722

  • a feeling and kind friend

    Up to this point all the expression of sympathy has come as a surmise of the Creature's
    about the cottagers. This assertion reminds us that for something like a year the
    Creature has intervened actively to assist the cottagers in their daily existence.
    His fellow-feeling has, indeed, extended into kind actions on their behalf. The heavy
    irony behind this scene is that all the Enlightenment virtues the Creature has presumed
    to be attributes of the cottagers have been employed by him on a daily basis.

  • 723

  • the first little white flower

    The snowdrop, a common subject of poems on fragile beauty and mutability, often associated
    with young women, in the late eighteenth century. Like the crocus, the snowdrop blooms
    in late winter.

  • 724

  • gnashing of teeth

    In his pain and anger the Creature imitates the actions of Victor Frankenstein twice
    noted in the first volume (I:L4:10 and note; I:7:27 and note) and again at the beginning
    of the second (II:1:6 and note). The Creature will again be portrayed as gnashing
    his teeth in the third volume (III:3:13). The prototype for this behaviour remains
    the Satan of Milton's Paradise Lost, VI.340.

  • 725

  • I determined to go alone

    It is of some use to the design of Frankenstein that Victor go onto the Mer de Glace
    by himself. At the same time, his rationale, that another human being would "destroy"
    what he considers its "solitary grandeur," is characteristic of his constitutional
    withdrawal into a contemplative introversion.

  • 726

  • a godlike science

    This seems another connection with legendary associations of Prometheus. In Percy
    Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Asia, the Titan's consort, credits him with responsibity
    for our access to language: "He gave man speech, and speech created thought,/ Which
    is the measure of the universe" (II.iv.72-73).

  • 669

  • I did not strive to controul them

    The power of the Creature's rage is shocking, perhaps as well to himself after having
    spent an entire year in isolation and under a regimen of strict and carefully enforced
    self-control. The infinitive, however, reminds us how severely that control has been
    earlier exercised by him. It might likewise call to mind the lack of restraint with
    which Victor Frankenstein pursued the researches that resulted in the Creature's birth
    (I:3:3).

  • 670

  • conversed with my family

    Such incongruity of tone can have its value (though Mary Shelley did decide in the
    third edition to remove the family presence altogether from Victor's excursion to
    Mont Blanc). We will shortly be reminded that there is another part of Victor's family
    he has assiduously avoided and to whom, unlike his conventional family, he has given
    no solicitude whatsoever. The oddity of tone here, quickly rectified by the gloomy
    weather of the next morning, almost unconsciously prepares us for the conversation
    so feared and so long postponed but now, given the state of Victor's psychological
    condition, clearly urgent.

  • 671

  • names of the cottagers

    The naming of the cottagers depends not just on their individual identities but also
    on their family, i.e., their social, relations. That they thus have several different
    names, depending on which aspect is being emphasized, constitutes a new level of awareness
    on the Creature's part.

  • 672

  • his countenance bespoke bitter anguish, combined with disdain and malignity

    The nouns here are all associated with Satan and the Satanic in Paradise Lost: e.g.
    "anguish" (II.568; VI.340); "disdain" (I.98; II.680; V.666); "malign" (III.553; IV.503;
    VII.189). And yet, the framing language forces us to consider perspective: "bespoke"
    is not the same as "constitutes" in its implicit representation of reality; and if
    Victor, even as he articulates it, openly remarks that he "scarcely observed this,"
    where, then, might his terms come from? As we will learn from the Creature himself
    (II:7:7), it is easy to insert oneself (or others) into the mythic texture of Paradise
    Lost: thus it might appear, as it were, that Victor does so first, here defining the
    Creature as Satanic not from sharp empirical observation but from literary—that is
    to say, cultural—convention.

  • 673

  • you must create

    The change in verb form to a command is rhetorically powerful, but it also signals
    a shift in, broadly speaking, the political dynamics of the novel. Victor's power,
    a symbolic extension of that of his father and family, is no longer absolute, but
    can be successfully challenged by the figure who stands in the position of his son
    and who can command superior strength and tenacity.