1017

  • be steady

    Coming immediately after allusions to the treacherous Ulysses and murderous Lady Macbeth,
    this injunction bears the stamp of one who, using like rhetoric, exhorted his comrades
    to throw off a similar despondency: "Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen!" (Paradise
    Lost, I.330). Satan, too, standing on his perseverance in a lost cause, represents
    himself as being      

         one who brings
    A mind not to be changed by place or time.
    The mind is its own place, and in itself
    Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
    What matter where, if I be still the same. . . (I.252-256).

    • 1016

  • St. Bernard's Well

    This spa, a neoclassical structure in the form of a circular temple, was erected on
    the Water of Leith in the 1790s. Black's Picturesque Tourist of Scotland, 18th ed.
    (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1869), describes it in these terms: The well (or
    pump-room as it might be called) stands close on the banks of the river, immediately
    below the Dean Bridge. The water is an excellent sulphureous liquid, possessing the
    usual medicinal qualities, similar to those of the Moffat, and Harrogate. The late
    Lord Gardenstone was the first to appreciate the properties of the spring, and erected
    the present classical temple enclosing a statue of Hygeia, whose face very properly
    'is expressive of sympathy and kindness.' (78)

    • 1015

  • benefactors of your species Both Robert Walton and Victor Frankenstein have held up this goal as the aim of their
    scientific endeavors, Walton in his opening letter to his sister (I:L1:2) and Victor
    in his enraptured vision of the "new species" that would owe its existence to him
    (I:3:8). That Victor should here repeat that term of distanced scientific taxonomy
    may give the reader pause.

    • 1014

  • be men The echo of Lady Macbeth's denunciation of her husband's vacillation before the murder
    of Duncan is unmistakable, and, like the earlier allusion to Inferno 26, provides
    an ironic subtext that undercuts Victor's histrionic oratory: Macbeth Prithee, peace:

    I dare do all that may become a man;
    Who dares do more is none. Lady Macbeth What beast was't, then,
    That made you break this enterprise to me?
    When you durst do it, then you were a man;
    And, to be more than what you were, you would
    Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place
    Did then adhere, and yet you would make both:
    They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
    Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know
    How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
    I would, while it was smiling in my face,
    Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
    And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
    Have done to this. (I.vii.44 ff.)

    • 1013

  • beautiful in nature . . . sublime . . . of man At this point it is clear that it is Clerval, "the image of [Victor's] former self"
    (III:2:3) who retains this responsiveness to his natural surroundings. This is exemplified
    in the previous chapter with his enthusiastic reaction to the Rhine valley (III:1:19).
    His citing of both the beautiful and the sublime in this sentence may point the reader
    less to Victor—who sees himself no longer able to respond fully to either—than to
    a sense of inclusiveness, at once aesthetic and intellectual, that Mary Shelley seems
    to be associating with a fully realized human being.

    • 1012

  • and I be alone? The faintly Biblical language in which the Creature speaks is actually derived, and
    it would seem significantly so, from Milton. The vocabulary reflects the scene in
    which Adam names the various, already-mated species of animals, then asks God why
    he should himself be left in solitude. See Paradise Lost 8.389ff. and 8.594. In context,
    then, the Creature is telling Victor that he has broken the contract that God had
    made with Adam.

    • 1011

  • a bad conscience

    The state of Victor's conscience is borne out by the perturbed dreams that, as he
    will report in the last paragraph of this chapter, continually afflict him in sleep.

    • 1010

  • the award of justice In the course of two trials and even in his final deposition to a Geneva magistrate
    Victor is exonerated from reponsibility for any criminal activity. Thus, this "award"
    is one that, in Victor's mind, exists beyond the checkered course of human justice.
    In a fine irony, it is only moments before he narrates the events of a trial from
    which he easily secures his release that Victor indicates to Walton that he has brought
    himself to the bar to be condemned.

    • 1009

  • avoided . . . any encounter Victor's regaining a sense of community through the influence of Clerval's letter,
    as he represented himself three paragraphs earlier, seems far from certain. His shying
    from contact with his fellow humans has become virtually instinctive. That he refers
    to the fishermen by the generic term "creatures" is instructive, since it separates
    them to a marked degree within the same generic category as the being whom he created.

    • 1008

  • I did not . . . avert it The language here is curious but characteristic of Victor, who tends to exonerate
    himself by deferral to a presumed destiny he cannot alter.
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