1031
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.
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
For Victor to lose a sense of his natural surroundings is, given the history of the
past several years, an ominous sign.
1033
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
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, 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
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
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
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
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.
1038
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).