The Wasp Factory

Angus is the father of Frank and Eric. He is a selfish, opportunistic, manipulative man who treats Frank as an experiment after the attack by Old Saul:

When Old Saul savaged me, my father saw it as an ideal opportunity for a little experiment, and a way of lessening—perhaps removing entirely—the influence of the female around him as I grew up. So he started dosing me with male hormones, and has been ever since (181).

Angus is a man who finds the influence of women so repellant and perilous that he takes medical measures to transform the baby assigned female at birth into a child assigned male as a toddler. He does this simply to spare himself proximity to a woman in the house. Angus is calculated and meticulous in his deception, going as far as making fake testicles as evidence of Frank’s castration, in the event that Frank managed to open the study.

Angus is not assertive with the women in his life, leading Frank to believe he is weak and cowardly. He lets Agnes stay in their house for two weeks when she shows up pregnant, three years after abandoning them. He walks with a limp after Agnes runs over him in her car for trying to stop her from leaving. Angus is soft-spoken and frail to the point that, when Frank finds the male hormones, he thinks that Angus must actually be Agnes, which would explain the traits that Frank associates with femininity.

Angus may be educated, but he privileges the appearance of intelligence—even omniscience—over actual accreditations. He even coordinates with the bartender to look more insightful than he is, a petty act of control meant to impress Frank.

Angus fixates on bodily functions such as flatulence and insists on talking with their infrequent guests about cancer and other diseases. He has allegedly written an academic treatise entitled The State of the Fart, which purports to prove his assertion that a person’s flatus can reveal “Whether they are emotionally unstable or upset, whether they are keeping secrets, laughing at you behind your back or trying to ingratiate themselves with you, and even what they are thinking about at the precise moment they issue the fart” (55). Angus is obsessive to the point of writing notes with the measurements of various household objects and puts them around the house. In a cruel joke—that Frank suspects, but which is never verified—Angus names one of his sons Paul, a name that rhymes with Saul, the dog who had recently attacked Frank.

Ultimately, Angus’s primary function in the narrative is to serve as the adult foil to Frank. Specifically, while Frank uses ritual and prognostication to “know” things, his father uses the empirical world. As the keeper of the secret of Frank’s birth, Angus raises the question in readers of whether he shares in the responsibility for Frank’s crimes.

Eric is perhaps the novel’s most tragic character, with the most extreme narrative arc, although he is physically absent for most of the novel. For most of the story, he is the closest thing Frank has to a clear antagonist. The news that Eric has escaped from a psychiatric hospital worries Angus, Diggs, and Frank, although Frank is secretly looking forward to seeing Eric again. Eric is Frank’s older brother but has a different mother. Prior to a traumatic incident at a hospital, Eric is intelligent, ambitious, and, by all accounts, good to his family, including Frank, who adored him.

Eric was also a target of Angus’s experiments, but to a lesser degree than Frank. Whereas Frank is subject to actual medical/biological intervention, Eric is only forced to dress in girls’ clothes and suffer the mental pressure under which Angus puts him. However, Eric escaped the island—and his father’s continued influence—to pursue medical school. He placed himself in a position to save and prolong lives, rather than control and end them.

The pivotal moment of Eric’s life occurs while working in a hospital ward for incapacitated infants. While feeding a smiling baby boy, Eric sees something move beneath the protective steel helmet the baby wears—a protection required because his skull never fully formed. When Eric removes the helmet, he sees that a fly has laid eggs in the boy’s brain and there are maggots in his skull.

Eric deteriorates after this event and is later hospitalized prior to the novel’s beginning. Eric’s escape from the hospital forms a central conflict in the novel. He becomes the isle’s boogeyman, burning dogs and forcing children to eat maggots and worms. Frank speculates, “Maybe he’s not really crazy after all. Perhaps he just got fed up acting normal and decided to act crazy instead, and they locked him up because he went too far” (111). Whereas Frank’s violent behavior is depicted within a debate of nature versus nurture, Eric’s violent behavior is depicted as an extreme, but understandable, response to tragedy.

When Eric and Frank find each other at the end of the novel, Eric sleeps with his head in Frank’s lap. There are no suggestions as to what they might do next, but Eric is capable of being comforted by Frank.