the Angel of Destruction
Mary Shelley's emendations of 1831
once again link early statements in Victor's narrative with his condition
when he is rescued by Walton's crew, a frantic and paranoid specter whose
otherworldly mystifications, as expressed in the late chapters of Volume
3, are a driving force in his obsessive pursuit of the Creature. It is
interesting to note that even this late in her work on the novel Mary
Shelley is recalling the machinery with which Percy Bysshe Shelley invested his
poem centering on the uncompromising pursuit of a love object, "Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitiude,"
published in March of 1816,
shortly before the two left for Switzerland.
