1373

  • swear That Victor has no right to implicate Walton in his vendetta goes without saying.
    But the legalistic, contractual mode in which he assaults Walton testifies strongly
    to the closed tyranny of mind in which he has been laboring now for many months.

    • 1372

  • the sun shone upon me The context seems to take the reader back to the May afternoon two and a half years
    earlier when Victor and Henry Clerval returned from their happy perambulations in
    the region of Ingolstadt to find Alphonse Frankenstein's letter describing William's
    death. Such innocent pleasure in natural renewal, Victor asserts, is no longer possible
    for him (see I:5:17).

    • 1371

  • a sum of money, together with a few jewels Does Mary Shelley intend us to see a comparison or a total contrast with Safie, who
    uses virtually the same words to explain how she escaped her father in Leghorn and
    made it north to the De Lacey's cottage in Germany? That episode, impelled by love,
    occurs at the center and southern extremity of the novel; Victor, in this last chapter
    of his narrative, stands near its outer edge and sets out for the far north driven
    by a hatred that in its passion and compulsion seems a mirror reflection of Safie's
    desire: see II:6:19.

    The statement also contains a second bearing, which is that, although it is not explicitly
    mentioned by Victor, with the demise of Alphonse Frankenstein, Victor, as first-born
    son, has inherited the family estate and can spend his inheritance in whatever fashion
    he chooses. No longer need he follow his father's admonition to attend a university
    (see I:2:1) or ask his permission to travel to the British Isles (see III:1:11). In
    effect, Victor is now the patriarch of his family.

    • 1370

  • sufficent for me was the consciousness of them In other words, what human society allows into its purview is no longer the factor
    by which Victor judges his actions. His sense of pronounced guilt in the face of a
    normative cultural sanction of his innocence moves him further into an alienated posture
    that seems identical with what we have come, in the second volume of the novel, to
    characterize as that of the Creature.

    • 1369

  • suffering blunt The reader who has overheard the Creature's narrative—particularly his claim that
    "misery made me a fiend" (see II:2:11 and note)—may view this generalized platitude
    with a more sharply focussed perspective than Victor brings to bear on it. As is so
    often the case, he misses the connnection between his experiences and those of the
    being he created.

    • 1368

  • yet another may succeed Victor's complete self-contradiction in his last moments mirrors the novel's ambivalence
    over the conflicting claims of domestic retreat and aspiring self-assertion, which
    are in turn poles that themselves comprise a dialectical field over which Romanticism
    continually expresses much ambivalence. The particular terms of Victor's last utterance
    have a somewhat chilling effect: at what, a reader may well wonder, does Victor contemplate
    another's success? If in the realm in which he has failed, assuming the role of God,
    we may envision from Victor's experience a greater, even a catastrophic, failure.
    Even as he moves linguistically to open up possibility, the lingering effects of his
    example resist his optimism.

    • 1367

  • I generally subsisted on the wild animals In the vegetarian Shelley household this information would carry an implicit ring
    of false consciousness, as Victor charges himself with a solemn revenge for murders
    of human beings yet supports his mission by killing other sentient creatures. Readers
    will recall that, in contrast, the Creature is a strict vegetarian.

    • 1366

  • A deadly struggle would take place Although Victor is self-evidently no match in strength with his creature, he continually
    looks to a melodramatic struggle-to-the-death to resolve their conflict, thus substituting
    a simply physical resolution for one that might embody ethical or psychological justice.
    Once again, one may read here a female author's sense of the conventions of masculinist
    fictions, whether those of art or real life. (For other instances where Victor similarly
    falls back on physical competitiveness, see II:2:5, II:2:6, III:3:16 and III:3:17).

    • 1365

  • the strange chances that have lately occured Mary Shelley's diction indicates how deliberately she has plotted these "strange
    chances" to seem beyond the ordinary expectations of causality, whether in a human
    or a novelistic sphere. Such uncanny events are, however, a customary feature of the
    gothic novel, and it is at points like this that one feels that the author fully recognizes
    the heritage she is exploiting.

    • 1364

  • Strasburgh

    The idea here is that Victor would travel northeast to Basel on the confines of Switzerland,
    thence follow the Rhine to Strasbourg, where he would be met by Clerval who, suspending
    his course of studies at the University of Ingolstadt, would have travelled west across
    Germany to join him. The two would then proceed north by boat through Germany into
    Holland where the Rhine empties into the North Sea just beyond Rotterdam. This is
    essentially the return route followed by Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley in their 1814
    excursion memorialized in A History of a Six Weeks' Tour.

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