1086

  • endeavours to move the passions As with the attention Walton gives to Victor's theatrical "command" in the opening
    paragraph of his resumed narrative (III:Walton:1 and note), we are here made conscious
    of how essentially manipulative (even if it could be argued to be not wholly intentional)
    is Victor's effort to insure that his perspective on events becomes the official record
    handed down to posterity.

    • 1085

  • He is eloquent and persuasive Mary Shelley nicely returns us to the earlier concern with the relationship between
    eloquence and truth, between the representation of action and action itself, well
    aware of how the issue impinges both on her characters (particularly Victor's desire
    to vindicate himself to the world) and on her own art.

    See also I:L4:24 and note; 1831:I:8:31 and note; I:7:5 and note; I:7:13 and note.

    • 1088

  • an English philosopher

    In the sense of "natural philosophy" encountered earlier (I:3:1), a physical scientist.

    • 1087

  • demoniacal enemy In the third volume Victor has increasingly come to refer to the Creature as a "daemon,"
    thus not only dehumanizing him through an association with Satanic evil, but also,
    by conferring on the Creature a transcendental status, absolving himself as his Creator
    from any responsibility for his nature. In effect, linguistically, Victor is canceling
    his own role in the formation of the Creature.

    • 1100

  • Ernest yet lived This is the last reference to Victor's younger brother in the novel. He is left,
    a nineteen-year-old student at the University of Geneva, perhaps to learn a more human
    kind of knowledge than his brother, certainly to carry the family name forward solely
    by himself. He is the single survivor of the catastrophic history surrounding Victor
    Frankenstein.

    • 1099

  • Ernest

    Ernest is at this point about nineteen years old, and, whether or not he has followed
    his father's wishes and begun to study law, it is clear that he has not pursued his
    earlier inclination, as expressed in Elizabeth's letter to Victor at Ingolstadt (I:5:2),
    to eschew the public life and become a farmer. Whatever degree he contemplates, we
    can determine from this statement that he is undertaking some extended program of
    higher education at the University of Geneva.

    • 1101

  • the events That Mary Shelley principally wrote Frankenstein, and certainly its third volume,
    while living in Marlow, near Windsor and not far from Oxford, might logically have
    suggested to her the value of inserting its local scenery and history into her novel.
    More pointedly, her own tribute to her father, in dedicating her novel to Godwin,
    would have been underscored by her including scenes associated with his most recent
    novel Mandeville, centered on the English civil war in the mid-seventeenth century.
    For this politically-minded group of writers (Godwin, Mary Shelley, P. B. Shelley),
    the civil war had been, first and foremost, a conflict of ideologies pitting aristocratic
    against republican values. Although a century and a half past, its political resonanace
    was far from muted in a reactionary political climate like England's during the Regency.
    Thus, the political undertones of this choice of scenery on Mary Shelley's part are
    unlikely to have been in any sense innocent.

    That said, there is another salient reason for the British setting of the earlier
    chapters of Volume 3, which is the simple fact that the novel is designed for an English-reading
    audience rather unaccustomed during the years of the Napoleonic Wars either themselves
    to travel abroad or to respond with much interest to a continental setting as sweeping
    as that embraced by the first two volumes. In its final volume Frankenstein goes rather
    out of its way, as if designed according to formula, to embrace all three parts of
    the United Kingdom.

    • 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.

    • 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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