1032

  • at the entrance of the cemetery In a macabre irony Mary Shelley brings Victor back to the kind of scene with which,
    as a student in Ingolstadt, he was well familiar, now to contemplate the unlooked-for
    consequences of his earlier grave-robbing in the destruction of his family. The sudden
    reappearance of his Creature in such a location—the type, as it were, of the bed on
    which he was conceived—is perversely appropriate.

    • 1031

  • its romantic castle Although Edinburgh Castle stands only 383 feet above sea-level, its position atop
    a sheer promentory gives it a distinctive commanding presence above the city. One
    of the most ancient edifices in Edinburgh, the Castle is the nucleus of the old city.

    • 1030

  • careless of what was passing around

    For Victor to lose a sense of his natural surroundings is, given the history of the
    past several years, an ominous sign.

    • 1029

  • candour

    This is not a virtue to which Victor can claim a strong adherence, as his analogy
    in the 1818 text between himself and Dante's hypocrites should reveal (II:9:22 and
    note). On the other hand, as was highlighted in Volume 1, it is distinctly one of
    Elizabeth's virtues (I:6:41 and note).

    • 1028

  • I called myself the murderer Although occuring within a delirium, this is, perhaps, the most open, revelation—even
    if it is subconscious—of how deeply Victor identifies with the being he created. There
    would seem, as well, to be a self-awareness of responsibility that, when he is in
    his senses, Victor represses.

    • 1027

  • they had called me mad Just nine months before Elizabeth's death Victor, after the discovery of Clerval's
    corpse, had fallen into a delirium lasting two months (III:4:11). Even, after he had
    regained his reason, his ranting convinced his father that he remained truly deranged
    (III:5:5). The constant threading of this issue through the novel must remind Mary
    Shelley's readers that they are wholly at the mercy of this autobiographical narrative
    embedded in her text, a narrative told by a man introduced as "generally having an
    expression of wildness, even madness" to him (I:L4:10). It is more than possible that
    this is exactly her point, that Victor has been slowly descending into a madness from
    which there is no escape, and that with his descent the narrative becomes increasingly
    unreliable.

    • 1026

  • that burning hatred, and ardent desire of revenge If it is really true that these striking oxymorons, in which hatred is expressed
    in the language of love, no longer impel Victor, they do reinforce the passionate
    cast of his diction in the last chapters of his narration (III:7:22 and note). The
    word "ardent" likewise reminds us of the use of that word to describe the obsessiveness
    with which he labored to bring his Creature into existence (I:3:1, I:3:9).

    • 1025

  • with what a burning gush The language of passion erupts at this point with a startling suddenness, as Victor
    begins to close with his Creature. That Mary Shelley expects her readers to sense
    some measure of perverse, almost abstracted eroticism in this "burning gush" might
    be inferred from her continual employment of the language of desire throughout the
    novel (for instance, the various forms of "ardour" and "ardent" she marshals with
    such skill) and the curious vacuum where one might anticipate passion in the relation
    of Victor and Elizabeth.

    • 1024

  • the bourne of my travels

    An archaic word, meaning "destination" or "terminal point" of a journey (compare Hamlet's
    famous phrase: "The undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns"—Hamlet
    3.1.79-80).

    • 1023

  • the blue seas of the south Victor's remark reminds us that this pursuit of the creature has gone on steadily
    in a great crescent from Marseilles across the length of the Mediterranean Sea, through
    the Dardanelles and across the Black Sea, and then north through Russia and even,
    perhaps, Siberia to the edge of the Arctic Ocean. This is a major geographical exploration
    for a man without an expeditionary force. Even more is it an ordeal for his Creature,
    who leads the way across the wilderness without any human intervention to help or
    comfort him.
    • Subscribe to