A favorite modern reading of the novel, popularised by Andre Gide in his introduction to the Cresset Press edition, tends to downplay the supernatural, religious and historic elements and concentrate on the psychological.
Various characters are introduced that represent opposing extremes of a “rounded personality”. The opening segment, “The Editor’s Narrative”, provides us initially with the carnal Laird of Dalcastle, a portraiture of the “corporeal” world, who is countered by his obsessively pious wife Lady Rabina. This division at first is an overt difference of faith which allegorises the religious breach in Scotland at the time but as the characters become increasingly fleshed out when they begin to more embody a split in personality. The Laird is sensuous and sexual. Whether he in effect raped his wife to conceive his first son is, like many other things in the novel, left ambiguous. He is not an evil man but neither is he noticeably devout. The narrating editor clearly sympathises with his nature and his religious and political leanings.
The Lady on the other hand is prudish, chaste and unable to relate to the corporeal. Her energy is spent in fervent devotions and religious debate with her mentor, Robert Wringhim Snr. It is during one such “debate” that her second son may have been conceived, but again this is left ambiguous.
The other major psychological rift of the first segment is especially apparent as it is between two brothers, George Colwan and the disowned, possibly illegitimate, Robert Wringhim. George is not a spectacular student but possesses great “personal prowess, form, feature and all that constitutes gentility.” His brother is an “acute boy..with a sternness of demeanor from which other boys shrunk.”
The brothers “repeat the divisions of their parents” (Oakleaf 29) George is clearly the sensualist and Robert the sterile rationalist who conditions himself to abhor the “carnal nature”, especially in relationships with women (Hogg, 114). He even masochistically seeks beatings so little is his regard for the physical body. In Robert’s confessions, the second section of the book, he admits that during a delirium he felt that George was one half of his hallucinated split self. This is a further implication that they are complementary fragments of a divided personality. However the divisions between characters in the first section are really only reinforcements of the principal psychological crisis in the book which comes in the exploration into Robert’s troubled psyche reveled in his “Memoirs”. The fact that the symbolic characters/personality facets of the “Editor’s Narrative” are not reconciled results in the destructively fragmented personality we see. Hogg concentrates the wide metaphysical concern of corporeal/carnal/secular vs. spiritual/magical/holy into one character. Fragments of the complete human personality are emblematised in surrounding characters like George and the Laird during the editor’s resoundingly rationalist introduction. Yet the actual “Confessions”, by dint of their subjective nature, present only Robert and concentrate within him the basic conflicts that were conveyed by several characters. He develops a malefic doppelganger, Gilmartin, who can be seen as the exteriorisation of Robert’s evil nature.
Prior to his antinomian “election” to a state of perpetual grace he was tormented with internal conflict, unable to separate the holy and the carnal aspects of himself (unlike the Laird and Rabina who could isolate their antagonistic natures in different parts of the house). As a result he is plagued by feelings of guilt. No doubt for a child of Robert’s peculiar predisposition the equivocal question of his paternity, placing him in a possible position of Original Sin, must also have been a cause of trauma to him.
Later in the book Gilmartin reveals he has “one parent who I do not acknowledge.” This could be interpreted as either the fallen angel, Satan, talking of God or Wringhim’s unfettered “dark side” talking of his only definite parent – The Lady Rabina. On page 114 of Confessions he admits he has “no great regard for her person” and after he assumes the Lairdship he confesses that he began to find her “detestable”.
According to some practitioners of developmental psychology such feelings of worthlessness, guilt or innate iniquity can lead a child to a traumatised, insecure personality. The lack of a definite father could only hinder Robert’s finding his own “self”. As a result there can be misguided attempts to prove one’s worth and identity often by destructively trying to achieve a kind of one-upmanship over peers. (Crider et al,Harris 114). Robert does this often, mainly early on in his life when he particularly unsure of his identity, antinominan status and position in God’s scheme. He connives to have John Barnett dismissed and his classmate expelled. After his preemptive justification one-upmanship progresses to murder but the inner crisis remains essentially the same: an uncertainty about his worth and his identity.
