1155
has become as well for Victor a totalized psychological overload. The "rage" that
immediately chokes off his speech is its manifestation.
has become as well for Victor a totalized psychological overload. The "rage" that
immediately chokes off his speech is its manifestation.
1154
the closing of Creator and Creature appears to near its consummation.
1153
of self-induced euphoria. It is literally the case that every time he indulges himself
in such a light-headed sense that he has escaped his "destiny," he is suddenly caught
up short by a new misfortune. (See I:5:17 and II:2:1).
1152
embarked for England from Le Havre when they returned from Geneva in September 1816
. The town would have held more than a tourist's interest for Mary. Her mother Mary
Wollstonecraft had moved to Le Havre to escape the Terror of 1794: there she wrote
her Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution
and gave birth to her daughter Fanny Imlay, Mary's half-sister, in May of that year.
In the 1831 revision Mary Shelley has Victor and his father sail directly from Dublin
to Le Havre, avoiding the lengthy coach journey across England in the 1818 novel.
This, perhaps, reflects a more sophisticated sense of the historical geography of
the British Isles gained after her return to England in 1823. Over many centuries
Ireland had maintained a commercial and cultural exchange with France that flourished
independently from the frames of reference in which the British viewed the power that
was increasingly its major antagonist. Napoleon's attempt to capitalize on the Wolfe
Tone rebellion of 1798 underscored the dangers implicit in Ireland's independent foreign
relations, leading directly to the Act of Union of 1801 in which Ireland was assimilated
to the British crown.
1151
Pilgrimage, Canto 3, stanza 45ff.: see particularly his summary in stanzas 59-61.
Clerval prefers the beautiful, with its humanistic overtones, to the sublime with
its otherworldly and supernatural associations. It is indicative that he centers his
descriptions of the landscape upon human images—the priest and his mistress, grape-pickers
among the vines—who give historical or local significance to its details.
1150
including the very notion of such a reiterated self-justification as Victor is presenting
(see III:6:21 and note), it would not be surprising to see this remark as a recasting
of his fine distinction between truth and the "willing suspension of disbelief" in
literature (see Biographia Literaria, Chapter 14). But, in fact, there is no assurance
that Mary Shelley would have come upon the formulation in time to have inserted it
into the novel. P. B. Shelley is recorded as having finished Coleridge's Biographia
Literaria on 8 December 1817. Frankenstein was advertised as published on 1 January
1818.
1149
such a statement matter to this narrative, except by way of reminding us that the
Creature, besides being a vegetarian, exists wholly outside the economy that links
Victor with other human beings? This is a telling reminder of the isolation of his
uniqueness, of how on a literal level all of humankind implicitly conspire to exclude
him from their interchange.
1148
references in this chapter, in their shaded ambiguity, along with the context of P.
B. Shelley's "Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude" (published February 1816), compel
the reader to question whether that guardian is a good angel or an evil spirit, an
alastor.
1147
to the equivalent of a modern superhighway, allowing a speedy transit to both mail
and passengers and the commercial consolidation of the "United Kingdom."
1146
formulation. Although Victor can exonerate himself by means of analytical logic, the
process is not liberating. Instead, psychologically he finds himself in a limbo of
uncertainty and incapacity, haunted by a dread he can neither escape nor define. Given
the increasingly psychotic symptoms he will reveal in the later chapters of the novel,
this early formulation may be considered a touchstone for Victor's successive mental
breakdowns.