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.

    • 1265

  • its deadly weight yet hanging around my neck

    Although this language may sound proverbial, we are actually witness here to the actual
    occurrence of a cultural transformation into proverbial status. The reference is,
    once again, specifically to Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," where the dead
    albatross is hung around the Mariner's neck in the last stanza of Part 2, not to be
    removed until the end of Part 4. Although the overtone of Victor's comment is light,
    it does return us to the isolation of the far northern seas where this story is being
    told and where earlier Coleridge's poem was invoked for analogy by Walton (I:L2:6).
    It may also remind us of the morning after the Creature's endowment with life (I:4:7)
    when Victor's sense of being haunted first descends on him.

    • 1264

  • nearly a year had elapsed

    This would suggest that the date is in early August, since it was "in the latter end
    of August that [Victor] departed" (III:1:15) from Geneva.

    • 1263

  • Nature This is the only point in the 1818 edition where Nature is capitalized to give it
    a quasi-transcendental significance. By the 1831 edition this practice is extended
    (see I:2:10 or II:10:1 in that text).

    • 1262

  • my wretchedness Once again, the Creature reverses Victor's assignment of "wretchedness," affirming
    that it is the state he is forced to inhabit, not the condition he wishes to perpetrate
    on human society.

    • 1261

  • my wanderings Another important theme of the novel and of the age here resonates in Victor's seemingly
    innocuous phrase. As the Ancient Mariner of Coleridge has been invoked on several
    occasions in the novel, the reader may here wish to see Victor, in his passive surrender
    to his obsession, as willingly assuming that character's fate. But the idea goes considerably
    beyond Coleridge's prototype. The notion of the Wandering Jew, cursed to be an eternal
    vagabond for having taunted Christ on his way to the cross, stands behind both Coleridge's
    and Mary Shelley's conceptions; and, indeed, that myth may be being evoked here on
    a particularly subtle level, as Victor's turning his back on his own will to live
    assumes a psychological counterpart to that taunting of the figure of redemption.
    The poet figure of Percy Shelley's "Alastor" (1815), who wanders over some of the
    same terrain as Victor in search of his visionary love, suggests yet another context.
    Behind that figure is probably another conceptual avatar, the peddler in Wordsworth's
    Excursion (1814) who is explicitly named the Wanderer, and who in that poet's conception
    is able through his internal poise and just relationship with his natural environment
    to maintain his balance amid the turbulence of life. Neither of the Shelleys had much
    respect for that poem, but, needless to say, Victor's balance in contrast to that
    of Wordsworth's peddler is seriously awry.

    • 1260

  • my vow was heard, and that I was reserved for vengeance The supposition with which this graveyard scene commenced has now hardened into conviction.
    But surely Mary Shelley emphasizes her irony here, that the sign that Victor's vow
    has been heard is not some apparition from the dead he would avenge but rather the
    laugh of the Creature. It is, then, specifically the Creature who reserves Victor's
    remaining months for vengeance.

    • 1259

  • my misfortunes, and their cause No reader can miss the tone here, as Elizabeth's murder is abstracted into merely
    another item in Victor's pitiful history of sorrows.
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