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.

    • 1284

  • I may still be misled by passion A final insistence on a continuing revision of the text, this phrase suggests that
    even at the end Victor cannot be sure that he responds to anything concerning his
    own situation with total disinterestedness. His frank admission is touching in its
    expression of a simple, unapologetic humanity.

    • 1283

  • I wished to be participated

    This curious locution calls attention to itself, and it would seem purposefully so,
    as being distinctively Miltonic. It is a verb used by Adam in Paradise Lost when pleading
    with God to create a second being with whom he can share his existence:      

    Of fellowship I speak
    Such as I seek, fit to participate
    All rational delight: wherein the brute
    Cannot be human consort. (VIII.389-92)

    • 1282

  • I would rather . . . friendless outcast over the earth Here, as Victor recognizes how wholly inverted was truth from expectation, the ironies
    become heavy indeed, for, however extreme his rhetoric, he seems wholly unconscious
    that this is the fate he has bestowed upon his Creature. And given that what he utters
    here comes with the burden of a sudden shift to the total retrospect of Walton's cabin,
    he seems strangely unable to acknowledge that this is the fate he has bestowed upon
    himself as well. From a few days after the marriage onward, Victor does, in fact,
    desert Switzerland for ever to pursue the Creature far and wide across national borders,
    the two of them sharing a state of permanent "exile."

    • 1281

  • our circle will be small Alphonse seems incapable of thinking outside the terms of an enclosed, bourgeois
    family unit. It is his point of stable reference throughout the novel (see also I:1:28,
    I:6:2).

    • 1280

  • one of the remotest of the Orkneys The Orkney Islands, or Orcades, long a Norse dependency, were joined to Scotland
    in 1472. There are eight principal islands, as well as other smaller ones of the type
    Victor chooses: in all, the group amounts to seventy islands.

    • 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.
    • Subscribe to