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that it is the state he is forced to inhabit, not the condition he wishes to perpetrate
on human society.
that it is the state he is forced to inhabit, not the condition he wishes to perpetrate
on human society.
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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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was developed during the eighteenth century and rapidly became the center of the vital
cultural and intellectual life of the "Scottish Enlightenment." When Percy Bysshe
Shelley and his first wife Harriet eloped to Edinburgh at the end of August 1811,
they took lodgings in George Street in New Town.
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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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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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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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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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innocuous phrase. As the Ancient Mariner of Coleridge has been invoked on several
occasions in the novel, the reader may here wish to see Victor, in his passive surrender
to his obsession, as willingly assuming that character's fate. But the idea goes considerably
beyond Coleridge's prototype. The notion of the Wandering Jew, cursed to be an eternal
vagabond for having taunted Christ on his way to the cross, stands behind both Coleridge's
and Mary Shelley's conceptions; and, indeed, that myth may be being evoked here on
a particularly subtle level, as Victor's turning his back on his own will to live
assumes a psychological counterpart to that taunting of the figure of redemption.
The poet figure of Percy Shelley's "Alastor" (1815), who wanders over some of the
same terrain as Victor in search of his visionary love, suggests yet another context.
Behind that figure is probably another conceptual avatar, the peddler in Wordsworth's
Excursion (1814) who is explicitly named the Wanderer, and who in that poet's conception
is able through his internal poise and just relationship with his natural environment
to maintain his balance amid the turbulence of life. Neither of the Shelleys had much
respect for that poem, but, needless to say, Victor's balance in contrast to that
of Wordsworth's peddler is seriously awry.
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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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of the novel. His "Pains of Sleep," in which he recounts the psychic repercussions
of a nightmare induced by opium, was published in 1816, shortly before Mary Shelley
began writing Frankenstein.