How we cite our quotes: (chapter.paragraph)
Quote #10
I avoided explanation and maintained a continual silence concerning the wretch I had created. I had a persuasion that I should be supposed mad, and this in itself would forever have chained my tongue. But, besides, I could not bring myself to disclose a secret which would fill my hearer with consternation and make fear and unnatural horror the inmates of his breast. I checked, therefore, my impatient thirst for sympathy and was silent when I would have given the world to have confided the fatal secret. Yet, still, words like those I have recorded would burst uncontrollably from me. I could offer no explanation of them, but their truth in part relieved the burden of my mysterious woe. (22.4-5)
Literary Allusion Snack: in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, the book of poetry that basically inaugurated English literary Romanticism, William Wordsworth calls poetry the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." How might that relate to Victor's secret "burst[ing] uncontrollably" out?