There is no release for Wringhim from his crisis - not sexual (he "abhors the beauty of women" (Hogg, 113), not artistic (he calls art "profane" (ibid,109) and not religious for he cannot pray enough to alleviate his sinfulness. When he is " welcomed into the society of the just made perfect." (115) his over taut mind rapidly unraveled but this only exacerbates his mental disintegration. He feels like an eagle and wholly superior to the rest of the world. Case studies presented in Crider et al suggest that it is common for severely disturbed personalities to feel like Robert with "every nerve buoyant with new life" (Hogg, 116) just before a severe diassociative or schizoid psychological disturbance. In this the case both the "new life" and the "psychological disturbance" takes the form of Gilmartin who Robert states "was the same being as myself." (ibid.,116). Douglas Gifford interprets Gilmartin as a "personified objectification of [Robert's] repressed desires…outlets for his greed, pent-up hate and - eventually - lust…thus relieving Wringhim of responsibility." (Gifford, 109). His analysis sounds like Gilmartin is Wringhim's "Id", Freud's term for the unrepressed carnality in human nature. The Id is in conflict with the repressively moral "Superego" and the two are balanced within the realm of the"Ego" which could be seen as being represented by the Robert the Justified Sinner and George respectively. It seems that Robert is controlled by physical externalisations of two opposing fragments of himself (Gilmartin and George), his Id and Ego. He becomes prey to this very distinct split in his identity after Wringhim Senior dedicates him a blood spilling "sword and scourge" and exonerates him from all evil. Ultimately Robert himself is peripheral to the warring factions in his identity crisis. “ I generally conceived myself to be two people….I rarely conceived myself to be any of the two persons..my companion was one of them and my brother the other.” Gilmartin assumes the hate-filled spiritual side (piety for Robert is defined in terms of “hatred”, “battle” and “scourge”) and George the joyous sensual aspect. This conflict occurs outside of the sinner himself. Gilmartin who makes Robert a passive agent to his malefic will dominates him. Such a perceived loss of control over one's life, whether caused by a externalised projection of the Id or the palpable presence of a devil, unsurprisingly causes him to feel abstracted from his own self and identity even further. He has the "singular delusion that I was two persons.." neither of which was himself, "my companion [Gilmartin] was one of them and my brother [George] the other.
When Robert is provoked to murder George it is as if his Id as consumed his Ego. Now he hasn't even a precarious psychological balance only extremes of personality which appear to be incompatible. Robert claims to have a "second self…of whose action my own soul was wholly unconscious…one half or two-thirds of the time." (Hogg, 182). He may be actually committing crimes (like the seduction and murder of a young girl in his demesne) during a “state of consciousness and unconsciousness” (ibid. 182). These amnesiac interludes could be repression of memories connected to actions of his Id.
Like Occam he may have shaved away “extraneous” elements of his psyche until he is left with an excessive debilitating piety (which could be decoded as his Superego) and , simultaneously, an excessive debilitating licentiousness (the Id) both existing in partial ignorance of the other. Wringhim recognises that he and his doppelganger “were incorporated together, identified with one another” and inseperable. Such a state “at the same time, in the same body and same spirit was impossible” (Hogg, 180) placing him under the greatest anxiety, further splintering his perceptual integrity.
Alternatively his double is a actual devil and the real culprit. Either way the conclusion is the same: Robert Wringhim has by this point degenerated into a totally disassociative personality.
Hogg describing events from two differing angles and creating a dialectic tension between them, what Wittig calls “the sustained contrast between theme and variation, substance and shadow, objective and subjective reality.” As a result raises the question of whether objective and subjective reality can ever have any real reconciliation. As the reader wonders whether there can be any certainty about the real identity of Gilmartin or Robert there is the question of whether the Robert of the editor’s narrative can be reconciled with Robert’s identity as perceived by himself. If, like Robert, we can’t be sure of what we see or feel can we be sure of who we are? Hogg’s book addresses this Cartesian conundrum. At one point Robert says of the murder that his “own impressions of the affair in some degree differed from the statement” yet he comes to believe the version narrated to him as “positive truth”. His identity is at this point so fragile he can allow himself to believe almost anything.
It is fitting then that, according to Bell Calvert’s version of events as related by the Editor, after the murder Robert had to be “led or carried” from the scene and “he walked as if he had been flat soled without any joints in his feet or ankles”, just like a puppet. Maybe a puppet controlled by the devil or maybe a man who felt controlled by urges and emotions that were not his own. A symbolic rendering of this feeling occurs on page 215 of Confessions when Robert – naked like a helpless baby – becomes trapped in a weavers webbed loom. This scene could be a metaphoric visualisation of Robert’s (willing) entry into, but rapid entrapment in, the snares of another’s design (either his detached psyche or Satan himself).
