I curbed the imperious voice of wretchedness
By the utmost self-violence Victor lacks the modern vocabulary
that would term this act mere repression. He likens it to
suicide, an active, even extreme, assertion of violence against
the self. Yet again, the reader may wish to ask, which self is
it that he would destroy, that of the Creator or of his extension
who has destroyed those whom Victor loves? The doubling of
selves is insistent even where, as here, it is merely insinuated.
