1190

I will not The reader may have forgotten, but certainly Victor Frankenstein has not, that he
deserted the ice floe on which Walton's crew had discovered him and boarded the sailing
vessel only because its course lay to the north, the destination toward which his
pursuit of the Creature was leading him (I:L4:8). Now that Walton's ship veers to
the south, remaining aboard can no longer serve his purpose, which is as single-minded
in its vengeance as ever.

1189

it was he . . . nurse Mary Shelley's emphasis is delicate but marked. In his several months of illness
and misery it appears that only late does Victor recognize that there are medical
costs that had to be borne by someone. He has focussed critically on the quality of
the care without inquiring who had accepted the expence on his behalf.

1195

a singularly variegated landscape Although Mary Shelley depends for the description here principally on her own observations,
Byron's representation of the Rhine landscape as a point in nature where one might
observe a symbolic reconciliation of opposite powers in harmonious symmetry (see Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto 3, stanzas 59-61) seems to touch her conception here. That
representation, in any case, would not be far from her mind, since it was written
in the summer of 1816 and, indeed, when the Shelleys returned to England they carried
the manuscript of the poem with them.

1199

I cannot lead them unwillingly to danger Despite the bitter dejection recorded at the beginning of this entry to the letter,
Walton recognizes the essential justice of a contract mutually agreed to and refuses
to use the arbitrary authority contemporary law put in his hands to force the mariners
to fulfill his purposes. The emphasis on the adverbial "unwillingly" carries political
as well as ethical connotations.

1201

the letters of Felix and Safie These were the letters Safie wrote Felix imploring his aid in the rescue of her father
from prison and that she had translated from Turkish into French. In recounting this
episode, the Creature had promised to give Victor the copies he had made of them (II:6:7),
and this offhand reference suggests that he did so. The logical completion of that
strand of the narrative does not, of course, explain just why Victor Frankenstein,
embarked on an odyssey of epic proportions where he can scarcely provide himself with
the essentials of life, is carrying the translated correspondence of a perfect stranger.

1200

the lessons of my father Victor is at this point twenty-five years old and seemingly beyond the necessity
of instruction in the nature of human affairs. The distance, in attitude and experience,
between father and son stands without comment, although Victor's silence at the beginning
of this scene of patriarchal instruction is indicative of how unbridgeable we may
presume has become the gap that divides them.

1198

a small quantity of laudanum This revelation helps greatly to explain Victor's manic changes of mood, from almost
delirious emotionality to an impassive lethargy. Laudanum, a form of liquified opium,
was a narcotic freely available in the latter part of the eighteenth century. In those
days its usage lacked the social stigma that would be attached to it by later cultures
and it was commonly employed in all stations of society. Thomas DeQuincey's Confessions
of an English Opium-Eater was published in its first version in two installments of
the London Magazine in 1821, three years after the publication of Frankenstein, making
his literary reputation overnight. Percy Bysshe Shelley seems to have used laudanum
to dull the pain of the chronic nephritis from which he suffered. Mary Shelley, however,
was also well aware of the more consequential abuses to which laudanum lent itself.
Her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and the American
Gilbert Imlay, committed suicide by an overdose of laudanum in November of 1816, while
Mary Shelley was still in the early stages of her novel. Thus, this detail must be
seen as colored by that tragic event. At the very least, it is a further indication
of the deep instability of Victor Frankenstein's mind at this juncture of his career.

1204

Light, feeling, and sense, will pass away In contemplating his end, the Creature logically reverts to the memory of his first
sensations as he became conscious of the world around him (II:3:1 and note).

1202

liberty had been a useless gift In Mary Shelley's households, whether living with her husband or her father, liberty
is the greatest of human gifts. For Victor to call it useless speaks volumes about
the deterioration of his mind and sensibility. It also subtly links his present mental
condition to his continuing sloughing off of personal responsibility upon an abstract
and transcendental destiny.

1203

until my own life, or that of my adversary, were extinguished Mary Shelley here offers another accentuation of the adversarial masculinist code
that has dominated Victor's perspective on his Creature and blinded him to the dangers
to which he has exposed his loved ones. The melodramatic posturing, it should be emphasized,
does have a purpose if we remind ourselves that this first-person narrative is delivered
to a listener, Robert Walton, who at the end of the next chapter will reenter the
novel. Since Victor is well aware that Walton is preserving this record as an exemplary
warning to later human generations, he has every reason to try to influence the portrait
thus handed down to the future.

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