1232

  • so miserable a wretch This speech is closely linked in tone and diction with the point in Victor's narration
    when, awaiting his trial in Ireland, he resolved on the destruction of his Creature
    as the sole purpose of his future existence (III:4:43). Once again, we discern language
    (e.g. "miserable," "wretch"), which was originally applied to the Creature (I:4:2,
    I:4:3), then thrown back upon Victor by the Creature's taunts (III:7:7), operating
    as a standard diction for his own self-reference.

    • 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.

    • 1188

  • the lovely Isis The Upper Thames River is called the Isis as it flows through Oxford.

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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).

    • 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.

    • 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.
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