1151

  • a soul more in harmony with man This is very much in the spirit with which Byron represents the Rhine in Childe Harold's
    Pilgrimage, Canto 3, stanza 45ff.: see particularly his summary in stanzas 59-61.
    Clerval prefers the beautiful, with its humanistic overtones, to the sublime with
    its otherworldly and supernatural associations. It is indicative that he centers his
    descriptions of the landscape upon human images—the priest and his mistress, grape-pickers
    among the vines—who give historical or local significance to its details.

    • 1150

  • that half kind of belief With so many allusions to Coleridge's writings governing the exposition of this novel,
    including the very notion of such a reiterated self-justification as Victor is presenting
    (see III:6:21 and note), it would not be surprising to see this remark as a recasting
    of his fine distinction between truth and the "willing suspension of disbelief" in
    literature (see Biographia Literaria, Chapter 14). But, in fact, there is no assurance
    that Mary Shelley would have come upon the formulation in time to have inserted it
    into the novel. P. B. Shelley is recorded as having finished Coleridge's Biographia
    Literaria on 8 December 1817. Frankenstein was advertised as published on 1 January
    1818.

    • 1146

  • some great crime The reader might well wish to contemplate the oddly contradictory character of this
    formulation. Although Victor can exonerate himself by means of analytical logic, the
    process is not liberating. Instead, psychologically he finds himself in a limbo of
    uncertainty and incapacity, haunted by a dread he can neither escape nor define. Given
    the increasingly psychotic symptoms he will reveal in the later chapters of the novel,
    this early formulation may be considered a touchstone for Victor's successive mental
    breakdowns.

    • 1156

  • what remains of my hideous narration The sharp suspension of narrative line here coincides with a self-regarding emphasis
    on story-telling of a sort that we have witnessed earlier (I:L4:30, I:3:13). Such
    a mirroring of the function of narrative will become a dominant motif in the late
    pages of the novel. This act of doubling seems to entail another, identifying the
    creation that is Victor's tale with his earlier creation, the being who five paragraphs
    earlier had presented to his sight "a figure the most hideous and deformed" (III:6:10).

    • 1155

  • the cursed and hellish monster The rhetorical overload here may be considered an appropriate expression of what
    has become as well for Victor a totalized psychological overload. The "rage" that
    immediately chokes off his speech is its manifestation.

    • 1152

  • Havre Le Havre is a principal seaport of Normandy: Mary, Shelley, and Claire Clairmont
    embarked for England from Le Havre when they returned from Geneva in September 1816
    . The town would have held more than a tourist's interest for Mary. Her mother Mary
    Wollstonecraft had moved to Le Havre to escape the Terror of 1794: there she wrote
    her Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution
    and gave birth to her daughter Fanny Imlay, Mary's half-sister, in May of that year.

    In the 1831 revision Mary Shelley has Victor and his father sail directly from Dublin
    to Le Havre, avoiding the lengthy coach journey across England in the 1818 novel.
    This, perhaps, reflects a more sophisticated sense of the historical geography of
    the British Isles gained after her return to England in 1823. Over many centuries
    Ireland had maintained a commercial and cultural exchange with France that flourished
    independently from the frames of reference in which the British viewed the power that
    was increasingly its major antagonist. Napoleon's attempt to capitalize on the Wolfe
    Tone rebellion of 1798 underscored the dangers implicit in Ireland's independent foreign
    relations, leading directly to the Act of Union of 1801 in which Ireland was assimilated
    to the British crown.

    • 1158

  • line of high land The north coast of Ireland near Scotland is among the most formidable in the British
    Isles, with high cliffs and a treacherous series of great rocks called the Giant's
    Causeway upthrust from the sea. At this time, as Mary Shelley's exposition indicates,
    the basic livelihood for the inhabitants was earned from these dangerous waters.

    • 1160

  • Holyhead

    Holyhead, on the island of Angelsey, which lies off the northwest coast of Wales,
    in the eighteenth century had developed into the major port linking Ireland and the
    British Isles. It was the closest landing place to Dublin, with some 100 kilometers
    of the Irish Sea intervening. Since, however, Anglesey was an island, passengers still
    had to negotiate the treacherous Menai Strait linking it to the mainland. In 1810
    Thomas Telford was commissioned at this site to build the first suspension bridge
    in the world as part of a modernization of the coach road to Holyhead.

    Mary Shelley never traced this itinerary, but Percy did, both going to and returning
    from his Dublin adventure via Holyhead in 1812. Mary Wollstonecraft had also taken
    this route when she took up her post as governess in the Irish seat of Lord and Lady
    Kingsborough in 1786.

    • 1159

  • a hired nurse Up to this point in the novel nursing has been the domain of friends and family,
    and the willingness to engage in it has been the mark of selfless affection and respect.
    We recall that Victor's mother Caroline dies from the effects of nursing Elizabeth
    Lavenza through an adolescent attack of scarlet fever (I:2:2) and that Justine Moritz,
    in her turn, contracts the disease from attending on Caroline Frankenstein and herself
    falls "very ill" (I:5:5) as a result. Although not vulnerable to consequences so life-threatening,
    Henry Clerval acts as Victor's "only nurse" during the months-long nervous fever that
    incapacitates him after the Creature is brought to life (I:4:17).

    • 1157

  • A high destiny This final sentence of Victor's retrospective memoir ends in a tone of great pathos
    stemming from the most innocuous of verbs: "seemed." Reversing the assurance with
    which the paragraph began, here Victor comes close to acknowledging that all his talk
    of and even reliance on a sense of special destiny is empty of signification. If there
    is no actual destiny, then there is also no particular meaning to what he has done
    that can exonerate his actions or the path of destruction left in their wake.
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