1173

  • I curbed the imperious voice of wretchedness

    "By the utmost self-violence": Victor lacks the modern vocabulary that would term
    this act mere repression. He likens it to suicide, an active, even extreme, assertion
    of violence against the self. Yet again, the reader may wish to ask, which self is
    it that he would destroy, that of the Creator or of his extension who has destroyed
    those whom Victor loves? The doubling of selves is insistent even where, as here,
    it is merely insinuated.

    • 1172

  • I could send . . . illness The normative expression of sympathy by which Mr. Kirwin reestablishes connections
    that Victor has all but severed emphasizes the extremity of Victor's withdrawal from
    the society of those who have loved him.

    • 1171

  • I called on him to stay In their monosyllabic simplicity these words constitute the moral center of Mary
    Shelley's novel. Against all his prejudices as Victor's friend, against his repugnance
    to face a multiple murderer, against his basic human instincts that revolt from such
    sublime ugliness, Robert Walton wills himself into a state of ethical selflessness
    that is truly benevolent. The Creature's "wonder" at this unique experience in his
    existence is only to be expected. He has never before been confronted by human inclusiveness.

    • 1170

  • a husband, and lovely children Until this very late point in the novel we have only been able to assume that Margaret
    Saville, because of the difference in her surname, has a husband. With this confirmed,
    we discover as well that she has children. One reason Mary Shelley may be supplying
    this information now would be to justify the emotional intensity of this outpouring
    in which Walton in solitude and dire straits reaches out to his only family connections.
    But by the same token, that connectedness contrasts pointedly with the situation in
    the Frankenstein household, where when the novel ends only Ernest, who would seem
    to have little to recommend him beyond being a dull and regular fellow, will survive
    its events.

    • 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.
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