1022
out of Lake Geneva through Geneva and eastward into France; there, confluencing with
the Loire at Lyons, it turns south, to exit into the Mediterranean at France's major
southern port of Marseilles.
out of Lake Geneva through Geneva and eastward into France; there, confluencing with
the Loire at Lyons, it turns south, to exit into the Mediterranean at France's major
southern port of Marseilles.
1021
childhood, from which the Rhône river begins its long course to the Mediterranean
Sea.
1020
has its source in his adolescent experience of watching the stump of a tree blasted
by lightning (I:1:22).
1019
he witnessed lightning shatter the venerable tree at the Frankenstein's summer house
near Bellerive: "I never beheld anything so utterly destroyed" (I:1:22). His premonition
of the destructive power of the vital force he would employ for creation here realizes
itself with ironic power.
1018
1017
Coming immediately after allusions to the treacherous Ulysses and murderous Lady Macbeth,
this injunction bears the stamp of one who, using like rhetoric, exhorted his comrades
to throw off a similar despondency: "Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen!" (Paradise
Lost, I.330). Satan, too, standing on his perseverance in a lost cause, represents
himself as being
one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same. . . (I.252-256).
1016
This spa, a neoclassical structure in the form of a circular temple, was erected on
the Water of Leith in the 1790s. Black's Picturesque Tourist of Scotland, 18th ed.
(Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1869), describes it in these terms: The well (or
pump-room as it might be called) stands close on the banks of the river, immediately
below the Dean Bridge. The water is an excellent sulphureous liquid, possessing the
usual medicinal qualities, similar to those of the Moffat, and Harrogate. The late
Lord Gardenstone was the first to appreciate the properties of the spring, and erected
the present classical temple enclosing a statue of Hygeia, whose face very properly
'is expressive of sympathy and kindness.' (78)
1015
scientific endeavors, Walton in his opening letter to his sister (I:L1:2) and Victor
in his enraptured vision of the "new species" that would owe its existence to him
(I:3:8). That Victor should here repeat that term of distanced scientific taxonomy
may give the reader pause.
1014
of Duncan is unmistakable, and, like the earlier allusion to Inferno 26, provides
an ironic subtext that undercuts Victor's histrionic oratory: Macbeth Prithee, peace:
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none. Lady Macbeth What beast was't, then,
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both:
They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this. (I.vii.44 ff.)
1013
(III:2:3) who retains this responsiveness to his natural surroundings. This is exemplified
in the previous chapter with his enthusiastic reaction to the Rhine valley (III:1:19).
His citing of both the beautiful and the sublime in this sentence may point the reader
less to Victor—who sees himself no longer able to respond fully to either—than to
a sense of inclusiveness, at once aesthetic and intellectual, that Mary Shelley seems
to be associating with a fully realized human being.