These two chapters make us more keenly aware than ever before of parallelism as the author’s favorite device for guiding our thoughts into certain channels without overtly imposing ideas upon us. Perhaps the earliest example of this device in the novel was the contrastive parallel of the fathers of Caroline Beaufort and of Victor Frankenstein, each representing an opposite extreme in the spectrum of friendship and of parental responsibility. This contrast impressed upon us the duties of parents to their offspring and of friends to friends. Another parallel, later on, warned us not to trust Victor’s reasoning, for at about the same time that he was accusing the creature of William’s death, having nothing but his feelings to back up his belief, we learned how Mme Moritz’s detestation of her child had convinced her that Justine had caused the deaths of her siblings. Still more recently, in the preceding chapter, the double image of a child at play coming into the creature’s hands, first to save, and next to kill, taught us what to expect in the murder of William, and when what happened was not quite what we had been led to expect—the creature really wanted the child as a companion, not as a victim—the difference impressed our minds and made us realize that we had been making unsound and even unfair assumptions about the creature’s character. The point I am making is simply that the author has not had to define parental responsibilities or state that Victor’s judgment is unreliable or shake her finger at us for being prejudiced—indeed, how could she do so when the words in the novel are not hers but Victor’s or the creature’s or Walton’s? All she has had to do was to insert a parallel story to make us see her point. That is one reason why parallels are so useful in literature. Another is that by noticing the parallels, perhaps only subliminally, and responding to them, we become a sort of collaborator with the author in making sense of the novel.
      Some parallels go deeper than this and are not confined to brief tales. One result of an extended parallel is our growing awareness that Victor and the creature are brothers, the creature being reflected within him in “the fiend that lurked in my heart” (Chapter 9). Both of them are alienated from the human race and spend much of their time alone, they both claim responsibility for the murders of William and Justine, and they think of each other with an obsessive hatred that poisons their views of life.
      The chief parallel between creator and creature is that each wants a life partner to complete his own personality. Yet that is as far as the parallel goes at the moment, for whereas the creature, in unendurable isolation forced upon him by humanity, has to bargain, beg, and threaten to secure his mate, Victor needs only say the word to have the wife he longs for, and yet by his own choice he delays his wedding and retreats from those who love him. Eventually, as we know, Victor will become almost as friendless and forlorn as his creature, and each will blame the other for his own misery. Considerable progress has already been made toward this dismal result, and although Victor’s promise to make a wife for the creature has achieved a sort of détente that officially arrests the process, it is actually proceeding relentlessly.
      We see it advance in Victor’s journey to the British Isles, where the author makes use of geographical, historical, and other kinds of parallelism to assist us in understanding Victor’s state of mind. For two chapters, what we see is a man moving steadily further and further away from the center of his life and the bosom of his family, northward and ever northward through England and then through Scotland and at last over the islands to the north of Scotland, until at last he stops on “one of the remotest of the Orkneys as the scene of [his] labours.” At the end of Chapter 19 Victor has reached—symbolically if not actually—the end of the line, where we saw him as the story began, on Walton’s ship. He will not get to the Arctic wasteland physically for quite a while, but we see in these two chapters the thumb-nail sketch of his destiny—away from love into a wilderness of the soul.
