The Wasp Factory

Frank describes women as one of his two greatest enemies. He hates women “because they are weak and stupid and live in the shadow of men and are nothing compared to them” (43). Frank disdains women because they symbolize a lack of strength and power. For Frank, strength and power are equated with masculinity and killing is the ultimate expression of masculinity. Women symbolize loss for Frank as he is abandoned by his mother and he assumes his groin injury from Old Saul’s attack is a castration. In line with traditional psychoanalysis, all women represent castration for all men because they lack a penis. What he believes was his castration made him less of a man—the harder sex, as he calls them.

Ultimately, women and all Frank deems feminine become a sign of disgust. He describes Eric as being “the victim of a self with just a little too much woman in it. That sensitivity, that desire not to hurt people, that delicate, mindful brilliance—these things were his partly because he thought too much like a woman” (148). Such is also the thinking of Frank’s father who uses the dog attack of Frank’s groin to conduct an experiment. Angus holds women in such disdain that he tries to raise Frances as a boy, just to spare himself the annoyance of having a woman in his home.

Old Saul is the dog that attacked Frank as a child. Frank’s father strangles the dog and buries it, but Frank finds its skull and installs it on the altar in the Bunker. He then uses the skull as a conduit for visions and warnings. The skull is a symbol of Frank’s loss, but it also represents his distorted worldview and the peculiarity of the system he has created for himself. Frank also describes the acquisition of the skull as causing the dog yet another death, as well as holding it captive as a tool to serve him. In this instance, the skull is another symbol of Frank’s willingness or need for revenge on those who have wronged him.