1433

  • young man As the weight of circumstances and of tragedies accumulates it may be somewhat difficult
    to remember the actual chronology of the novel. Victor is yet only 24 years old.

    • 1410

  • I lay for two months It has been less than three years since Victor Frankenstein had been seized with
    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.

    • 1409

  • like the turning of the wheel When Ixion, king of Thessaly, fell in love with Hera, Zeus punished him for his effrontery
    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).

    • 1416

  • the love of virtue The Creature unwittingly echoes the language with which Victor surveyed his past
    life after the execution of Justine Moritz (II:1:1).

    • 1417

  • voluntary thought Beginning with this phrase, the last chapter of Victor's long narration starts a
    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.

    • 1377

  • tears . . . streamed from my eyes Even as Victor thinks of himself as reacting with compassion to the assumed plight
    of Elizabeth, it is clear to any reader that he is actually weeping for himself. His
    giving in at last to his feelings is thus ironized, for rather than opening him to
    a renewal of his emotional life, his convulsive weeping results from a maudlin theatrical
    representation of his own death that wholly mistakes the threat to his future wife.

    • 1376

  • tears gushed from my eyes Victor's emotional instability is underscored by this sudden excess of sensibility.
    That his rekindled joy will soon be transformed into the despair his isolation in
    the boat had prefigured is indicative of the irony in which, from the point in which
    he spurned his Creature's desire for sympathetic rapport, he finds himself invested.
    Later, hope will come to him in a "burning gush" of ironically inverted expectation
    (III:7:22).

    • 1382

  • Are you then safe Victor's first words to his father in fourteen months must, if we detach ourselves
    from his obsessive perspective, seem more than merely odd. They are the expression
    of what has become a deeply paranoid personality.

    • 1379

  • the banks of the Thames

    London is situated far up the Thames from the entrance to the river on the Kent coast.
    Victor notes the principal landmarks the travelers pass enroute.

    • 1381

  • the devil Curiously, with so many references to the Creature as diabolical, only once earlier
    has Victor used this flat substantive, when he glimpsed the Creature on the Plainpalais
    outside Geneva after uttering a similar imprecation to the heavens.
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