Compulsive Acts: A Psychiatrist's Tales of Ritual and Obsession

A Greek Tragedy

“Did Jane Austen turn me on to kleptomania or did kleptomania turn me on to Jane Austen? It’s a fascinating question to ponder.” With these words, Hannah, my new forty-eight-year-old patient, a comparative literature professor and Jane Austen expert, tried to recall for me the origins of her urge to steal. “I was a senior in college writing my thesis on how Jane Austen transcended the boring details of her day-to-day life to write brilliant works of literature ,” she added. “I was looking in her biography for something surprising, maybe a little dark, that might have inspired her, but all I could find was story after story of Jane Austen as the dutiful sister tending her invalid brother or Jane Austen as the doting aunt—Jane Austen as the quintessential old maid, basically. And then, when I was about to give up on finding anything truly interesting , I came across court records about charges repeatedly brought against her aunt, Jane Leigh-Perrot, for multiple thefts. Well, my imagination ran with that! I started thinking how even the most serene and imperturbable of surfaces—like the social A Greek Tragedy 77 order she described so beautifully in her novels—can have undercurrents of sin and transgression running below their shallow waters. I imagined what Jane Austen might have written about her aunt the thief had she been able to publicly address this family secret. And given that she did not really write about it, I wondered how it might have indirectly informed her writing and whether the shame somehow found sublimation in beautiful prose . . . “As I said, I don’t recall which came first, and I certainly cannot blame my stealing on Jane Austen, but around the time I started researching the kind of lace Jane Leigh-Perrot was given to stealing, I, Hannah P. Wells, started stealing, too.” ⡥⡺⡥ “Who the hell is Jane Austen?” asked Tenisha. I had just recounted the story of Jane Austen’s aunt in an attempt to soothe her feelings of guilt and isolation, but it didn’t seem to be having the desired effect. She had been court-ordered to see me in lieu of going to jail after giving powerful testimony in court that could serve as a definition of kleptomania, although Tenisha had never heard the term before. At our first meeting, she recounted for me her experience with stealing, as she had done with the judge who sent her to my clinic. “Yes,” she said, “we live in Section 8 housing, and, yes, I’m a single black mother with a boy who has sickle cell, and, yes, we live under a lot of stress. But the things I steal I don’t even want! My last arrest was for taking a pacifier, for God’s sake. A pacifier! Now you tell me—what need do I have for a pacifier when my boy is five? And why not buy it if I had to have it? We may live welfare check to welfare check, but I can always afford to buy a stupid 78 / A Greek Tragedy pacifier or whatever other small things I usually steal! Listen, I grew up in the ’hood. I married a criminal. I’ve seen plenty of men in my day go in and out of jail for theft and other crimes, and I can tell you that my problem is different. I’m not saying I don’t have one—God knows I do! What I am saying is that I’m not a thief, or I’m a different kind of thief, and that I don’t belong in jail with my ex-husband and his friends.” “I agree with you, Tenisha,” I said. “Your stealing is different, and you don’t belong in jail. I know you didn’t come here willingly , but that’s because you didn’t think that anyone else had this problem or that it could be treated. Well, this problem is a psychiatric disorder. It’s more common than you think, and it has a name: kleptomania.” ⡥⡺⡥ Since its introduction into the medical vocabulary in 1838, kleptomania has been the subject of intense controversy. The debate has focused on whether kleptomania constitutes a legitimate mental disorder to be diagnosed and treated by mental health professionals, or a form of willful deviance that is more akin...