1380

  • that class This would appear to be another point where one senses in the conceptions of the
    novel the effects of Mary Shelley's experiences of giving birth.

    • 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.

    • 1385

  • this deposition did not in the least interest me A reader could sense a cultural dislocation and estrangement behind this remark.
    On the other hand, the lack of concern for the plight of others unless it bears in
    some way on his own subtly underscores Victor's egotism here.

    • 1401

  • it did not endure the violence of the change without torture Having been created over a long period of time, then brought to life, the Creature
    has passed the nearly six years of his existence being recreated in an inverse, indeed,
    a negative manner. He describes it as viscerallly painful, a creation without anesthesia.
    The violent negation of his original being is a corollary to the way in which hatred
    replaced love as his bond with Victor Frankenstein.

    • 1387

  • Tilbury Fort This fortress was erected as the major barrier to the Spanish fleet if it attempted
    to sail up the Thames. The Earl of Leicester's troops were stationed here in 1588.

    • 1386

  • thrust your sword From the language of the legalistic contract, expressing at least an implicit ideal
    of fidelity, Victor advances to that of the secret assassin. Here in the last sentence
    of his narration, we are confronted with the mentality of a murderer. In that regard,
    at the very least, the doubling with his creature is absolute.

    • 1389

  • which are to cease but with life Another conspicuous feature of the final chapter is introduced here. Although we
    are close to having completed the narrative circle, returning to Walton's voice part
    way through this chapter, the continual shift of time frames does more than remind
    us of this impending closure. The sudden confrontation of past and future in a sentence
    such as this also serves implicitly to suggest that at the point where Victor locked
    himself into the hermetically sealed enclosure of his obsession, time began to lose
    its normative distinctions.

    • 1400

  • tore to pieces the thing On the complex moral spectrum laid out by this novel Victor here engages in the equivalent
    of murder. His destructive burst of passion and pointed denial of humanity to the
    object of his creation, which he calls a thing, reduce him at least to the moral level
    of the Creature, who at this point has likewise been guilty of one murder.

    • 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.
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