      And yet from the “official” standpoint, this journey promises to resolve the creature’s plight, to rid the world of the threat he poses, and to hasten Victor’s own fulfillment in his union with Elizabeth. Its whole ostensible purpose is to clear the decks so that he can marry and begin again to enjoy life with no undischarged duty haunting him. He is to gather data from English scientists and find a spot to assemble his laboratory where his loved ones will not have to witness his frightful labors. By making the journey, he seems to be putting an end to his procrastination, for until then, he “clung,” he says, “to every pretence of delay” (Chapter 18).
      In truth, however, his procrastination has by no means ended; it continues throughout his journey. In the first place, he avoids getting to work on the female creature for as long as possible. Although he mentions consulting scientists in London and beginning with repugnance to collect his “materials” on his journey north, these activities are not described in any detail, so that all we actually see is a man uneasily wandering on and on until he runs out of places to hide from the inevitable commencement of his hated project. But this is not his only procrastination; as already noted, he has placed his own wedding on hold until he can pay his debt to his creature. We can see the wisdom and even the necessity for this, but we need to bear in mind that this single-mindedness is an old habit of his: focusing on only one issue at a time. It is a trait of character that he himself pointed out in Chapter 4, where he said, “I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection until the great object, which swallowed up every habit of my nature, should be completed.” So in effect, the trip to England is a kind of double procrastination: The task occasioning the journey postpones his wedding, and his aversion to the work required postpones his completing the task.
      In fact, Victor never does complete this task, and the real purpose of these chapters is not just to get him physically from Geneva to the Orkney Islands but to help us understand how, after assenting to his creature’s demands, he hardens his heart and breaks his promise. To grasp this catastrophic alteration, we need to know Victor better: what he plans to do or what expectations he has. Although he does not directly discuss these matters, parallels teach us how to infer what is going on in the secret places of his mind and heart. Just as the journey itself, as seen abstractly on a map, is the portrait of procrastination and a forecast of how Victor will retreat from all that matters to him into desolation, so the landscape and the incidental sights among which he passes become mirrors that reflect the inner landscape of his soul. This is not an entirely new kind of parallelism in the novel. We have already seen it in the storm during which Victor deals with his loss of William and his suspicion that he himself may be to blame for it. The storm outside Victor corresponds to another in his soul. We have also seen the Sea of Ice reflect the creature’s sublimity (rather than beauty, which he lacks). This is the kind of parallel that is extensively employed in Chapters 18 and 19 as a means of providing insights into Victor’s mind.
      Consider the beautiful descriptions of the journey down the Rhine, for instance. It is a very beautiful voyage; I have taken it. Everywhere you look, as Henry’s descriptions show, you see nature and humanity in harmony, with an ancient castle nearly melded with the cliffs it clings to or “a village half hid in the recess of the mountain” or a happy party of peasants singing as they come from their vineyards that grow on the gentle slopes of the valley and are fed by the river that flows through it. These images are more than a travelogue; they define a kind of ideal world, a “faeryland,” at a time in Victor’s life when his own world has begun to fall apart. The descriptions of the Rhine valley climax with Clerval’s contrasting this German landscape with that of Switzerland. As you listen to Henry, try to imagine what thoughts are swirling about in the mind of Victor, who, says he, “lay at the bottom of the boat, and . . . gazed on the cloudless blue sky,” and only heard the words, as we do, leaving the seeing to his friend.

