And so starts Volume Two, where we will find out what the creature has been up to over the past several years after being brought to life and promptly abandoned. A few notes, mostly pertaining to places, but first our new cover:
This cover is from an edition published by Signet in 1965, and is rather special to me as the edition in which I myself first read the story, and which still sits on my bookshelf. It does, however, contain the 1832 version, so it's not the one I'm actually reading right now.
I like the impressionistic style of this cover. It emphasizes the monster's human-like but somehow still bestial nature, and gives the whole thing a sort of air of mystery over horror, while still being suitably creepy. It also manages to be somewhat reminiscent of Karloff's monster — the flat-top head, the sunken eyes — while not being an obvious reference to it.
Notes after the jump!
10:10 - The family decides to take a trip to the "valley of Chamounix," more properly spelled nowadays as "Chamonix." This is a town in south-east France in the Alps, right about where the borders of France, Italy, and Switzerland all meet. It lies on the north side of Mont Blanc (and thus, technically, contains the summit of Mont Blanc itself) and is thus a popular destination for skiers and mountaineers. Fun fact: this was the site of the first Winter Olympics, in 1924.
Interesting side note: I haven't been keeping careful track of the differences between our 1818 text and the more common 1832 text, but one I did happen to notice as I was looking up this annotation is that the 1818 trip to Chamounix includes Victor, his father, his brother, and Elizabeth, the 1832 text has Victor going alone as part of his guilty ramblings. I think I prefer the family going, as it emphasizes their relationship and heightens the tragedies to come. Um, spoilers.
12:33 - We hear of the "aiguilles," which refers to a specific type of mountaintop that comes to a sharp point, from the French word for "needle."
13:51 - The "Arveiron" is a glacial tributary coming down near Mont Blanc and emptying into the River Arve, itself a tributary of the Rhone. The Arveiron is another of those things that is obscure enough that, at this point, most references to it are because of people wondering about its mention in Frankenstein. The source of the Arveiron is the Glacier Montanvert (itself mentioned around 15:14 and where Victor meets his creation properly for the first time). It's now known as Mer de Glace, the sea of glass.
17:21 - "We rest; a dream... Naught may endure but mutability!" Ha ha, oh, this one. I even had to break into the narration for this one. Victor quotes two verses from a poem, which turns out to be "Mutability" by, yes, Percy Bysshe Shelley from his 1816 collection Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude: And Other Poems. Aside from the obvious ego-stroking of either Mary quoting one of her husband's poems in her novel, or of Percy revising her novel and inserting a quote of himself, note that this further screws with the timeline of the novel, supposedly taking place in the late 1700s.
And that's all for today! Come back next time and we'll dive into the monster's story.
If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!
No comments:
Post a Comment