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as a physiologist. What the reader cannot miss, however, is the extent of self-absorption
that could lead a man in the process of discovering his wife's corpse to note his
own bodily symptoms with such detached scrupulosity.
as a physiologist. What the reader cannot miss, however, is the extent of self-absorption
that could lead a man in the process of discovering his wife's corpse to note his
own bodily symptoms with such detached scrupulosity.
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the Creature and Victor acknowledged their similarities toward the end of the colloquy
on the Mer-de-Glace (II:8:36, II:9:2, II:9:5).
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the late Enlightenment. A major reason for this was the presence of the Royal Society
for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, founded in 1660 shortly after the restoration
of Charles II: its periodical, Philosophical Transactions, was still in Mary Shelley's
day the principal scientific journal of the world. The president of the Royal Society
at the time of the publication of Frankenstein was Sir Joseph Banks, one of the great
explorers and botanists of the eighteenth century. Although Banks's diverse interests
would not have specifically engaged Victor Frankenstein, we can be sure that his example
would have been a guiding light for Walton. That of his successor, Sir Humphrey Davy,
however, would have equally drawn Victor's admiration, since he was perhaps the premier
scientist experimenting with the chemical effects of electricity in the first quarter
of the nineteenth century.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, it should be noted, attended a number of anatomical lectures
by John Abernethy in 1811.
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of the novel. His "Pains of Sleep," in which he recounts the psychic repercussions
of a nightmare induced by opium, was published in 1816, shortly before Mary Shelley
began writing Frankenstein.
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In the 1818 edition Elizabeth is the daughter of Alphonse's deceased sister (see I:1:7).
Although in the 1831 edition her parentage is distanced, she retains this same designation
of being "more than daughter." The terms recall the rhetoric in which she herself,
in her dungeon, addressed Justine (see I:7:23). Even more so, they echo Victor's own
description of her in their youth, in the revised 1831 edition (see 1831:I:1:10),
and thus strongly suggest that there Mary Shelley was attempting to draw together
these linguistic echoes to emphasize the inbred, almost incestuous, closeness of the
family. As elsewhere, the echoes may intimate that the bourgeois domestic affections
are not an unmixed blessing.
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almost wholly by its gradual character, the reader can attribute this statement either
to Mary Shelley's desire for a gothic ambience or, more consistent with her art, to
Victor's overheated imagination. Since the previous paragraphs have, through the foreshortening
of time, already hinted at his surrender to mania, this could be intended as a further
example of the slippage of his sense of reality.
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the statements of its narrators continues here as Walton twice—and in the formulation
of a logical proof ("conviction of the truth" . . . "Such a monster has then really
existence")—thoughtlessly borrows Victor's diction to describe the Creature. Careful
readers will remember that the "apparition . . . seen from our ship" was described
very differently at the time (I:L4:3).
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applicable to a true understanding of the dynamics that underlie the identification
of him as monstrous. No longer merely a "monster" in and of himself, here the Creature
is designated as being created in such a form. Victor thus tacitly acknowledges his
responsibility for making his Creature monstrous, whether in deed or by the mere utterance
of the word.
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The Creature is thoroughly demonized in his mind.
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phrase. In the second case, although the revised edition lacks the epigraph from Milton's
Paradise Lost that marks the original title page ("Did I request thee, Maker, from
my clay / To mould me Man?"—X.743-44 ), Mary Shelley's recast diction seems to recall
it with a deliberate irony. In this reconstitution the new Adam, lacking all free
will, is animated by his own revenge, which is the pattern, the "mould," established
by Satan in Milton's epic.
On a mundane rather than cosmic level, however, we might want to contemplate what
it is to have one's entire emotional life formed by the sentiment of revenge? In accord
with the loss of "voluntary thought" mentioned in the previous sentence, Victor also
gives up any feeling, any instinctual sense of identification, that might lead him
away from his obsessive rage against his double. He thus confesses himself as being
wholly shaped, both intellectually and emotionally, by this bond of negation. As he
embarks on a pursuit of high adventure, he casts himself, ironically, as a totally
passive victim of his own choosing.