“I have seen,” [said Henry], “the most beautiful scenes of my own country; I have visited the lakes of Lucerne and Uri, where the snowy mountains descend almost perpendicularly to the water, casting black and impenetrable shades, which would cause a gloomy and mournful appearance were it not for the most verdant islands that relieve the eye by their gay appearance; I have seen this lake agitated by a tempest, when the wind tore up whirlwinds of water and gave you an idea of what the water-spout must be on the great ocean; and the waves dash with fury the base of the mountain . . . ; but this country, Victor, pleases me more than all those wonders. The mountains of Switzerland are more majestic and strange, but there is a charm in the banks of this divine river that I never before saw equalled. . . . Oh, surely the spirit that inhabits and guards this place has a soul more in harmony with man than those who pile the glacier or retire to the inaccessible peaks of the mountains of our own country.”

When Henry speaks of “the spirit that inhabits and guards this place” and of “the glacier” and “inaccessible peaks,” doesn’t your mind return to that bleak landscape where the creature “could,” in Victor’s words, “exist in the ice caves of the glaciers and hide himself from pursuit among the ridges of inaccessible precipices"? And when Henry speaks of a metaphorical “spirit that inhabits and guards this place,” can we fail to recall the real, non-metaphorical spirit back there in Switzerland who called “desert mountains and dreary glaciers” his “refuge” and “the caves of ice” his “dwelling, the only one which man does not grudge”?
      Henry himself certainly does not know of the being that Victor has called “my spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me.” That, though, is the thought that will be filling Victor’s mind as he listens to Henry—that and his uncertainty about where the creature is now and what he is doing. Victor left Geneva feeling “that the fiend would follow me,” and in that case he might be thinking, “A soul in harmony with man? Oh, no, Henry, not the spirit that inhabits this place, for I know him better than you.” Or else he might be thinking of the other creature, the one he intends to create. Could it be that she will be, as a female, perhaps less fierce, more in harmony with man than the male? He may have such hopes from time to time.
      We cannot know his thoughts, though. He dared not express them to his friend, and in later years either he did not confide them to Walton or Walton did not write them down, but Shelley periodically levers us inside Victor’s mind to stimulate in us thoughts analogous to those he may have had. These are only suggestions, only hints, for she wants us not so much to know facts about Victor as to be Victor for the duration of this journey, just as we shared the point of view of the creature while he told his story.
      I do not know that there is any official literary term for this practice of levering an audience into a character’s mind, but it might be one function of dramatic irony. When Henry’s words call to our mind and to Victor’s mind ideas that Henry cannot share, we and Victor are, as it were, on the same page and share a kind of mental intimacy, with Henry on the outside, shut out of the secret we share with Victor. This kind of experience continues in the description of the journey through England, which commences in the final two paragraphs of Chapter 18, the last sentence containing a fresh instance of this phenomenon: “At length we saw the numerous steeples of London, St. Paul’s towering above all, and the Tower famed in English history.” Ordinarily the use of “towering” so close to “Tower” would be a stylistic fault, but the echo functions here to call our attention to this final detail of the city of London. For what is the Tower of London famed in English history? [Prisoners kept before trial and before execution or left to languish without trial—why of interest to Victor?]
      On their way to visit a Scottish friend in Perth, the two friends have further experiences that contain for Victor alone an element of private horror. When they visit Oxford, where the English Civil War had begun more than a century earlier, Victor sympathetically describes the beleaguered monarch, who would eventually be defeated and beheaded:

It was here that Charles I had collected his forces. This city [i.e., Oxford] had remained faithful to him, after the whole nation had forsaken his cause to join the standard of Parliament and liberty. The memory of that unfortunate king and his companions, the amiable Falkland, the insolent Goring, his queen, and son, gave a peculiar interest to every part of the city which they might be supposed to have inhabited.

Naturally this moment in English history interests a man whose own creature has contended with its maker. This very journey itself is devoted to doing the creature’s bidding, so of course Victor feels a kinship with “that unfortunate king” who was forced by his subjects to take up arms and eventually even to lay his anointed head on the block.
      By the same token, is it any wonder that Victor can just as readily feel sympathy with the rebels, who had the courage to depose a tyrant, just as he himself must often think of breaking free of his slavery to his creature? Here is how he describes one of the principal leaders of the rebels:

We visited the tomb of the illustrious Hampden and the field on which that patriot fell. For a moment my soul was elevated from its debasing and miserable fears to contemplate the divine ideas of liberty and self-sacrifice of which these sights were the monuments and the remembrancers. For an instant I dared to shake off my chains and look around me with a free and lofty spirit, but the iron had eaten into my flesh, and I sank again, trembling and hopeless, into my miserable self.

