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.

    • 1065

  • destined for some great enterprise

    Whether this is seen as an attempt on Victor's part to rewrite his initial account,
    as an overt expression of a megalomania earlier under firmer control, or as simply
    a more commanding perspective on his youthful passion, a comparison with the first
    chapter of his narrative (I:1:18) yields no sense of Victor's feeling singled out
    for accomplishment, but rather a somewhat wry recollection of a self-indulgent adolescence.
    Even his remove to Ingolstadt and the most advanced medical school of central Europe
    is a decision totally "resolved" (I:2:1) by his parents. It is true that Victor has
    consistently appealed to a ruling destiny (I:1:14, I:2:19, III:4:41) to justify the
    course of his life. Indeed, it could be argued that his narrative to Walton constitutes
    a writing of the plot of that destiny, so that by its end every event in his life
    appears logically necessitated. In that case the force of his autobiography would
    require that the early chapters be revised to accommodate this narrative necessity.
    Once again the reader senses in its capacity for revision an underlying instability
    in the text of the novel. This indeterminacy is finely underscored in the 1831 revision
    where "I believed myself destined" is substituted for "I felt as if I were destined."

    • 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).

    • 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.

    • 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.
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