1108

  • external nature This sentence suggests that, in this novel, nature as a principle, as is often the
    case with Enlightement materialist philosophy, is carrying something of the freight
    associated with the deity in earlier religious formulations. Nature is acknowledged
    as an enveloping principle of reality, and Clerval's feeling for it marks both his
    largeness of mind and disinterested perspective.

    • 1107

  • excitements to his vengeance Walton is referring to Victor's own acute sense that the spirit world that guides
    him is vindictive (III:7:19) and exonerates him from normal codes of worldly justice
    or, indeed, responsibility for his acts as a member of society. Yet, the emphasis
    here on "his vengeance" suggests that Walton's apprehension is crucially different
    from Victor's own and serves to underscore the delusional, paranoid mentality that
    is now Victor's habitual mode of thought.

    • 1106

  • examining my past conduct The plot of Frankenstein, with its insistent narrative mirrorings and doublings of
    character, seems always to be engaged in reexamining its own conduct, a process that
    contributes to the reader's skepticism about the truth of any single utterance by
    its protagonists. Here, in an epitome of this structural idiosyncrasy, we are told
    that Victor, after recounting his biography and then rewriting those parts of it he
    felt Walton had not succeeded in capturing in the manner in which he wanted them represented
    (III:Walton:4), has rethought the terms of his entire narrative and has revised it
    once more. That last revision, however, we will never read: the synopsis here presented
    does, however, differ in salient ways from the account we have been asked to accept
    as the truth.

    • 1105

  • Evil thenceforth became my good

    This is a direct citation of the conclusion to Satan's soliloquy upon Mount Niphates
    in Milton's Paradise Lost:

    Farewell, remorse! all good to me is lost;
    Evil, be thou my good. (IV.109)

    • 1104

  • Evian Evian was, even in the eighteenth century, renowned for its waters and, though P.
    B. Shelley upon visiting it found little to recommend its inhabitants, it would seem
    a natural destination for a honeymoon couple from Geneva.

    • 1103

  • Everywhere I turn We are quietly returned to the present tense, or at least to the telescoped time
    intervening between Elizabeth's death and the present scene of narration in Walton's
    cabin.

    • 1102

  • everlasting hatred If we can believe that the Creature really used such language, then its very indistinguishability
    from Victor's, even down to the extreme hyperbole of the adjective, is another indication
    that at this late point in the novel, the two of them have become a single entity
    whose overriding passion is hatred and whose life force is provided by death.

    • 1101

  • the events That Mary Shelley principally wrote Frankenstein, and certainly its third volume,
    while living in Marlow, near Windsor and not far from Oxford, might logically have
    suggested to her the value of inserting its local scenery and history into her novel.
    More pointedly, her own tribute to her father, in dedicating her novel to Godwin,
    would have been underscored by her including scenes associated with his most recent
    novel Mandeville, centered on the English civil war in the mid-seventeenth century.
    For this politically-minded group of writers (Godwin, Mary Shelley, P. B. Shelley),
    the civil war had been, first and foremost, a conflict of ideologies pitting aristocratic
    against republican values. Although a century and a half past, its political resonanace
    was far from muted in a reactionary political climate like England's during the Regency.
    Thus, the political undertones of this choice of scenery on Mary Shelley's part are
    unlikely to have been in any sense innocent.

    That said, there is another salient reason for the British setting of the earlier
    chapters of Volume 3, which is the simple fact that the novel is designed for an English-reading
    audience rather unaccustomed during the years of the Napoleonic Wars either themselves
    to travel abroad or to respond with much interest to a continental setting as sweeping
    as that embraced by the first two volumes. In its final volume Frankenstein goes rather
    out of its way, as if designed according to formula, to embrace all three parts of
    the United Kingdom.

    • 1100

  • Ernest yet lived This is the last reference to Victor's younger brother in the novel. He is left,
    a nineteen-year-old student at the University of Geneva, perhaps to learn a more human
    kind of knowledge than his brother, certainly to carry the family name forward solely
    by himself. He is the single survivor of the catastrophic history surrounding Victor
    Frankenstein.

    • 1099

  • Ernest

    Ernest is at this point about nineteen years old, and, whether or not he has followed
    his father's wishes and begun to study law, it is clear that he has not pursued his
    earlier inclination, as expressed in Elizabeth's letter to Victor at Ingolstadt (I:5:2),
    to eschew the public life and become a farmer. Whatever degree he contemplates, we
    can determine from this statement that he is undertaking some extended program of
    higher education at the University of Geneva.

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