Here the associations that were merely hinted at emerge into explicit statement, and we can no longer doubt that the sights along the route are intended to reflect Victor’s state of mind.
      While still on the road, he seems to be restive under his obligation—or, if I may be permitted a metaphor, resents the albatross’s weight—but for the most part he acts the good tourist, perhaps lulled by the landscape, for he tells Walton that although the countryside of Matlock, north of Oxford, resembled Switzerland, “everything is on a lower scale.” There are hills but no snow-topped mountains. Switzerland’s dramatic contrasts of sheer heights and profound depths, with pockets of high cultivation separated by vast barren stretches suit the creature and remind Victor of him. Therefore, when not too much reminded of that Swiss landscape, Victor seems relatively at ease, as if perhaps in hope that the female will be on a lower scale as well, but even the mention of Chamounix, where he first conversed with his creature, makes him “tremble” and hurry “to quit Matlock, with which that terrible scene was thus associated.” Traveling further north, he finds the landscape more nearly reminiscent of Switzerland and accordingly complains of fatigue and the irksomeness of being continually on the move and unable to settle in anywhere. What is really eating at him, of course, is that “I had now neglected my promise for some time, and I feared the effects of the demon’s disappointment. . . . I felt as if I had committed some great crime. . . .”
      And well he might; nor is this the last time he will say these words, without ever recognizing that they are not metaphorical but that he is in fact guilty—if not of a crime—then of criminal negligence of his creature’s needs. Only once, as I mentioned, in Chapter 10, has he ever acknowledged the “duties of a creator towards his creature,” and that grudging admission of his own failure as a parent induced him to consent to construct a female to atone for his short-sightedness, but it has been a very long time since he has thought of this journey in that light. Now he feels the weight of his guilt and does not even recognize it for what it is: “I was guiltless, but I had indeed drawn down a horrible curse upon my head, as mortal as that of crime.” Victor has forgotten that his purpose in coming here was to render to his creature what he justly owes him.
      Finally, with his back up against the wall, or rather, against the North Sea, he is forced to stop stalling and get down to work, and the chapter ends with a multi-layered description of Victor’s mental state. In the absence of that drive toward discovery that sustained him during the construction of the first creature, the ugly process itself and his doubts about the rightness of proceeding with it both cause in him a spiritual “sickness.” The inchoate fears that gnaw at him are never explicitly named, but we have learned how to see in his landscape descriptions what he is thinking about. This is how he describes his environment outside the laboratory:

. . . [I]n the evening, when the weather permitted, I walked on the stony beach of the sea to listen to the waves as they roared and dashed at my feet. It was a monotonous yet ever-changing scene. I thought of Switzerland; it was far different from this desolate and appalling landscape. Its hills are covered with vines, and its cottages are scattered thickly in the plains. Its fair lakes reflect a blue and gentle sky, and when troubled by the winds, their tumult is but as the play of a lively infant when compared to the roarings of the giant ocean.

He is not thinking only of that part of the Swiss landscape that he explicitly mentions. The phrase “the play of a lively infant” adds to this description the element of personification, which calls to mind the only passage where Victor has ever previously used personification to describe a landscape: the description of the valley of the glacier:

The abrupt sides of vast mountains were before me; the icy wall of the glacier overhung me; a few shattered pines were scattered around; and the solemn silence of this glorious presence-chamber of imperial nature was broken only by the brawling waves or the fall of some vast fragment, the thunder sound of the avalanche or the cracking, reverberated along the mountains, of the accumulated ice, which, through the silent working of immutable laws, was ever and anon rent and torn, as if it had been but a plaything in their hands.

