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a daemon to human proportions. In this they seem cast in the same mold as Walton's
lieutenant who, after the initial appearance of the Creature, stolidly questions Victor
about the "man" he has been pursuing (I:L4:11).
a daemon to human proportions. In this they seem cast in the same mold as Walton's
lieutenant who, after the initial appearance of the Creature, stolidly questions Victor
about the "man" he has been pursuing (I:L4:11).
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his will that Walton closes his eyes; yet with eyes closed he occupies an essentially
different space from that in which he first viewed the Creature a second before. He
has unwittingly placed himself in the position of the elder DeLacey, who is the only
stranger not to have rejected the Creature at first sight (II:7:18). DeLacey's blindness
and Walton's closed eyes remove from their judgments the beautiful as a determining
aesthetic criterion. With its absence each is able to act on what purports to be an
objective moral plane, or at least not to have pre-determined aesthetic categories
prejudice their responses. Paradoxically, an act that is reflexive and therefore deterministic
in its inception becomes the means by which unexamined, normative standards of behavior,
which are truly deterministic in their impulse, can be transcended, allowing an exercise
of free will. Since Walton is not actually blind, his act in its ethical import is
unique for the novel.
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this is the only shout heard in Frankenstein. The intense silence of the novel, indeed,
is a remarkable stylistic achievement. The noisy enthuasiasm of the sailors may remind
us of Victor's recent recollection of how the Greek soldiers wept for joy upon reencountering
the sea when they returned from Persia (III:7:17). The naturalness of the mariners'
response stands in paradoxical contrast with Victor's sense of transcendental empowerment.
It is little wonder that he should be awakened from his sleep by the threat simple
humanity poses against his aims.
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health, it resonates within a psychological and moral construction as well, once again
reminding us of how like the state of his Creature Victor's has become. The Creature
functions as a shadow, not just in the modern sense of trailing Victor wherever he
goes, but also in his incapacity ever to assume a full human dimension. Victor, in
his isolation and his chronic sense of undiscriminating guilt, has also forsaken that
dimension. In the late chapters of the novel Victor's physical condition is, as here,
a measure of his psychic state.
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error unnoticed in the Shelleys' proofreading of the text for the first edition. The
mistake, once in print, went unnoticed in all later editions of the novel. In Mary
Shelley's draft, however, the word is unmistakably "September." She would have had
every reason to adhere to this timeline since, just a few weeks earlier than her fictional
schedule, in 1814, it took the Shelley party nine days to cover the distance between
Basel and Rotterdam (30 August-7 September) travelling exactly as do Victor Frankenstein
and Henry Clerval and, even when adverse conditions delayed their departure from Holland,
a three days' crossing brought them to London on 13 September (see Six Weeks' Tour
for Switzerland and Holland).
The attenuated journey of the 1818 text is whittled to three months in the shifting
of the original departure date in 1831, which, as indicated earlier, may have been
done to accommodate the timespan after Victor's return from Mont Blanc rather than
his arrival date in England. In the next chapter, as recorded in both the 1818 and
1831 texts, the chronology reverts to a normative calendar and Victor observes that
he and Clerval "had arrived in England at the beginning of October" (III:2:5).
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In 1818 the compositor, evidently reading this as one in a series of journal entries,
surmised that it could not follow "September 12th" and added an integer to make it
"September 19th." But, of course, what the text intends us to understand by its idiom
is, "On September 9th the ice began to move." Since this is the date in the manuscript
and it is restored in 1831, the text has been emended here.
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absence in a time frame that has been previously so overcharged with event. The dating
makes comparison almost inevitable, and the reader thus becomes conscious of the curious
fact that the entirety of Victor's narration of his life took one day less than this
week-long lacuna in which the late-summer ice has slowly but inexorably been heaved
by the pressures of wind and sea into threatening mountains. The natural landscape,
as is so often the case with Mary Shelley's treatment of the sublime Arctic wilderness,
has a corollary in the psychological development of her characters, particularly in
the nexus of guilt and destiny driving Victor.
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nonetheless carries a profound psychological sense that he has been convicted in the
court in which his destiny has been plotted and that there is no escaping the sentence.
That he totally misreads the result, however, is sufficient commentary on the "necessity"
under which he feels he labors.
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Enlightenment cultural standards of a kind associated with the writings of Rousseau
and, in English, Adam Smith. With the latter, see particularly The Theory of Moral
Sentiments, 3.2-3.3, 5.2, and 6.3.
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Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 BCE — 65 CE). A leading philosopher and statesman of the
mid-first century, Seneca was also a playwright, whose nine tragedies celebrate stoic
resignation. As a statesman, his practice was anything but what such a philosophical
stance might indicate, for he was an activist not a conservative. He was Nero's tutor
and later acted behind the scenes to secure the emperor's power. He retired from the
court in the year 62 to devote himself to philosophy, but three years later he was
denounced as taking part in the conspiracy of Piso against the emperor. Ordered by
Nero to commit suicide, Seneca took his own life with stoic resignation and fortitude.
It is not, it would appear, in Seneca's writings but in his example that Walton looks
for comfort in his peril.