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a unique status in human annals is surely self-serving, the more so as this summary
comes at so determined a break in the narrative thread.
a unique status in human annals is surely self-serving, the more so as this summary
comes at so determined a break in the narrative thread.
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minutely into details; attentive, close." Elizabeth's frankness and perspicuity are
testified to earlier by Victor upon his return to Geneva after William's murder (see
I:6:41).
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nor any sense of possible future exoneration. For him, truly, guilt has become a constant
state of mind.
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become familar through Victor's own usage. Here, it is the terminology of destiny.
There is, however, an added recognition on his part that the course he embarked on
was "willingly chosen," which is an acknowledgement that Victor would have been wont
to suppress.
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in Book I of Spenser's Faerie Queene, she is represented as "griesly Night, with visage
deadly sad" (I.5.172), testifying that "I the mother bee/ Of falshood" (I.5.240-41).
The eldest of divinities, she has unimpeded access to the depths of Hell. In Paradise
Lost Night dwells with Chaos in the "dark/ Illimitable ocean without bound" (II.891-92)
from which God creates Hell. Whatever Victor thinks he is doing by solemnly invoking
Night to aid him in his revenge, it is clear, by all traditional associations, that
no good will come of it.
The observant reader may recall that the Creature invoked figures associated with
the daytime in swearing before Victor that, if he were given a partner, he would never
trouble his maker again (see II:9:17).
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that it is the state he is forced to inhabit, not the condition he wishes to perpetrate
on human society.
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almost wholly by its gradual character, the reader can attribute this statement either
to Mary Shelley's desire for a gothic ambience or, more consistent with her art, to
Victor's overheated imagination. Since the previous paragraphs have, through the foreshortening
of time, already hinted at his surrender to mania, this could be intended as a further
example of the slippage of his sense of reality.
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the Creature and Victor acknowledged their similarities toward the end of the colloquy
on the Mer-de-Glace (II:8:36, II:9:2, II:9:5).
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the late Enlightenment. A major reason for this was the presence of the Royal Society
for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, founded in 1660 shortly after the restoration
of Charles II: its periodical, Philosophical Transactions, was still in Mary Shelley's
day the principal scientific journal of the world. The president of the Royal Society
at the time of the publication of Frankenstein was Sir Joseph Banks, one of the great
explorers and botanists of the eighteenth century. Although Banks's diverse interests
would not have specifically engaged Victor Frankenstein, we can be sure that his example
would have been a guiding light for Walton. That of his successor, Sir Humphrey Davy,
however, would have equally drawn Victor's admiration, since he was perhaps the premier
scientist experimenting with the chemical effects of electricity in the first quarter
of the nineteenth century.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, it should be noted, attended a number of anatomical lectures
by John Abernethy in 1811.
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as a physiologist. What the reader cannot miss, however, is the extent of self-absorption
that could lead a man in the process of discovering his wife's corpse to note his
own bodily symptoms with such detached scrupulosity.