| Romantic Circles

1167

how little do you know me The return of Alphonse Frankenstein to the narrative center of the novel brings with
it the vexed tension between father and son observed in the early chapters when Victor
was an adolescent. Victor's silence here, of course, is of no advantage in bringing
Alphonse to a better understanding of his by-now adult scion. Perhaps the son's reticence
is meant not just to mark his fear that the truth of his guilt would not be countenanced
by his father but also to implicate this strained history between them.

1173

I curbed the imperious voice of wretchedness

"By the utmost self-violence": Victor lacks the modern vocabulary that would term
this act mere repression. He likens it to suicide, an active, even extreme, assertion
of violence against the self. Yet again, the reader may wish to ask, which self is
it that he would destroy, that of the Creator or of his extension who has destroyed
those whom Victor loves? The doubling of selves is insistent even where, as here,
it is merely insinuated.

1172

I could send . . . illness The normative expression of sympathy by which Mr. Kirwin reestablishes connections
that Victor has all but severed emphasizes the extremity of Victor's withdrawal from
the society of those who have loved him.

1168

how many days have passed Victor has gone from a collapse of time distinctions (as in III:7:4) to an inability
to differentiate time itself. The entrance onto the ice field seems to remove him
from all normative structures of human life.

1166

a howl of devilish despair and revenge A further instance of Victor's reconstruction of the Creature's emotions as diabolical
so as not to have to confront their actual nature. The howl represents, indeed, a
reaction of despair following an entire year's attentuated expectation, a year spent
in solitude and without any other hope. In turn, that understanding tends to ironize
Victor's own emotional dependency on Clerval during their trip. Both creator and creature
are here at last equally alone in their solitude, unconsciously prepared to transfer
their entire gamut of emotional needs into a single-minded pursuit of the other's
destruction.

1177

the strangest tale that ever imagination formed There may be an element of self-puffery by Mary Shelley in this statement, yet it
is surprisingly prescient in its sense of the cultural impact her novel was to have.
Moreover, it is entirely consistent with the way both she and her husband represented
the work to its public. Percy Bysshe Shelley, writing the Preface to the original
edition of Frankenstein, distanced this novel from any attempt at "merely weaving
a series of supernatural terrors," insisting on its adherence to the higher aims of
the "imagination." Similarly, Mary Shelley, in writing the Introduction to the third
edition, stresses how in its initial conception her "imagination, unbidden, possessed
and guided" her. That all these statements are congruent with one another and with
an exalted notion of the Romantic imagination, however, cannot alter the ironic context
in which this particular phrase is uttered. In the previous paragraph we have been
observing Victor Frankenstein, who was once swept along by his imagination to create
a deformed and alienated being, revising with soberly rational care his account of
that act and its consequences. The actual context for this phrase in the novel would
thus appear to offset its perhaps expected paean to the imagination.

1174

ignorant This is a word with considerable resonance by this point in the novel. Victor has
carefully kept Walton ignorant of the process by which he created life, and, moreover,
excoriates him when he suspects Walton of wanting to penetrate his secret (III:Walton:3).
He dies clearly wishing that he had himself remained in a state of innocent ignorance.
Although it is likely that, upon reflection, Walton will broaden the range under which
he construes knowledge to embrace a moral education, here he limits its conception
wholly to scientific discovery. In his dejection he seems to have gone out of his
way to miss the point of Victor Frankenstein's narration, which is itself truly a
mark of his ignorance.

1179

immersed in a solitude This statement makes very clear that, for Victor, solitude carries psychological
consequences of considerable and dangerous weight. From this point on for many months,
with only the briefest exceptions, Victor will be trapped in a kind of solitary confinement.
What begins as a figurative condition, indeed, will become an actual physical fact.

1178

my imagination was vivid Victor's remembrance alters the emphasis of his earlier account, which contrasted
his own interest in facticity with Elizabeth's (and Henry Clerval's) delight in the
imagination (I:1:9). However much he may be inflating the record here, the reader
cannot but be aware of the ambivalence about the nature of the imagination expressed
in these lines. That Victor once "trod heaven in [his] thoughts" cannot mitigate the
hellish misery to which he has now sunk, nor even at that earlier point in his remembrance
could it guarantee that the outcome of such an introverted elation would have an essential
value. The imagination, in this analysis, might be necessary for great achievement,
but by itself it is by no means sufficient, being merely an instrument, and, as such,
easily capable of indulging a self-absorbed solipsism.

1176

imagination was dreadful

This is a further example of the dark tones in which the Romantic imagination is painted
in this novel, resembling earlier cases where an isolated mind is confronted with
a radical uncertainty. For earlier instances pertaining to Victor, see I:4:18 and
note; II:1:8 and note; for a similar construction on the part of the Creature, see
II:4:17 and note.