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paragraph.
paragraph.
1313
an enclosed room, as he had done when engaged in creating the Creature in Ingolstadt.
Although the former desire has turned to abhorrence, his practices do not alter.
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At this point Elizabeth Lavenza is about twenty-one years old. Two years younger,
Mary Shelley has spent a good part of her childhood in Scotland, has twice been to
France and Switzerland, and has travelled up the Rhine through Germany and Holland
(none of it under parental guidance or supervision). That her experiences were unusual
is reflected in this observation, with its glancing feminist edge.
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endow with life. What most deeply plagues his mind is the fact that his creation will
be beyond his control. In a theological extension of this concern, the question before
the creator is whether the new race, particularly the female member of it, can be
trusted to exercise free will.
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predict, bears an uncanny resemblance to the obsessive Victor Frankenstein racing
to the denouement of the Creature's birth in Ingolstadt (I:3:8). The difference, and
it is one maintained throughout the novel's self-reflexive mirroring of its own operations,
is that writing has no effect in the world until it is read. The writer's obsession
with the text may seem both narcissistic and solipsistic, but this antisocial dimension
is confined to a conceptual plane. Still, Walton's unselfconscious acquiescence in
the claims of what seems to him irresistable reinforces our sense that what drives
Victor is little different from the passions we all share as human beings.
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experiences of victimization some cases were freer than others from any possible mitigation.
He concentrates here on the two instances (see II:7:38 and II:8:19) where his own
disinterested benevolence was rewarded with a violent attack on his person. For all
Victor's repeated threats to grapple with his Creature, it is interesting to observe
that after his creation he never again physically touches him.
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cut grass: this would appear a memory of Mary Shelley's from the 1816 summer.
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Enlightenment cultural standards of a kind associated with the writings of Rousseau
and, in English, Adam Smith. With the latter, see particularly The Theory of Moral
Sentiments, 3.2-3.3, 5.2, and 6.3.
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Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 BCE — 65 CE). A leading philosopher and statesman of the
mid-first century, Seneca was also a playwright, whose nine tragedies celebrate stoic
resignation. As a statesman, his practice was anything but what such a philosophical
stance might indicate, for he was an activist not a conservative. He was Nero's tutor
and later acted behind the scenes to secure the emperor's power. He retired from the
court in the year 62 to devote himself to philosophy, but three years later he was
denounced as taking part in the conspiracy of Piso against the emperor. Ordered by
Nero to commit suicide, Seneca took his own life with stoic resignation and fortitude.
It is not, it would appear, in Seneca's writings but in his example that Walton looks
for comfort in his peril.
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easily be reconciled with a disinterested ethics, one senses in this phrase a tone
of self-accusation reflecting a more mature understanding of his own implication in
the catastrophic events he has unleashed. This acceptance of responsibility is not
uniform, returning only sporadically in the later chapters of the novel, but it testifies,
perhaps, to a measure of moral growth; or, if Victor's vindictive diction places that
conclusion in some doubt, at least to a sharper sense of the price that has been paid
for his solitary ambition and withdrawal from normative human interactions. Still,
suspecting that Victor's self-important posture as family protector will only eventuate
in great calamities, a reader may find it hard not to cast an ironic eye upon what
continue as usual to be good intentions never sufficiently thought through.