1055

  • senseless curiosity This phrase represents another instance of the complexity of verbal resonance we
    encounter late in Mary Shelley's novel. It was, as Victor Frankenstein himself acknowledged,
    curiosity about the Creature he pursued (I:L4:11) that first animated the interest
    of Walton and his crew. In the very beginning Walton had characterized his driving
    passion as an "ardent curiosity" (I:L1:2), and it is this trait that most obviously
    links him with the obsessive scientific pursuits that Victor early on associated with
    the realm of the "lawless" (I:7:1). Yet, it is the same trait that compels Victor
    to listen to the Creature's naration (II:2:16) below Mont Blanc and that will restrain
    Walton from attacking him (III:Walton:38) upon his reappearance in the final pages.
    Thus, what leads to an antisocial solipsism can also be an instrument for transcending
    rigid barriers and reestablishing social relationships through sympathy. The strongly
    oppositional ways in which curiosity functions in the novel may suggest that this
    most human (and Romantic) attribute is inherently neither good nor bad, but is merely
    an instrument, neutral in itself, that should never be dissociated from our common
    "sense" of the ends it pursues.

    • 1054

  • a mixture of curiosity and compassion If Victor Frankenstein's dying injunction carries a weight equivalent to that of
    the law, what suspends Walton's obedience to it are attributes of our human constitution
    that, for good or for bad, actively resist a rigid legalistic construction. The law,
    which has persecuted both Justice Moritz in volume 1 and Victor Frankenstein in volume
    3, is accorded no special privilege by this novel; but on the other hand curiosity,
    which has led Walton to endanger the lives of his crew (I:L1:2) and Victor to be blind
    to the consequences of his scientific obsessions (I:7:1 and note), seems deliberately
    to have been accorded a bad repute by Mary Shelley. Yet, for the author so to link
    it with compassion is to suggest an ethical likeness underpinning the two.

    This similarity between sympathy and intellectual inquiry resonates as well in other
    writings of Mary Shelley and her husband. A central passage of Percy Bysshe Shelley's
    "Defence of Poetry" succinctly outlines the dimensions of this similarity and suggests
    why its terms might matter so deeply to these writers.

    • 1057

  • the daemon Such nomenclature has been absent from the novel since early in the second chapter
    (see, for instance, II:2:7): from this point on, Victor resorts increasingly to this
    term, which increasingly lends his Creature a larger-than-life, fantastic presence
    in his mind and in the representation of him.

    • 1056

  • I was cursed by some devil, and carried about with me my eternal hell To what sort of devil can Victor be referring? Is it what, exonerating himself from
    responsibility, he described to his father as "some destiny of the most horrible kind"
    (III:4:41)? Or is it a more immediately relevant sense that the world of the dead,
    which in the previous paragraphs he has seen as impelling his mission of revenge,
    has a fundamentally diabolical association (III:7:5)? Or is it that he knows himself
    to be self-curst, as he earlier surmised at the beginning of the second volume (II:1:1)?
    Such an admission would involve acknowledging that the "devil" is an internal spirit.
    Certainly, the continuation of the sentence suggests such a recognition of the diabolical
    as a psychological state, for it returns us to the conclusion of the first volume,
    where Victor confesses that upon the execution of Justine Moritz he "bore a hell within
    [him]" (I:7:30). Once again, the context is supplied by Milton's Satan as he reviews
    his career in soliloquy on Mt. Niphates (see Paradise Lost, IV.73ff.).

    • 1059

  • a dæmon Such dehumanized nomenclature is becoming Victor's standard term for his Creature.

    • 1061

  • The threat appeared more as a delusion So heavily ironized has become Victor's existence by this point in the novel that
    he can entertain a notion of a wholesale inversion of reality without remarking on
    the distortion. The return to an actual reality will come, we can be sure, with a
    devastating finality.

    • 1060

  • when you . . . danger Compare with this the stanza quoted from Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
    to characterize Victor's precipitous walk the morning after the Creature came to life
    (I:4:7 and note). Victor's sense of helplessness, which will soon reach an extremity,
    becoming transformed into a catatonic physical state, will increasingly dominate the
    novel's late events.

    • 1063

  • deserts The term is a generic locution for an area uninhabited by humanity (see II:2:13 and
    note). Thus, the Creature's plan to seek "the vast wilds of South America" is compatible
    with this meaning.

    Compare the OED:

    1. An uninhabited and uncultivated tract of country; a wilderness: . . . b. formerly
    applied more widely to any wild, uninhabited region, including forest-land.

    See also Johnson's definition from the Dictionary of 1755:

    DESERT. n.s. [desertum, Latin.] A wilderness; solitude; waste country; uninhabited
    place.

    Be alive again,
    And dare me to the desert with thy sword.
    Of trembling I inhibit; then protest me
    The baby of a girl. Shakespeare's Macbeth. He, looking round on every side, beheld

    A pathless desert, dusk with horrid shades. Paradise Reg.

    • 1062

  • deserts and barbarous countries As elsewhere in the novel (see III:3:1 and note) and in accord with contemporary
    usage, "desert" here means any wilderness. In classical references the land of the
    barbarians is generally construed as Scythia, which is the far interior of Russia.
    Fittingly, then, it is to that exact geographical region that Victor will pursue the
    Creature.
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