'Mad Monkton', Wilkie Collins
May. 7th, 2006 08:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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darkling_talesLJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY hellbound_heart)
Although Wilkie Collins is primarily known as a prolific novel writer, he also delved into short story writing - 'Mad Monkton' is one of the best of these. To me, this story is interesting because of its treatment of the Victorian ideals of manliness, affirmative action, monomania and that old gem 'hereditary insanity'. During the period, it was accepted as a medical fact that madness in a family would descend down through the generations, endangering them and, possibly, ultimately extinguishing them. In fact, Mad Monkton himself bears no small similarity to that other somewhat emasculated man of fiction, Roderick Usher.
We are introduced the Monkton by an outsider to the family - a young man who sets about befriending Alfred Monkton, that 'madman' of the title. Alfred, a bizarrely brilliant young man, is thrown into complete personal disarray by his discovery of an ancient bit of folklore in his family's extensive library. The verse he discovers states that, should a member of the Monkton clan lie unburied somewhere outside of the family vault, so shall the family line become extinct. This plunges Monkton into monomania - moral paralysis due to the unmitigated hold taken upon a person by an idea or set of ideas - and the discovery that his rakehell uncle has been killed in a duel in Italy leads him to abandon himself wholly to searching for the corpse. Monkton knows about his uncle's death, because at the moment it occurred, he began to be plagued by visions of this man in his death agony...
Collins skillfully layers elements of detective fiction with his treatment of the theme of the supernatural - as the two young men look for the unburied body and attempt to release young Monkton from his torpour, we the readers are also led to examine the mental state of the protagonists, for our narrator seems to struggle to evade the permeating influence of Monkton's own aberrant state of mind. The ending of the tale is far from conclusive, and our narrator chooses not to offer a 'diagnosis': thus we are left to fend for ourselves, and wonder whether the outcome of the story is due to a prophecy coming true, or because of a young man's self-fulfilling prophecy of insanity. 'Mad Monkton' is wonderfully evasive.
hellbound_heart)Although Wilkie Collins is primarily known as a prolific novel writer, he also delved into short story writing - 'Mad Monkton' is one of the best of these. To me, this story is interesting because of its treatment of the Victorian ideals of manliness, affirmative action, monomania and that old gem 'hereditary insanity'. During the period, it was accepted as a medical fact that madness in a family would descend down through the generations, endangering them and, possibly, ultimately extinguishing them. In fact, Mad Monkton himself bears no small similarity to that other somewhat emasculated man of fiction, Roderick Usher.
We are introduced the Monkton by an outsider to the family - a young man who sets about befriending Alfred Monkton, that 'madman' of the title. Alfred, a bizarrely brilliant young man, is thrown into complete personal disarray by his discovery of an ancient bit of folklore in his family's extensive library. The verse he discovers states that, should a member of the Monkton clan lie unburied somewhere outside of the family vault, so shall the family line become extinct. This plunges Monkton into monomania - moral paralysis due to the unmitigated hold taken upon a person by an idea or set of ideas - and the discovery that his rakehell uncle has been killed in a duel in Italy leads him to abandon himself wholly to searching for the corpse. Monkton knows about his uncle's death, because at the moment it occurred, he began to be plagued by visions of this man in his death agony...
Collins skillfully layers elements of detective fiction with his treatment of the theme of the supernatural - as the two young men look for the unburied body and attempt to release young Monkton from his torpour, we the readers are also led to examine the mental state of the protagonists, for our narrator seems to struggle to evade the permeating influence of Monkton's own aberrant state of mind. The ending of the tale is far from conclusive, and our narrator chooses not to offer a 'diagnosis': thus we are left to fend for ourselves, and wonder whether the outcome of the story is due to a prophecy coming true, or because of a young man's self-fulfilling prophecy of insanity. 'Mad Monkton' is wonderfully evasive.
