1269

  • O Night, and by the spirits that preside over thee In all conventional mythologies Night is a figure of discord and threat. As she appears
    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).

    • 1266

  • new and dear objects of care will be born This statement carries a subtle resonance, reminding us that this was exactly the
    fear Victor entertained of his Creature if he were allowed a mate, except that his
    perspective on those "dear objects of care" was of "a race of devils [being] propagated
    upon the earth" (III:3:2 and note). Immersed as he is in irony, Victor does not notice
    the similarity between his state and that of his Creature.

    • 1271

  • no creature . . . history of man Victor's lot is doubtless a hard one, but the hyperbole by which he inflates it to
    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.

    • 1272

  • for the guilty there is no peace Victor's self-conviction is once again expressed with neither mitigating excuses
    nor any sense of possible future exoneration. For him, truly, guilt has become a constant
    state of mind.

    • 1270

  • I had no choice but to adapt my nature As the Creature laments over Victor, he unwittingly uses language with which we have
    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.

    • 1268

  • nicer eye Nice here bears the significance of sense 12a of the Oxford English Dictionary: "Entering
    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).

    • 1267

  • the new town The area to the north of the old town, between the Castle and the Firth of Forth,
    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.

    • 1261

  • my wanderings Another important theme of the novel and of the age here resonates in Victor's seemingly
    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.

    • 1242

  • Towards morning . . . night-mare This appears to be a further application of Coleridge's writings to the general tenor
    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.

    • 1241

  • his more than daughter

    In the 1818 edition Elizabeth is the daughter of Alphonse's deceased sister (see I:1:7).
    Although in the 1831 edition her parentage is distanced, she retains this same designation
    of being "more than daughter." The terms recall the rhetoric in which she herself,
    in her dungeon, addressed Justine (see I:7:23). Even more so, they echo Victor's own
    description of her in their youth, in the revised 1831 edition (see 1831:I:1:10),
    and thus strongly suggest that there Mary Shelley was attempting to draw together
    these linguistic echoes to emphasize the inbred, almost incestuous, closeness of the
    family. As elsewhere, the echoes may intimate that the bourgeois domestic affections
    are not an unmixed blessing.

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