| Romantic Circles

1343

during which I was the slave of my creature

The new terminology for Victor's relationship with the Creature, introduced four paragraphs
earlier (III:1:9), returns with augmented stress. The underlying notion of slavery
includes not just bondage but an absence of willed responsibility. Victor thus appears
to be distancing himself from his recognition of the awesome obligations of a deity
with which the second volume closed (II:9:18).

1342

I was the slave, not the master The Creature reverts to the terms of his last confrontation of Victor Frankenstein,
when he called Victor his slave and demanded his obedience (III:3:11 and note). The
effect of this recantation, however, is not so much the simple reversal the diction
connotes, as an erasure of the polarizing of his terms. Both he and Victor were slaves,
mastered alike by their antagonism.

1341

a sister or a brother In terms of Mary Shelley's biography, this may be a revealing, if somewhat odd, statement.
Mary Shelley was the sole child of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, conceived
before they were officially married and then left motherless by Wollstonecraft's death.
She had three step-siblings: Fanny Imlay, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and
the American Gilbert Imlay, who committed suicide in 1817 while Mary was still engaged
in the writing of Frankenstein; and Charles and Claire Clairmont, children of the
first marriage of Godwin's second wife Mary Jane Clairmont. Because of their gender
and nearness of age, Mary and Claire were thrown much together and experienced considerable
sibling friction. Claire's unacknowledged pregnancy by Lord Byron was the driving
force behind the 1816 journey to Geneva, and when her condition became known it fell
largely to Mary to see her through the pregnancy without scandal. From this point
on, for the next five years, Claire lived with the Shelleys both in England and Italy.
Whatever words Victor speaks here, it is clear that Mary's closeness to her step-sister
generally increased the suspiciousness with which she regarded Claire's motives and
actions.

1340

with a single man in it The villagers one and all reduce the being whom Victor has been anathematizing as
a daemon to human proportions. In this they seem cast in the same mold as Walton's
lieutenant who, after the initial appearance of the Creature, stolidly questions Victor
about the "man" he has been pursuing (I:L4:11).

1339

I shut my eyes involuntarily These two sentences encapsulate a highly complex aesthetic and moral act. It is against
his will that Walton closes his eyes; yet with eyes closed he occupies an essentially
different space from that in which he first viewed the Creature a second before. He
has unwittingly placed himself in the position of the elder DeLacey, who is the only
stranger not to have rejected the Creature at first sight (II:7:18). DeLacey's blindness
and Walton's closed eyes remove from their judgments the beautiful as a determining
aesthetic criterion. With its absence each is able to act on what purports to be an
objective moral plane, or at least not to have pre-determined aesthetic categories
prejudice their responses. Paradoxically, an act that is reflexive and therefore deterministic
in its inception becomes the means by which unexamined, normative standards of behavior,
which are truly deterministic in their impulse, can be transcended, allowing an exercise
of free will. Since Walton is not actually blind, his act in its ethical import is
unique for the novel.

1338

a shout of tumultuous joy Although there are shrieks of fear or anger here and there across this novel's landscape,
this is the only shout heard in Frankenstein. The intense silence of the novel, indeed,
is a remarkable stylistic achievement. The noisy enthuasiasm of the sailors may remind
us of Victor's recent recollection of how the Greek soldiers wept for joy upon reencountering
the sea when they returned from Persia (III:7:17). The naturalness of the mariners'
response stands in paradoxical contrast with Victor's sense of transcendental empowerment.
It is little wonder that he should be awakened from his sleep by the threat simple
humanity poses against his aims.

1337

the shadow of a human being Although this phrase is meant to underscore the precarious state of Victor's physical
health, it resonates within a psychological and moral construction as well, once again
reminding us of how like the state of his Creature Victor's has become. The Creature
functions as a shadow, not just in the modern sense of trailing Victor wherever he
goes, but also in his incapacity ever to assume a full human dimension. Victor, in
his isolation and his chronic sense of undiscriminating guilt, has also forsaken that
dimension. In the late chapters of the novel Victor's physical condition is, as here,
a measure of his psychic state.

1336

the latter days of The text printed in 1818 has "latter days of December," which is clearly a compositor's
error unnoticed in the Shelleys' proofreading of the text for the first edition. The
mistake, once in print, went unnoticed in all later editions of the novel. In Mary
Shelley's draft, however, the word is unmistakably "September." She would have had
every reason to adhere to this timeline since, just a few weeks earlier than her fictional
schedule, in 1814, it took the Shelley party nine days to cover the distance between
Basel and Rotterdam (30 August-7 September) travelling exactly as do Victor Frankenstein
and Henry Clerval and, even when adverse conditions delayed their departure from Holland,
a three days' crossing brought them to London on 13 September (see Six Weeks' Tour
for Switzerland and Holland).

The attenuated journey of the 1818 text is whittled to three months in the shifting
of the original departure date in 1831, which, as indicated earlier, may have been
done to accommodate the timespan after Victor's return from Mont Blanc rather than
his arrival date in England. In the next chapter, as recorded in both the 1818 and
1831 texts, the chronology reverts to a normative calendar and Victor observes that
he and Clerval "had arrived in England at the beginning of October" (III:2:5).

1335

September 9th

In 1818 the compositor, evidently reading this as one in a series of journal entries,
surmised that it could not follow "September 12th" and added an integer to make it
"September 19th." But, of course, what the text intends us to understand by its idiom
is, "On September 9th the ice began to move." Since this is the date in the manuscript
and it is restored in 1831, the text has been emended here.

1334

September 2d A week has elapsed since Walton's last entry in the letter to his sister, a notable
absence in a time frame that has been previously so overcharged with event. The dating
makes comparison almost inevitable, and the reader thus becomes conscious of the curious
fact that the entirety of Victor's narration of his life took one day less than this
week-long lacuna in which the late-summer ice has slowly but inexorably been heaved
by the pressures of wind and sea into threatening mountains. The natural landscape,
as is so often the case with Mary Shelley's treatment of the sublime Arctic wilderness,
has a corollary in the psychological development of her characters, particularly in
the nexus of guilt and destiny driving Victor.