smooth and placid as a southern sea
Victor's only experience of a southern sea would appear to have come at
the beginning of this last trip in pursuit of the Creature, embarked on
from a French Mediterranean port (3.7.3). On its surface his sardonic
comment roundly indicts the crew for moral and spiritual laxity. Yet, on
second thought, an even stronger counterforce ironically deflates the
surface terms. This ironic inversion begins as we recognize the
considerable negative connotations from earlier in the novel already
adhering to this celebration of the "glorious" (Letter 1.4 and note, Letter 2.3 and note, and Walton 2 and note). On top of those resonances, the reference
to "a southern sea" should remind the knowledgeable reader of the last
voyage undertaken by Ulysses and his crew in search of glory, a voyage
that took them far into the unknown southern sea where their ship
foundered. This is the subject of Canto
26 of Dante's Inferno,
which is likewise the source upon which
Tennyson depended for his dramatic monologue, "Ulysses," written in 1833. In Dante's
rendition of this story, for all his heroic posturing, Ulysses has led his
men to their death for nothing beyond a meaningless personal glory. For
this act of essential treachery he is lodged near the bottom of hell for
eternity.
It is worth remarking that, in her draft of this passage,
Mary Shelley originally wrote
"summer lake," and the phrase "southern
sea"
was inserted above it in P. B.
Shelley's hand. This interpolation, of
course, would have had to have been agreed to by Mary Shelley, presumably
after some discussion of the appropriateness of the intertextual context
the phrase evokes.
