1027

  • they had called me mad Just nine months before Elizabeth's death Victor, after the discovery of Clerval's
    corpse, had fallen into a delirium lasting two months (III:4:11). Even, after he had
    regained his reason, his ranting convinced his father that he remained truly deranged
    (III:5:5). The constant threading of this issue through the novel must remind Mary
    Shelley's readers that they are wholly at the mercy of this autobiographical narrative
    embedded in her text, a narrative told by a man introduced as "generally having an
    expression of wildness, even madness" to him (I:L4:10). It is more than possible that
    this is exactly her point, that Victor has been slowly descending into a madness from
    which there is no escape, and that with his descent the narrative becomes increasingly
    unreliable.

    • 1026

  • that burning hatred, and ardent desire of revenge If it is really true that these striking oxymorons, in which hatred is expressed
    in the language of love, no longer impel Victor, they do reinforce the passionate
    cast of his diction in the last chapters of his narration (III:7:22 and note). The
    word "ardent" likewise reminds us of the use of that word to describe the obsessiveness
    with which he labored to bring his Creature into existence (I:3:1, I:3:9).

    • 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).

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • 1035

  • Cologny

    Cologny, Switzerland, lies on the southern side of Lake Geneva. It is the site of
    the Maison Chapuis, the house that Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley rented during the
    summer of 1816.

    • 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).

    • 1036

  • the progress of European colonisation Scholars have debated how to construe this addition to the 1831 text of the novel.
    Given Clerval's seeming representation as a Shelleyan ideal, his desire to attach
    himself to the imperialist designs of Europe upon Asia would appear to have Mary Shelley's
    endorsement. And it should be said that this early in the growth of the British empire—long
    before the Afghan Wars (1839-42) and the Indian Mutiny (1857-59)—when the liberal-minded
    Sir William Bentinck was Governor-General (1828-35), the British saw their influence
    in the Indian subcontinent as morally benign. Still, the extent to which the imperial
    "native" is debased within this system has its corollary in the rejection of the Creature
    by Europeans wherever he encounters them. Likewise, earlier imperial projects are
    roundly condemned elsewhere in the novel: for instance, by Victor and by the Creature
    himself in his reaction to the reading of Volney's Ruins of Empires.

    • 1038

  • Come on, my enemy; we have yet to wrestle for our lives Indicative either of Victor's own deliberate reinterpretation of the Creature as
    his double in rewording the "inscriptions" left for him, or of the symbiotic way in
    which the Creature through the experience of revenge now sounds like a second self
    of Victor's, this phrase recalls the masculinist bravado Victor twice indulges in
    his impotent rage before the power of the Creature (see II:2:6 and III:3:16).
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