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''See also'' Fictional Portrayals Of Psychopaths In Film Psychopath ic characters in literature are characters whose behavior, belief system, and general demeanor show signs of a fictionalized personality disorder. The fictional disorder has a number of traits, which are not necessarily as common among clinically diagnosed psychopaths or those in wards for the criminally insane. As a result, critical thinking and discretion is required for exploring and interpreting the writer's purpose in offering a simplified or ambiguous portrayal of psychopathy within a literary fiction. Personality traits that are typically identified with psychopathic characters in literature (and in other media) include:
Liiterary horror, abjection, and the "invention" of the fictional psychopath According to Julia Kristeva , one of the "powers of horror" is the freedom to explore an abject humanity that appears completely Other . In her book, ''The Powers of Horror - An Essay on Abjection'', Kristeva describes Abjection as "immoral, sinister, scheming and shady, a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles...the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes its subject...the criminal with a good conscience, the killer who claims he is a savior" Kristeva,j "Powers of Horror - An essay on abjection", translated by L. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982, pp 4-5. These fictional characters display more than mere madness or malevolence, and today they might be described as " Psychopathic Personalities ", using a contemporary diagnostic Category . Fictional psychopathic characters first appeared in European literature in the Fourteenth Century as a negative example (or perversion) of Renaissance Humanism . This was a European Worldview which sought to break with the traditions of the Middle Ages by giving priority to individual human dignity, experience, and creative potential. Even the characterization of certain historical persons in antiquity as "psychopaths" — for example, the five "mad emperors" of , Nero , Domitian , Commodus , and Elagabalus — is in fact a retroactive speculation premised on a decidedly modern view of human nature and individual psychology. This modern view did not start to develop until the Late Middle Ages , reaching full fruition in the Enlightenment and Romantic Movement of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries . Our contemporary understanding of the psychopathic personality (in both life and fiction) has also been richly informed by the trend toward Existentialism in European Philosophy and the Human Sciences from the nineteenth century into the first half of the Twentieth — specifically, the examination of the moral and psychological vicissitudes of individual human experience within an environment that is perceived as utterly threatening and hostile or absurd and unfathomable. Ancient Persian literature In the collection of stories called '' The Book Of One Thousand And One Nights '', King Shahryar discovers his wife's infidelity and has her executed, without conscience or recognizing any defect in his own psyche, declaring all women to be unfaithful. He marries a succession of virgins only to have Scheherazade's father, the Vizier , execute each one the next morning until finally he comes to Scheherazade herself, after three years of ordering the death of his brides after each wedding night. Scheherazade survives because she tells the king a story on each of the 1001 nights, which end in a Cliffhanger at dawn. Shahryar's brother had earlier discovered his own first wife in bed with a cook and he butchers them both and then continued a pattern of marriage and murder like Shahryar. The stories in ''The Book of One Thousand and One Nights'' likely began in the oral tradition before the Fifth Century AD . Though Shahrya was not then a stock psychopathic character the Book and its many characters, has had wide influence on writers, not only in the sex and serial murder genre. Edgar Allan Poe , for example wrote "A Thousand and Second Night", where in the story of Sinbad, Poe's king kills Scheherazade in disgust at the story she tells him. Late Medieval and Early Renaissance literature Chaucer's Pardoner in ''The Canterbury Tales'' Perhaps the earliest example of a psychopathic character in English literature is the remorselessly deceitful, parasitic, venal Pardoner from Chaucer 's '' The Canterbury Tales '', written during the last