again and again testify
Only in retrospect will the conclusion of this letter take on additional
meaning from the remarkably heightened rhetoric indulged in by Walton
here at its end. For Walton so to "testify" is to "bear witness" before the
world to a dependence upon and need for his sister. In a narrative in which
solitude and obsessiveness will come to seem a threat to all normative human
relationships, this prior assertion of the primacy of human affection
bears an ideological import. Students of English Romantic poetry may
even be reminded of the highly emotional faith with which Wordsworth
turns to his sister Dorothy in "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern
Abbey" (lines 116ff.), a poem
that will be quoted by Victor Frankenstein in an encomium to his friend
Henry Clerval at a point of structural balance with this passage, at the
beginning of Volume 3 of the novel (3.1.8).
