1231

  • Miserable himself, that he may render no other wretched This phrasing succinctly captures the closed circle in which the Creature and his
    creator exist, miserable and incapable of producing anything else but misery. Its
    terms are as applicable to the speaker as to the object of his hatred, as may be indicated
    by the simple fact that Victor Frankenstein dies first.

    • 1227

  • an absorbing melancholy, that resembled madness

    The final third of the novel is going to concentrate much attention on the progressive
    deterioration of Victor's mental health. Thus, in revising the novel, Mary Shelley
    carefully implants at this crucial turn of events, when Victor once again plans to
    depart the family circle, Alphonse Frankenstein's suspicion that his son may be deranged.

    • 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.

    • 1197

  • last autumn This is another sign of the mistaken chronology at this point in the narrative. The
    previous autumn Victor spent awaiting his trial. What Elizabeth is referring to is
    actually the late summer—the aftermath of the August trip to Mont Blanc—of the previous
    year.

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • 1196

  • that language Victor's sudden reminder of the instability of language throughout the novel also
    serves to link linguistic difference with the notion of an alienated identity, a condition
    that from now on he will share with his Creature. The Creature's vow to make Victor
    equally miserable first unfolds on a psychological plain.

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.
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