two decades of the fourteenth century: as a Canterbury pilgrim from the Ellesmere manuscript DB.]] :''What, do you suppose, that while I can preach, :''And win gold and silver because I teach, :''That I will live in poverty voluntarily? :''Nay, nay, I never thought it, truly! :''For I will preach and beg in various lands; :''I will not do any labor with my hands, :''Nor make baskets and live thereby, :''Because I will not beg idly. :''I will imitate none of the apostles; :''I will have money, wool, cheese, and wheat, :''Although it were given by the poorest servant boy, :''Or by the poorest widow in a village, :''Even though her children should die of hunger. :''Nay, I will drink liquor of the vine :''And have a pretty wench in every town. :''But listen, gentlemen, in conclusion: :''Your desire is that I shall tell a tale. :''Now I have drunk a draft of strong ale, :''By God, I hope I shall tell you a thing :''That shall, for good reason, be to your liking. :''For though myself be a very vicious man, :''Yet I can tell you a moral tale, :''Which I am accustomed to preach in order to profit. Now hold your peace! My tale I will begin. (lines 439-462 from "The Prologue to the Pardoner's Tale", modern verse translation from ''The Riverside Chaucer'', edited by Larry D. Benson) A likely precursor to Chaucer's Pardoner is a character called "False-Seeming", a hypocrite described in the Thirteenth-century French Chivalric Romance , '' Le Roman De La Rose '', a poem which Chaucer himself had translated into English as '' The Romaunt Of The Rose ''. To a lesser extent, the Pardoner's assistant — a brutish and morally bankrupt Blackmail er called the Summoner — might also qualify as a kind of early fictional psychopath, albeit one lacking the Pardoner's keen intelligence and unerring powers of perception and deception. As the Pardoner's rather less clever enabler and right-hand man, the Summoner bears a similar relationship to the Pardoner as the fatally misguided Guido Da Montefeltro does to the consummately wicked Pope Boniface VIII in Dante 's '' Inferno ''. Historical and mythic malefactors in Dante's ''Inferno'' Chaucer probably conceived his supreme villain — who is given the bitterly ironic appellation, "the gentle Pardoner" — as his own composite version of the treacherous civic and ecclesiastic malefactors, who surely existed in the Late Middle Ages and even earlier, and were first identified and fashioned into literary characters by Dante in the ''Inferno'' (c. 1308-1321). Such malefactors include Ciampolo , Pope Nicholas III , and Guido da Montefeltro, all of whom Dante describes as being condemned to the Malebolge , the ditches of the fraudulent in the Eighth Circle of Hell . climbs the flinty steps in ''bolgia'' seven in the Eighth Circle of Hell, '' Inferno '', Canto XXVI. Illustration by Gustave Doré ( 1857 ).]] However, unlike the damned spirits in Dante's poem, who have reached their eternal stasis in Hell, Chaucer's Pardoner and Summoner are still mutable personalities residing in the mortal realm — i.e., they are both still very much alive and in business. In this sense, the Pardoner and the Summoner resemble Dante's most hated enemy, Pope Boniface VIII, who is likewise still alive and still occupying the episcopal seat of St. Peter as of Good Friday , 1300 — the date that the first Cantica of the poem takes place. But according to Dante the poet, Boniface — who will eventually die in 1303 — does indeed have an appropriate spot reserved for him in the Malebolge, right next to Nicholas III; and Dante the pilgrim takes a measure of consolation, as well as a certain vengeful satisfaction, in the living pope's prophesied damnation. Chaucer differs from Dante in that the former does not, either as the fictional Canterbury pilgrim or as authorial poet, openly condemn the Pardoner. Indeed, Chaucer the pilgrim seems to reserve a faint admiration for the Pardoner's wit and cleverness, which Chaucer the poet has, of course, created — hence, Chaucer pays himself a compliment within his own text. On the other hand, Dante, both the supernatural pilgrim ''and'' the Florentine poet of the eternal, most certainly condemns his very personal enemies — whether they are already receiving their just reward in Hell, or are still alive on Earth and yet to arrive in Hell — with an unequivocal and unsparing vehemence. Dante had previously reserved his praise — i.e., his compliments to his own powers of poetic invention — for the redemptive figure of