the novel, to insinuate a viewpoint that could not be explicitly stated
    in the political climate of England in 1818.
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