The purpose of the Delacey family
Throughout the semster we have viewed Frankenstein through many different lenses of literary criticism in an attempt to discover what could be signified by this historical and influential text. The novel as a whole is significant, and we tend to use the different forms of criticism to evenly analyze the many different parts of this work, but when I look back at my blog posts, I find that I often chose to focus on the monster’s interactions with the de Lacey family as a central point to my analyses. In regards to the de Lacey family, a very interesting parallel is occuring. On one side of this are the monster’s violent mood swings that he experiences upon his interactions with the family: just as Safie’s music “at once drew tears of sorrow and delight from my eyes” (107), the observances of the de Laceys “were a mixture of pain and pleasure, such as I had never before experienced” (100). The monster is simultaneously delighted and thrown into a pit of despair by these humans. He worships their values of goodness and kindness, but become wretched when he realizes that he will never be able to become one of them. On the other side of this parallel (which may perhaps be the manifestation of the conflicting emotions described above), is the transformation of the monster due to his interactions with the de Laceys. The monster says: “I shall relate events, that impressed me with feelings which, from what I had been, have made me what I am” (106), when describing his relations with the family. Initially a benevolent and innocent creature, the monster learns of the ways of humans, and in particular what he perceives to be the extreme kindness of the de Laceys. When he is unable to gain their acceptance, his hopes are crushed and he becomes violent. Just as happiness and despair coincide in the monster, so do the potential for both kindness and violence, emotions manifested in actions. The conflicts that rage throughout the monster in regards to the de Lacey family eventually cause the monster to snap, and the turning point of the novel to be reached. Prior to his interactions with the family, the monster is naive and benign, a mere nomad, simply satiating his instinctual desires. But following his studies and observances of the family, the monster learns of more than just instinct: he knows what it means to be spurned and rejected, and gives vent to his feelings of anguish, hatred, and vengeance. Without observing the de Laceys, there is the chance that the monster would have remained in the former state, leaving Frankenstein alone, and thus the novel would not be the novel that we have been studying all semester. The turning point caused by the de Laceys could find its basis in many of the fields of literary criticism, but it has strong connections to ideas of the psychological. The monster’s passionate and varied surges of emotion – euphoria, happiness, sadness, anger, fear, hatred – respresent an unstable base that eventually cause him to snap and hence, the turning point. The de Lacey’s importance is that they create this unstable base, and then allow it to fall. Without them, the monster may not even have formed breakable emotions in the first place. The psychological automatically leads to Freud and his ideas of psychoanalysis: “from a psychoanalytic perspective, boys learn oedipally through identifying with the father and his threat of castration, the threat that originates concepts like honor and law” (Parker 135). This quote demonstrates the origination of higher concepts through the psychological processes of the psychoanalytic, and mirrors the monster’s learning of the higher concepts of emotion and human society through his observances and psychological processes in relation to the de Laceys. The de Laceys teach the monster everything that he knows about humanity and thus model the oedipal stage that the monster must go through in order to learn about these “higher concepts”. Once the monster has learned, the turning point is reached, demonstrating the de Lacey’s intense importance in the novel.
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