623

  • All pleasures . . . life

    This is a remarkable sentence, redolent of all of Victor's earlier obsessiveness but
    now transposed into a kind of psychotic state. It is surely tied to earlier questions
    about the unhealthy products of the human imagination.

    • 622

  • All bounds of moderation

    Although Victor had earlier moralized against letting the pursuit of knowledge run
    away with one's sober judgment (I:3:12), here he portrays himself as indulging his
    hatred with the kind of impulsiveness and lack of restraint he had displayed in Ingolstadt.
    It is clear that what Alphonse Frankenstein had termed "immoderate grief" three paragraphs
    earlier (II:1:3) is not Victor's problem.

    • 621

  • A league

    The Oxford English Dictionary defines this unit of measurement as follows:

    LEAGUE:

    league lig, sb.1 Forms: 4-5 leghe, 4-6 lege, leuge, (4 lewge, 5 lewke, leuke, leeke),
    5-6 leege, 6 legge, le(a)que, Sc. lig, 6-7 leag(e, 6- league. Late ME. leuge, lege,
    leghe, etc., ad. late L. leuga, leuca (= late Gr. leu'gh, leu'kh), according to Hesychius
    and Jordanes a Gaulish word; hence OFr. liue, liwe (mod.Fr. lieue), Pr. lega, legua,
    Cat. llegua, Sp. legua, Pg. legoa, Ital. lega.

    a. An itinerary measure of distance, varying in different countries, but usually estimated
    roughly at about 3 miles; app. never in regular use in England, but often occurring
    in poetical or rhetorical statements of distance.

    MARINE LEAGUE

    marine league: a unit of distance = 3 nautical miles or 3041 fathoms. Although the
    league appears never to have been an English measure, leuca occurs somewhat frequently
    in Anglo-Latin law-books (Bracton, Fleta, etc.); it is disputed whether in these works
    it means one mile or two.

    • 620

  • All was blasted

    The language seems intended to invoke the "blasted stump" (I:1:22 and note) that is
    left after lightning strikes the tree near Bellerive, a manifestation of the power
    of the "vital fluid," electricity, that can at once create and destroy.

    • 619

  • a lady With the arrival of this enigmatic stranger Mary Shelley essentially completes the
    cast of characters—which is to say, the balance of human and social elements—that
    compose her novel. That Safie is herself an outsider makes her curiously similar to
    the Creature who observes her entrance on the scene.

    • 618

  • aiguilles Literally needles: the term applies to the smaller pinnacles that rise in the periphery
    of Mont Blanc.

    • 617

  • a hell of intense tortures Again, the stress is on hell as a mental state that Victor bears within himself.
    As demonstrated earlier at I:4:5 (and note) and I:7:30 (and note), Victor's internalization
    of the pangs of hell-fire is a clear allusion to the misery of Milton's Satan in Paradise
    Lost, especially IV.66-75.

    • 616

  • A gentle light

    The moon, which appears from details that follow in the narrative to be in its full
    phase. It is so bright, in Victor's narrative of the night of the Creature's birth,
    that "it forced its way through the window-shutters" (I:4:3), allowing him sufficient
    light to discern the features of the Creature as he opened the bed curtains to discover
    Victor.

    • 615

  • again, with a lessened form That is, the moon has disappeared totally, then has just reappeared in its new phase:
    so, a period of two weeks has elapsed.

    • 614

  • disgust and affright The explicitly sensual terms with which the Creature characterizes Caroline Frankenstein,
    unknown to him the mother of his creator-father, recalls his reaction to the first
    sight of Safie (II:5:4 and note). Clearly, Safie is in his mind when the paragraph
    ends with the anticipated aversion of a beautiful woman to his form.
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