      Now here in the far north, he again uses the metaphor of a child’s play, this time to contrast the disturbances of lakes which he has witnessed in Switzerland with the elemental force of the sea: “. . . their tumult is but as the play of a lively infant when compared to the roarings of the giant ocean.” The actual words he uses in this passage emphasize the placid beauty of Switzerland, but this metaphor reminds us of the creature's rugged domain, so that we think, as Victor himself may also be thinking, not only that the Orkney Islands are far more grim than the beauties of Switzerland (mentioned in the words) but even that they may perhaps become the scene of an encounter still more fearful than that he had on the glacier with the first creature (hinted at by the repeated metaphor).
      Throughout his journey, Victor has had conflicting attitudes toward his intended work. He hopes it will be quickly done and will solve his problem, but he fears it may make matters worse. Comparing the landscape of home to that of the British Isles, he has taken comfort from the milder, less extreme character of the hills where he will be working, but now that he has begun to work, he finds the ocean more primitive and powerful than any force he has yet encountered. What if the female is worse than the male? Plagued by such thoughts, Victor is becoming restless and nervous, working by fits and starts, never thinking ahead; as he says, “through the whole period during which I was the slave of my creature I allowed myself to be governed by the impulses of the moment” (Chapter 18). Is it any wonder that, when it finally dawns on him that he doesn’t intend to finish this task, he doesn’t do any of the many clever and sensible things I’m sure you’ve written in your homework?
      The problem Victor has is one of focus. When his attention is fully engaged, he focuses entirely on one goal (bringing the creature to life) with a sort of frenzied zeal.  He seems to put on blinders that shove every other concern out of consideration, even serious matters like eating and sleeping and (worst of all) consequences or simply taking stock of what comes next, as when he failed to provide for the maintenance of his creature after bringing it to life. This is what I am calling single-mindedness; it’s a form of obsessive compulsiveness.  The corollary of single-mindedness is evasion, screening from the mind what one doesn’t want to think about. Of course, not every thought blocked from the mind by single-mindedness can said to be evaded, only thoughts that one is from time to time aware of but which one deliberately blocks. We can’t say, for instance, that Victor was evading when he failed to plan for his creature’s future, since that thought had never occurred to him and thus did not need to be evaded, but surely the need to eat and sleep and the duty to write home did occur to him; he told us that he knew his father would worry since he had promised to write regularly as long as all was well with him. Pushing these matters out of his mind by returning to his science project whenever they intruded upon his attention was a form of evasion.
      Victor also practices evasion when not engaged in an all-consuming endeavor, as he does by playing tourist so as not to deal with what he came to Britain to do. This is mere distraction, though, and we have seen its ineffectiveness, for the sights he takes in continually remind him of what he is trying to block out.
      However, in addition to evasion by means of distraction (whether by indulging an obsession or by engaging in a mere pastime), there is one other method of evasion that works extremely well for him: revising history, lying to himself, replacing an unwelcome thought by one more palatable though untrue. This is what happens when he refuses to focus his mind on how he has caused his creature’s corruption. For one moment near the glacier his creature’s eloquence made him recognize his duty as a creator, and he agreed to correct his fault by belatedly attending to the creature’s need for a friend, but he soon thereafter banished that thought from his mind and until just before his death regards it as a deception, warning Walton that the creature "is eloquent and persuasive, and once his words had even power over my heart; but trust him not. His soul is as hellish as his form, full of treachery and fiend-like malice." Why? We have to assume that acknowledging that he has been a bad parent is unbearable, for he himself has had very good parents, so he substitutes a false guilt that is easier to bear, claiming that he ought never to have brought the creature to life, as if it had been malicious from birth. He can bear to think himself the dupe of those damned alchemists with their unholy dabblings in forbidden lore; he can bear to imagine himself to be a bad scientist, to have produced a monster whose soul was as ugly as his face. Therefore, he uses those lies to block out the horrifying truth: that his project was only a cosmetic failure. It was a success physically in that his creature is stronger than man, more agile, better equipped to bear extremes of temperature, and able to subsist on coarser diet. It was also benevolent and inclined to virtue until suffering corrupted it. Victor blames himself for the deaths of his loved ones, and he has indeed caused their deaths but not, as he wishes to believe, by creating a monster, no—by turning his own innocent, well-constructed, and promising son into a murderer by simply not taking care of him after he was born.
      It is important to recognize how dysfunctional both these modes of thought are and how much damage they have already done. His single-mindedness has deprived the creature of its basic needs and thus has caused its eventual criminal behavior, and evasion has led to a serious misunderstanding of what he himself has done wrong and why he is suffering so greatly. These habits of mind have still more harm to do to Victor. Both of them, working in concert, bring about a catastrophic denouement to his journey and precipitate the rest of the horrors that break upon his head. Look for both single-mindedness and evasion in the next chapters that you read.

Notes

"Metaphorical spirit":  It is even possible that Henry is not speaking in metaphors but really believes in spirits that haunt localities. Victor seems to, since he more than once has prayed to them, and Coleridge did when he wrote in a side note to “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” that spirits are “invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels; concerning whom the learned Jew, Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be consulted. They are very numerous, and there is no climate or element without one or more.”  Return to text.

"What if the female is worse":  If Victor has read Beowulf, he would remember that after Grendel had been killed, in the midst of the soldiers’ rejoicing there had come the horrible surprise attack by Grendel’s mother, an older, wilier, and more tenacious, far more dangerous foe.  Return to text.