950

  • his daughter should be united to a Christian

    Himself victimized on account of his religion (II:6:3), the wily Turk is as bigoted
    as those who persecute him. He is likewise a type of Turkish villain frequently found
    on the early nineteenth-century stage, in England and across Europe, so there is another
    level of bigotry being appealed to here as well.

  • 949

  • Unfeeling, heartless creator!

    This is not the first time that Victor has been thought "heartless": he levels the
    charge at his own behavior after Clerval's arrival in Ingolstadt (I:4:13 and note).

  • 948

  • uncouth and inarticulate sounds

    This is the Creature's first sense of how he appears as a figure within a natural
    order. It is not a pleasant discovery to find oneself a discordant presence, but,
    as the ensuing paragraph relates, a kind of natural logic helps this eight-foot anomalous
    being not to feel himself divorced from the natural order. On the contrary, he seems
    instinctively able to recognize his affinity with it, even down to what he shares
    with beings as tiny as sparrows.

  • 947

  • the eternal twinkling of the stars weighed upon me

    The sense of the momentous responsibility he has assumed seems for the moment to have
    made Victor into a new being. In a curious way, by recognizing what it is to be God,
    he becomes more like the sober and fearful Adam setting out from Eden at the end of
    Paradise Lost, a moral being for whom, as the Creature himself has acknowledged in
    reference to Byron's Manfred (II:5:18 and note, II:7:10 and note), knowledge is commensurate
    with sorrow.

  • 946

  • a true history

    The Creature has not yet learned the concept of fictionality: from his naive perspective
    all narratives are alike dutiful representations of reality.

  • 945

  • the trial

    Although only mentioned here in passing, this is the novel's third unjust trial. All
    its circumstances—from involvement of the elder De Lacey and Agatha, who had no part
    in Felix's machinations, to the five-month pre-trial incarceration, to the confiscation
    of the family fortune and their banishment—suggest an arbitrary and tyrannical abuse
    of power by the state.

  • 944

  • the tremendous and ever-moving glacier

    That is, the Mer de Glace, the Sea of Ice, which is the horizontal glacial field fed
    by three glaciers (including Montanvert) on the sides of Mont Blanc.

  • 943

  • trees broken and strewed on the ground

    Compare Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Mont Blanc," lines 104-14.

  • 942

  • in a transport of fury

    This phrase stands with a startling contradictory purity against the elder De Lacey's
    amiable platitudes concerning "brotherly love" (paragraph 25 above). Even worse, it
    undercuts all the ideals for which Felix has stood as well as the intellectual command
    by which he has restored his family's happiness and tranquillity. In a pinch Volney's
    ideal of an open, accepting humanity gives way to an unthinking recidivism, a protective
    and brutal tribalism, a masculinist belligerence, that is the moral equivalent of
    war.

  • 941

  • towards the setting sun

    The Creature travels west for three full days. Given his stature and endurance, one
    would assume this would allow him to cover a large tract of south-central Germany.