Frankenstein, Volume Two, Chapters Three and Four

In which the creature explains how he lived in a forest for a while, was attacked by some villagers for being scary, and shacked up in a hovel where he could spy on a beautiful little poor family he falls in love with; and in which our narrator really wonders about the family not ever looking into the little little hovel attached to their house over the course of several months even though someone's nearby collecting their wood for them, I mean, right?



Okay, so now we've tunneled down through our Frankenbar into the chewy nougat center that is the Creature's Story, and I think that's where our candy bar metaphor reaches its limit. Anyway, this installment's cover is from a Romanian edition by Excelsior-Multi Press from some indefinite year:

This is crazy! We've got the title all drippy and bleeding and stuff, and it looks like we're seeing the monster as his head is being, like, hooked up, on a background of lab equipment and... and is that a... a crocodile? What in the world is that doing there? Was that used for parts or something?

Notes after the jump!

Most of these chapters are pretty self-explanatory, so only two notes this time around:

9:05 - "as exquisite and divine a retreat as Pandæmonium appeared to the daemons of hell after their sufferings in the lake of fire." Pandæmonium is the capital of Hell in John Milton's classic poem Paradise Lost, designed by the fallen angel Mulciber (who previously had been the architect of Heaven's palaces and who was also the Roman god Vulcan). Milton created the name from the Greek words "pan," meaning "all," and "dæmon," meaning "little spirit," or as Christians obviously interpreted it, "demon." This is also, naturally, where the English word "pandemonium" comes from.

28:40 - "the ass and the lapdog" refers to one of Aesop's Fables, where a donkey gets jealous of how much love and attention his owner lavishes on his dog, so he goes in the house and climbs up into his owner's lap and licks his face and it goes about as well as it sounds.


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!