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Carrying On Like a Madman
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Melissa J. Ganz, “Carrying On Like a Madman: Insanity and Responsibility in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (pp. 363–397) This essay reads Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) alongside medico-legal debates about the nature and scope of insanity, arguing that the novel seeks to shore up the idea of individual responsibility in Victorian society. The cognitive test of insanity that emerged from the M’Naghten case of 1843 deemed a person legally irresponsible for his acts if, due to a defect of reason resulting from mental disease, he was unable to perceive the nature and quality of his acts or to know that they were wrong. Alienists such as James Cowles Prichard and Henry Maudsley, however, argued that this test failed to acknowledge the existence of affective and volitional disorders such as moral and impulsive insanity. In their treatises, they urged judges to adopt a more permissive standard—an “irresistible impulse” test—that deemed accused criminals “mad” if they could not control their actions, even if they knew what they were doing was wrong. While the novel appears to be sympathetic to the position articulated by Prichard and Maudsley, I argue, it ultimately shows the dangers of broadening the definition of insanity. To recognize the idea of irresistible impulse as the basis of an insanity defense, Stevenson suggests, is to confound the distinctions between freedom and compulsion, deviance and disease. Contesting the use of emotional insanity to acquit educated professionals like Jekyll, Stevenson holds the doctor guilty of murder.
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“Neither the weight of his conscience nor his ''terrors of the scaffold'' (p.65) has any effect on his behavior.”
§ Carrying On Like a Madman: Insanity and Responsibility in Strange Case of > Abstract
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“Over time, however, he loses control of his impulses when he least expects and wishes to do so.”
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“And in the 1870s, he drafted a Homicide Law Amendment Bill and a Criminal Code that incorporated the broader standard.34”
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“Eight years later, in A General View of the Criminal Law of England (1863), however, Stephen acknowledged that defects of will might be relevant to the criterion set out in M'Naghten.33”
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“This verdict, like the earlier one, produced widespread alarm, as the judge's instructions to the jury deviated from the traditional formulation.13”
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- [1]1. Stevenson mentions, in particular, stories such as ''The Tell-Tale Heart'' and ''The Imp of the Perverse,'' which-as John Cleman astutely argues-hold the idea of irresistible impulse up to critique (see Cleman, ''Irresistible Impulses: Edgar Allan Poe and the Insanity Defense,'' American Literature, 63 [1991], 623-40). Stevenson would have encountered the ''right and wrong'' test of insanity during his legal studies, as Scottish courts adopted a cognitive test that was identical to M'Naghten (see John H. A. MacDonald, A Practical Treatise of the Criminal Law of Scotland [Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1867], pp. 14-16). Stevenson had long been attuned to questions of free will and responsibility, as he was raised in a rigidly Calvinist family. During his early child- hood, his father and his nurse, Alison Cunningham, instilled in him a heightened awareness of sin. In his late teens, however, Stevenson rejected his parents' Christian beliefs and, in January 1873, he announced to his father that he was an atheist (see Jenni Calder, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980], pp. 32-34;
- [2]2. William Gray, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Literary Life [New York: Palgrave, 2004], pp. 3-4; and Robert Louis Stevenson, letter to Charles Baxter, 2 February 1873, in Letters, I, 273-74).
- [3]3. On the centrality of the law courts to Victorian fiction and the role of novels as forums for moral and legal judgment, see Jonathan H. Grossman, The Art of Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2002).
- [5]5. In Jekyll and Hyde, Stevenson affirms this approach. Much as Carpenter does, Stevenson presents addiction to vice as a habit that can-and should-be controlled. After Jekyll unexpect- edly wakes up in the body of Hyde, he admits: ''I began to spy a danger that, if this were much prolonged, the balance of my nature might be permanently overthrown, the power of voluntary change [might] be forfeited, and the character of Edward Hyde [might] become irrevocably mine'' (Jekyll and Hyde, p. 62). But, even as he bids ''a resolute farewell to the liberty, the comparative youth, the light step, leaping pulses and secret pleasures, that [he] . . . enjoy[s] in the disguise of Hyde'' (p. 63), he neither gives up his house in Soho nor destroys Hyde's clothes. His vivid description of these pleasures suggests that he is not, in fact, willing to let go of them. As Jekyll explains, using a tellingly passive formulation, ''I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it'' (p. 63). When Jekyll brutally beats Carew to death two months later, he still has 64 On intemperance as a cause of insanity, see Maudsley, Body and Mind, pp. 67-68;
- [6]6. Maudsley, Body and Will, pp. 273-75; and Maudsley, Responsibility, pp. 43, 283-87.
- [7]7. See K.J.M. Smith, Lawyers, Legislators and Theorists: Developments in English Criminal Jurisprudence 1800-1957 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 100-102, 239-45;
- [8]8. and Walker, Crime and Insanity, I, 177-81. The courts did accept the idea that alcohol- ism could give rise to involuntary intoxication, and they permitted evidence of a defen- dant's intoxicated condition to be used to establish other defenses (see Smith, Lawyers, pp. 101-2, 240-41). Today, some states permit evidence of voluntary intoxication to negate the mens rea requirement for ''specific intent'' crimes. But the principle is controversial and some states have begun to narrow or abolish it (see Cases and Materials on Criminal Law, ed.
- [9]9. Joshua Dressler and Stephen P. Garvey, 6th ed. [St. Paul: Thomson Reuters, 2012], pp. 587-89).
- [10]10. On the analogy between insanity and intoxication, see also W. B. Carpenter, ''The Physiology of the Will,'' Contemporary Review, 17 (1871), 215-16.
Cited by
Violating positivist precepts: a Comtean look into The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Esmailzadeh, S., Beyad, M. S., & Salami, A. (2024) · Nineteenth Century Contexts · doi:10.1080/08905495.2024.2336620 · Cited by 2
Tinnin, J. G. (2019) · UKnowledge (University of Kentucky) · doi:10.13023/etd.2019.441 · Cited by 1
Paquin, M. (2019) · Corpus Université Laval (Université Laval)
Krawczyk-Łaskarzewska, A. (2021) · Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego eBooks · doi:10.31338/uw.9788323548737.pp.101-123
Ek, S. (2023) · Diva portal (Dalarna University Library)
Metadata
- Authors
- Ganz, M. J.
- Affiliations
- Marquette University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Ganz, Melissa J.
- ORCID
- Ganz, Melissa J.
- Venue
- Nineteenth-Century Literature
- Publisher
- University of California Press
- Published
- 2015-12-01
- Volume
- 70
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 363-397
- ISSN
- 0891-9356 (ISSN-L)
- 1067-8352
- OpenAlex
- W3123550728
- Cited by
- 3
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2024: 1 · 2021: 1 · 2019: 1
- FWCI
- 0.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Nineteenth-Century Literature (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Decadence, Literature, and Society
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Crime and Detective Fiction Studies
- Keywords
- Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson, insanity, criminal liability, moral insanity, alienism, Henry Maudsley, Victorian psychiatry, medical law
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