| Romantic Circles

1379

the banks of the Thames

London is situated far up the Thames from the entrance to the river on the Kent coast.
Victor notes the principal landmarks the travelers pass enroute.

tears . . . streamed from my eyes Even as Victor thinks of himself as reacting with compassion to the assumed plight
of Elizabeth, it is clear to any reader that he is actually weeping for himself. His
giving in at last to his feelings is thus ironized, for rather than opening him to
a renewal of his emotional life, his convulsive weeping results from a maudlin theatrical
representation of his own death that wholly mistakes the threat to his future wife.

1376

tears gushed from my eyes Victor's emotional instability is underscored by this sudden excess of sensibility.
That his rekindled joy will soon be transformed into the despair his isolation in
the boat had prefigured is indicative of the irony in which, from the point in which
he spurned his Creature's desire for sympathetic rapport, he finds himself invested.
Later, hope will come to him in a "burning gush" of ironically inverted expectation
(III:7:22).

1375

the sympathy of a stranger In accentuating his own lack of any ties but the common ones of humanity, Mr. Kirwin
quietly establishes his link with Walton, who in the immediate context of the narrative
recital has likewise altruistically attended to Victor's well-being without any sense
of obligation or self-congratulation.

1374

sympathies Although Victor dehumanizes the creature, it is interesting to recognize that, even
so, he is unable to deny the being's fundamental claim to a primary human attribute.

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.