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In the eighteenth century the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral, after St. Peter's in Rome
the largest structure in the world, dominated the London cityscape.
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sharpened by Victor into a certainty. The dead become the enablers of his action and
he sees himself increasingly as acting upon their behalf. Again, Mary Shelley's psychological
portrait here is subtly telling: a person who has given up all sense of individual
will has surrendered the central principal of vitality and may, indeed, be considered
to have become an agent of death.
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of destruction. Yet, the forceful egotism by which Victor empowers himself, justifying
his actions as divinely decreed, also suggests what today we would call a megalomania.
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Victor's life throughout his long voyage, not the heaven-directed spirits that Victor
imagines. Thus, this phrase is heavily weighted with irony. The irony is in fact attenuated,
for Mary Shelley could not have written this phrase without consciousness of P.B.
Shelley's title, "Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude," the poem he published in 1816,
three months before the excursion to Lake Geneva. An alastor in Greek is an evil spirit.
1339
his will that Walton closes his eyes; yet with eyes closed he occupies an essentially
different space from that in which he first viewed the Creature a second before. He
has unwittingly placed himself in the position of the elder DeLacey, who is the only
stranger not to have rejected the Creature at first sight (II:7:18). DeLacey's blindness
and Walton's closed eyes remove from their judgments the beautiful as a determining
aesthetic criterion. With its absence each is able to act on what purports to be an
objective moral plane, or at least not to have pre-determined aesthetic categories
prejudice their responses. Paradoxically, an act that is reflexive and therefore deterministic
in its inception becomes the means by which unexamined, normative standards of behavior,
which are truly deterministic in their impulse, can be transcended, allowing an exercise
of free will. Since Walton is not actually blind, his act in its ethical import is
unique for the novel.
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This term is ominous for Victor's future relations with his Creature. It also considerably
darkens the construction of what Victor sees as his destiny, also of how he comprehends
the nature of imitative behavior, for he appears to think it achieved not through
emulation but, rather, through the exercise of coercion.
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The new terminology for Victor's relationship with the Creature, introduced four paragraphs
earlier (III:1:9), returns with augmented stress. The underlying notion of slavery
includes not just bondage but an absence of willed responsibility. Victor thus appears
to be distancing himself from his recognition of the awesome obligations of a deity
with which the second volume closed (II:9:18).
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when he called Victor his slave and demanded his obedience (III:3:11 and note). The
effect of this recantation, however, is not so much the simple reversal the diction
connotes, as an erasure of the polarizing of his terms. Both he and Victor were slaves,
mastered alike by their antagonism.
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rhetoric here strongly suggests a lack of candor. It also indicates that, however
self-accusing he may be, he has accepted no real responsibility for the actions of
his Creature.
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of this last trip in pursuit of the Creature, embarked on from a French Mediterranean
port (III:7:9). On its surface his sardonic comment roundly indicts the crew for moral
and spiritual laxity. Yet, on second thought, an even stronger counterforce ironically
deflates the surface terms. This ironic inversion begins as we recognize the considerable
negative connotations from earlier in the novel already adhering to this celebration
of the "glorious" (I:L1:6 and note, I:L2:3 and note, and III:Walton:6 and note). On
top of those resonances, the reference to "a southern sea" should remind the knowledgeable
reader of the last voyage undertaken by Ulysses and his crew in search of glory, a
voyage that took them far into the unknown southern sea where their ship foundered.
This is the subject of Canto 26 of Dante's Inferno, which is likewise the source upon
which Tennyson depended for his dramatic monologue, "Ulysses," written in 1833. In
Dante's rendition of this story, for all his heroic posturing, Ulysses has led his
men to their death for nothing beyond a meaningless personal glory. For this act of
essential treachery he is lodged near the bottom of hell for eternity.
It is worth remarking that, in her draft of this passage, Mary Shelley originally
wrote "summer lake," and the phrase "southern sea" was inserted above it in P. B.
Shelley's hand. This interpolation, of course, would have had to have been agreed
to by Mary Shelley, presumably after some discussion of the appropriateness of the
intertextual context the phrase evokes.