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from his obsessive perspective, seem more than merely odd. They are the expression
of what has become a deeply paranoid personality.
from his obsessive perspective, seem more than merely odd. They are the expression
of what has become a deeply paranoid personality.
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novel the effects of Mary Shelley's experiences of giving birth.
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Main text here.
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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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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).
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himself. At the age of twenty-two she should not be so beyond her prime. Clearly,
worry over the last two years has taken its toll. Although Mary Shelley maintains
her undeviating focus on Victor, this momentary description illuminates the cost of
his obsession and detachment from Elizabeth on her state of mind and body. This is
as close to an inner life as Elizabeth ever manifests.
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Gothic atmosphere in which to wrap the suspense of this long-awaited evening. But
the storm functions more specifically as a leitmotif associated with the sublime power
of nature, of forces beyond human control, and of the Creature. There actually are
only two such Gothic storms in Frankenstein. The first was also set in the environs
of Lake Geneva and occured as Victor, returning from Ingolstadt, sought out the scene
of his brother William's death at Plainpalais. There in a brilliant flash of lightning
he encountered the form of his Creature for the first time since the night of its
creation. That scene in the sixth chapter in the first volume (I:6:20) thus operates
as a symmetrical counterpart to this other storm of the sixth chapter of the third
volume, anticipating the reemergence of the Creature into Victor's domestic idyll.
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looks to a melodramatic struggle-to-the-death to resolve their conflict, thus substituting
a simply physical resolution for one that might embody ethical or psychological justice.
Once again, one may read here a female author's sense of the conventions of masculinist
fictions, whether those of art or real life. (For other instances where Victor similarly
falls back on physical competitiveness, see II:2:5, II:2:6, III:3:16 and III:3:17).
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chances" to seem beyond the ordinary expectations of causality, whether in a human
or a novelistic sphere. Such uncanny events are, however, a customary feature of the
gothic novel, and it is at points like this that one feels that the author fully recognizes
the heritage she is exploiting.
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The idea here is that Victor would travel northeast to Basel on the confines of Switzerland,
thence follow the Rhine to Strasbourg, where he would be met by Clerval who, suspending
his course of studies at the University of Ingolstadt, would have travelled west across
Germany to join him. The two would then proceed north by boat through Germany into
Holland where the Rhine empties into the North Sea just beyond Rotterdam. This is
essentially the return route followed by Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley in their 1814
excursion memorialized in A History of a Six Weeks' Tour.