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.

    • 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.

    • 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.
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