1053

  • Cumberland and Westmoreland Cumberland and Westmoreland are the counties comprising England's Lake District,
    at the point of Frankenstein's publication famous for having been the site of a school
    of distinguished poets, foremost among whom was Wordsworth, who settled at Dove Cottage
    in Grasmere in 1799. When he transferred a few miles south to the more commodious
    Rydal Mount a decade after, Thomas DeQuincey moved in to Dove Cottage. In this day
    the Lake District, as celebrated as it was for its unspoiled natural beauty, was probably
    the remotest area of England.

    • 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.).

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • 1059

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

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.
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