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acknowledges that he had a duty toward the being he created. Earlier, we will recall,
the Creature had himself to instruct Victor on this subject (II:2:7 and note).
acknowledges that he had a duty toward the being he created. Earlier, we will recall,
the Creature had himself to instruct Victor on this subject (II:2:7 and note).
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his family or his Creature, should be able to speak in such measured terms of a balance
among multiple duties is certainly an indication of the objectivity and even wisdom
to which he may aspire when he moves outside his own narrow concerns. That he specifically
steps back from the coercive tone by which he had earlier tried to enlist Walton as
his agent in murder (III:7:26) likewise testifies to his rediscovery of a moral center
in his last hours of life.
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and increasingly death comes to subsume life (see III:7:4), this further jumbling
of reality and the world of dream seems particularly appropriate to Victor's slippage
into a delusionary psychic state.
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eroticized relationship with her has the paradoxical effect of alerting us to its
rougher corollary in events of the novel of which she is ignorant. Translated from
the level domestic plane in which she is centered to the sublime heights where Victor
and his Creature struggle, this ambivalence might seem strangely akin to the intense
love-hate dynamic in which that homosocial relationship plays itself out.
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The Shelleys passed the Drance during their Swiss excursion; it is described in Letter
6 of A History of a Six Weeks' Tour:
As soon as we had passed the opposite promontory, we saw the river Drance, which descends
from between a chasm in the mountains, and makes a plain near the lake, intersected
by its divided streams. Thousands of besolets, beautiful water-birds, like sea-gulls,
but smaller, with purple on their backs, take their station on the shallows, where
its waters mingle with the lake.
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the living Victor casts himself as the agent of the dead, now here he begins to collapse
the difference between the realms of life and death. His life will go on only in pursuit
of death.
1072
Alphonse Frankenstein's foregrounding of domesticity may come as something of a shock
after the Creature's long account of his life amid the sublime landscape of Mont Blanc.
The aftershock is the realization that he is privileging the same exclusionary tribalism
as Felix De Lacey. No more than the De Laceys could one expect the Creature to be
adopted by the Frankenstein family.
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Alphonse Frankenstein, more than any other member of the family, prizes a total seclusion
from the world. This may be contrued as a result of his advanced years, but it does
appear in sharp contrast to his long professional commitment to public service in
Geneva. His desire for retreat is tied directly to that of the Creature, and Victor's
unwillingness to satisfy the desire demanded by the Creature on Mont Blanc will likewise
visit dire consequences on his father.
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with the image he cuts, we are brought back to the reality of why he is forced so
carefully to hold up a mirror to his conduct. This stolid Swiss bureaucrat flattens
four murders and the destruction of a prominent Genevan family into a matter of "disappointment"
for Victor. It is little wonder that, after what he has suffered, he explodes in anger.
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when he crossed the Rubicon: it is quoted in the Life of Julius Caesar, the first
of the Lives of the Twelve Caesars of Caius Suetonius Tranquillus. Mary Shelley read
Suetonius in May 1817 while she was writing Frankenstein, so it is certain that she
would not allude to this famous phrase without a sense of its actual context. Caesar
goes forward to total victory, whereas it would seem in contrast that Walton returns
in defeat. But perhaps the context is as ironic as that provided Victor's speech to
the sailors by Dante's Inferno 26. In such a case we might want to read Walton's superficial
defeat as cloaking a moral victory.