A View from the Bridge is set among the Italian-American longshoremen of Red Hook, Brooklyn, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, and is framed by the commentary of Alfieri, a neighbourhood lawyer who acts as a chorus and who knows from the start that the story will end in blood. Eddie Carbone, a hard-working dock labourer, lives with his wife Beatrice and her orphaned niece Catherine, whom they have raised.
Medical tag
Obsession Monomania
Fixed ideas, compulsive pursuit, 19th-century 'monomania'.
Works
Locke says in the Epistle to the Reader that the Essay began when five or six friends meeting in his rooms found themselves at a standstill over questions of morality and revealed religion, and he proposed that they first examine what objects human understanding is fitted to deal with. Nearly twenty years later the result was a long, patient survey of where ideas come from, how they combine, how words signify them and how far knowledge and probable belief can reach.
Characters is a collection of brief sketches of recognizable social types: the dissembler, flatterer, chatterer, boor, complaisant man, reckless man, tactless man, mean man, show-off, coward, oligarchic sympathizer, late learner, slanderer and many others. Each sketch begins with a definition and then offers small scenes in which the type reveals himself through repeated behavior.
Chess (Schachnovelle, also translated as The Royal Game or Chess Story) is narrated by a passenger on a liner sailing from New York to Buenos Aires shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. Aboard is the world chess champion Mirko Czentovic, a stolid, almost illiterate son of a poor Danube boatman who was raised by a village priest, revealed an uncanny talent for chess, and now plays mechanically and greedily for money, showing no curiosity about anything else.
Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel parodying the overwrought rural fiction of the early twentieth century, the 'loam and lovechild' school associated with writers such as Mary Webb and D. H.
Crime and Punishment follows Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished former student in St. Petersburg, as he murders the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna and her sister Lizaveta while testing an idea about extraordinary persons who may step over ordinary law.
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha was published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. An impoverished hidalgo of about fifty, Alonso Quixano, reads chivalric romances until, from too little sleep and too much reading, his brain dries up and he loses his wits.
Dracula is told through journals, letters, phonograph diaries, telegrams and newspaper cuttings assembled by its characters. Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travels to Transylvania to arrange the purchase of a London property, Carfax, for Count Dracula.
Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order is set out like Euclid: definitions, axioms, numbered propositions, proofs, corollaries and the discursive notes (scholia) where Spinoza speaks most freely. Its five parts lead from God to human blessedness.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a frame narrative told through the letters of Robert Walton, an English explorer whose ship is trapped in Arctic ice. Walton rescues a dying stranger, Victor Frankenstein, who has been pursuing a gigantic figure across the frozen sea, and who tells his story as a warning to a man whose ambition resembles his own.
Humboldt's Gift is narrated by Charlie Citrine, a successful middle-aged Chicago writer who has won a Pulitzer Prize and made a fortune from a Broadway hit about the eighteenth-century adventurer Baron von Trenck, which was also made into a film. Now in his fifties, Charlie is distracted, spiritually restless and steadily losing his money.
Napoleon dictated or wrote tens of thousands of letters, often several dozen a day, to generals, ministers, prefects, bishops, kings, his family and the women he loved. Napoleon III's government published a thirty-two-volume Correspondance de Napoléon Ier between 1858 and 1870, pruning letters that embarrassed the dynasty; the Fondation Napoléon's complete edition, begun in 2004, runs to more than forty thousand items.
Macbeth opens on a Scottish heath where three witches plan to meet Macbeth. Returning from victory over rebels and Norwegian invaders, Macbeth and his fellow general Banquo meet the witches, who hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and future king, and tell Banquo that his descendants will be kings.
Esquirol expands Pinelian alienism into a more elaborate clinical and institutional system. Mental Maladies surveys insanity as a family of disorders marked by disturbances of perception, judgment, passion, volition, and bodily function.
The Metamorphoses is a Latin poem in fifteen books of dactylic hexameter, about 12,000 lines, that strings together some 250 myths of transformation from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar and the reign of Augustus. Its unifying thread is change of form: gods, humans and nymphs become animals, plants, stones, stars and springs, usually at moments of extreme passion, violence or divine punishment.
On the Nature of the Universe, better known as De Rerum Natura, is a philosophical poem that tries to cure fear by explaining the world. Lucretius addresses Memmius and invokes Venus, then argues that religion has driven human beings to cruelty, as in the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher is Charles Babbage's late memoir of invention, public controversy, and scientific administration. It is not a continuous autobiography so much as a set of argued recollections.
This volume pairs one of Plato's most literary dialogues with two letters attributed to him. The Phaedrus takes place outside the walls of Athens, where Socrates, who rarely leaves the city, walks with the young Phaedrus along the river Ilissus and sits under a plane tree on a hot summer day.
