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in Mary Shelley's day. Johnson's Dictionary (1755) lists the following two definitions:
- Pain of guilt
- Tenderness; pity; sympathetick sorrow
In both cases, but particularly in the first, remorse involves a passionate suffering
that could be likened to the action of poison.
1292
dependent upon his largess for their future welfare.
1295
experience recorded in her History of a Six Weeks' Tour, where the party left the
Rhine after Cologne and proceeded on the final leg of their continental excursion
by stagecoach.
1294
Portsmouth was at this time the principal commercial port of the south of England,
maintaining a constant traffic between it and France. For a Londoner the normal crossing
would have been via Kent, from Dover to Calais; but embarkation from Portsmouth would
have been preferable for voyagers coming, like Alphonse and Victor, from the west
of England.
1299
value judgment into his discourse, the question of narrative truth is once again brought
to the fore. Once again, Victor intrudes the notion of a "tale," a word used by him
(I:L4:28, I:3:13) and by the Creature (II:2:13, II:2:16, II:9:18) to describe their
narratives, also (with a different construction of what might constitute the truth)
in the last sentence of the novel's Preface.
1298
death and Justine's being cast into the Swiss prison where he visited her, the second
wave of dark events is starkly complementary. Now his best friend has been murdered
and he has himself experienced the alienating effects of imprisonment.
1297
Bearing in mind the previous paragraph's emphasis on Alphonse's fears for his son's
mental stability, we may see this careful planning between father and fiancée as reflecting
a shared concern that Victor not be left alone to indulge what they see as a tendency
toward melancholy, or, in his own characterization, "lonely, maddening reflection."
Even his seemingly innocent adjective here ("maddening") takes on added weight in
the depiction of Clerval as a kind of chaperon to ensure the preservation of Victor's
mental balance.
1300
to refer to inventors, often in a pejorative sense. Its ambivalence of connotation
is reflected in the double primary meaning assigned to it by the Oxford English Dictionary:
a. One who forms a project, who plans or designs some enterprise or undertaking; a
founder.
b. In invidious use: A schemer; one who lives by his wits; a promoter of bubble companies;
a speculator, a cheat.
Samuel Johnson is, if anything, less evenhanded in the double definition of "projector"
contained in his 1755 Dictionary: 1. One who forms schemes or designs.
2. One who forms wild impracticable schemes.
Perhaps the most famous literary account of projectors is that offered by Jonathan
Swift in Gulliver's tour through the Grand Academy of Lagado (Gulliver's Travels,
III.5), a think-tank populated by inventors of perfectly useless or insane conceptions
and contraptions.
Victor Frankenstein's desire to separate himself from madmen and hacks is thus easily
justifiable, whether we construe it in accord with his ambition or his achievement.
Yet, the tone of condescension in his phrasing is expressive of an arrogance and self-approbation
that verges on universal contempt. Its natural complement in a social dimension would
be a hierarchical rigidity denominated according to class, and in a psychological
field the prejudice we customarily comprehend under the rubric of racism. In other
words, there is an easy shift from this self-esteem to the denigration of the Other
expressed by Victor's continual demonization of his Creature.
1301
had "passed a considerable period at Oxford" and "two months in Cumberland and Westmoreland,"
not to mention the time spent in this lengthy journey northward, it should now be
early in July, which is to say, almost a year after Victor's promise to his Creature.
His pattern of attenuated delays throughout the novel is particularized in an earlier
note.