Grave Sites and Moral Death: A Reëxamination of Stevenson's "The Body-Snatcher"

GRAVE SITES AND MORAL DEATH: A REEXAMINATION OF STEVENSON'S »THE BODY-SNATCHER" By Joseph J. Egan (The Graduate School, Slippery Rock State College) In his recent study of Stevenson's fiction Edwin M. Eigner remarks that "The Body-Snatcher" is one of the author's short stories wherein "the supernatural is used purely for sensational effects."1 Although he is correct to a degree in seeing "The Body-Snatcher" as too dependent on the shock value associated with its fantastic elements. Eigner perhaps overstates the case against the story when he warns us not to "confuse this sort of diablerie with ideas belonging to the more serious romance tradition."2 My purpose in this paper will be to examine the possibility that criticism of "The Body-Snatcher" has been unduly condemnatory and to suggest that, in common with more representative Stevenson works, such as "Markheim" and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it does dramatize concepts peculiar-^) the serious romance, a genre which, as Eigner so expertly demonstrates, concerns itself with the mythic presentation ot man's moral-psychological predicament. In "The Body-Snatcher" fiction blends, almost imperceptibly, with the dark reality of the Burke and Hare murders of the late 1820's - "grumbling Irish voices" (VIII, 415)3 were heard in the laboratory the day Jane Galbraith's corpse was delivered there - Stevenson weaving his own tale of terror around macabre details drawn from the legal records of nineteenth-centnry Edinburgh. Indeed, he makes use of the device of a story within a story throughout, and the narrative movement from anonymous first to third person point of view, from present time to past, parallels the increasing depth of the psychological study of Fettes and Macfarlane, the chief actors in this moral drama. From the beginning Fettes had sought to imitate his "clever, dissipated, and unscrupulous" superior, Dr. Wolfe Macfarlane (p. 416), whose first name supplies a vivid character intimation. Seemingly untroubled by the tragedy that has befallen the unfortunates whose murdered bodies are daily committed to his charge and thence to the dissecting table, Fettes appears increasingly perverse once his safety from society's retribution is assured: "Fettes had outlived his terrors and had forgotten his baseness. He began to plume himself upon his courage, and had so arranged the story in his mind that he could look back on these events with an unhealthy pride" (p. 423). Nonetheless, on each occasion of the moral test Fettes wavers in this tacit compliance with evil, his bravado and warped rationalizations revealing a constant need to reassure himself of the "propriety* of his course: "'The great thing is not to be afraid . . . but for all cant, Macfarlane, I was born with a contempt. Hell, God, Devil, right, wrong, sin, crime, and all the old gallery of 10 curiosities - they may frighten boys, but men of the world, like you and me, despise them·" (p. 427). Significantly, on the morning Jane Galbralth's body was brought to the laboratory door, the morning his "policy of silence was put sharply to the test," Fettes "had been awake all night with a racking toothache pacing his room like a caged beast or throwing himself in fury on his bed - and had fallen at last into that profound, uneasy slumber that so often follows on a night of pain" (p. 414). In the context of the spiritual-psychical discovery, Fettes* toothache suggests the "toothache" of the conscience he has endeavored to suppress, the "profound, uneasy slumber" that ensues being symbolic of the "sleep" which has momentarily overcome his accusing self. The belief, buoyantly entertained by Fettes and Macfarlane, that they have succeeded in escaping "Justice" for their crimes, especially the letter's murder of the blackmailer Gray, Is a finely Ironic touch, as Is Fettes· drunken toast, "'Here's to the memory of Gray!*" (p. 427), which wryly foreshadows the grim manifestation of the end; for on the Edinburgh road the pair discover that the thing they removed from the Glencorse cemetery is no longer the corpse of a harmless country wife who had "been known for nothing but good butter and a godly conversation" (p. 425) but "the body of...