Psychopathia Sexualis is a medico-forensic taxonomy of sexual behavior written for physicians and lawyers. Krafft-Ebing organizes case histories under categories such as hyperaesthesia, anaesthesia, paraesthesia, sadism, masochism, fetishism, and contrary sexual feeling, using the language of degeneration, neuropathic heredity, and criminal responsibility.
Maupassant's stories, written mostly between 1880 and 1890, are compact, ironic and often brutal studies of French life: Norman peasants, Parisian clerks, prostitutes, bourgeois families, soldiers and the provincial gentry. This selection gathers many of the best known, which typically include the following.
The Brothers Karamazov centers on the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a sensual, neglectful father whose sons embody conflicting responses to desire, faith, reason, and guilt. Dmitri is passionate, impulsive, indebted, and publicly at war with his father over inheritance and Grushenka.
The Meek One (Krotkaya), also translated as A Gentle Creature, is a long short story that Dostoyevsky published in his one-man journal A Writer's Diary in November 1876, prompted by newspaper reports of suicides, including that of a young seamstress who leapt from a window holding an icon. In a short preface Dostoyevsky calls it a 'fantastic' story, explaining that it is realistic in every respect except its form: it imagines the inner monologue of a man as though a stenographer could record his chaotic thoughts.
The New York Trilogy gathers three linked short novels: City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room. Each begins from the materials of detective fiction and then dissolves the detective plot into questions of identity, authorship, language and mental disintegration.
This volume pairs two of Henry James's most intense short fictions about possession, interpretation and moral trespass. The Turn of the Screw is framed as a manuscript read aloud during a country-house gathering.
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature collects the twenty Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion that William James delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. Instead of studying churches, creeds or theology, James studies personal religious experience as a psychologist, drawing on a large collection of first-person documents: diaries, autobiographies, letters and replies to questionnaires.
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, translated by Haldane and Kemp as The World as Will and Idea, is Arthur Schopenhauer's single, systematic statement of a philosophy that he claimed expressed one thought from four sides. It appeared in December 1818 (dated 1819) in four books with an appendix criticising Kant, and in 1844 he added a second volume of fifty supplementary chapters keyed to the first.
Troilus and Criseyde retells a story from the Trojan War tradition, but its real subject is erotic psychology under the pressure of fortune, language and time. Troilus, a Trojan prince and son of Priam, initially mocks lovers until he sees Criseyde in the temple and is struck by desire.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is a lyric sequence of erotic longing, memory, landscape and loss. The poems do not tell a plot, but they trace an emotional arc from sensual address to abandonment and despair.
We is presented as the diary or record of D-503, mathematician and builder of the spaceship Integral in the OneState, a glass-walled totalitarian society ruled by the Benefactor. Citizens, called Numbers, live by tables of hours, regulated labor, monitored sex, prescribed walks and transparent architecture.
White Nights is narrated by an unnamed young dreamer in St. Petersburg, a lonely man who lives more intensely in imagination than in social life.
Wuthering Heights is a violent family romance told through layered narration. Mr.
Passages
- A View from the Bridge, Act 1 (two-act version)
Eddie's consultation with Alfieri, in which he insists Rodolpho is 'not right' and Alfieri hints at what Eddie feels.
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. XI, §12–13
Difference between 'naturals' (intellectual disability) and madmen; delusions such as believing oneself a king or made of glass; partial madness in otherwise sober people.
- Characters, The Chatterer
Compulsive, poorly bounded speech becomes a recognizable social burden.
- Chess, Dr B.'s narrative (chess against himself)
He splits into a white self and a black self and is consumed by compulsive play, losing sleep and appetite.
- Chess, Final scene
During the second game against Czentovic, Dr B.'s agitation and confusion return until the narrator stops him.
- Cold Comfort Farm, Later chapters
Flora arranges for Judith to see a psychoanalyst to cure her fixation on her son.
- Crime and Punishment, Fever and pursuit
Crime and Punishment gives this tag concrete force through this is a major psychiatric novel: fever, delirium, obsession, dissociation, alcoholism, suicide, trauma, and moral injury drive the action
- Dracula, Ch. 5–6, 8–9 (Seward's diary)
Seward's observations of Renfield: flies, spiders, sparrows, and his classification as a zoophagous maniac; Renfield's escape attempts toward Carfax.
- Ethics, Part IV, Props. XLI–XLIV and Notes
Pleasure and pain evaluated by their bodily effects; mirth always good, melancholy always bad, localized stimulation and love capable of excess; fixed ideas as madness.
- Frankenstein, Vol. I, Ch. III (1818) / Ch. 4 (1831)
Studies in anatomy and decay; gathering materials from charnel houses, dissecting rooms and slaughterhouses; secretive, sleepless labour that damages his health.
- Humboldt's Gift, Early sections (Charlie's memories)
Humboldt's torrential talk, grand plans and sleepless energy in the 1940s and 1950s.