Beatrice , who will take over from Virgil as the pilgrim's guide toward the end of the second catica, '' Purgatorio '', and into the third, '' Paradiso ''. Interestingly enough, the only damned spirit in the lower reaches of hell whom Dante the pilgrim professes a certain fascination with, and a kind of abiding admiration for, is Ulysses, who is encountered in the seventh ''bolgia'' of the Eighth Circle, in Canto XXVI of the ''Inferno''. Dante's Ulysses is a crosser of boundaries, a hero who boldly ventures into realms of the unknown, much like Dante himself. Nevertheless, the wanderer from Ithaca is ostensibly condemned, according to the account of him provided by Virgil in '' The Aeneid '' — i.e., Ulysses is portrayed as a fraudulent counsellor for stealing the sacred Palladium from Troy (with the help of Diomedes , who is also condemned to burn within a single tongue of flame alongside Ulysses), and then devising the stratagem of the Trojan Horse to invade and sack the city, which has been rendered vulnerable to attack without the talismanic protection of the image of Pallas . Dante defers to Virgil's judgment on Ulysses, originally the Homeric Odysseus, while making an exception for himself — Dante the pilgrim is a kind of Ulysses (and a kind of Aeneas ) who passes through Hell unscathed, and who will scale the mountainous Ziggurat of Purgatory to reach the terrestrial and celestial realms of Paradise , with both poetic and divine sanction. Dante also differs from Ulysses in that the only stratagems required of the Florentine are those of his own poetic imagination — which absorb and transcend those of his great predecessor and initial guide, Virgil. Thus, questing classical heroism gives way to the questing, heroic Renaissance imagination. All of the supernatural encounters described in all three cantiche of Dante's '' Divine Comedy '' are a poetic commentary on history, classical mythology, and Biblical scripture, which chart and dramatize the decline of the traditional ideals of classical heroism and medieval Chivalry , and the rise of Renaissance Humanism , by the turn of the fourteenth century. As the supreme and most influential literary work of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, ''The Divine Comedy'' — particularly ''Inferno'' — serves as a necessary prelude to, and template for, the invention of the fictional psychopath that effectively occurs with Chaucer's ''Canterbury Tales'' at the end of the fourteenth century. The notion of the fictional psychopath (or malefactor, villain, Machiavel , Nihilist ) as a kind of negative or inverted Humanist or " Renaissance Man " — i.e., one whose personality and identity is "self-invented" through his own will to act and learn and create (or destroy) — seems to originate with Dante, and carries through to Chaucer and Marlowe and Shakespeare and beyond. Elizabethan-Jacobean drama edition of Shakespeare 's '' Titus Andronicus '' ( 1594 ).]] Marlovian tragedy In Christopher Marlowe 's '' Tamburlaine The Great, Parts I And II '' (c. 1587), the merciless, power-hungry tyrant of the play's title — who arrogates to himself the appellation "the Scourge of God" — demonstrates vicious, bloodthirsty traits that we would well identify with a psychopathic personality. However, Marlowe's most notable creation — and possibly the first significant, and fairly unambiguous, full-fledged fictional psychopath in English drama — is Barabas in '' The Jew Of Malta '' (c. 1589). In the play, the villain Barabas is presented as a rather curious combination of the "morbid" and the "comedic" psychopath (see " Fictional Portrayals Of Psychopaths In Film " for definitions of these types). Barabas also presents as a kind of psychopath whose personality style is quite susceptible to the influence of external pressures and circumstances. Shakespearean tragedy Literary critic Harold Bloom has argued that Marlowe's Barabas had served as the prototype for Shakespeare 's early villains like Richard, Duke Of Gloucester (later King Of England) in '' Richard III '' (c. 1591) and Aaron the Moor in '' Titus Andronicus '' (c. 1594), both of whom are indubitably psychopathic characters. Bloom goes on to suggest that Shakespeare eventually overcame this Marlovian influence with the morally ambiguous character of Shylock — the vengeful Jewish moneylender who, in the end, undergoes a forced conversion — in '' The Merchant Of Venice '' (c. 1596-1598). Bloom, Harold. ''The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages''. Riverhead