1320

  • a restless spectre Literally, a ghost who cannot break through the barrier separating the afterworld
    from the scene of actual human life. Such a being, we should remind ourselves, is
    also a "dæmon," the term used by Victor in the previous sentence to distance himself
    from and dehumanize his Creature.

    • 1319

  • to restrain me It would appear from this statement that Victor's capacity for violence has increased
    markedly since, three months earlier, he had destroyed the female creature, "trembling
    with passion" (III:3:4). Again, the terminology (e.g., "restrain") seems appropriate
    to a pathological condition.

    • 1318

  • I grew restless and nervous As in Ingolstadt (I:3:14), Victor's health begins to suffer from his compulsive and
    solitary existence.

    • 1317

  • a resolution . . . of vice This is a term with something of a history in the novel. Both Walton and Victor have
    earlier prided themselves on their resolution. See I:L1:6 and note, confirmed in I:L2:5,
    and I:3:1. Victor's resolution will become ever more unbending and even murderous
    in the course of the novel's conclusion.

    • 1316

  • even to the most repulsive among them Perhaps this statement is meant to remind us that, though Victor was originally repelled
    by the "repulsive countenance" of Krempe, the chemistry professor at the University
    of Ingolstadt (see I:2:9), in time he came to treasure "his sound sense and real information,"
    however much he was still aware of their being "combined . . . with a respulsive physiognomy"
    (I:3:1). Obviously, however, what Victor can tolerate in a human constrained by the
    normative boundaries of inherited genetic combination he is unwilling to extend to
    his Creature, who is a being of whom, from the first, he claimed "no mortal could
    support the horror of that countenance" (I:4:4), a being who himself, upon first seeing
    his reflection, "started back" from his "miserable deformity" (II:4:13). Victor's
    magnanimous identification with his fellow beings collapses here under the weight
    of the ironies of a categorical discrimination he seems unable to comprehend.

    • 1315

  • remorse Remorse is by no means an unalloyed virtue in Enlightenment usage, as Johnson's definition
    of it makes clear. Contemporary literary usage had, indeed, suggested that this was
    a tragic passion. Coleridge's Remorse, which was produced in 1813, represents the
    passion as a static rankling, and Byron, who had a hand in bringing that tragedy to
    the stage at Drury Lane, recasts its essential situation into the unavailing grief
    of Manfred.

    • 1314

  • his remembrance This confirms the sense of mortality initimated by the questions of the previous
    paragraph.

    • 1313

  • that I might remain alone Victor's retreat from society characteristically involves shutting himself up in
    an enclosed room, as he had done when engaged in creating the Creature in Ingolstadt.
    Although the former desire has turned to abhorrence, his practices do not alter.

    • 1312

  • only regretted . . . understanding

    At this point Elizabeth Lavenza is about twenty-one years old. Two years younger,
    Mary Shelley has spent a good part of her childhood in Scotland, has twice been to
    France and Switzerland, and has travelled up the Rhine through Germany and Holland
    (none of it under parental guidance or supervision). That her experiences were unusual
    is reflected in this observation, with its glancing feminist edge.

    • 1311

  • I cannot forbear recording it Walton, who cannot resist the impulse to continue a creation whose end he cannot
    predict, bears an uncanny resemblance to the obsessive Victor Frankenstein racing
    to the denouement of the Creature's birth in Ingolstadt (I:3:8). The difference, and
    it is one maintained throughout the novel's self-reflexive mirroring of its own operations,
    is that writing has no effect in the world until it is read. The writer's obsession
    with the text may seem both narcissistic and solipsistic, but this antisocial dimension
    is confined to a conceptual plane. Still, Walton's unselfconscious acquiescence in
    the claims of what seems to him irresistable reinforces our sense that what drives
    Victor is little different from the passions we all share as human beings.
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