1061
he can entertain a notion of a wholesale inversion of reality without remarking on
the distortion. The return to an actual reality will come, we can be sure, with a
devastating finality.
he can entertain a notion of a wholesale inversion of reality without remarking on
the distortion. The return to an actual reality will come, we can be sure, with a
devastating finality.
1060
to characterize Victor's precipitous walk the morning after the Creature came to life
(I:4:7 and note). Victor's sense of helplessness, which will soon reach an extremity,
becoming transformed into a catatonic physical state, will increasingly dominate the
novel's late events.
1059
1058
1057
(see, for instance, II:2:7): from this point on, Victor resorts increasingly to this
term, which increasingly lends his Creature a larger-than-life, fantastic presence
in his mind and in the representation of him.
1056
responsibility, he described to his father as "some destiny of the most horrible kind"
(III:4:41)? Or is it a more immediately relevant sense that the world of the dead,
which in the previous paragraphs he has seen as impelling his mission of revenge,
has a fundamentally diabolical association (III:7:5)? Or is it that he knows himself
to be self-curst, as he earlier surmised at the beginning of the second volume (II:1:1)?
Such an admission would involve acknowledging that the "devil" is an internal spirit.
Certainly, the continuation of the sentence suggests such a recognition of the diabolical
as a psychological state, for it returns us to the conclusion of the first volume,
where Victor confesses that upon the execution of Justine Moritz he "bore a hell within
[him]" (I:7:30). Once again, the context is supplied by Milton's Satan as he reviews
his career in soliloquy on Mt. Niphates (see Paradise Lost, IV.73ff.).
1055
encounter late in Mary Shelley's novel. It was, as Victor Frankenstein himself acknowledged,
curiosity about the Creature he pursued (I:L4:11) that first animated the interest
of Walton and his crew. In the very beginning Walton had characterized his driving
passion as an "ardent curiosity" (I:L1:2), and it is this trait that most obviously
links him with the obsessive scientific pursuits that Victor early on associated with
the realm of the "lawless" (I:7:1). Yet, it is the same trait that compels Victor
to listen to the Creature's naration (II:2:16) below Mont Blanc and that will restrain
Walton from attacking him (III:Walton:38) upon his reappearance in the final pages.
Thus, what leads to an antisocial solipsism can also be an instrument for transcending
rigid barriers and reestablishing social relationships through sympathy. The strongly
oppositional ways in which curiosity functions in the novel may suggest that this
most human (and Romantic) attribute is inherently neither good nor bad, but is merely
an instrument, neutral in itself, that should never be dissociated from our common
"sense" of the ends it pursues.
1054
the law, what suspends Walton's obedience to it are attributes of our human constitution
that, for good or for bad, actively resist a rigid legalistic construction. The law,
which has persecuted both Justice Moritz in volume 1 and Victor Frankenstein in volume
3, is accorded no special privilege by this novel; but on the other hand curiosity,
which has led Walton to endanger the lives of his crew (I:L1:2) and Victor to be blind
to the consequences of his scientific obsessions (I:7:1 and note), seems deliberately
to have been accorded a bad repute by Mary Shelley. Yet, for the author so to link
it with compassion is to suggest an ethical likeness underpinning the two.
This similarity between sympathy and intellectual inquiry resonates as well in other
writings of Mary Shelley and her husband. A central passage of Percy Bysshe Shelley's
"Defence of Poetry" succinctly outlines the dimensions of this similarity and suggests
why its terms might matter so deeply to these writers.
1053
at the point of Frankenstein's publication famous for having been the site of a school
of distinguished poets, foremost among whom was Wordsworth, who settled at Dove Cottage
in Grasmere in 1799. When he transferred a few miles south to the more commodious
Rydal Mount a decade after, Thomas DeQuincey moved in to Dove Cottage. In this day
the Lake District, as celebrated as it was for its unspoiled natural beauty, was probably
the remotest area of England.
1052
in the north of Ireland where, presumably, Victor landed his boat. The present size
of Ulster, Northern Ireland, is in the range of 100 square miles.