As Robert, thought to be a multiple murder, flees from Dalcastle, he attempts also to flee from Gilmartin but this proves impossible. Even at their first meeting, despite feeling uneasy, Robert felt that he “was not thus to get free of him, but that was like to be an acquaintance that was to stick to me for good or evil.”
To modern audiences and critics a psychological reading of Confessions is certainly attractive but we risk clumsily grafting our own preconceptions onto the author’s original intentions. It is more likely Hogg wanted to write an effective supernatural tale. Like in Henry James’ Turn of the Screw Confessions has a potential psychological reading but also details of the story that do not fit into this pattern suggesting the supernatural was the intended genre. For example the evidence of Bell Calvert and Arabella Logan distinctly refers to a figure with the facial aspect of the deceased George Colwan and numerous other sources claim to see Robert companion (who he describes as the man Gilmartin) assume various other visages. Admittedly the details the Editor has been furnished with are unlikely to be completely accurate as he confesses that all he has “from history” is the sate George Colwan Snr succeeded his uncle the Laird. For the rest he looks to the “powerful monitor” of “tradition”. Hogg slyly insinuates the inaccuracies of Arabella Logan and Bell Calvert’s recollection by recounting a scene in which Arabella convinces Bell that the figure she saw looked like the murdered brother then their landlady, not knowing what or whom they were talking about, gets caught up with “some infection in the air of the room” and also hysterically cries “ ‘It is he! It is he’ “ Although comic the scene conveys the serious point that people can exaggerate and make mysteries out of almost nothing.
Nevertheless Gilmartin follows all Hogg’s “rules of devilment” outlined in various preceding poems and prose (Gifford, 92). He does not visit private houses but only appears when summoned by sin or invocation: when George is virtuous he staves Satan off, when his debauchery rears its head (drinking and womanising) he relinquishes the “guardian angel” that protected him on Arthur’s Seat. There are other clues to the nature of the “noble Lord” including the fact that his bible is scarred with red ink, he has only one unacknowledged parent (God before he threw Satan down to Hell?) , he has no need for prayer, he refuses a “Christian name” (Hogg, 129) and he often “inflames” and “enchants” Robert when in his presence. From the outset Hogg uses the language of the “invisible power” of “demonic possession” to describe relations between Robert and Gilmartin. Robert hardly ever refers to Gilmartin by his name. He awards him a range of attributes from “noble Lord” to “fiend”. This may be because Gilmartin’s very name echoes that of Gil-Mouly, a Scottish folk name for he devil and possibly Hogg’s philological source.
Despite this supernatural reading it is much to Hogg’s credit that he leaves the nature of Gilmartin ambiguous even through to the final pages of the “Memoir” which are full of demoniac (but possibly hallucinatory) apparitions.
The supernatural in the novel does not detract from the contemporary view that it has remarkably foresighted psychological resonance and that it dramatises the theme of an identity crisis considerably predating the modern psycho-thriller.
The actual presence of the devil/Gilmartin need not mean that he cannot also represent Robert’s Id or “dark side”. Robert himself interrogates his own identity with some astoundingly topical self-analytical allusions to his quasi-schizophrenic state (Hogg 155, 182).
The editor himself refers to the contact within the text between the explicable and the fantastic in the final lines of his closing section. He thinks it possible that Robert was either in league with the devil or “believed himself the very object who he had all day been describing.”
Hogg himself caught in a crisis of identity the parallels between Confessions and his own life are so apparent as to be, either consciously or unconsciously, clearly apparent in the book. Hogg was divided between his role as an eighteenth century man of sense and his belief and pastoral delight in fairies. Biographical details show he felt torn between the urban and the rural, the educated and the uneducated, the hegemony and the marginalised, Edinburgh and Ettrick.
He was sent away from his family to work when he was six so he has no formal education. Hogg always felt like an outcast from the erudite Scottish literary set (Carey, xiv) so he shares some sense of Robert Wringhim’s exclusion. Barbara Bloede (quoted in Gifford) wrote, “The Justified sinner…is the expression of Hogg’s own conflicts.” In fact, like the sinner, Hogg truly has a “second self” for in 1822 a distorted versions of him – as a “boozing buffoon” (Carey, xx) -began to appear in a series of satires called Noctes Abrosianae.
