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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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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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
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
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).
1065
Whether this is seen as an attempt on Victor's part to rewrite his initial account,
as an overt expression of a megalomania earlier under firmer control, or as simply
a more commanding perspective on his youthful passion, a comparison with the first
chapter of his narrative (I:1:18) yields no sense of Victor's feeling singled out
for accomplishment, but rather a somewhat wry recollection of a self-indulgent adolescence.
Even his remove to Ingolstadt and the most advanced medical school of central Europe
is a decision totally "resolved" (I:2:1) by his parents. It is true that Victor has
consistently appealed to a ruling destiny (I:1:14, I:2:19, III:4:41) to justify the
course of his life. Indeed, it could be argued that his narrative to Walton constitutes
a writing of the plot of that destiny, so that by its end every event in his life
appears logically necessitated. In that case the force of his autobiography would
require that the early chapters be revised to accommodate this narrative necessity.
Once again the reader senses in its capacity for revision an underlying instability
in the text of the novel. This indeterminacy is finely underscored in the 1831 revision
where "I believed myself destined" is substituted for "I felt as if I were destined."
1064
and note), so here the reader is brought short by the Creature's assertion that his
series of acts have been freely willed. The very adjective he employs embodies an
internalization of Victor's demonization of him. Although he certainly bears responsibility
for his acts through an abiding remorse, at the same time we are aware that he has
been conditioned into the state of the demonic. To adapt the logic of his own rhetoric,
negated as a human being, he has been recreated as a demon by the relentless scapegoating
he has suffered.