Books, 1994. p. 48 After this point, thr great villains of the high tragedies, like Iago in '' Othello '' (c. 1603) and Edmund in '' King Lear '' (c. 1603-1606), are wholly original "Shakespearean" creations in the truest and strongest sense. The destruction that these characters inflict on those around them is vast and profound. Their mysterious motivations manifest an intellectualized and self-dramatizing moral corruption that is practiced with shrewdly considered subtlety and calculation, uncanny psychological acuity, and a fanatic single-mindedness of purpose. The "honest Iago" is a frustrated, hotheaded schemer driven by the very same suspicion and jealousy with which he infects and inflames his master, Othello. On the other hand, Edmund — the bastard son of Gloucester and younger brother of Edgar — is pragmatic and emotionally frigid; he is an amoral intellectual devoid of all feeling or compassion. Edmund's corrupt rationality freezes all scruple and pity within himself and Lear's two eldest sisters, the treacherous Goneril and Regan . Indeed, Bloom sees Shakespeare's two supreme "Machiavels", Iago and Edmund, along with Chaucer's wicked Pardoner, as prefigurations of corrupt, exploitative ''. The Jacobean revenge tragedy In the Jacobean Revenge Tragedies of the early Seventeeth Century , there appear a number of misanthropic and psychopathic characters. One prime example is the Duke in John Webster 's '' The Duchess Of Malfi '' (1614), who devolves into Lycanthropy . Vindice in '' The Revenger's Tragedy '' (1606) — a play variously attributed to either Cyril Tourneur or Thomas Middleton — also stands as another formidable fictional psychopath of Jacobean drama. European fairy tales Children's Fairy Tale s — some of which date as far back as the High and Late Middle Ages in Europe — also feature psychopathic characters, such as the eponymous villain of Charles Perrault 's " Bluebeard " (inspired by the notorious 15th century child murderer Gilles De Rais and published in 1697) and the wicked, Infanticidal stepmother in the Grimm Brothers ' " Hansel And Gretel ". The legend of Don Juan and the early libertine psychopath One of the earliest types of "psychopathic" characters in literature is the debauched libertine — a character who lives only for his own personal sensory gratification and material wealth at the expense of all other values. This fictional type starts to gain prominence in the literature of the early Seventeenth Century . Tirso de Molina's ''El Burlador de Sevilla'' In the Golden Age ("Siglo De Oro") of Spanish Literature , the figure of Don Juan is introduced. Tirso De Molina 's Morality Play , '' El Burlador De Sevilla '' (c. 1630), first depicts the character as a morally and socially abject, conscienceless debauchee and sexual predator. Molina's play is set in the fourteenth century and its Protagonist , the titular El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra — a.k.a., Don Juan — may have been modeled on characters in the earlier Golden Age plays, such as Leucino in Juan De La Cueva 's ''Infamador'' (1581) and Leonido in Lope De Vega 's ''Fianza Satisfecha'' (1612). Molina's original Don Juan has more in common with our contemporary understanding of the fictional psychopath, as the character is guiltless, loveless, impulsive, and altogether lacking insight and judgment into his own actions and those of others. At the end of ''El Burlador de Sevilla'', Don Juan is dragged down into Hell by the ghost of the father of his first conquest (whom he had killed), while maintaining a consistent lack of remorse or regret for his wrong doing. Indeed, so self-absorbed that he was proud of the perverse depravity that marked his life. Over time, via the subsequent works of Molière and Mozart , the legendary figure of Don Juan gradually lost his abject — or "psychopathic" like — qualities and became the archetype of a charming and manipulative womanizer. As a seductive and heroic transgressor who craves worldly experience and ultimately meets with his damnation, Don Juan has come to resemble Dante's Ulysses. In some later versions of the story — like Molière's (from 1665) — Don Juan repents. The real-life exploits and writings of eighteenth-century figures like Giacomo Casanova and the Marquis De Sade can be seen as a revival of the Don Juan myth. In particular, Sade's writings seem to explode the Don Juan archetype and alter it beyond regonition by endowing it with extravagantly perverse