• 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.