Havre-de-Grace

Havre-de-Grace is the French port that serves as the point of departure for Victor Frankenstein and his father Alphonse after Victor's liberation from an Irish prison, a journey that returns him to the continent and to the final, catastrophic phase of his story. The port appears at a moment of profound physical and psychological ruin: Victor, having been acquitted of the murder of his friend Henry Clerval, is a "shattered wreck — the shadow of a human being," a mere skeleton preyed upon by fever. His father, anxious about Victor's ability to endure travel, nevertheless yields to his son's desperate urgency to leave Ireland. They take passage on a vessel bound for Havre-de-Grace and sail with a fair wind from the Irish shores at midnight, a departure that Victor greets with a "feverish joy" at the prospect of soon seeing Geneva again.

The Voyage from Ireland

The sea voyage from Ireland to Havre-de-Grace becomes a space of haunted reflection for Victor. Lying on the deck, watching the stars and listening to the dashing waves, he hails the darkness that shuts Ireland from his sight. The past appears to him as a "frightful dream," yet the vessel, the wind, and the sea force upon him the undeniable reality that Clerval has fallen victim to him and the monster of his creation. In this liminal state, Victor repasses his entire life in memory: his quiet happiness in Geneva, the death of his mother, his departure for Ingolstadt, the mad enthusiasm that drove him to create his hideous enemy, and the night the monster first lived. Overwhelmed, he weeps bitterly.

The Use of Laudanum and Troubled Sleep

During this voyage, Victor's reliance on a drug reveals the depth of his psychological disintegration. Since his recovery from the fever that followed Clerval's murder, he has been in the habit of taking a small quantity of laudanum each night to gain the rest necessary for the preservation of life. Oppressed by the recollection of his misfortunes, he now swallows double his usual quantity and soon sleeps profoundly. Yet sleep offers no respite: his dreams present a thousand objects that scare him, and toward morning he is possessed by a kind of nightmare in which he feels the fiend's grasp on his neck and cannot free himself, with groans and cries ringing in his ears. His father, watching over him, perceives his restlessness and awakens him. The dashing waves are around, the cloudy sky above, but the fiend is not there — a sense of security, a feeling that a truce is established between the present hour and the disastrous future, imparts to Victor a kind of calm forgetfulness.

Arrival and Aftermath

The voyage ends with the landing at Havre-de-Grace, from which Victor and his father proceed to Paris. There, Victor soon finds that he has overtaxed his strength and must repose before continuing his journey to Geneva. His father's care is indefatigable, but he does not know the origin of Victor's sufferings and seeks erroneous methods to remedy the incurable ill. Victor abhors the face of man, yet feels attracted even to the most repulsive among them as to creatures of an angelic nature, because he knows he has unchained an enemy among them whose joy it is to shed their blood. Havre-de-Grace thus functions as the threshold between the legal exoneration of Ireland and the moral and emotional reckoning that awaits Victor in Geneva, a port of return that offers no real homecoming.