psychopathic traits and behaviors. Ximen Qing in ''Jin Ping Mei'' In the seventeenth-century Chinese epic, '' Jin Ping Mei '' (literally "The Plum in the Golden Vase", also translated as ''The Golden Lotus'') — a semi-pornographic saga of human corruption, detailing the rise and fall of the Ximen household — the central character of Ximen Qing also presents as a kind of psychopathic libertine. The original Chinese text of ''Jin Ping Mei'' was first printed in the early seventeenth century and existed in hand written scrolls during the late Ming Dynasty . In the story, Ximen Qing is a corrupt drug store/pharmacy owner and a debauched social climber. One day, as Pan Jinlian attempts to shut the windows on her home's second floor using a bamboo rod, the rod slips and falls into the street hitting Qing. When Qing looks up and realizes that Jinlian is in fact a pretty woman, his anger quickly turned to lust. He goes into the teahouse next door and bribes the owner to arrange a meeting with Jinlian and later seduces her. Some time later, as Qing and Jinlian are in the heat of their affair and are about to be discovered by her husband, Wu Dalang , Qing attempts to kill him. But the husband survives and is bedridden as a result of his injuries. Qing then provides Jinlian with a dose of arsenic from his pharmacopea in order to finally murder Wu Dalang. Jianlin administers the poison but ends up having to suffocate her husband in order to ensure his end. Upon the husband's death Qing marries Jinlian, and thus begins his ill-starred rise and fall. The Libertine novel The Libertine Novel was especially known for emphasis on human vices, debaucheries, and anti-social behavior. This scandalous literary genre first appeared shortly after the English Restoration in 1660 and existed until the time of the French Revolution . The authors of libertine novels typically sought to expose the alleged moral hypocrisy, sexual corruption, and material decadence of the Feudal Nobility and Clergy . by Charles-Amédée-Philippe Van Loo (c. 1761).]] In the quintessential French libertine novel of the Eighteenth Century , the Epistolary '' Les Liaisons Dangereuses '' (1782) by Pierre Choderlos De Laclos , the dominating figure of the Marquise de Merteuil, the cold-blooded aristocratic manipulatrix, presents as a female psychopath. The Marquis de Sade In the works of the Marquis De Sade , most if not ''all'' of the major villains featured are perverse criminal psychopaths on a truly monumental scale. These include the Duc de Blangis, the Bishop, the Président de Curval, and Durcet in '' The 120 Days Of Sodom '' (1785); Dolmancé, Madame de Saint-Ange, and Le Chevalier in '' Philosophy In The Bedroom '' (1795); and Clairwil, Noirceuil, and Saint-Fond in '' L'Histoire De Juliette '' (1797-1801). Sade's novels and stories ostensibly Satirize (and also subvert and hyperbolize) the genre conventions of the eighteenth-century Picaresque novels and '' Bildungsroman s'' of Voltaire , Diderot , Rousseau , Richardson , and Fielding , as well as harking back to the Grotesque and Scatological satire of earlier writers like the fourteenth-century Chaucer and Boccaccio and the fifteenth-century Rabelais . In addition to social and literary satire, Sade exploits the generic trappings of the libertine novel for explicitly Pornographic purposes. He also manipulates these received literary forms as a guise from which he may expound his own Atheist ic, Materialist Cosmology — largely derived from David Hume , Baron D'Holbach , and the " Natural Philosophy " of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sade's writings also venture to proffer and illustrate an unfathomably brutish and Nihilistic Moral and Civic Philosophy purely for its own sake (although some have suggested that this aspect of his work is merely a trenchant satire of the purported high ideals and extreme measures of the current French revolutionaries, particularly those of the radical '' Sans-culottes '' as well as the Jacobin s during the Reign Of Terror ). '' (c. 1800).]] Sadean philosophy — and the sexualized bloodshed and perversion it seeks to sanctify — is partly drawn from the bleaker, more extreme implications of Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes . Even more tendentiously, Sade also attempts to demonstrate how his code of sexual barbarism and murder mingles with, and inflects, his pitiless, atheistic materialist worldview — one that sees live human bodies as yet more raw matter to be abused