1024

  • the bourne of my travels

    An archaic word, meaning "destination" or "terminal point" of a journey (compare Hamlet's
    famous phrase: "The undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns"—Hamlet
    3.1.79-80).

    • 1023

  • the blue seas of the south Victor's remark reminds us that this pursuit of the creature has gone on steadily
    in a great crescent from Marseilles across the length of the Mediterranean Sea, through
    the Dardanelles and across the Black Sea, and then north through Russia and even,
    perhaps, Siberia to the edge of the Arctic Ocean. This is a major geographical exploration
    for a man without an expeditionary force. Even more is it an ordeal for his Creature,
    who leads the way across the wilderness without any human intervention to help or
    comfort him.

    • 1022

  • The blue Mediterranean appeared Victor has followed the entire course of the Rhône from the point at which it flows
    out of Lake Geneva through Geneva and eastward into France; there, confluencing with
    the Loire at Lyons, it turns south, to exit into the Mediterranean at France's major
    southern port of Marseilles.

    • 1021

  • the blue lake The placid and clear Lake Geneva, symbolic of Victor's untroubled and unambiguous
    childhood, from which the Rhône river begins its long course to the Mediterranean
    Sea.

    • 1020

  • blasted and miserable Victor's iteration of the adjective "blasted" (II:1:1, III:2:8) to describe his condition
    has its source in his adolescent experience of watching the stump of a tree blasted
    by lightning (I:1:22).

    • 1019

  • I am a blasted tree Victor unconsciously echoes the terms of his experience at the age of fifteen when
    he witnessed lightning shatter the venerable tree at the Frankenstein's summer house
    near Bellerive: "I never beheld anything so utterly destroyed" (I:1:22). His premonition
    of the destructive power of the vital force he would employ for creation here realizes
    itself with ironic power.

    • 1018

  • black melancholy In modern psychological parlance Victor has fallen into a profound state of depression.

    • 1017

  • be steady

    Coming immediately after allusions to the treacherous Ulysses and murderous Lady Macbeth,
    this injunction bears the stamp of one who, using like rhetoric, exhorted his comrades
    to throw off a similar despondency: "Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen!" (Paradise
    Lost, I.330). Satan, too, standing on his perseverance in a lost cause, represents
    himself as being      

         one who brings
    A mind not to be changed by place or time.
    The mind is its own place, and in itself
    Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
    What matter where, if I be still the same. . . (I.252-256).

    • 1016

  • St. Bernard's Well

    This spa, a neoclassical structure in the form of a circular temple, was erected on
    the Water of Leith in the 1790s. Black's Picturesque Tourist of Scotland, 18th ed.
    (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1869), describes it in these terms: The well (or
    pump-room as it might be called) stands close on the banks of the river, immediately
    below the Dean Bridge. The water is an excellent sulphureous liquid, possessing the
    usual medicinal qualities, similar to those of the Moffat, and Harrogate. The late
    Lord Gardenstone was the first to appreciate the properties of the spring, and erected
    the present classical temple enclosing a statue of Hygeia, whose face very properly
    'is expressive of sympathy and kindness.' (78)

    • 1015

  • benefactors of your species Both Robert Walton and Victor Frankenstein have held up this goal as the aim of their
    scientific endeavors, Walton in his opening letter to his sister (I:L1:2) and Victor
    in his enraptured vision of the "new species" that would owe its existence to him
    (I:3:8). That Victor should here repeat that term of distanced scientific taxonomy
    may give the reader pause.
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