1052
in the north of Ireland where, presumably, Victor landed his boat. The present size
of Ulster, Northern Ireland, is in the range of 100 square miles.
in the north of Ireland where, presumably, Victor landed his boat. The present size
of Ulster, Northern Ireland, is in the range of 100 square miles.
1051
it is actually less than two-and-a-half years since the miscarriage of justice that
resulted in Justine Moritz's execution. That Victor, who on that occasion condemned
the entire criminal magistracy of Geneva (I:7:14), should now repair to one of them
to justify his own murderous pursuit of his Creature underscores the intellectual
distance he has traversed in the intervening months, as well as the extremity of his
current mental state.
1050
unconscious. There is another "existence" in the novel who is just as wholly dependent
"on the life of its creator," though Victor, as here, ignores the imperative posed
by his Creature and his own obligations to his creation.
1049
possessed of dauntless courage" (I:L2:1). It is, of course, possible that Walton was
wrong in his original estimation, or that the ordeal through which they have passed
has sapped the men of their bravery. But it is also possible that Walton, driven by
an obsession with a purpose to which he has devoted years and a small fortune, has
misinterpreted the caution with which these seamen view the continuance of their mission.
Twice in his early letters to his sister (I:L2:5, I:L3:3), Walton assured her that
he would "do nothing rashly." His crew may simply be holding him to that promise.
1048
When one examines the chronology of this novel, Victor's inaction or procrastination
or incapacity, however one denominates it, almost seems more its impetus than his
earlier obsessiveness. After a six months' illness at Ingolstadt, Victor spends an
entire year doing almost nothing there (I:5:15). Urgently recalled to Geneva by William's
death, he is stopped for two days when he reaches Lausanne by a sense of undefined
dread (I:6:14). Although he is certain of Justine's innocence, he is incapable of
doing anything to support it and watches her trial and execution in helpless frustration.
There ensues, as the first sentence of the second volume indicates, a "dead calmness
of inaction and certainty" (II:1:1) from which Victor is roused by the expedition
to Mont Blanc. In all, this trip takes just four days, and he returns from it to his
family "passive to all their arrangements" (II:9:22). The way in which a sort of psychotic
trauma wholly blocks the ability to act is likewise a major theme of Byron's Manfred
(1817), which also grew out of the Geneva summer of 1816.
1047
expression. Victor has neither seen nor spoken to him for an entire year since their
encounter on the Sea of Ice. Moreover, throughout the progress of the second volume,
in the humanization attendant upon the Creature's autobiographical account, we had
gradually lost sight of his objective physical deformity. Here, we are thrust back
into an "objectification" that is so extreme that it allows Victor to relinguish all
sense of humane obligation or fellow feeling. The self-righteousness that accompanies
this distancing is perhaps to be expected.
1046
the course of nearly three volumes containing Victor's narrative, we have come to
assume that it is a straight-forward account, unmediated by another voice. Now we
are forced to recognize that what we have read in this simple understanding has been
twice edited, first by Victor, and then by Walton acting at Victor's behest. What
Walton first wrote has in its second draft not only been "corrected," but "augmented,"
added to, leaving us with the uncomfortable feeling that mistakes could still survive
in the text, or that they could have been accidentally or—much more worrisome—deliberately
introduced in the process of editing, or that further areas for augmentation might
still exist that, if properly elaborated, might materially change the focus of our
perspective. In other words, Mary Shelley, having just merged two distinct narrative
voices and their respective audiences, now further destabilizes her text as an embodiment
of a fixed, immutably true account of its personalities and events. Our knowledge
is indeterminate and relative, wholly dependent on those voices that filter it.
1045
tellingly reasserts the centrality of human continuity and connectedness. Her sudden
reassignment of the role of narrator, from Victor to Walton, also alters its assumed
audience. A ship's captain listening to the solitary voice of a dying refugee in the
Arctic wilderness shares in that sense of impacted solitude. In contrast, the vicarious
experience of Walton's sister, who is addressed directly in the next sentence and
who presumably will read this transmitted account in London, takes place at the heart
of human civilization. This inserted tag may have a second function as well, that
of reinforcing the question posed in the last paragraph of Victor's narrative, whether
Walton will honor his plea and continue Victor's obsessive pursuit of the Creature.
1044
which is to say, how much we have likewise learned from reading the novel. Confronting
the Creature with a stern morality but also with compassion, Walton attributes fundamental
human characteristics to him, insisting on his humanity and thus on his obligations
as a human being. The Creature responds in kind, enumerating even more complexly shaded
human attributes as fundamental to his constitution. This process of dynamic self-examination
through human interchange may also be seen as a new element in his experience, eliciting
a sense of self not as an alienated, and therefore unique and unaccountable, being,
but as a sharer in emotions and social duties common to the human race.
1043
the actual state of the world beyond his enclosed family circle—and in this case,
he seems even unable to discern what is going on within it.