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Frankenstein Family Delacey Essay

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In Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, Shelley presents family and friendship as the cornerstone of a fulfilling life. This idea is exemplified by the obvious contrast of the idyll of the De Lacey family relationship and the Monster's abject loneliness and the deterioration of Frankenstein's life after his friends and family are slowly removed. Perhaps Shelley is using the novel to explore her own abandonment by her father after eloping, and championing familial connection as a necessity for happiness. Shelley uses the DeLacey family to highlight the importance of mutual connection and devotion in a relationship. Although the incredibly negative semantic field, created by the nouns 'poverty' and 'evil' is used to make the reader realise that …show more content…

The author epitomises this through the juxtaposition of the semantic field of struggle, created by the adjectives'miserable' and 'distressing', which surrounds the DeLacey family with the monster's admiration for their 'affection' and 'gentleness'. Shelley's portrayal of an almost hyperbolically idyllic family coupled with the 'ardent desire' of the Monster is used as a foil for Frankenstein's folly of abandoning his family. At the beginning of the novel, Frankenstein's family have a similar lexus to that of the DeLacey family and a constant semantic field of love and devotion, created by the metaphor of a 'god' and the 'present' of Elizabeth, but this slowly fades into 'wretchedness', as his friends and family are slowly taken away. Shelley mirrors the unnaturalness of the repeated murders by foreshadowing murder through the repeated use of the pathetic fallacy of the'storm' and 'thunder' before the death of both Elizabeth and Clerval, through Nature, which reflects her Romantic background and foregrounds the pain of the removal of human connection. The reader witnesses the transition through both the Monster and Frankenstein's perspectives, which implies that Shelley's use of both characters as foils for each other was intended to highlight the pain that both characters feel at the same situation, but from completely contrasting backgrounds. Perhaps, through this, Shelley wishes to imply that the lack of family and friends affects everyone equally, no matter their background, intelligence or previous

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