The New Annotated Frankenstein

by Mary Shelley

  His voice seemed suffocated; and my first impulses, which had suggested to me the duty of obeying the dying request of my friend, in destroying his enemy, were now suspended by a mixture of curiosity and compassion. I approached this tremendous being; I dared not again raise my looks49 upon his face, there was something so scaring and unearthly in his ugliness. I attempted to speak, but the words died away on my lips. The monster continued to utter wild and incoherent self-reproaches. At length I gathered resolution to address him, in a pause of the tempest of his passion: “Your repentance,” I said, “is now superfluous. If you had listened to the voice of conscience, and heeded the stings of remorse, before you had urged your diabolical vengeance to this extremity, Frankenstein would yet have lived.”

  “And do you dream?” said the daemon; “do you think that I50 was then dead to agony and remorse?—He,” he continued, pointing to the corpse, “he suffered not more51 in the consummation of the deed;—oh! not the ten-thousandth portion of the anguish that was mine during the lingering detail of its execution. A frightful selfishness hurried me on, while my heart was poisoned with remorse. Think ye that the groans of Clerval were music to my ears?52 My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy; and, when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as you cannot even imagine.

  “After the murder of Clerval, I returned to Switzerland, heart-broken and overcome. I pitied Frankenstein; my pity amounted to horror: I abhorred myself. But when I discovered that he, the author at once of my existence and of its unspeakable torments, dared to hope for happiness; that while he accumulated wretchedness and despair upon me, he sought his own enjoyment in feelings and passions from the indulgence of which I was for ever barred, then impotent envy and bitter indignation filled me with an insatiable thirst for vengeance. I recollected my threat, and resolved that it should be accomplished. I knew that I was preparing for myself a deadly torture; but I was the slave, not the master of an impulse, which I detested, yet could not disobey. Yet when she died!—nay, then I was not miserable. I had cast off all feeling, subdued all anguish to riot in the excess of my despair. Evil thenceforth became my good.53 Urged thus far, I had no choice but to adapt my nature to an element which I had willingly chosen. The completion of my dæmoniacal design became an insatiable passion. And now it is ended; there is my last victim!”

  I was at first touched by the expressions of his misery; yet when I called to mind what Frankenstein had said of his powers of eloquence and persuasion, and when I again cast my eyes on the lifeless form of my friend, indignation was re-kindled within me. “Wretch!” I said, “it is well that you come here to whine over the desolation that you have made. You throw a torch into a pile of buildings, and when they are consumed you sit among the ruins, and lament the fall. Hypocritical fiend! if he whom you mourn still lived, still would he be the object, again would he become the prey of your accursed vengeance. It is not pity that you feel; you lament only because the victim of your malignity is withdrawn from your power.”

  “Oh, it is not thus—not thus,” interrupted the being; “yet such must be the impression conveyed to you by what appears to be the purport of my actions. Yet I seek not a fellow-feeling in my misery. No sympathy may I ever find. When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being overflowed, that I wished to be participated. But now, that virtue has become to me a shadow, and that happiness and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair, in what should I seek for sympathy? I am content to suffer alone, while my sufferings shall endure: when I die, I am well satisfied that abhorrence and opprobrium should load my memory. Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings, who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of bringing forth.54 I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now vice has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No crime, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I call over55 the frightful catalogue of my deeds, I cannot believe that I am he whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendant visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am quite alone.

  “You, who call Frankenstein your friend, seem to have a knowledge of my crimes and his misfortunes. But, in the detail which he gave you of them, he could not sum up the hours and months of misery which I endured, wasting in impotent passions. For whilst I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires. They were for ever ardent and craving; still I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all human kind sinned against me? Why do you not hate Felix, who drove his friend from his door with contumely?56 Why do you not execrate the rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his child? Nay, these are virtuous and immaculate beings! I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. Even now my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice.

  “But it is true that I am a wretch. I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept, and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing. I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he lies, white and cold in death. You hate me; but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself. I look on the hands which executed the deed; I think on the heart in which the imagination of it was conceived, and long for the moment when they57 will meet my eyes, when it will haunt my thoughts, no more.

  “Fear not that I shall be the instrument of future mischief. My work is nearly complete. Neither yours nor any man’s death is needed to consummate the series of my being, and accomplish that which must be done; but it requires my own. Do not think that I shall be slow to perform this sacrifice. I shall quit your vessel on the ice-raft which brought me hither, and shall seek the most northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile,58 and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch, who would create such another as I have been. I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me, or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched. He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish. I shall no longer see the sun or stars, or feel the winds play on my cheeks. Light, feeling, and sense, will pass away; and in this condition must I find my happiness. Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer, and heard the rustling of the leaves and the chirping59 of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation. Polluted by crimes, and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?

