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on Mary Shelley's part on second glance bears a startling exactness. The passion of
revenge has been truly devouring Victor from within. The more obsessively he devotes
himself to it the more assuredly he pursues his own destruction.
on Mary Shelley's part on second glance bears a startling exactness. The passion of
revenge has been truly devouring Victor from within. The more obsessively he devotes
himself to it the more assuredly he pursues his own destruction.
1067
Victor naturally adds "devil" to his name-calling. In these paragraphs we observe
both Victor and the Creature revert to the nomenclature of Volume 2 to define their
unchanging relationship.
1066
to recount a trial in which it is essential that he exonerate himself. On a more interior
level of the discourse we as readers are privy to a second narrative, which is meant
by Victor to exonerate the course of his life to Walton and, through Walton, to posterity.
This comment, then, links up with other instances, both early and late in the novel,
in which Victor's concern with rhetorical propriety shadows a desire to write history
so as to reflect well on him (see I:L4:30, I:3:13, and III:WC:2 and III:WC:4).
1065
Whether this is seen as an attempt on Victor's part to rewrite his initial account,
as an overt expression of a megalomania earlier under firmer control, or as simply
a more commanding perspective on his youthful passion, a comparison with the first
chapter of his narrative (I:1:18) yields no sense of Victor's feeling singled out
for accomplishment, but rather a somewhat wry recollection of a self-indulgent adolescence.
Even his remove to Ingolstadt and the most advanced medical school of central Europe
is a decision totally "resolved" (I:2:1) by his parents. It is true that Victor has
consistently appealed to a ruling destiny (I:1:14, I:2:19, III:4:41) to justify the
course of his life. Indeed, it could be argued that his narrative to Walton constitutes
a writing of the plot of that destiny, so that by its end every event in his life
appears logically necessitated. In that case the force of his autobiography would
require that the early chapters be revised to accommodate this narrative necessity.
Once again the reader senses in its capacity for revision an underlying instability
in the text of the novel. This indeterminacy is finely underscored in the 1831 revision
where "I believed myself destined" is substituted for "I felt as if I were destined."
1064
and note), so here the reader is brought short by the Creature's assertion that his
series of acts have been freely willed. The very adjective he employs embodies an
internalization of Victor's demonization of him. Although he certainly bears responsibility
for his acts through an abiding remorse, at the same time we are aware that he has
been conditioned into the state of the demonic. To adapt the logic of his own rhetoric,
negated as a human being, he has been recreated as a demon by the relentless scapegoating
he has suffered.
1063
note). Thus, the Creature's plan to seek "the vast wilds of South America" is compatible
with this meaning.
Compare the OED:
1. An uninhabited and uncultivated tract of country; a wilderness: . . . b. formerly
applied more widely to any wild, uninhabited region, including forest-land.
See also Johnson's definition from the Dictionary of 1755:
DESERT. n.s. [desertum, Latin.] A wilderness; solitude; waste country; uninhabited
place.
Be alive again,
And dare me to the desert with thy sword.
Of trembling I inhibit; then protest me
The baby of a girl. Shakespeare's Macbeth. He, looking round on every side, beheld
A pathless desert, dusk with horrid shades. Paradise Reg.
1062
usage, "desert" here means any wilderness. In classical references the land of the
barbarians is generally construed as Scythia, which is the far interior of Russia.
Fittingly, then, it is to that exact geographical region that Victor will pursue the
Creature.
1061
he can entertain a notion of a wholesale inversion of reality without remarking on
the distortion. The return to an actual reality will come, we can be sure, with a
devastating finality.
1060
to characterize Victor's precipitous walk the morning after the Creature came to life
(I:4:7 and note). Victor's sense of helplessness, which will soon reach an extremity,
becoming transformed into a catatonic physical state, will increasingly dominate the
novel's late events.