1144

  • the ground sea As time has disappeared, so has the conventional security of space. Under the terrifying,
    antihuman solidity of this barren field of ice, even where mountains appear to arise
    from it, there is open and fluid water capable of erupting with terrifying sublimity.
    Victor is, in fact, at sea; he has become the ancient mariner that the continual evocation
    of Coleridge's text across the length of the novel has presaged.

    According to the Oxford English Dictionary:

    GROUND-SEA

    ground-sea. A heavy sea in which large waves rise and dash upon the coast without
    apparent cause.

    * A. 1642 Sir W. Monson Naval Tracts ii. (1704) 247/2 He met with so great a Storm
    and Ground Seas.

    * 1756 Prince in Phil. Trans. XLIX. 642 A rumbling noise was heard, like that which
    usually precedes what the sailors call a ground-sea.

    * 1835 R. S. Hawker Prose Wks. (1893) 28 On, through the ground-sea, shove!

    * 1865 Englishm. Mag. Oct. 296 A heavy ground-sea.

    GROUND-SWELL

    a. ground-swell. A deep swell or heavy rolling of the sea, the result of a distant
    storm or seismic disturbance.

    * 1818 Scott Hrt. Midl. iii, The agitation of the waters, called by sailors the ground-swell.

    * 1840 R. H. Dana Bef. Mast i. 2 The vessel..rolled with the heavy ground swell.

    * 1877 Black Green Past. xxviii. (1878) 221 Crashing its way through the rolling waves
    of a heavy ground-swell.

    b. fig. Usually with reference to mental or political agitation.

    * 1817 Coleridge Zapolya i. Wks. IV. 219 It is the ground-swell of a teeming instinct.

    * 1856 R. A. Vaughan Mystics (1860) I. 91 The religious world was rocking still with
    the groundswell that followed those stormy synods.

    * 1870 Lowell Among my Bks. Ser. i. (1873) 219 The deep-raking, ground-swell of passion,
    as we see it in the sarcasm of Lear.

    • d30e9547

  • to dedicate; to consecrate; to appropriate

    • d30e9549

  • to curse; to execrate; to doom to destruction

    • 1135

  • A ghastly grin This is only the second occasion in which the Creature is perceived smiling (the
    first is in I:4:3), and in each case Victor interprets an expression of pleasure and
    anticipation as alien, even diabolical.

    • 1134

  • I, the native of a genial and sunny climate The atmosphere of the third volume of the novel, with the exception of the honeymoon
    excursion along Lake Geneva, has been so far from genial that the reader is enjoined
    at this point to recall the original balancing of the novel, in which the civilized
    bourgeois world of the Frankenstein household represents the beautiful against the
    sublime of Mont Blanc and the Creature whom Victor encounters there in the second
    volume (II:2:5).

    • 1137

  • in giving the life and spirit There is no little irony in this phrase, since Victor has already in a material sense,
    given "life and spirit" to his Creature and even to his Creature as "enemy." Given
    his manifest failure on the level of the actual, his desire to succeed on the level
    of the merely textual may be understandable, but it is no less morally problematic.
    Having the last word must be a poor substitute for acting with foresight and responsibility
    in the first place.

    • 1136

  • a gigantic monster As this paragraph suggests ("the fiend" . . . "the fiend" . . . "a gigantic monster"),
    the creation of an abnormal identity through naming has become wholly habitual on
    Victor's part. We have here, however, one last indication that, wherever the Creature
    goes, he is immediately accorded the status of monster by the human beings he encounters.

    • 1140

  • gnashed his teeth The Creature manifests the likeness of himself to Victor by replicating an act the
    reader has already identified as characteristic of his creator: see also I:L4:10,
    I:7:27, and note. The Creature had earlier gnashed his teeth when shot by the father
    of the girl he rescued (see II:8:20 and note): then, as here, he vowed revenge.
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