  “Farewell! I leave you, and in you the last of human kind whom these eyes will ever behold. Farewell, Frankenstein! If thou wert yet alive, and yet cherished a desire of revenge against me, it would be better satiated in my life than in my destruction. But it was not so; thou didst seek my extinction, that I might not cause greater wretchedness; and if yet, in some mode unknown to me, thou hast not yet ceased to think and feel,60 thou desirest not my life for my own misery. Blasted as thou wert, my agony was still superior to thine; for the bitter sting of remorse may61 not cease to rankle in my wounds until death shall close them for ever.

  “But soon,” he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, “I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames.

  The light of
that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.”

  He sprung from the cabin-window,62 as he said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance.63

  THE END.

  1. Chapter 24 in the 1831 edition.

  2. The word “modelled” is replaced by “moulded” in the 1831 edition.

  3. The phrase “I swear” is omitted here in the 1831 edition.

  4. In furtherance of his invocation of “spirits of the dead,” Victor likely refers to the Erinyes or Furies, female deities of vengeance, older than the Olympian gods of ancient Greece.

  5. Like Constantinople and the Golden Horde in the Mongol empire, Tartary has been invoked by countless writers, usually to conjure romance, unknowableness, and the forbidden. It traditionally served as a historical more than a geographical designation—referring to the vast tract of northern and central Asia extending from the Caspian Sea and the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. George Ripley and Charles A. Dana’s New American Cyclopaedia: A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge, 16 vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1863) acknowledges the difficulty of explaining exactly what the region encompassed (while simultaneously offering a primer on the nineteenth-century spelling of place-names): “applied somewhat vaguely to an extensive region of central Asia, stretching from the seas of Japan and Okhotsk [in the Russian district of Khabarovsk Krai] on the East to the Caspian on the West; and some geographers even extend the term so as to include a portion of eastern Europe as far West as the river Don. Tartary in its most extended sense therefore includes Mantchooria, Mongolia, the country of the Khalkas, Soongaria [between the Altay and Thian-chan mountains, and known for marriage ceremonies performed on horseback, with the bride speeding ahead and the putative groom in pursuit: ‘and if he overtakes her, she becomes his wife without further ceremony; but if the woman be disinclined toward her pursuer, she will not suffer him to overtake her’—see Samuel Augustus Mitchell, Mitchell’s Geographical Reader: A System of Modern Geography, Comprising a Description of the World, with Its Grand Divisions, America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceanica (Philadelphia: Thomas, Cowperthwait, and Co., 1840), 451], and East Toorkistan, all subject to China; Independent Toorkistan; all the southern part of the Russian possessions in Asia; and in Europe the greater part of the Russian governments of Orenburg, Astrakhan, Ekaterinoslav, the Cossack provinces, and the Crimea, the last of which is sometimes called Little Tartary.” Backpedaling, the editors then conclude: “The name Tartary, however, is generally restricted to the region bounded North by Siberia, East by the seas of Okhotsk and Japan, South by China proper, Thibet, India, Afghanistan, and Persia, and West by the Caspian Sea; while it is properly applicable to the western part only of this territory, known as Toorkistan” (Vol. 15, Spiritualism–Uzziah, 295). The Encyclopædia Britannica (3rd ed.) is more definite: “Tartary is a vast country in the northern parts of Asia, bounded by Siberia on the north and west; this is called Great Tartary. The Tartars who lie south of Moscovy and Siberia, are those of Affracan, Cireassia, and Dagistan, situated north-west of the Caspian Sea; the Calmuc Tartars, who lie between Siberia; the Usbec Tartars and Moguls, who lie north of Persia and India; and, lastly, those of Tibet, who lie northwest of China” (Vol. 3, 387).

  6. The phrase “of him” is inserted here in the 1831 edition, and the word “often” appearing later in this sentence is omitted.

  7. The word “may” becomes “will” in the 1831 edition.

  8. The plainer phrase “give up” is substituted for “omit” in the 1831 edition, and “those” becomes “my departed friends.”

  9. Victor imperfectly recalls a story told by Xenophon, in the Anabasis, his roughly contemporaneous account of Cyrus of Persia (Cyrus the Younger) and of the retreat, in 401–399 BCE, of the “Ten Thousand,” mercenaries who, upon their return to Greece, stood upon Mount Theches (present-day Deveboynu Tepe) and cried out, upon first seeing the Black Sea (not the Mediterranean), “Thálatta! Thálatta!” (“The sea! The sea!”)—initially Xenophon, then in the rearguard, mistook his soldiers’ exuberance for cries of alarm signaling an attack. The text is a classic of ancient Greek literature. A small group of scholars maintain that there is no known independent basis of fact for the tale or for Xenophon’s participation in the march. His unabashedly swashbuckling depiction of his own exploits and leadership role has been parsed by writers such as Italo Calvino (1923–1985)—who, in praising the work, likened Xenophon (who wrote the book thirty years after the events are said to have taken place) to a comic book superhero (Calvino, “Why Read the Classics?,” trans. Martin McLaughlin [London: Penguin, 2009], 19–24). The book loosely formed the basis for the 1979 film The Warriors, directed by Walter Hill and adapted from the eponymous novel by Sol Yurick (1965). Hill and David Shaber, who co-wrote the screenplay, centered the actions around contemporary gang warfare in New York.

