Character analysis
De Lacey
in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
De Lacey is the blind, elderly head of the De Lacey family, and his cottage in Germany becomes the Creature's secret school and temporary home for over a year. Once a thriving merchant in Paris, De Lacey was wrongfully ruined and imprisoned after his son Felix helped the Turkish merchant Safie's father escape, forcing the family into a life of poverty and exile. Despite his hardships, De Lacey maintains a quiet dignity, warmth, and a philosophical outlook—he plays the guitar to soothe his children, engages them in gentle conversations, and speaks about human suffering with calm acceptance rather than bitterness.
His blindness is key to the story: it allows him to be the only family member who can meet the Creature without fear. When the Creature finally enters the cottage to speak with De Lacey, the old man listens with genuine sympathy, calling him "unfortunate" and offering friendship and help. This moment marks the Creature's only true human connection and serves as the emotional high point of the novel's middle section. De Lacey's acceptance, even if fleeting, affirms the Creature's desire for belonging, making the later scene where Felix returns and violently drives the Creature away all the more heartbreaking.
De Lacey acts as a contrast to Victor Frankenstein: while Victor abandons his creation in disgust, De Lacey—unable to see the Creature’s appearance—responds to his words and pain with kindness. He illustrates Shelley's idea that prejudice stems from sight and societal conditioning rather than moral instinct. His story ends abruptly; the family flees, and De Lacey vanishes from the narrative, leaving the Creature feeling permanently alone.
Who they are
De Lacey is an aged, blind Parisian merchant who, by the time the reader encounters him, has been stripped of fortune, status, and homeland. Once prosperous enough to hold a position of civic standing in France, he now occupies a small, impoverished cottage in rural Germany alongside his son Felix and daughter Agatha. His blindness is total, yet Shelley renders him as the novel's most perceptive moral figure—the one character capable of seeing the Creature clearly because he cannot see him at all. Despite enduring wrongful imprisonment and the collapse of everything he once owned, De Lacey retains what Shelley describes through the Creature's admiring observations as a steady, gentle dignity: he plays the guitar on evenings when his children are sorrowful, he speaks of human suffering without rancor, and he absorbs his family's poverty with philosophical calm. He has no chapter of his own; he exists entirely within the Creature's embedded narrative in Volumes II and III, yet his brief presence carries disproportionate moral weight.
Arc & motivation
De Lacey's arc is one of endurance rather than transformation. His fall from Parisian prosperity came not through any fault of his own but through his son Felix's courageous—and legally ruinous—decision to help Safie's father, a Turkish merchant, escape unjust imprisonment. The irony is quietly devastating: the family was destroyed by an act of exactly the kind of compassionate intervention De Lacey himself models. By the time the Creature discovers the cottage, De Lacey's arc has already peaked and broken; what the reader witnesses is the aftermath—a man who has chosen acceptance over bitterness. His motivation throughout the cottage scenes is simply to sustain his children's spirits and maintain human warmth in diminished circumstances. When the Creature finally enters and speaks to him, De Lacey's willingness to extend friendship requires no internal struggle; it is entirely consistent with who he has already shown himself to be.
Key moments
The pivotal scene occurs in Chapter 12–15 of Volume II, when the Creature—having spent more than a year secretly observing the family—chooses a moment when Felix and Agatha are absent and knocks on De Lacey's door. De Lacey invites him in without hesitation. Hearing the Creature describe himself as friendless and shunned, De Lacey responds with immediate empathy, calling him "unfortunate" and stating that to "redress the injuries of so miserable a wretch" would bring him genuine happiness. This is the only moment in the entire novel where a human being responds to the Creature's words on their own terms, without the distorting interference of appearance. It represents the emotional summit of the novel's central section. The moment is shattered when Felix, Agatha, and Safie return: Felix, seeing the Creature clinging to his blind father, tears him away and beats him. The family subsequently abandons the cottage. De Lacey disappears from the narrative entirely. His exit is not dramatic—it is an erasure, which is itself meaningful.
Relationships in depth
De Lacey and the Creature: The Creature's relationship with De Lacey is the closest thing to a parent–child or mentor–student bond the novel offers outside of the poisoned relationship with Victor. For over a year, De Lacey unknowingly educates the Creature in language, history, and feeling simply by living openly. When they finally speak, De Lacey treats the Creature's pain as legitimate and his plea for companionship as reasonable. The expulsion that follows—delivered not by De Lacey but by Felix—transforms that single afternoon of acceptance into the Creature's most corrosive wound, because it proves that even goodwill cannot survive the fact of the Creature's appearance once sight is restored to the encounter.
De Lacey and Victor Frankenstein: The two men never meet, but Shelley constructs their opposition with care. Victor, who created the Creature and can see him, responds with revulsion and flight. De Lacey, who did not create the Creature and cannot see him, responds with compassion and offered friendship. This parallelism implicitly arraigns Victor: De Lacey demonstrates that the rejection is not instinctive but aesthetic, rooted in appearance rather than moral assessment.
Connected characters
- The Creature (Monster)
The Creature secretly observes De Lacey's family for months, learning language, history, and human emotion by watching them through a chink in the cottage wall. De Lacey becomes the Creature's sole willing human interlocutor: when they speak face-to-face, De Lacey offers sympathy and aid, giving the Creature his only taste of acceptance. The violent expulsion that follows De Lacey's children's return transforms this hope into the Creature's deepest wound, directly fueling his turn toward vengeance.
- Victor Frankenstein
De Lacey never meets Victor, but functions as his moral counterpart. Victor, who can see the Creature, abandons him out of aesthetic revulsion; De Lacey, who cannot see him, extends immediate compassion. The contrast implicitly indicts Victor's failure of responsibility and highlights how appearance, not character, drives his rejection of his creation.
- Robert Walton
De Lacey's story reaches Walton only as a tale-within-a-tale: the Creature recounts it to Victor, who recounts it to Walton in his letters. De Lacey thus represents one of the novel's most distant narrative layers, underscoring Shelley's frame-within-frame structure and the way human kindness is filtered through multiple, increasingly unreliable voices.
Use this in your essay
Blindness as moral clarity: Argue that Shelley uses De Lacey's physical blindness to expose sight itself as the mechanism of prejudice, suggesting that visual perception is not a neutral faculty but a socially conditioned one that corrupts moral judgment.
The failure of the surrogate father: De Lacey momentarily fills the paternal role Victor abdicated; explore how his involuntary abandonment of the Creature (through Felix's intervention rather than his own choice) deepens Shelley's critique of the structures—family, society—that fail those they should protect.
Victimhood and virtue: Both De Lacey and the Creature are innocent victims of injustice; examine whether Shelley implies that suffering can cultivate empathy or whether De Lacey's goodness is contingent on his not having been shown whom he is sympathizing with.
The frame narrative and the erosion of testimony: De Lacey's story passes through three narrators—De Lacey to the Creature, the Creature to Victor, Victor to Walton—before reaching the reader; consider what Shelley implies about the reliability of accounts of human kindness when they are this thoroughly mediated.
De Lacey as counter-Enlightenment figure: De Lacey's cottage life, centered on music, familial feeling, and stoic acceptance rather than ambition or scientific mastery, positions him against Victor's Promethean striving; build a thesis on what Shelley endorses through this contrast.