Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries

"Markheim" and the Shadow of the Other

“Markheim” and the Shadow of the Other                    At the core of “Markheim” (), a short, but highly concentrated story, is a ruthless and apparently gratuitous crime and its aftermath leading to the murderer’s final confession. Through a web of intertextual references ranging from Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, and Poe, Stevenson explores both the psychology of crime and the ethics of guilt. Skillfully constructed and related with extraordinary dramatic power, this tale that investigates the idea that human freedom is exhibited in an extreme act, a murder, also articulates typical late-Victorian anxieties concerning degeneration, criminality , and post-Darwinian fascination with regression. The almost satanic quality permeating “Markheim”—when Stevenson finished it, he said that “to be clear of ‘Markheim’ is like a ton’s weight off my neck” (Ltrs : )—testifies to Stevenson’s unceasing concern with moral ambiguity and with the strands of violence and irrationality in the human psyche. In its suspense and swiftness of development, “Markheim” resembles the genre of the modern thriller. However, its emphasis on the conflicts in the human will, on the dialectics of pride, and on the problem of evil makes the tale closer to a moral fable. Frightening forces are internalized and thus become part of the inscrutable workings of the human mind. Confronted with the dark forces of his nature, the title character of the story meets a tragic destiny he is powerless to evade. The form adopted seems close to that of Poe’s “The Black Cat,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Imp of the Perverse”: that hybrid of essay and  tale, which foregrounds the “innate and primitive principle of human action” (Poe : ). In Poe’s stories one also finds the crime without a clear motive, the act gratuit. The calm murder and the compulsive confession in “The Imp of the Perverse” is seen by Stevenson, in a perceptive essay, as “an important contribution to morbid psychology” (Stevenson : ). (Poe’s dark protagonist is also found in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment , Gide’s Les caves du vatican, and Camus’s L’étranger.) In “Markheim ” the impulse to kill is a supreme act of hubris and is followed, as in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” by the need for release, by an equally irresistible impulse to confess.1 In Stevenson, however, the emphasis lies more in the dynamics of selfincrimination and on the protagonist’s tortured consciousness than on the motive of perversity. His Presbyterian heritage with its idea of predestination and sense of sharply overdefined opposition between good and evil led him to graft the analysis of the psychology of the killer onto one of his most abiding preoccupations, that of duality. Herdman suggests (: ) that although the ultimate reasons for the “heightened Scottish awareness of duality” of both Hogg and Stevenson “may lie deep in the national psyche and history, a proximate causation in the schematic polarities of Calvinist theology can scarcely be put in doubt.” A further and crucial question arising from his Calvinist background is the possibility of repentance, an idea central to the Christian conception of the working redemption. This exploration of divided consciousness is further developed in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In this later work the personified conscience of “Markheim ” becomes an independent character, whose uncontrollable violence and apelike fury correspond to Lombroso’s characterization of the typical criminal personality (Mighall : ). Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, “Markheim” testifies to Stevenson’s abiding responsiveness to the language of dreams, long before Freud’s epochmaking theory of dreams and the unconscious, that place where the desires that can’t be fulfilled are repressed. Fanny reported that her husband was “deeply impressed by a paper he read in a French scientific journal on sub-consciousness.”2 This article, “combined with the memories of Deacon Brodie” who was publicly a respectable person but privately a thief and rakehell, “gave the germ of the idea that afterwards developed into the play, was used again in the story of “Markheim,” and finally, in a hectic fever following a hemorrhage of the lungs, culminated in the dream of Jekyll and Hyde” (F. Stevenson : ). The tale begins in medias res, close to the climax of the action. The  Evolutionary Psychology, Masculinity, Jekyll and Hyde reader hears a conversation, one that began before his arrival on the scene, between Markheim and his interlocutor. “Yes,” said the dealer, “our windfalls are of various kinds. Some customers are ignorant...