Modern pedagogy might admiringly term this a wholly noncompetitive educational environment.
Even that description, however, might be too bland for the usage of Mary Shelley's
day. Johnson's 1755 Dictionary defines "emulation" in a surprisingly harsh manner:
The terms have grown increasingly self-centered, until here Victor casts himself in
an absolute posture, anticipating a never-ending gratitude by the very function of
his bestowing animation on his creation. As usual, Paradise Lost presents the complementary,
though ironic text, in Satan's desire to escape what he considers a necessitated,
automatic response to God's genesis of spiritual and corporeal being:
lifted up so high
I sdeined subjection, and thought one step higher
Would set me highest, and in a moment quit
The debt immense of endless gratitude,
So burdensome still paying, still to owe. . . .
--IV.49-53
In contrast to the shared grief and affection of Elizabeth and Justine, Victor has
immured himself in a barricaded isolation, unable to attract sympathy and, through
his lack of candor, unable also truly to offer it. That "misery" is the last noun
of Volume I, as "disaster" was the first (I:L1:1), brings the reader full circle within
that sense of perilous enclosure.
Mary Shelley characteristically complicates the moral lines here. Even as Justine
is called a "monster," she resorts to her own habitual modes of religious instruction
to categorize the behavior of the murderer. That she happens to use the same terminology
as Victor does is a nice irony. But if we then seriously accept his own claim of ultimate
responsibility for this debacle, Justine's invocation of the devil is tantamount to
an ironic accusation against Victor, implicitly inverting his earlier (I:3:8) moral
exoneration of himself as a godlike creator.
The trip home, as Victor testified in the preceding chapter (I:2:8), would doubtless
be long and arduous, but his passing two years without concern for his family indicates
the obsessiveness of his scientific pursuits and a concomitant retreat from normative
social ties.
This is, indeed, the case, and this fact deeply complicates the novel. The Creature
incriminates Justine not because he knows, as with William, of a connection to the
Frankenstein household, but because she is a person whose ordinary sympathies, he
presumes, would be blocked in his presence. Without thinking, he too victimizes Justine,
and he does it on the grounds, since sympathy is more readily expected of women, of
her gender. For his explanation, see II:8:35.
Victor's unassuming choice of language, on a second reading, immediately brings to
mind his treatment of his own "creature."
This seemingly offhand sentimentalism is in actuality an exceedingly subtle move on
Mary Shelley's part, suggestive of how dangerous unexamined metaphors can be, especially
those that stem from our day-to-day existence and common practices. Victor Frankenstein,
deeply aware from his scientific experiments that electricity achieves its dynamic
energy from the interplay of polarities, here sees in the heavens an example of that
polarity writ large and, as it were, iconically—as elemental warfare. He will almost
immediately transfer that icon into an earthly counterpart, a permanent struggle between
positive and negative poles, by which he respectively denominates himself and his
Creature as good and evil, as figures of God and Satan. Thus, almost unconsciously
adopting a quasi-divine sign, Victor reinforces the animosity that allowed him conveniently
to categorize, externalize, and thus alienate as Other the Creature whom he brought
to life and then left to his own devices (see I:4:3 and note).
It is probably too early in the novel for the intonation of this phrase to resonate
fully, but by the time Victor has finished recounting his experiences and Walton repeats
these same sentiments (I:L2:4 and note), the reader will be ready to identify the
prototype standing behind this characterization as being that of Satan in Milton's
Paradise Lost.
In I:L4:21, Walton also connects Victor with this attribute: "He must have been a
noble creature in his better days." Nobility would appear to include a capacity for
self-abnegation and thus to be incompatible with the burning force of vengeance that
drives so much of the action of this novel.
