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that Victor has all but severed emphasizes the extremity of Victor's withdrawal from
the society of those who have loved him.
that Victor has all but severed emphasizes the extremity of Victor's withdrawal from
the society of those who have loved him.
1171
Shelley's novel. Against all his prejudices as Victor's friend, against his repugnance
to face a multiple murderer, against his basic human instincts that revolt from such
sublime ugliness, Robert Walton wills himself into a state of ethical selflessness
that is truly benevolent. The Creature's "wonder" at this unique experience in his
existence is only to be expected. He has never before been confronted by human inclusiveness.
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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.
1165
III:3:6), the sublime power represented by the Creature is introduced to disturb its
tranquillity. Before, however, it was Victor who felt the effect of this natural profusion.
Here, clearly, Elizabeth is identified with a natural beneficence that Victor over
the course of the past five years has all but forsaken. What distinguishes her examples
is the ability she demonstrates to see all elements in motion; in their varied relations
with one another; and in their distinct particularity, whether distant and high (Mônt
Blanc) or near and deep (the bottom of Lake Geneva), rather than according to some
reductive model by which they are made identical and rendered inanimate. One senses
here a very different conception of nature from that manifested by Victor as scientist.
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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.
1173
"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.
1178
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.
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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.
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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.
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events of the night before Victor departed "[b]etween two and three in the morning"
(III:3:24) are wholly unremarked. Clerval's body was discovered approximately four
hours earlier, some time after 10 o'clock.