1128
as "ardour" and thought his "enthusiasm" then to be essentially innocent (I:3:8).
The symptoms noted there all return here, although their neurotic character is now
much more firmly marked.
as "ardour" and thought his "enthusiasm" then to be essentially innocent (I:3:8).
The symptoms noted there all return here, although their neurotic character is now
much more firmly marked.
1127
the personal and more public conceptions of responsibility that can be traced through
the novel. Although Victor, and recently his father too, think of him as haunted by
a destiny over which he has no control (III:4:43), Elizabeth's language is firmly
rooted in the primacy of choice in all human relations. Her rejection of a male concept
of honor here seems to link it to stereotypes of behavior that at once shackle the
will and suspend the individual's ultimate responsibility for actions and their consequences.
1126
the first volume, only here, after the establishment of a complex doubling between
Victor and the Creature, does Mary Shelley extend the pattern to involve Clerval.
Given Mary Shelley's setting Clerval within the context of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"
in the previous chapter (III:1:21), it is hard not to hear in this phrase the timbres
Wordsworth addresses to his sister in that poem (lines 116-19).
1125
depiction. It suggests that a detached perspective on Victor's withdrawal would make
it seem more neurotic than it might appear to us as accustomed sharers of Victor's
point of view.
1124
of this word as "any violent affection of mind or body," in general the connotation
emphasized is the temporary state of the affliction. In contrast, Victor's enthusiastic
obsession was years in its gestation, and it was succeeded by another, more lethal
obsession with the destruction of the being he created. In other words, though the
madness he admits to may have taken several forms, it has been unremitting since he
entered upon his studies at the University of Ingolstadt. As Victor's diction appears
to mitigate its force, it suggests that even now, in his final assessment, he is unwilling
fully to engage his own culpability.
1123
processes of everyday life, but reminds us that even in the farthest reaches of the
globe human beings establish a basic community one with the other. These sounds from
the darkness at once remind us of the Creature's yearning to participate in such a
community and reinforce Victor's total self-exclusion from its claims. Moreover, surely
there is an intentional irony here pitting the productive labor of the fishermen,
who in turn depend upon it for their sustenance, against the long-postponed and now
aborted labor of Victor, who is financially free of such necessities, as well as the
lack of productive community in which the Creature is forced to exist.
1122
workshop of filthy creation" (I:3:9).
1121
The withdrawal is a dangerous portent, but for Mary Shelley once again to connect
such a process with the exercise of the imagination clearly questions the value of
this central concept of Romanticism.
1120
compulsive hyperbole that distances himself from and demonizes his creation. In the
process Victor comes to identify himself with "the whole human race" against the anomalous
alien being he would cast out from it.
1119
As is evidenced by his once again denominating his Creature by degrading epithets,
Victor returns to his old habits of mind as the time slips away.