NOTES

the family of De Lacey

The marmoreal cast of this sentence throws the emphasis on the family unit. Whereas before the Creature had seen a patriarchal family as nurturing civilized values (II:7:6), here he has reason to interpret it from a contrasting perspective, as harboring the equivalent of ethnic prejudices on a small, tightly formed, and exclusionary scale. With that perspective in mind one might return to the family unit that Victor Frankenstein left a few hours back to consider how little different is its underlying ethos (II:1:3).