1169

  • human sympathies This sentence carries an interestingly pointed balance. Everywhere in the novel,
    in accord with Enlightenment values, human sympathy is marked as the foundation for
    personal and social happiness. Here one infers that Mary Shelley recognizes that even
    this virtue can lead to a measure of self-absorption in the merely human, at the expense
    of an external reality principle embodied in nature.

    • 1168

  • how many days have passed Victor has gone from a collapse of time distinctions (as in III:7:4) to an inability
    to differentiate time itself. The entrance onto the ice field seems to remove him
    from all normative structures of human life.

    • 1167

  • how little do you know me The return of Alphonse Frankenstein to the narrative center of the novel brings with
    it the vexed tension between father and son observed in the early chapters when Victor
    was an adolescent. Victor's silence here, of course, is of no advantage in bringing
    Alphonse to a better understanding of his by-now adult scion. Perhaps the son's reticence
    is meant not just to mark his fear that the truth of his guilt would not be countenanced
    by his father but also to implicate this strained history between them.

    • 1166

  • a howl of devilish despair and revenge A further instance of Victor's reconstruction of the Creature's emotions as diabolical
    so as not to have to confront their actual nature. The howl represents, indeed, a
    reaction of despair following an entire year's attentuated expectation, a year spent
    in solitude and without any other hope. In turn, that understanding tends to ironize
    Victor's own emotional dependency on Clerval during their trip. Both creator and creature
    are here at last equally alone in their solitude, unconsciously prepared to transfer
    their entire gamut of emotional needs into a single-minded pursuit of the other's
    destruction.

    • 1165

  • how happy and serene all nature It appears in this novel that whenever the serenity of nature is emphasized (I:5:17,
    III:3:6), the sublime power represented by the Creature is introduced to disturb its
    tranquillity. Before, however, it was Victor who felt the effect of this natural profusion.
    Here, clearly, Elizabeth is identified with a natural beneficence that Victor over
    the course of the past five years has all but forsaken. What distinguishes her examples
    is the ability she demonstrates to see all elements in motion; in their varied relations
    with one another; and in their distinct particularity, whether distant and high (Mônt
    Blanc) or near and deep (the bottom of Lake Geneva), rather than according to some
    reductive model by which they are made identical and rendered inanimate. One senses
    here a very different conception of nature from that manifested by Victor as scientist.

    • 1164

  • I will hover near Victor is transforming himself into the alastor, the evil spirit, that has been his
    own guardian spirit through this chapter. But what he foresees is grisly, himself
    as one of the living dead, a zombie haunting the ongoing processes of life among the
    living. Remarkable as it may seem, this final vision is, in effect, an image of one
    last Creature let go from his hands as a free and frighteningly independent agent
    on earth: himself. Perhaps, however, that was what he became from the point at which
    he matriculated at Ingolstadt and entered into the world of his obsessions.

    • 1163

  • The hour . . . arrived Ironically affirming the Creature's statement of the reversal of power in their relationship,
    Victor Frankenstein here as much as signs a contract for their future antagonism.

    • 1162

  • horrible pilgrimage Another ironic usage of religious terminology, this phrase also reminds us of the
    principal context for this term in contemporary culture, Byron's monumental antiromance,
    Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the third canto of which he wrote during the Geneva summer
    of 1816.

    • 1161

  • honour Honour is a concept that, until now, has figured only modestly in this novel. One
    earlier reference, however, might be construed to have a bearing on Walton's present
    insistence on its claims. This comes in Elizabeth's letter of commiseration to Victor
    about his illness while in Ingolstadt. There she testified to her accord with Ernest's
    desire to be a farmer, though it were a less "honourable occupation" (I:5:2) than
    that of a judge. In her letter the idea of honour is tied to social and class hierarchies,
    perhaps as well to distinctions between gender roles. It is clear that in Walton's
    eyes his crew are, to return to Victor's formulation (III:Walton:17), lesser men than
    they would be if they were possessed of a sense of honorable duty to the cause to
    which their master has committed them.

    • 1160

  • Holyhead

    Holyhead, on the island of Angelsey, which lies off the northwest coast of Wales,
    in the eighteenth century had developed into the major port linking Ireland and the
    British Isles. It was the closest landing place to Dublin, with some 100 kilometers
    of the Irish Sea intervening. Since, however, Anglesey was an island, passengers still
    had to negotiate the treacherous Menai Strait linking it to the mainland. In 1810
    Thomas Telford was commissioned at this site to build the first suspension bridge
    in the world as part of a modernization of the coach road to Holyhead.

    Mary Shelley never traced this itinerary, but Percy did, both going to and returning
    from his Dublin adventure via Holyhead in 1812. Mary Wollstonecraft had also taken
    this route when she took up her post as governess in the Irish seat of Lord and Lady
    Kingsborough in 1786.

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