1275

  • you do not credit my narrative Mary Shelley here achieves a fine balance herself between crediting and subverting
    the narrative. On the one hand, her readers (not to exclude Walton) have been at the
    mercy of this autobiographical account for the better course of the novel. Its "connectedness"
    is in great part what keeps them reading on. Yet there is the lingering hint of madness
    threading its way through the narrative and impinging on its claims to reliability.
    That Victor manages to convince Walton of its truth before the actual evidence appears
    is, in the face of the skepticism he arouses here, rather an achievement. But then,
    we might wish to remind ourselves that Walton is an habitué of adventure stories and
    was wont to believe the North Pole a "region of beauty and delight" (I:L1:2).

    • 1274

  • I shall seek the most northern extremity of the globe Mary Shelley gives her Creature the honor of discovering the North Pole over a century
    before the first human explorer reached it. She does so, however, not just for the
    sake of irony, but to complete a figurative line that has spanned the novel from Walton's
    first letter (I:L1:2) on and has underscored the linkage of Walton and Victor Frankenstein.
    The Creature, who was brought to life by a fiery electric charge, intends through
    fire to resign his being into the pure electromagnetic field of the pole.

    • 1273

  • I would not lead them further north

    The association of the north with the realm of Satan is deeply embedded in Christian
    mythology, perhaps justifying Dante's depiction of the lowest circle of Hell, in which
    Satan is trapped, as ice-bound. Certainly, in Paradise Lost Milton knowingly exploits
    this association, as at the very moment in which Satan's revolt against God materializes
    he retreats to the north:

              Assemble thou
    Of all those myriads which we lead the chief;
    Tell them, that by command, ere yet dim night
    Her shadowy cloud withdraws, I am to haste,
    And all who under me their banners wave,
    Homeward, with flying march, where we possess
    The quarters of the north; there to prepare
    Fit entertainment to receive our King,
    The great Messiah. (V.683-91)

    • 1272

  • for the guilty there is no peace Victor's self-conviction is once again expressed with neither mitigating excuses
    nor any sense of possible future exoneration. For him, truly, guilt has become a constant
    state of mind.

    • 1271

  • no creature . . . history of man Victor's lot is doubtless a hard one, but the hyperbole by which he inflates it to
    a unique status in human annals is surely self-serving, the more so as this summary
    comes at so determined a break in the narrative thread.

    • 1270

  • I had no choice but to adapt my nature As the Creature laments over Victor, he unwittingly uses language with which we have
    become familar through Victor's own usage. Here, it is the terminology of destiny.
    There is, however, an added recognition on his part that the course he embarked on
    was "willingly chosen," which is an acknowledgement that Victor would have been wont
    to suppress.

    • 1269

  • O Night, and by the spirits that preside over thee In all conventional mythologies Night is a figure of discord and threat. As she appears
    in Book I of Spenser's Faerie Queene, she is represented as "griesly Night, with visage
    deadly sad" (I.5.172), testifying that "I the mother bee/ Of falshood" (I.5.240-41).
    The eldest of divinities, she has unimpeded access to the depths of Hell. In Paradise
    Lost Night dwells with Chaos in the "dark/ Illimitable ocean without bound" (II.891-92)
    from which God creates Hell. Whatever Victor thinks he is doing by solemnly invoking
    Night to aid him in his revenge, it is clear, by all traditional associations, that
    no good will come of it.

    The observant reader may recall that the Creature invoked figures associated with
    the daytime in swearing before Victor that, if he were given a partner, he would never
    trouble his maker again (see II:9:17).

    • 1268

  • nicer eye Nice here bears the significance of sense 12a of the Oxford English Dictionary: "Entering
    minutely into details; attentive, close." Elizabeth's frankness and perspicuity are
    testified to earlier by Victor upon his return to Geneva after William's murder (see
    I:6:41).

    • 1267

  • the new town The area to the north of the old town, between the Castle and the Firth of Forth,
    was developed during the eighteenth century and rapidly became the center of the vital
    cultural and intellectual life of the "Scottish Enlightenment." When Percy Bysshe
    Shelley and his first wife Harriet eloped to Edinburgh at the end of August 1811,
    they took lodgings in George Street in New Town.

    • 1266

  • new and dear objects of care will be born This statement carries a subtle resonance, reminding us that this was exactly the
    fear Victor entertained of his Creature if he were allowed a mate, except that his
    perspective on those "dear objects of care" was of "a race of devils [being] propagated
    upon the earth" (III:3:2 and note). Immersed as he is in irony, Victor does not notice
    the similarity between his state and that of his Creature.
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