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.

    • 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.

    • 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

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • 1139

  • glorious creature

    The shading here seems deliberately suggestive of Milton's Satan. From the very first,
    the Satanic legions sense that the fall from heaven has diminished their spiritual
    essence, and, as in these early words of Satan's chief follower Beelzebub, that loss
    is expressed in terms of "glory."
    the mind and spirit remains
    Invincible, and vigour soon returns,
    Though all our glory extinct, and happy state
    Here swallowed up in endless misery. (I.139-42) The most resonant identification
    of diminished glory with the fall of the angels is uttered by Satan as he soliloquizes
    atop Mount Niphates at the opening of Book IV. There, as he addresses the Sun, the
    fallen archangel directly contrasts himself and God in terms of their manifestation
    of glory.
    O thou, that, with surpassing glory crowned,
    Lookest from thy sole dominion like the God
    Of this new world; at whose sight all the stars
    Hide their diminished heads; to thee I call,
    But with no friendly voice, and add thy name,
    O Sun! to tell thee how I hate thy beams,
    That bring to my remembrance from what state
    I fell, how glorious once above thy sphere;
    Till pride and worse ambition threw me down
    Warring in Heaven against Heaven's matchless King. (IV.32-41)

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