and immolated and then finally consigned to, and devoured by, nature's insatiable compost heap. Among other things, Sade's libertines argue for the universality of their prescriptive savagery on the basis of the Anthropological record of Human and Animal Sacrifice , legalized State Execution and Torture , ritual punishments and Mutilation s owing to social, religious, and sexual Taboo s, along with countless other similarly sanctified brutalities that — at one time or another, in one form or another — have been practiced in every culture the world over. Largely mythologized (and for the most part, culturally unsanctioned) atrocities and Paraphilia s that are generally regarded, even in the most primitive and savage societies, as Morbid , Bestial , and/or otherwise Subhuman — deviant practices like Cannibalism , Hematophagy , Coprophagy , and Necrophilia — are venerated and performed with imaginative zest by the Pansexual , Polymorphous Perverse Sadean libertine. Given his Jesuit education, it is perhaps not surprising that Sade's fictions are saturated in a particularly fanatical and virulent Anti-clericism characterized by mock-Jesuitical criminal Catechism s and Ratiocinative discourses, as well as extravagantly obscene Parodies and Desecration s of church Sacrament s, Ritual s, and Iconography . While Sade's insistence on locating all of these debauched goings-on in claustrophobic chateaux, dungeons, and impenetrable forests is undoubtedly attributable to the long-term psychological pressures and effects sustained from his 27-year imprisonment, the literary results offer some notable parallels with the contemporaneous Gothic Movement In Fiction , exemplified by the novels of Ann Radcliffe . Nearly all of Sade's Gothic scenarios feature an encounter of some kind between the willful, perverse libertines and their unfortunate victims. The former become bound to the latter in a dynamic of sensual and suprasensual gratification (what Lacan was to later call '' Jouissance '') based on a calculated refinement and spectacularization of depravity, an anarchistic enjoyment of profanation and debasement (even a debasement of oneself), and a furious exhilaration derived from the deliberate corruption of virtue and the ritual destruction of innocents. In short, Sade's scandalous legacy constitutes the most extensive catalogue of psychopathological impulses, perversions, and paraphilias in world literature; but whether the author was himself a psychopath — or merely a Narcissistic Paraphilia c with a fevered imagination — is very much open to question. Sade's influence on Surrealism in the twentieth century Sade's influence can be most keenly perceived and felt in the works of the Surrealist s of the 1920s and '30s, which — post- Freud and post- Marx — sought to liberate and give expression to the mysterious and aggressive drives lurking within the unconscious mind. Surrealist artists and scenarists like Man Ray , Salvador Dalí , and Luis Buñuel had all made use of ideas, themes, and scenarios based on Sade's writings. In the fictive realm of art, they attempted to emulate Sade — as well as other, later ''écrivains maudits'' of the nineteenth century like Lautréamont and Rimbaud — by giving free rein of expression to all manner of psychopathological impulses and wanton paraphilias, including rape, murder, sodomy, Coprophilia , and religious blasphemy. Buñuel was arguably the most pessimistic and nihilistic (as well as the most vociferously anti-clerical) of Sade's Surrealist legatees, as he did not see the liberation of the unconscious mind and its repressed impulses as a guaranteed route to human freedom and (perceived) utopian happiness — or even a satisfactory deliverance or diversion from the banal frustrations of Bourgeois life. This negative position stood in stark contrast to the more hopeful attitudes taken by the progressive-minded followers of the French poet and principal theoretician of the Surrealist movement, André Breton . Victorian literature and lore 's '' The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde '' (1886).]] Charles Dickens Psychopathic characters in Victorian Fiction include Bill Sykes in Charles Dickens ' '' Oliver Twist '' (1838) and Monseigneur Marquis St. Evrémonde in '' A Tale Of Two Cities '' (1859). Uriah Heep in '' David Copperfield '' (1850) is another Dickens character who presents some psychopathic traits, such as extreme selfishness, manipulative insincerity and a notable absence of remorse for his Antisocial behavior. Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" The main character of Robert Browning 's poem, " My Last Duchess " (1842) — perhaps the most famous of all Victorian dramatic monologes — is a fictional psychopath ''par excellence''. Indeed, Browning's duke is probably the most formidable psychopathic character in English poetry since Shakespeare's Iago and Edmund. Browning's duke is a villain who has murdered his wife and is planning on taking another. In the context of the poem, the duke is speaking casually to a messenger, discussing arrangements for a wedding to his new bride (a "new" duchess), whilst hinting at — with grim irony and chilling narcissistic relish — the demise of his previous wife (his "last duchess"). The duke's acute lack of remorse, his superficial charm and narcissistic shamelessness are all classic traits of a psychopathic personality. However, his calm and controlling style, as well as the culture and sophistication that goes with his aristocratic breeding, are qualities more common to the later "smooth" Hollywood psychopath. The tale recounted by Browning's murderous duke — and the type of scheming, predatory, coldblooded character presented in the telling — recalls the legendary Uxoricide s ordered by such historical figures as Nero and Henry VIII , as well as the story of " Bluebeard ". Algernon Charles Swinburne's "Anactoria" Alegernon Charles Swinburne 's Dramatic Monologue , " Anactoria " (1866) characterizes the speaker — the Seventh-century BCE Aeolic Greek Poetess Sappho — as a kind of Lesbian Vampire who entertains sadistic fantasies of Cannibalizing her lover, Anactoria, while immortalizing her death in poetry. "Anactoria", which is clearly influenced by the writings of Sade (particularly ''L'Histoire de Juliette'') and Baudelaire (the poem "Femmes damnées"), also has the distinction of being the only dramatic monologue in Victorian poetry which assumes the voice of a woman. Robert Louis Stevenson's ''The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde'' Edward Hyde, the monstrous alter ego of the gentle, respectable Dr. Henry Jekyll, in Robert Louis Stevenson 's story, '' The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde '' (1886), is yet another prime example of a psychopathic character in Victorian fiction. Stevenson's cautionary medical fable about the perils of isolating and unleashing the proverbial forces of good and evil — or order and chaos, passivity and aggression — within the individual personality seems to anticipate Freud 's theories about the unconscious battle that goes on between the Superego and the Id . Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the legend of Sweeney Todd It has been suggested that 's Sherlock Holmes stories (56 of them in all, written from the 1880s to the 1920s), the master criminal Professor Moriarty , called "the Napoleon of crime" — a character believed to have been based on legendary London criminals like Jonathan Wild and Adam Worth — is a precursor to the contemporary psychopath as Supervillain . The nineteenth-century legend of Sweeney Todd , a fictional London barber in Fleet Street who murders unsuspecting victims with a straight razor — later made famous in a 1979 musical by Stephen Sondheim — similarly anticipates the modern criminal psychopath. Nineteenth-century American literature Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" In Nineteenth-century American Literature , the remorseless, calculating Italian aristocrat Montresor in Edgar Allan Poe 's story, " The Cask Of Amontillado " (1846), thinks and behaves very much like a psychopathic personality. Montresor's aristocratic pride and bearing, as well as his concern for preserving and vindicating his reputation, are reminiscent of the duke in Browning's poem, "My Last Duchess". Herman Melville's ''Billy Budd'' Another example of a possible psychopathic character occurs in Herman Melville 's Novella , '' Billy Budd '' (1886), the envious, vengeful Master-at-Arms of the HMS ''Bellipotent'', John Claggart, is described by the author as being possessed by "a depravity according to nature". Claggart's neurotic hatred and fear of the enigmatic Billy Budd invites comparison with Iago's irrational motivation to arouse Othello's jealousy in order to destroy him. In this manner, Claggart presents some of the antisocial personality traits common to psychopaths. Existentialist and social realist fiction |
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