an evil spirit
Mary Shelley seems deliberately to
invoke the terms of Percy Bysshe
Shelley's "Alastor: or, the Spirit
of Solitude," published in March 1816 a few months before the
summer trip to Geneva. The title was
suggested by their friend Thomas Love
Peacock, poet and novelist, and an autodidact in classical Greek, who
conveyed to Percy Bysshe Shelley the aptness of using the Greek word for a
kakodaimon, "alastor," as the governing term for his poem. The word
kakodaimon translates exactly into the "evil spirit" invoked here
by Victor Frankenstein, and its association with solitude is manifest in
these circumstances as well. At the same time, a sensitive reader cannot
help observing the likeness of this term to the diction Victor commonly
uses to describe his Creature, which he now, without recognizing the
similarity, applies to himself.
