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 (2.7.3), 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 (2.1.1).
