1202

  • liberty had been a useless gift In Mary Shelley's households, whether living with her husband or her father, liberty
    is the greatest of human gifts. For Victor to call it useless speaks volumes about
    the deterioration of his mind and sensibility. It also subtly links his present mental
    condition to his continuing sloughing off of personal responsibility upon an abstract
    and transcendental destiny.

    • 1201

  • the letters of Felix and Safie These were the letters Safie wrote Felix imploring his aid in the rescue of her father
    from prison and that she had translated from Turkish into French. In recounting this
    episode, the Creature had promised to give Victor the copies he had made of them (II:6:7),
    and this offhand reference suggests that he did so. The logical completion of that
    strand of the narrative does not, of course, explain just why Victor Frankenstein,
    embarked on an odyssey of epic proportions where he can scarcely provide himself with
    the essentials of life, is carrying the translated correspondence of a perfect stranger.

    • 1200

  • the lessons of my father Victor is at this point twenty-five years old and seemingly beyond the necessity
    of instruction in the nature of human affairs. The distance, in attitude and experience,
    between father and son stands without comment, although Victor's silence at the beginning
    of this scene of patriarchal instruction is indicative of how unbridgeable we may
    presume has become the gap that divides them.

    • 1199

  • I cannot lead them unwillingly to danger Despite the bitter dejection recorded at the beginning of this entry to the letter,
    Walton recognizes the essential justice of a contract mutually agreed to and refuses
    to use the arbitrary authority contemporary law put in his hands to force the mariners
    to fulfill his purposes. The emphasis on the adverbial "unwillingly" carries political
    as well as ethical connotations.

    • 1198

  • a small quantity of laudanum This revelation helps greatly to explain Victor's manic changes of mood, from almost
    delirious emotionality to an impassive lethargy. Laudanum, a form of liquified opium,
    was a narcotic freely available in the latter part of the eighteenth century. In those
    days its usage lacked the social stigma that would be attached to it by later cultures
    and it was commonly employed in all stations of society. Thomas DeQuincey's Confessions
    of an English Opium-Eater was published in its first version in two installments of
    the London Magazine in 1821, three years after the publication of Frankenstein, making
    his literary reputation overnight. Percy Bysshe Shelley seems to have used laudanum
    to dull the pain of the chronic nephritis from which he suffered. Mary Shelley, however,
    was also well aware of the more consequential abuses to which laudanum lent itself.
    Her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and the American
    Gilbert Imlay, committed suicide by an overdose of laudanum in November of 1816, while
    Mary Shelley was still in the early stages of her novel. Thus, this detail must be
    seen as colored by that tragic event. At the very least, it is a further indication
    of the deep instability of Victor Frankenstein's mind at this juncture of his career.

    • 1197

  • last autumn This is another sign of the mistaken chronology at this point in the narrative. The
    previous autumn Victor spent awaiting his trial. What Elizabeth is referring to is
    actually the late summer—the aftermath of the August trip to Mont Blanc—of the previous
    year.

    • 1196

  • that language Victor's sudden reminder of the instability of language throughout the novel also
    serves to link linguistic difference with the notion of an alienated identity, a condition
    that from now on he will share with his Creature. The Creature's vow to make Victor
    equally miserable first unfolds on a psychological plain.

    • 1195

  • a singularly variegated landscape Although Mary Shelley depends for the description here principally on her own observations,
    Byron's representation of the Rhine landscape as a point in nature where one might
    observe a symbolic reconciliation of opposite powers in harmonious symmetry (see Childe
    Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto 3, stanzas 59-61) seems to touch her conception here. That
    representation, in any case, would not be far from her mind, since it was written
    in the summer of 1816 and, indeed, when the Shelleys returned to England they carried
    the manuscript of the poem with them.

    • 1194

  • I have visited the lakes of Lucerne and Uri Mary Shelley's History of a Six Weeks' Tour recounts her visit to Lucerne and Uri.

    • 1193

  • in justice, or even in possibility Questions of justice have entered this novel from various directions, spanning the
    Creature's plea for a mate (II:9:2, II:9:8) to the condemnation of Justine Moritz
    (I:7:1). What may be most interesting about Walton's invocation of the term is his
    implicit understanding of the notion of disinterested equity, a notion wholly absent
    from the closed circle of antagonism in which Victor and his Creature exist. For Mary
    Shelley to introduce such a concept this late in the novel might suggest an effort
    on her part to establish an ethical code by which readers can take the measure of
    the novel's characters and events.
    • Subscribe to