This edition was first designed and marked up in XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS by Joseph Byrne at the University of Maryland. Additional markup assistance was contributed by Lisa Marie Rhody, David Rettenmaier, and Mike Quilligan. Finally, in 2009, David, Mike, and Laura Mandell TEI-encoded the edition for the sake of preserving it and making it accessible through NINES. The present design features a detail from Tabulae sceleti et musculorum corporis humani (1747) by Bernhard Siegfried Albinus and engraved by Jan Wandelaar.
1409
by binding him to a wheel in Hades that revolved in perpetuity. In notable instances
in the English literary tradition the mode of Ixion's torture is reconceptualized
in psychological terms. Mary Shelley would surely have been familiar with King Lear's
portrayal of himself as "bound/ Upon a wheel of fire" (IV.vii.46-47). It could well
be that her own image influenced Percy Shelley's employment of the same figure in
Prometheus Unbound (see I.139-42).
1414
replicates the gesture in which he first appeared before Victor's eyes, in his bedroom
in Ingolstadt (I:4:3). The reaction of Walton to his monstrous presence is in stark
contrast to that evinced on that previous occasion by his creator.
1413
(I:7:30), Victor's innate sense of decency is evoked to complicate our recognitions:
in this particular case, that his own medical carelessness was implicit in his creation
of a being with monstrous features who could not function within a conventional social
format (I:3:7) and that his uncaring brutality has been recently marked in the wanton
destruction of the second creature on whom he had been working in the preceding chapter
(III:3:4).
1412
of his case, both for the magistrate and for Mary Shelley's readers. We cannot help
recognizing here that the end of a novel is to make fiction appear like truth. That
Victor in the end does not gain the credence of his judge does, of course, vindicate
his earlier reticence; but it also in some sense impinges on his reliability as a
witness. Does it also have a destabilizing effect on the larger narrative of which
it is a microcosm?
1410
a similar "nervous fever" that, after the creation of his being, confined him for
months (see I:4:17 and note). Mary Shelley emphasizes how severely debilitated his
physical state has become as a result of the acute psychological stress under which
he has been laboring and from which no amount of diversion can seem to liberate him.
1418
happiness of the De Lacey household, on his contrasting solitude. The diction the
Creature used at the point—"no Eve soothed my sorrows"—would suggest that it was then
that he began to conceive the plan for a mate that here comes to a disastrous conclusion.
(See II:7:11).
1417
subtle recapitulation and intensification of the overarching themes of his discourse.
In this case, if we read between the lines we realize that Victor has finally given
up all reponsibility for his own actions and, with that loss, any sense of his individual
identity. He is now locking himself within the dyad of his adversarial relation with
the Creature.
1415
white wines of Germany frequently designated as "Rhine wines." Mary Godwin, Claire
Clairmont, and Percy Bysshe Shelley descended the Rhine at this same time of year
in 1814, and this description is colored by the experiences Mary recorded in A History
of a Six Weeks' Tour.