The purpose of the Delacey family
People can often feel lonely and helpless, they may feel they are the only person with such a terrible fate. There are other people with somewhat equally tragic life, it is important to learn to move on, not always looking back and complain about life. The DeLaceys were the first people the monster encountered and observed secretly. He learns a lot from them; he realizes he was not the only person with a hard life. One of the main purpose of the DeLaceys in the novel was to act as the monster’s teachers without knowing it and their cottage was the connects the Monster to the world. They taught him what is good and wrong; the feeling of sympathy to others and the definition of family. They helped the monster…show more content…
People who are hating their life should always look around them and they will learn that they are not the only people suffering and learn to recover from people with similar experience; because people with similar experience could become the best teachers for the individual. DeLacey is the Parisian-turned-blind-peasant who lives in a cottage with his son and daughter. He is a nice old man: "descended from a good family in France", he was the only person who treats the monster kindly because he was blind. His family experiences were also tragic. This gives the monster the idea that he is not the only one who suffered from an injustice. At first the monster did not know any of the family stories or had the courage to meet them; he camped around their cottage and observed them. He started his self-education through the observation…show more content…
The Delaceys also taught the monster what a family is; the monster is able to see the love behind the actions of each family member that serve the greater good of the family. The monster’s observation of the love the family members have for one another is a benefit to the monster 's understanding of family life, as he comes to crave for such a relationship. He begins to care for others, he sees the Delaceys as family and he secretly helps the family out. The love he sees in the DeLaceys’ household is what he truly wanted because he lacks of love. The monster never experienced or even seen love. The monster recalls memories of Felix’s kindness towards Agatha. He also saw Felix waking up before his father and sister to clear paths through the snow for Agatha’s chores, gathering wood for the family’s fire and getting water for the family to drink. Felix’s actions put him into his father’s shoes, as he is the one to take the responsibility of caring for his family because of his father’s inability to do so. He learns as family members they must help each other out. This is the first time the monster ever came to contact with love, even though he was not able to experience it himself, but he finally was able to witness the love he has been searching for. This experience made want to experience love and companionship himself, causing him to find victor and asking victor to make him a companion so he
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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