Summary Of Lying On Like A Madman

Melissa J. Ganz’s essay, “Carrying On Like a Madman: Insanity and Responsibility,” reads Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde through a new historical lens, looking at the novel alongside medico-legal debates about insanity in Victorian culture, as well as Stevenson’s own career in the law. She argues that while other scholars have examined criminality in the novel, they have ignored the legal questions Jekyll’s “madness” brings up. The M’Naghten case of 1843 deemed a person legally irresponsible for their actions if, because of a mental disease, they were unable to perceive the nature of their acts or know that they were wrong. The idea of insanity sparked debates between jurists and doctors. Early psychiatrists,

For example, physiologist William B. Carpenter suggested that the strength of one’s will depends on the “constancy with which it is exercised” (375). He believed that repeated voluntary behaviors would become habit over time. In other words, a criminal repeatedly giving into their impulses may eventually be unable to stop them, but they would still be responsible for the behavior in the first place. Jurists stressed the importance of self-control, and while self-control can be strengthened or weakened by different circumstances in life, each individual is ultimately responsible for bringing their desires under control. Robert Louis Stevenson, Ganz points out, would have been well aware about the debate between jurists and alienists at the time. He studied law at Edinburgh University in 1871, during which he became very interested in criminal justice. He owned more than twenty-eight volumes of trial reports, as well as several books about criminality. His essays and reviews from the 1870s and 1880s were published in journals that featured articles by Maudsley and Carpenter. Stevenson’s background in law and awareness of the controversy gives basis to Ganz’s argument: Stevenson uses Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to align his views with the jurists and to suggest that broadening the definition of insanity would “confound the distinctions between freedom and compulsion, deviance and disease”