R. Incorvati suggest that the incident at the end of the novel involving L______t and L_____w at the sinner’s grave Hogg was aware of and exploited the analogies between his life and his book. He assumes, like many other critics, that L______t is Lockhart, a contemporary and sometime friend of Hogg’s who was openly contemptuous of his whimsy and shepherd’s existence. “L_____w” is probably William Laidlaw, Hogg’s grandfather, a traditional superstitious shepherd who claimed a lineage including numerous witches. Like most other characters in the book, assume a personified symbolic role. In this case that of the rational (Lockhart) against the paranormal and the hegemonic against marginalised Scottish folk tradition.
It seems that Hogg sways more towards the “mysterious” Scotland of his grandfather than the mundane country of his colleague as L_____t comes across as a pedantic pompous fool who disregards the pamphlet found in the tomb whereas L____w appears to appreciate its inherent importance. Although ultimately the book it ambiguous and does not provide any definitive resolution regarding he rational/tradition or psychological/diabolical debates.
If taken purely as a Gothic novel in vein of Caleb Williams it is more about the persecution of one man by another. If we employ a psychological reading it becomes more about one man’s crisis of identity. However both possible themes were as much a concern of Hogg himself (reiterated throughout his corpus of work) as of Romanticism in general. Both readings still represent, to different degrees, a crisis of identity either through personality fragmentation or demonic possession.
Hogg consistently hints at a solution to the crisis, one that the smug editor and the suffering Wringhim completely overlook. He implies that psychological harmony can only result from generosity and the elimination of feelings of guilt. George Colwan compromised his identity by acting against his nature and striking his brother. in “a flush of anger glowed in his ..face and flashed from his ..eye, but it was a stranger to both” (Hogg,22). From then on he becomes worried, lonely and followed “as if by a demon [attending] some devoted being that had sold himself to destruction.” Like his brother he now has a demonic, physical manifestation of his unruly Id. When he holds out the hand of fraternity to his undeserving brother he is harmonised with nature (arguably the Romantic ideal) and is even given a “bright halo in the cloud of haze” (Hogg, 30). However Robert is constantly burdened by the guilt of hi s countless perceived sins: “I was utterly confounded at the multitude of my transgressions….150,000 a minute.”
Robert himself is “deeply affected” by the generosity of the rural peasants he meets on his flight from the law. The more good will he encounters the more he is humbled and becomes an increasingly sympathetic character. Maybe Hogg is saying a simple, apolitical, transreligious kindness is the ultimate adherent for unifying the soul. This maxim certainly would appeal to Romantic sensibilities. One feels that Wordsworth would be proud.
G. Gulati. 2001.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
BOOKS & ARTICLES
Carey, John. “Introduction” in Hogg, James;Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, 1969, OUP, 1981.
Crider, Goethals et al. Psychology 3rd Edition.1989, Harper Collins.
Donelley, Hugo. “Shelley’s Poetry:The Divided Self” Book Review, Studies in Romanticism, Vol 38, No. 3, pp 483-485
Gide, Andre. “Introduction” in Hogg, James; Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Cresset Press,
Gifford, Douglas. James Hogg, 1976, The Ramsey Head Press, Edinburgh.
Harris, Thomas. I’m OK, You’re OK. 1973. Pan Books, London, Sydney, Auckland.
Henderson, Andrea. “Introduction” in Romantic Identities, 1996, Cambridge U.P.
Hogg, James. Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, 1969, OUP, 1981.
Oakleaf, David. “Not The Truth: The Doubleness of Hogg’s Confessions and the Tradition”, Studies in Scottish Literature, Vol. 18, pp. 59-74.
Punter, D. “The dialectic of persecution” in The Literature of Terror Volume I, 1996, Longman Group (David Punter), London and New York.
Simpson, L. James Hogg, a Critical Study, 1962, Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh.
Wittig, Kurt. The Scottish Tradition in Literature, 1958, Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh.
Wu, Duncan. “Introduction” in Romanticism: An Anthology
WEBSITES.
Incorvati, R. “Dialogue and Marginality in James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner.” Prometheus Unplugged Website.
Although Hogg was writing in a pre-Freudian era the essentials of his psychodynamic theory were as pertinent in 1834 as they were in 1934.
