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.

    • 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.

    • 1030

  • careless of what was passing around

    For Victor to lose a sense of his natural surroundings is, given the history of the
    past several years, an ominous sign.

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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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