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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  • Suddenly the broad disk of the moon arose Since the rising of the moon is, like the dawning of the sun, a phenomenon marked
    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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  • mutilated one The irony of the previous sentence is here almost grotesquely intensified. The being
    to whom Victor originally gave "life and spirit" was so horribly mutilated in his
    creation as to provoke universal aversion from all whom he met. Now, in the text,
    Victor hopes in some way to rectify that lack of initial perspective and clean up
    either what he once called his "filthy creation" (I:3:9), or lacking success at that
    aim, at least his own image. The secondary irony is that neither he nor his Creature
    can expect an individual "posterity" since each has denied the other the possibility
    of procreation. The posterity that will determine their lasting reputations is thus
    composed solely of readers of the present text that Victor is so assiduously determined
    to rewrite.

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  • motion of every muscle . . . extremities of my limbs The oddity of this observation seems to be directly based in Victor's experience
    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.

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  • the fears I entertained of a mutiny These are by no means unfounded fears. The notorious mutiny of Henry Hudson's crew
    during his fourth voyage to the north in 1611 resulted in the renowned explorer's
    death. Even so late as his polar exploration of 1829, Sir John Ross experienced a
    mutiny on one of its ships.

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  • to shake off my chains This conception of slavery as a psychological as well as physical condition is very
    much of a piece with other literary productions by the Geneva circle during the summer
    of 1816, most particularly The Prisoner of Chillon, written by Lord Byron in the week
    after he and Percy Bysshe Shelley visited the Castle of Chillon during their boat
    trip around the lake in mid-July. Shelley included an account in the letters he appended
    to A History of a Six Weeks' Tour. In Byron's poem, at the end of his long captivity,
    François de Bonnivard, the prisoner, claims, "It was at length the same to me, / Fetter'd
    or fetterless to be" (lines 372-73) and ruefully notes, in much the same language
    as Victor employs here, that "iron is a cankering thing, / For in these limbs its
    teeth remain, / With marks that will not wear away" (lines 38-40).

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  • most miserable of mortals The terms here have a strongly echoing effect, returning us to the language in which
    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).

    • 1243

  • the most distinguished natural philosophers In general terms England was the center for scientific knowledge in the Europe of
    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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  • 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.

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  • I passed whole days . . . silent and listless

    Victor has returned to the desultory sailing on Lake Geneva that occupied him earlier
    in the summer (II:1:5 and note). To be "listless" is literally to be without desire.

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