  Anabasis was first translated into English in 1839; Victor likely read it in Greek, though the story itself was also perhaps part of an oral tradition to which he may have been exposed.

  10. The word “carried” is corrected to “conveyed” in the 1831 edition.

  11. The word “foe” replaces “enemy” in the 1831 edition.

  12. The balance of this sentence is revised in the 1831 edition to read as follows: “and survive to add to the list of his dark crimes.” Here Mary Shelley makes the creature more evil, a criminal; in the previous version, it is the creature’s existence that makes Victor a “wretch,” not the creature’s evildoing.

  13. A Roman term for the spirits of the dead.

  14. And so the novel returns to the epistolary form established in Volume I, Letters I through IV, above, with letters written by Robert Walton to his sister, Margaret Saville. Letter IV breaks off on page 33, above, and as this is “in continuation” there is no salutation. Because the device was wholly familiar to the average reader of the day, Shelley’s use of it here and the reappearance of the reliable narrator Walton work to dispel any lingering doubts as to Victor’s credibility.

  15. This is likely August 1799 (as is confirmed by the clues of various publications quoted by Frankenstein and Walton). The date given in the Draft is August 13, but it was apparently changed to be consistent with the August 19 missive reproduced above as part of Volume I, Letter IV.

  16. Probably to avoid the repetition of the word “agony,” it is replaced in the 1831 edition with “anguish.”

  17. “Smothered” in the Draft, altered by Percy Shelley.

  18. These are at best copies of the letters. Why would copies—which could have been fabricated by Victor—be seen by Walton as credible evidence?

  19. This question is omitted in the 1831 edition.

  20. Ten days in the Draft.

  21. The word “spirit” is substituted for “feelings” in the 1831 edition.

  22. The 1831 edition replaces the phrase “real beings” with “beings themselves[.]”

  23. Are we to understand that, on his deathbed, Victor engaged Walton in conversation about books that they had both read?

  24. The preceding phrase is deleted in the 1831 edition, and the phrase “I believed myself” is substituted.

  25. An archaic term: a “projector” is one who creates a project.

  26. The word is “thought” in the 1831 edition, not “feeling.”

  27. Here Victor explicitly likens himself to Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, a comparison already made by the creature with regard to himself. See text accompanying note 15, Volume II, Chapter VII, above.

  28. In The Essential Frankenstein: The Definitive, Annotated Edition of Mary Shelley’s Classic Novel, ed. Leonard Wolf (New York: Plume/Penguin Books, 2003), Wolf points out that Walton is presumptuous: There is no evidence that Walton’s “love” was reciprocated, and indeed, only a few sentences later,
Victor explains why he cannot attach himself to Walton.

  29. The 1831 edition replaces the odd word “invaded” with “contemplated.”

  30. In the Draft, originally August 27, corrected to August 31.

  31. Seneca, a Stoic philosopher (ca. 4 BCE–65 CE), wrote De Brevitate Vitae (“On the Shortness of Life”), in which he argued that the human lifespan is long enough to afford time for what is important—in his view, the study of philosophy—and that a life in pursuit of the material (a category in which he included labor, exertion of authority, and what we would today call the development of a career) is meaningless. He structured the essay as a letter to a friend, Paulinus, who supervised Rome’s supply of grain. Ordered by his former pupil Nero—whom he had accused of being a political demagogue, and whom he and others were said to have conspired to assassinate—to commit suicide as punishment for rebellion, Seneca complied.

  32. This sentence does not appear in the 1831 edition; the following takes its place, its effect that of Walton’s training the lens upon himself: “Yet it is terrible to reflect that the lives of all these men are endangered through me. If we are lost, my mad schemes are the cause.”

  33. September 6th in the Draft.

  34. The word “demand” is replaced with “requisition” in the 1831 edition.

  35. Only a few years earlier, in 1789, a mutiny occurred on HMS Bounty on its return from Otaheite (Tahiti). Apparently the result of personality and disciplinary conflicts between Captain William Bligh and Master Fletcher Christian following theft, insubordination, and desertion among the crew during nearly six months in Tahiti and the resultant punishment meted out to the men by Bligh, the mutiny had nothing to do with personal danger to the crew occurring in the course of the voyage itself.

  The morning of April 28 found Bligh, half-dressed and seemingly inadequately provisioned, set adrift with eighteen members of the crew before dawn in a 23-foot launch by mutinous crewmen. His shockingly successful 3,618-mile voyage from the spot of the mutiny, near Tofoa, to Coupang, a settlement on Timor (where he purchased a boat and began his return voyage to England), is the subject of A Narrative of the Mutiny, on Board His Majesty’s Ship Bounty; And the Subsequent Voyage of Part of the Crew, in the Ship’s Boat (London: George Nicol, 1790). In the memoir, Bligh gave no opportunity for the traitorous members of his crew to feel that they had triumphed: He devoted only six pages to the indignity of having been ambushed, tied up, and tossed into the launch, and eighty to his subsequent return voyage.