- Letters of Napoleon, Letters to Joséphine, Italian campaign (spring–autumn 1796)
Repeated complaints of sleeplessness, fevered longing and jealousy as he campaigns; Joséphine's illness and delay in joining him.
- Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1
Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking and hand-washing observed by the Doctor and Gentlewoman.
- Mental Maladies, Lypemania and monomania
The diagnostic chapters track partial delusions, fixed ideas, fear, sorrow, and suicidal danger under now-historical labels.
- Metamorphoses, Book III
Narcissus falls in love with his reflection and wastes away; Echo fades to a voice; Tiresias's change of sex.
- On the Nature of the Universe, Book 4
Dream images, sexual arousal and erotic fixation are explained through bodily images and habit.
- Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, Chapters on street nuisances
Babbage's intense campaign against organ-grinders and urban noise shows the bodily strain of attention in a city environment.
- Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Phaedrus 251a–252b
The lover's symptoms: shuddering, sweating, fever, sleeplessness and obsessive longing as the wings regrow.
- Selected Short Stories, 'The Horla', later entries
Water and milk vanish from the carafe; the narrator's reflection fails to appear in the mirror; he reads of an epidemic of madness in São Paulo.
- Selected Short Stories, 'A Piece of String'
Hauchecorne's fixation on clearing his name ends in delirium and death.
- The Brothers Karamazov, Murder and trial
The Brothers Karamazov gives this tag concrete force through its medical material includes epilepsy, hysteria, alcoholism, trauma, patricidal obsession, suicidal despair, and the contagious psychology of families
- The Meek One, Part One, Ch. 5–6
The wife stands over her husband with a revolver at his temple while he feigns sleep.
- The New York Trilogy, City of Glass, surveillance of Stillman
Quinn maps Stillman's walks into patterns and lets the case consume sleep, home and ordinary social reality.
- The New York Trilogy, Ghosts
Blue's assignment to watch Black becomes a closed circuit of isolation, projection and increasingly paranoid interpretation.
- The New York Trilogy, The Locked Room
The narrator's fixation on Fanshawe turns literary stewardship into rivalry, envy and self-loss.
- The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, school expulsion and surveillance
Miles's unclear misconduct and the governess's scrutiny raise questions about child psychology, projection and moral panic.
- The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, The Aspern Papers, narrator's pursuit
The scholar's fixation on the papers becomes a study in monomania and professional self-excuse.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures VI and VII: The Sick Soul
Anhedonia, Tolstoy's crisis of meaning, Bunyan's obsessions and verbal automatisms, and the anonymous French sufferer's panic and lasting dread.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures XI–XV: Saintliness
Extreme asceticism, self-mortification and fasting described and evaluated, including James's judgement on its pathological excesses.
- The World as Will and Representation, Third Book, §36
Genius and madness compared; theory of insanity as a broken thread of memory filled with fictions, giving rise to monomania, melancholy or folly; the difficulty of obtaining histories from asylum patients; madness as a refuge from unbearable grief.
- Troilus and Criseyde, Book I
Troilus is struck by love and displays classic lovesickness: pallor, secrecy, sighing, sleeplessness and obsessive thought.
- Troilus and Criseyde, Book IV
Separation intensifies Troilus's despair, appetite loss and fixation on Criseyde's return.
- Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Middle poems
Distance, jealousy and memory turn erotic longing into repetitive thought and emotional dependence.
- We, Records after meeting I-330
D-503 experiences desire, jealousy and dreams as illness or infection of the self.
- White Nights, Second night
The dreamer narrates his withdrawal into fantasy, revealing both self-protection and social deprivation.
- Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff's final days
Heathcliff's visions of Catherine, refusal of food and death show grief as obsessive bodily unraveling.
Quotes
“a man who is very sober, and of a right understanding in all other things, may in one particular be as frantic as any in Bedlam”
“Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology”
“My homicidal maniac is of a peculiar kind. I shall have to invent a new classification for him, and call him a zoöphagous (life-eating) maniac”
“Human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions I name bondage”
“But, in reality, Avarice, Ambition, Lust, &c., are species of madness, though they may not be reckoned among diseases”
“Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world”
“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand”
Frequently cited
“Out, damned spot! out, I say”
“one supposeth himself to be a dog, cock, bear, horse, glass, butter, &c”
“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him”
“He was a typical case of the psychopathic temperament, sensitive of conscience to a diseased degree, beset by doubts, fears, and insistent ideas, and a victim of verbal automatisms, both motor and sensory”
“the thread of memory is broken, the continuity of its connection destroyed, and no uniformly connected recollection of the past is possible”
“The streak of chalk bewitcheth the hen; the stroke he struck bewitched his weak reason. Madness AFTER the deed, I call this”
“How long have I investigated this one thing, the brain of the leech, so that here the slippery truth might no longer slip from me”
Frequently cited
“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same”
Frequently cited
“I _am_ Heathcliff”
Frequently cited
“Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad”