Diagnosing Mr. Darcy
Does Mr. Darcy, the haughty, handsome, sometimes unaccountably rude (=socially graceless) bachelor of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice have Asperger’s Syndrome?
Canadian speech-language pathologist Phyllis Ferguson Bottomer makes just this argument in a soon-to-be-published book, So Odd a Mixture: Along the Autistic Spectrum in Pride and Prejudice. Bottomer also argues that another character, Lydia Bennet (younger sister of sharp-witted and smart protagonish Elizabeth Bennet) has Attention Deficit Disorder. As noted in today’s The Telegraph:
Bottomer told the Times Educational Supplement: “I hope it will help people understand the sometimes subtle challenges faced by those on the mild end of the autistic spectrum and serve as a reminder not to judge too quickly.”
The book, which the publishers hope will be used to provoke debate in schools, was dismissed by UK’s National Association for the Teaching of English as “wonderfully absurd”.
While this sort of diagnostic past-posting can be a perilous past-time, in which a reader rather mechanically takes DSM-IV criteria and applies them to an author’s literary creation, I do think it has its uses. Professor Stuart Murray has written about Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener as potentially being on the autism spectrum; I have fancifully (very fancifully) offered 10 reasons for why Socrates may have been autistic. Such exercises in applying diagnostic criteria to literary texts can perhaps be one way to practice “diagnosing autism,” as well as bringing up the question of, once we know what autism is, do we see it everywhere?
On the other hand, what do such fanciful diagnoses add to our understanding of autism?
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POSTED IN: Books, Diagnosis, Literature
9 opinions for Diagnosing Mr. Darcy
Daisy
Apr 8, 2007 at 7:26 pm
Newer works, such as young adult works, are beginning to feature characters on the spectrum. “Al Capone Does My Shirts”, a recent Newbery winner, has an important supporting character with autism. “The Truth Out There”, a mystery set in England, has a character with Asperger’s Syndrome. Then there’s “Silent to the Bone” by E.L. Konigsburg, with a character that seems like he’s on the spectrum, and “The Silent Boy” by Lois Lowry, a historical fiction featuring a developmentally disabled boy who may be on the spectrum as well.
(Sorry for the quotation marks; I haven’t quite mastered the HTML to put the titles in italics.)
laurentius-rex
Apr 8, 2007 at 7:38 pm
I diagnose Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Malvolio in Shakespeares Twelfth night, and I shall bung in Feste as well as having a pinch of Larry Arnold’s syndrome as well, too clever by half :)
Was Odyseus and Aspie? no way, but poor old Polyphemus took things a bit literally didn’t he.
Lets see, I think I will diagnose Moses, now hang on a moment, that’s already been done before.
Lolasmom
Apr 8, 2007 at 8:09 pm
How very coincidental…I was just watching the movie the other night and thought the very thing. Darcy made some statement about being uncomfortable making social chit-chat, whereupon Elizabeth suggested he practice it more often (or something to that effect).
Phil Schwarz
Apr 8, 2007 at 8:16 pm
Indeed, from my own perspective, Moses started in motion an entire ethno-religious *culture* that is in many ways autistic-friendly.
But then Jerry Newport aimed higher than us, Larry, by correctly diagnosing God — who, after all, made the celestial bodies *spin*… ;-)
Do you think Jesus could have been one of us? Maybe that is a harder thing to determine, if his relationship to you is that of being your savior and part of a divine trinity, rather than the relationship I experience to him as having been a (thoroughly and exquisitely human) probable distant cousin :-) and a voice for social change in the tradition of the prophets of the 10th thru 6th centuries BCE, but not part of my relationship with God.
FWIW, it is very likely that at least one of the Hasidic masters of the early- and mid-nineteenth century CE, Menahem Mendel of Kotzk, was indeed one of us. (There is also actually a good bit of scholarship identifying another Hasidic master, Nachman of Bratslav, who lived in the latter half of the 18th century CE, as having been bipolar.)
And there were probably a few of us among the sages quoted in the Talmud, who shaped Judaism in the 2nd century BCE through the 5th century CE, much as the church fathers shaped Christianity in roughly the same period.
Kristina Chew, PhD
Apr 8, 2007 at 8:21 pm
Odysseus as an Aspie….. it had crossed my mind but doesn’t hold up……
bubandpie
Apr 8, 2007 at 8:31 pm
I’m teaching “Bartleby” this week, and exactly that thought crossed my mind. It doesn’t really fit (Bartleby is more symbol than human being anyway) - but I did wonder whether thinking of him as being on the spectrum would allow me to overcome my chronic irritation at the character. It didn’t.
Kristina Chew, PhD
Apr 8, 2007 at 9:34 pm
Alas for Bartleby—do you think do you might offer the “autism diagnosis” in discussing the story with your students?
Kristina Chew, PhD
Apr 8, 2007 at 9:42 pm
Leo Kanner’s father is described as “socially awkward” and “obsessively dedicated to Talmudic studies” with a phenomenal memory (Unstrange Minds, p 39).
Phil Schwarz
Apr 9, 2007 at 8:20 am
In fact, sacred-text scholarship — or fulfilling some role in serving the practical needs of the scholars — constituted a definite niche for many folks like us, throughout the course of Rabbinic Judaism, from its origins in the 2nd century BCE to the present day. Much as I suspect monastic life did, in other religious traditions.
As I wrote in my contribution to Autism and Representation, in all likelihood, three hundred years ago I would have been a Talmud scholar.
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