1072

  • the tie of our domestic comfort

    Alphonse Frankenstein's foregrounding of domesticity may come as something of a shock
    after the Creature's long account of his life amid the sublime landscape of Mont Blanc.
    The aftershock is the realization that he is privileging the same exclusionary tribalism
    as Felix De Lacey. No more than the De Laceys could one expect the Creature to be
    adopted by the Frankenstein family.

    • 1071

  • our domestic calm

    Alphonse Frankenstein, more than any other member of the family, prizes a total seclusion
    from the world. This may be contrued as a result of his advanced years, but it does
    appear in sharp contrast to his long professional commitment to public service in
    Geneva. His desire for retreat is tied directly to that of the Creature, and Victor's
    unwillingness to satisfy the desire demanded by the Creature on Mont Blanc will likewise
    visit dire consequences on his father.

    • 1070

  • you should . . . make up your mind to disappointment Just at the point that we may have become overly preoccupied with Victor's own preoccupation
    with the image he cuts, we are brought back to the reality of why he is forced so
    carefully to hold up a mirror to his conduct. This stolid Swiss bureaucrat flattens
    four murders and the destruction of a prominent Genevan family into a matter of "disappointment"
    for Victor. It is little wonder that, after what he has suffered, he explodes in anger.

    • 1069

  • The die is cast As several editions of the novel have noted, this phrase was uttered by Julius Caesar
    when he crossed the Rubicon: it is quoted in the Life of Julius Caesar, the first
    of the Lives of the Twelve Caesars of Caius Suetonius Tranquillus. Mary Shelley read
    Suetonius in May 1817 while she was writing Frankenstein, so it is certain that she
    would not allude to this famous phrase without a sense of its actual context. Caesar
    goes forward to total victory, whereas it would seem in contrast that Walton returns
    in defeat. But perhaps the context is as ironic as that provided Victor's speech to
    the sailors by Dante's Inferno 26. In such a case we might want to read Walton's superficial
    defeat as cloaking a moral victory.

    • 1068

  • the devouring and only passion of my soul As is often the case, what appears at first to be an indulgence in gothic hyperbole
    on Mary Shelley's part on second glance bears a startling exactness. The passion of
    revenge has been truly devouring Victor from within. The more obsessively he devotes
    himself to it the more assuredly he pursues his own destruction.

    • 1067

  • Devil Having called the creature both "dæmon" and "wretch" in the previous paragraphs,
    Victor naturally adds "devil" to his name-calling. In these paragraphs we observe
    both Victor and the Creature revert to the nomenclature of Volume 2 to define their
    unchanging relationship.

    • 1066

  • in proper detail This remark may be seen as less innocent than it appears at first. Victor is about
    to recount a trial in which it is essential that he exonerate himself. On a more interior
    level of the discourse we as readers are privy to a second narrative, which is meant
    by Victor to exonerate the course of his life to Walton and, through Walton, to posterity.
    This comment, then, links up with other instances, both early and late in the novel,
    in which Victor's concern with rhetorical propriety shadows a desire to write history
    so as to reflect well on him (see I:L4:30, I:3:13, and III:WC:2 and III:WC:4).

    • 1065

  • destined for some great enterprise

    Whether this is seen as an attempt on Victor's part to rewrite his initial account,
    as an overt expression of a megalomania earlier under firmer control, or as simply
    a more commanding perspective on his youthful passion, a comparison with the first
    chapter of his narrative (I:1:18) yields no sense of Victor's feeling singled out
    for accomplishment, but rather a somewhat wry recollection of a self-indulgent adolescence.
    Even his remove to Ingolstadt and the most advanced medical school of central Europe
    is a decision totally "resolved" (I:2:1) by his parents. It is true that Victor has
    consistently appealed to a ruling destiny (I:1:14, I:2:19, III:4:41) to justify the
    course of his life. Indeed, it could be argued that his narrative to Walton constitutes
    a writing of the plot of that destiny, so that by its end every event in his life
    appears logically necessitated. In that case the force of his autobiography would
    require that the early chapters be revised to accommodate this narrative necessity.
    Once again the reader senses in its capacity for revision an underlying instability
    in the text of the novel. This indeterminacy is finely underscored in the 1831 revision
    where "I believed myself destined" is substituted for "I felt as if I were destined."

    • 1064

  • my demoniacal design As "design" had an ambiguous sense in its recent application to Victor (III:Walton:18
    and note), so here the reader is brought short by the Creature's assertion that his
    series of acts have been freely willed. The very adjective he employs embodies an
    internalization of Victor's demonization of him. Although he certainly bears responsibility
    for his acts through an abiding remorse, at the same time we are aware that he has
    been conditioned into the state of the demonic. To adapt the logic of his own rhetoric,
    negated as a human being, he has been recreated as a demon by the relentless scapegoating
    he has suffered.

    • 1063

  • deserts The term is a generic locution for an area uninhabited by humanity (see II:2:13 and
    note). Thus, the Creature's plan to seek "the vast wilds of South America" is compatible
    with this meaning.

    Compare the OED:

    1. An uninhabited and uncultivated tract of country; a wilderness: . . . b. formerly
    applied more widely to any wild, uninhabited region, including forest-land.

    See also Johnson's definition from the Dictionary of 1755:

    DESERT. n.s. [desertum, Latin.] A wilderness; solitude; waste country; uninhabited
    place.

    Be alive again,
    And dare me to the desert with thy sword.
    Of trembling I inhibit; then protest me
    The baby of a girl. Shakespeare's Macbeth. He, looking round on every side, beheld

    A pathless desert, dusk with horrid shades. Paradise Reg.

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