my mad schemes are the cause
The notion of madness, encountered frequently in the late chapters of the
novel, has been associated almost entirely with Victor Frankenstein's
disturbed mental state. This small shift in rhetoric for the 1831
edition, coming as it does eight paragraphs after Victor's impassioned
questioning of Walton's naive desire to know "the particulars of his
creature's formation" ("Are you mad, my friend . . . ?" -- see Walton 1 and note), suggests that, for this novel,
madness may be less a matter of actual derangement than it is a kind of
violation of accepted codes of social conduct whereby the individual
becomes isolated from the community and communal obligations. Its closest
synonymn might then be "solipsism," which is an issue with deep roots
within Romanticism and one that is stressed in these final pages of
Frankenstein.
