1027

  • they had called me mad Just nine months before Elizabeth's death Victor, after the discovery of Clerval's
    corpse, had fallen into a delirium lasting two months (III:4:11). Even, after he had
    regained his reason, his ranting convinced his father that he remained truly deranged
    (III:5:5). The constant threading of this issue through the novel must remind Mary
    Shelley's readers that they are wholly at the mercy of this autobiographical narrative
    embedded in her text, a narrative told by a man introduced as "generally having an
    expression of wildness, even madness" to him (I:L4:10). It is more than possible that
    this is exactly her point, that Victor has been slowly descending into a madness from
    which there is no escape, and that with his descent the narrative becomes increasingly
    unreliable.

    • 1026

  • that burning hatred, and ardent desire of revenge If it is really true that these striking oxymorons, in which hatred is expressed
    in the language of love, no longer impel Victor, they do reinforce the passionate
    cast of his diction in the last chapters of his narration (III:7:22 and note). The
    word "ardent" likewise reminds us of the use of that word to describe the obsessiveness
    with which he labored to bring his Creature into existence (I:3:1, I:3:9).

    • 1025

  • with what a burning gush The language of passion erupts at this point with a startling suddenness, as Victor
    begins to close with his Creature. That Mary Shelley expects her readers to sense
    some measure of perverse, almost abstracted eroticism in this "burning gush" might
    be inferred from her continual employment of the language of desire throughout the
    novel (for instance, the various forms of "ardour" and "ardent" she marshals with
    such skill) and the curious vacuum where one might anticipate passion in the relation
    of Victor and Elizabeth.

    • 1024

  • the bourne of my travels

    An archaic word, meaning "destination" or "terminal point" of a journey (compare Hamlet's
    famous phrase: "The undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns"—Hamlet
    3.1.79-80).

    • 1023

  • the blue seas of the south Victor's remark reminds us that this pursuit of the creature has gone on steadily
    in a great crescent from Marseilles across the length of the Mediterranean Sea, through
    the Dardanelles and across the Black Sea, and then north through Russia and even,
    perhaps, Siberia to the edge of the Arctic Ocean. This is a major geographical exploration
    for a man without an expeditionary force. Even more is it an ordeal for his Creature,
    who leads the way across the wilderness without any human intervention to help or
    comfort him.

    • 1022

  • The blue Mediterranean appeared Victor has followed the entire course of the Rhône from the point at which it flows
    out of Lake Geneva through Geneva and eastward into France; there, confluencing with
    the Loire at Lyons, it turns south, to exit into the Mediterranean at France's major
    southern port of Marseilles.

    • 1021

  • the blue lake The placid and clear Lake Geneva, symbolic of Victor's untroubled and unambiguous
    childhood, from which the Rhône river begins its long course to the Mediterranean
    Sea.

    • 1020

  • blasted and miserable Victor's iteration of the adjective "blasted" (II:1:1, III:2:8) to describe his condition
    has its source in his adolescent experience of watching the stump of a tree blasted
    by lightning (I:1:22).

    • 1019

  • I am a blasted tree Victor unconsciously echoes the terms of his experience at the age of fifteen when
    he witnessed lightning shatter the venerable tree at the Frankenstein's summer house
    near Bellerive: "I never beheld anything so utterly destroyed" (I:1:22). His premonition
    of the destructive power of the vital force he would employ for creation here realizes
    itself with ironic power.

    • 1018

  • black melancholy In modern psychological parlance Victor has fallen into a profound state of depression.
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