1064

  • my demoniacal design As "design" had an ambiguous sense in its recent application to Victor (III:Walton:18
    and note), so here the reader is brought short by the Creature's assertion that his
    series of acts have been freely willed. The very adjective he employs embodies an
    internalization of Victor's demonization of him. Although he certainly bears responsibility
    for his acts through an abiding remorse, at the same time we are aware that he has
    been conditioned into the state of the demonic. To adapt the logic of his own rhetoric,
    negated as a human being, he has been recreated as a demon by the relentless scapegoating
    he has suffered.

    • 1066

  • in proper detail This remark may be seen as less innocent than it appears at first. Victor is about
    to recount a trial in which it is essential that he exonerate himself. On a more interior
    level of the discourse we as readers are privy to a second narrative, which is meant
    by Victor to exonerate the course of his life to Walton and, through Walton, to posterity.
    This comment, then, links up with other instances, both early and late in the novel,
    in which Victor's concern with rhetorical propriety shadows a desire to write history
    so as to reflect well on him (see I:L4:30, I:3:13, and III:WC:2 and III:WC:4).

    • 1028

  • I called myself the murderer Although occuring within a delirium, this is, perhaps, the most open, revelation—even
    if it is subconscious—of how deeply Victor identifies with the being he created. There
    would seem, as well, to be a self-awareness of responsibility that, when he is in
    his senses, Victor represses.

    • 1029

  • candour

    This is not a virtue to which Victor can claim a strong adherence, as his analogy
    in the 1818 text between himself and Dante's hypocrites should reveal (II:9:22 and
    note). On the other hand, as was highlighted in Volume 1, it is distinctly one of
    Elizabeth's virtues (I:6:41 and note).

    • 1031

  • its romantic castle Although Edinburgh Castle stands only 383 feet above sea-level, its position atop
    a sheer promentory gives it a distinctive commanding presence above the city. One
    of the most ancient edifices in Edinburgh, the Castle is the nucleus of the old city.

    • 1033

  • greater claims to my attention Victor seems to refer to the reasoning that brought him to suspend work on the female
    companion to his Creature (III:3:1). Yet, this present rearticulation of his thinking
    revises the terms used earlier, substituting what appears to be a distinction between
    natural and unnatural life forms, or at least between a majority and minority class,
    that many readers would find invidious because inherently racist. Again, if this is
    to be construed as an attempt at honest reassessment, the strained casuistry hints
    at a slanted self-exoneration.

    • 1032

  • at the entrance of the cemetery In a macabre irony Mary Shelley brings Victor back to the kind of scene with which,
    as a student in Ingolstadt, he was well familiar, now to contemplate the unlooked-for
    consequences of his earlier grave-robbing in the destruction of his family. The sudden
    reappearance of his Creature in such a location—the type, as it were, of the bed on
    which he was conceived—is perversely appropriate.

    • 1034

  • my mind is overshadowed by a cloud of disappointment With a subtle touch Mary Shelley emphasizes Walton's similarity to the Victor Frankenstein
    who, two paragraphs earlier, had been unsure whether he could rid his mind of its
    "passion," that is, self-interest in its own affairs. The principal cloud overshadowing
    Walton is the failure of the entire enterprise to which he has been committed for
    a number of years. The death of Victor has also robbed him of the only deep friendship
    he has known. On professional and personal planes, then, he is equally bereft.

    • 1037

  • the commission of a dreadful crime As with the language with which he earlier speaks of these "remains," Victor's skulking
    hesitation suggests that, however morally blameless he represents himself as being,
    in his deep consciousness he recognizes the similarity between his un-creative act
    and murder. (See III:3:4 and note; III:3:22 and note).

    • 1039

  • commanded his countenance The connotations of this verb, along with the panoply of described emotions surrounding
    it, forcefully indicate Victor's awareness of the effect he has had on his audience
    over the previous six days. Walton's language, however, coming immediately upon his
    assuming what purports to be a narrative objectivity, seems intended to have an even
    more pronounced effect on the larger audience of Mary Shelley's novel. Where Walton
    may feel he is experiencing an authentic emotionality, we in our greater detachment
    may wish instead to discern in Victor's recounted autobiography an accomplished actor's
    knowing manipulation of his subject matter and his audience.
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