1075

  • dread, and yet be pleased The delicacy with which Elizabeth recognizes Victor's possible ambivalence to an
    eroticized relationship with her has the paradoxical effect of alerting us to its
    rougher corollary in events of the novel of which she is ignorant. Translated from
    the level domestic plane in which she is centered to the sublime heights where Victor
    and his Creature struggle, this ambivalence might seem strangely akin to the intense
    love-hate dynamic in which that homosocial relationship plays itself out.

    • 1074

  • Drance The River Drance, a tributary of the Rhône in Switzerland near Evian.

    The Shelleys passed the Drance during their Swiss excursion; it is described in Letter
    6 of A History of a Six Weeks' Tour:

    As soon as we had passed the opposite promontory, we saw the river Drance, which descends
    from between a chasm in the mountains, and makes a plain near the lake, intersected
    by its divided streams. Thousands of besolets, beautiful water-birds, like sea-gulls,
    but smaller, with purple on their backs, take their station on the shallows, where
    its waters mingle with the lake.

     

    • 1073

  • to destroy him I must drag out my weary existence As, two paragraphs above, time distinctions suddenly fail and in the preceding paragraph
    the living Victor casts himself as the agent of the dead, now here he begins to collapse
    the difference between the realms of life and death. His life will go on only in pursuit
    of death.

    • 1072

  • the tie of our domestic comfort

    Alphonse Frankenstein's foregrounding of domesticity may come as something of a shock
    after the Creature's long account of his life amid the sublime landscape of Mont Blanc.
    The aftershock is the realization that he is privileging the same exclusionary tribalism
    as Felix De Lacey. No more than the De Laceys could one expect the Creature to be
    adopted by the Frankenstein family.

    • 1071

  • our domestic calm

    Alphonse Frankenstein, more than any other member of the family, prizes a total seclusion
    from the world. This may be contrued as a result of his advanced years, but it does
    appear in sharp contrast to his long professional commitment to public service in
    Geneva. His desire for retreat is tied directly to that of the Creature, and Victor's
    unwillingness to satisfy the desire demanded by the Creature on Mont Blanc will likewise
    visit dire consequences on his father.

    • 1070

  • you should . . . make up your mind to disappointment Just at the point that we may have become overly preoccupied with Victor's own preoccupation
    with the image he cuts, we are brought back to the reality of why he is forced so
    carefully to hold up a mirror to his conduct. This stolid Swiss bureaucrat flattens
    four murders and the destruction of a prominent Genevan family into a matter of "disappointment"
    for Victor. It is little wonder that, after what he has suffered, he explodes in anger.

    • 1069

  • The die is cast As several editions of the novel have noted, this phrase was uttered by Julius Caesar
    when he crossed the Rubicon: it is quoted in the Life of Julius Caesar, the first
    of the Lives of the Twelve Caesars of Caius Suetonius Tranquillus. Mary Shelley read
    Suetonius in May 1817 while she was writing Frankenstein, so it is certain that she
    would not allude to this famous phrase without a sense of its actual context. Caesar
    goes forward to total victory, whereas it would seem in contrast that Walton returns
    in defeat. But perhaps the context is as ironic as that provided Victor's speech to
    the sailors by Dante's Inferno 26. In such a case we might want to read Walton's superficial
    defeat as cloaking a moral victory.

    • 1068

  • the devouring and only passion of my soul As is often the case, what appears at first to be an indulgence in gothic hyperbole
    on Mary Shelley's part on second glance bears a startling exactness. The passion of
    revenge has been truly devouring Victor from within. The more obsessively he devotes
    himself to it the more assuredly he pursues his own destruction.

    • 1067

  • Devil Having called the creature both "dæmon" and "wretch" in the previous paragraphs,
    Victor naturally adds "devil" to his name-calling. In these paragraphs we observe
    both Victor and the Creature revert to the nomenclature of Volume 2 to define their
    unchanging relationship.

    • 1066

  • in proper detail This remark may be seen as less innocent than it appears at first. Victor is about
    to recount a trial in which it is essential that he exonerate himself. On a more interior
    level of the discourse we as readers are privy to a second narrative, which is meant
    by Victor to exonerate the course of his life to Walton and, through Walton, to posterity.
    This comment, then, links up with other instances, both early and late in the novel,
    in which Victor's concern with rhetorical propriety shadows a desire to write history
    so as to reflect well on him (see I:L4:30, I:3:13, and III:WC:2 and III:WC:4).
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