1385

  • this deposition did not in the least interest me A reader could sense a cultural dislocation and estrangement behind this remark.
    On the other hand, the lack of concern for the plight of others unless it bears in
    some way on his own subtly underscores Victor's egotism here.

    • 1384

  • She was thinner Characteristically, Victor construes Elizabeth's state of health in reference to
    himself. At the age of twenty-two she should not be so beyond her prime. Clearly,
    worry over the last two years has taken its toll. Although Mary Shelley maintains
    her undeviating focus on Victor, this momentary description illuminates the cost of
    his obsession and detachment from Elizabeth on her state of mind and body. This is
    as close to an inner life as Elizabeth ever manifests.

    • 1383

  • the Tower

    By the eighteenth century the Tower of London had been reduced to a tourist attraction,
    housing the crown jewels, the royal armor modelled by full-size wooden figures, and
    a menagerie dominated by the great cats.

    • 1382

  • Are you then safe Victor's first words to his father in fourteen months must, if we detach ourselves
    from his obsessive perspective, seem more than merely odd. They are the expression
    of what has become a deeply paranoid personality.

    • 1381

  • the devil Curiously, with so many references to the Creature as diabolical, only once earlier
    has Victor used this flat substantive, when he glimpsed the Creature on the Plainpalais
    outside Geneva after uttering a similar imprecation to the heavens.

    • 1380

  • that class This would appear to be another point where one senses in the conceptions of the
    novel the effects of Mary Shelley's experiences of giving birth.

    • 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.

    • 1378

  • title here

    Main text here.

    • 1377

  • 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).
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