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Chapter 7
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Erasure, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Race and Identity
Familial Obligation vs. Personal Needs
Artistic Integrity vs. Commercial Success
Authenticity
Summary
Analysis
Monk is sitting in the study when he stumbles upon a gray box containing a series of love letters addressed to Monk’s father, starting in 1955, from an English woman named Fiona. The contents of the letters reveal they met in Korea, where Fiona was a nurse. In a letter dated November 12, Fiona reveals that she is pregnant with Monk’s father’s child and that she is moving. She doesn’t provide her new address and tells Monk’s father not to contact her again. She follows this up with a postcard to say that the baby is a girl whom she’s named Gretchen. There’s an unsent, unsigned letter addressed to Gretchen from Monk’s father telling her it was wrong of Fiona to remove him from their lives and that he loves her and wishes he could be a father to her. He tells Gretchen about her half-siblings.
Monk has long idolized his father and derived his own self-worth from this father’s approval. Uncovering this secret about his father’s affair and the child that resulted from it is therefore emotionally and existentially devastating to Monk. It forces Monk to question everything he has believed to be the truth about his father and about his own identity, the sense of self he built around his fierce desire to please his father.
Themes
