1206
Victor has returned to the desultory sailing on Lake Geneva that occupied him earlier
in the summer (II:1:5 and note). To be "listless" is literally to be without desire.
1205
The near-catatonic state in which Victor exists is a sign of profound mental disturbance:
Mary Shelley's repetition of the word "listless" from the chapter's beginning indicates
that Victor leaves in the same state in which he has existed since his interview with
the Creature: compare III:1:1 and note.
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sensations as he became conscious of the world around him (II:3:1 and note).
1203
that has dominated Victor's perspective on his Creature and blinded him to the dangers
to which he has exposed his loved ones. The melodramatic posturing, it should be emphasized,
does have a purpose if we remind ourselves that this first-person narrative is delivered
to a listener, Robert Walton, who at the end of the next chapter will reenter the
novel. Since Victor is well aware that Walton is preserving this record as an exemplary
warning to later human generations, he has every reason to try to influence the portrait
thus handed down to the future.
1202
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
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
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
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
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
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.