1353

  • a spirit of good The context strongly suggests that it is the ever-watchful Creature who is sustaining
    Victor's life throughout his long voyage, not the heaven-directed spirits that Victor
    imagines. Thus, this phrase is heavily weighted with irony. The irony is in fact attenuated,
    for Mary Shelley could not have written this phrase without consciousness of P.B.
    Shelley's title, "Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude," the poem he published in 1816,
    three months before the excursion to Lake Geneva. An alastor in Greek is an evil spirit.

    • 1352

  • the spirits of the dead The character of the "guiding spirit" (III:7:17) is darkened even more by this representation
    of the walking dead hovering around Victor and encouraging his desperate venture into
    a world of death. Although such macaberie is conventional to the gothic mode, its
    psychological impress here is new and startling.

    • 1351

  • so unfeeling a speech Victor's reflection on the nurse's lack of charity and sympathy is surely justified,
    but it has a double edge, reminding the reader of a similar abstracted indifference
    with which he has treated a being with far more substantial claims on his interest
    and attention.

    • 1350

  • soon lost amid the waves The Creature disappears not only with the same superhuman speed but also in much
    the same language as accompanied his previous departure from Victor's ken, on the
    Mer de Glace below Mont Blanc (see II:9:18).

    • 1349

  • wishing for some mighty revolution Victor's desire for an externally applied apocalyptic solution that will break the
    logical circle he cannot escape is as characteristic of him as the passivity into
    which he actually retreats from the stress of events. Still, his figure resonates
    against his contrasting application of the turning wheel a few paragraphs earlier
    (see III:4:12 and note), where its every revolution was conceived as bringing new
    calamities upon him.

    The term "mighty revolution" cannot but retain some of its political charge in the
    context of post-Napoleonic Europe, particularly if connected to the world of undiscriminated
    wretchedness that Victor had been contemplating before Mr. Kirwin entered to prepare
    him for his father's arrival (III:4:21).

    • 1348

  • some destiny Victor's perhaps unconscious withdrawal into vague euphemism to match his father's
    rhetoric here strongly suggests a lack of candor. It also indicates that, however
    self-accusing he may be, he has accepted no real responsibility for the actions of
    his Creature.

    • 1347

  • the solitude I coveted

    Although, of course, Victor will need to pursue his scientific labors by himself,
    the verb "coveted" conveys a sense of profound asociality as a crucial aspect of Victor's
    constitution. However eagerly he expresses his anticipation of returning to find fulfillment
    in his union with Elizabeth, what his father praises as "our domestic calm" at this
    point in the 1818 edition seems wholly to lack the capacity to satisfy Victor.

    • 1346

  • smothered voice A year after the Creature's long narration beneath Mont Blanc and after several chapters
    devoted to Victor's egocentric ruminations in the interim, we are here sharply reminded
    of the Creature's inner life that Victor refuses to acknowledge. In modern parlance
    the Creature is engaged at this point in a deliberate repression of his anger. As
    in their previous encounter Victor notably outrants his Creature.

    • 1345

  • smooth and placid as a southern sea Victor's only experience of a southern sea would appear to have come at the beginning
    of this last trip in pursuit of the Creature, embarked on from a French Mediterranean
    port (III:7:9). On its surface his sardonic comment roundly indicts the crew for moral
    and spiritual laxity. Yet, on second thought, an even stronger counterforce ironically
    deflates the surface terms. This ironic inversion begins as we recognize the considerable
    negative connotations from earlier in the novel already adhering to this celebration
    of the "glorious" (I:L1:6 and note, I:L2:3 and note, and III:Walton:6 and note). On
    top of those resonances, the reference to "a southern sea" should remind the knowledgeable
    reader of the last voyage undertaken by Ulysses and his crew in search of glory, a
    voyage that took them far into the unknown southern sea where their ship foundered.
    This is the subject of Canto 26 of Dante's Inferno, which is likewise the source upon
    which Tennyson depended for his dramatic monologue, "Ulysses," written in 1833. In
    Dante's rendition of this story, for all his heroic posturing, Ulysses has led his
    men to their death for nothing beyond a meaningless personal glory. For this act of
    essential treachery he is lodged near the bottom of hell for eternity.

    It is worth remarking that, in her draft of this passage, Mary Shelley originally
    wrote "summer lake," and the phrase "southern sea" was inserted above it in P. B.
    Shelley's hand. This interpolation, of course, would have had to have been agreed
    to by Mary Shelley, presumably after some discussion of the appropriateness of the
    intertextual context the phrase evokes.

    • 1344

  • my slavery

    This term is ominous for Victor's future relations with his Creature. It also considerably
    darkens the construction of what Victor sees as his destiny, also of how he comprehends
    the nature of imitative behavior, for he appears to think it achieved not through
    emulation but, rather, through the exercise of coercion.

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