The Wasp Factory

The Wasp Factory is deeply interested in its characters’ mental states, especially in how those mental states relate to their behavior. Importantly, the novel is not interested in mental disorders writ large, but rather in the particular subset that manifest in violent and obsessive actions and a callous personality. In particular, the novel engages with questions of evil, especially in relation to childhood, and the nature/nurture-origin debate of psychopathy. Psychopathy is a mental disorder typically identified by a person’s lack of empathy, deficient affect, and inability to regulate behavior. This state makes an act like murder easier for someone like Frank who has no consideration for the suffering his actions might cause victims or their families. Given Frank’s young age and the typical attribution of innocence to childhood, The Wasp Factory challenges expectations and essentially asks, “Can children be evil?”

Through Frank’s narration of his and Eric’s lives growing up, another question develops: “If children can be evil, is that something innate or developed?” Both Frank’s and Eric’s behaviors seemingly have an origin story, suggesting that their psychopathy was nurtured, but Frank’s unreliable narration and the extremity of both brothers’ actions indicate that nature cannot be discounted. 

Angus’s treatment of his sons—particularly Frank—makes it difficult to imagine a scenario where they escaped his influence and retained desirable mental health. Frank’s instability arises, at least in large part, from his father’s manipulations, his mother’s abandonment, and the loss of his brothers, even the one by his own hand. Further, the trauma of a dog attack resulting in genital wounding of any kind cannot be underestimated for its impact on Frank’s sense of bodily integrity. Eric Cauldhame’s mental state is different only in that its origin can be traced more explicitly—to the extent that Frank is ever a reliable narrator—to the incident with the smiling baby in the hospital. Eric was pursuing a career in medicine, which speaks to his ambition and mental strength, which was subsequently fractured at the sight of the infested baby. Frank even argues that Eric’s emotional breakdown might be perfectly reasonable:

Maybe some deep part of him, buried under layers of time and growth like the Roman remains of a modern city, still believed in God, and could not suffer the realization that, if such an unlikely being did exist, it could suffer that to happen to any of the creatures it had supposedly fashioned in its own image (147).

Yet, Frank does not kill Blyth, Esmerelda, and Paul simply due to how he was raised. He was too young at the time of those murders to place that particular blame on his father’s experiment. Further, his extreme and abject behavior—animal cruelty and excessive interest in his own bodily fluids—paired with his methodical dispassion points to something deeper at work than how Frank was nurtured. In many ways, Frank’s use of the Sacrifice Poles, the Skull of Old Saul, the Wasp Factory, and his own bodily fluids seems to come from a survival instinct—he conducts his rituals to protect himself and the island. Indeed, Eric’s behavior and rage seem all the more circumstantial in light of Frank’s personality. In comparison to Frank’s attempts to create a particular kind of reality, Eric appears to have broken with reality all together. While Frank leaves the reader questioning the role of nature and nurture in the development of deviant behavior, Eric’s character privileges the role of random chance in determining why one engages in violence.

Angus Cauldhame is perhaps the most sinister and unknowable of the three, despite the fact that he does not kill anyone during the novel. His quirks are so bizarre that they go beyond eccentricity. Like Eric and Frank, Angus is fixated on bodily fluids, flatulence, and the decay brought on by cancer and parasites. He determined, in large part, the course that Frank’s life would take. He subjected Frank to a sinister facet of the nature versus nurture paradigm. His decision may have nurtured Frank’s worst proclivities, combining them with the worst parts of Angus’s own nature.