"A Point in Morals"

This review was fast lane comissioned by @krinsbez.


Ellen Glasgow was a turn-of-the-last-century era American author whose written some well-known and influential titles, but who I don't think I've read anything by. Might have had a short story or two of hers as required reading in high school or something, but nothing that stuck in my memory. I know she's supposed to be fairly philosophical, but that's about it.

So, I don't really know what to expect from this 1899 short story of hers. Let's see.


The opening is a little hard to get into, since we start mid-conversation in a sizeable group of people who are only given descriptions rather than names. Detail is sparse. I think they're all taking a ship ride across the Atlantic and having this conversation in the dining room, but I'm not sure. Anyway, the conversation is being driven by a psychologist (or "alienist" as those were called in this era) who poised the question "is civilization, in placing an exorbitant value upon human life, defeating its own aims?"

The others aren't sure exactly what he means with that question, but he refuses to elaborate. According to the alienist, their interpretations of the question are, in and of themselves, an important part of the answers they each provide. The question is sort of a Rorschach test, at least in part, which is why I quoted its exact words in the previous paragraph.

So, the diners volunteer their opinions. A well dressed and rather squeamish Englishman murmurs loftily about whether or not there is such a thing as a situation in which saving a human life is positively immoral, approaching the question from a fully individualistic angle.

A journalist takes on a creepy eugenicist angle, talking about how giving everyone a shot at reproduction might be threatening humanity's genetic integrity. I wish I could just shrug and say "1899, that's just how people were back then," except that attitudes like the journalist's are back in vogue nowadays even though our understanding of evolutionary genetics has improved to the point where they should be impossible for an educated person to hold.

A lawyer, meanwhile, takes the scope sensitivity angle, and remarks that knee-jerk investment in individual human lives might be leading to many others in less dramatic or imminent peril being neglected. The example he uses is...not a great one, but for a criminal prosecutor it makes sense for his mind to go there. Talking about how much energy and attention is spent arguing the merits of letting individual criminals be hanged or not while much bigger problems that impact many more lives - including the doing of those very criminals - are ignored. Like I said, bad example, but the principle he's trying to stand for with it is a reasonable one.

A girl in a yachting cap takes issue with the lawyer's assessment, saying that what he's describing is a problem with certain individuals rather than being systemic. To be clear, she's talking about the people who care too much about criminals, not the criminals themselves. Not the best argument she could have made, but she does seem to be coming from a genuinely humanitarian angle if not being very competent at it.

They argue a bit, and the conversation drifts into a discussion about Great Man Theory and the type of society best able to produce Great Men versus the type that has a higher mean quality of men in general, until the alienist fortunately drags them all back on topic. Attention is called repeatedly to how the cast are all dressed, the salt they're putting on their shellfish from the buffet, etc. The impression given is that these people are all a little too rich and sheltered to have a grounded perspective, but that's just a general vibe so far that the story may or may not end up following through on.

Eventually, the alienist tells them all that the reason he asked the question, and the reason he was curious about their interpretations of the question itself rather than just their answers to it, is because of an experience he had some years ago. Ooh boy, storytime, let's hear it!

Also, storytime ends up being the entire rest of "A Point in Morals." The shipboard conversation is just a framing narrative apparently. What purpose it serves (assuming it does in fact serve one ), perhaps I'll be able to determine by the end.

...

Back when he was doing his post-doc, the alienist had a morphine-addicted patient who wanted to go cold turkey. After judging her to be healthy and hardy enough to safely go through with it, he took all the morphine she had access to and left her with her parents in their isolated village to head home. The drugs she'd been taken were prescription, and still well within the sell-by date, so the alienist figured he might as well bring them back to his practice and add them to his pharmaceutical stockpile. So, he was traveling with a big clearly labelled jar of morphine in his handbag on a long cross-country train ride. Some of us choose to live dangerously.

Sure enough, it wasn't long before he found himself sharing a mostly-empty smoking compartment with a rough, violent-looking man who sat far away from him and only looked over when he happened to open his handbag to get a book out and the morphine fell out for a second. The sketchy man's eyes fell on that jar, and then lingered on his handbag long after the alienist put it away again. Heh, predictable I suppose. Well, we know that the alienist survived to tell this story, so whatever ended up happening here he at least didn't get shanked. Maybe he ended up curing two addicts that day, heh.

Unsurprisingly, it wasn't long before the sketchy man came over to the alienist and struck up a conversation. After going through some forced pleasantries, he asks about the philosophy book that he saw the alienist reading, and from there starts interrogating the alienist about his openmindedness, ethical disposition, etc. Just as the alienist is starting to think he might have misjudged this man and perhaps imagined his covetous stare at the morphine jar, the man explains what he's really all about here. It turns out he does want the morphine, and is willing to pay his entire fortune (which consists of the handful of coins he's got in his pocket) for it, but he's not an addict. It's...well, it's one of those highly improbable but not-technically-impossible philosophical thought experiments, heh. Not that I expected anything other than that after this buildup, but still, it amused me.

The man - I'll call him Morphy - was born to a wealthy, respected lawyer politician guy who invested heavily in his son's education and refinement. He passed away when Morphy was still in school though, and his mother - who had always had mental health issues - wasn't there to stop him from making bad decisions like his father used to. He promptly squandered the opportunities that had been given to him, dropping out of school, chasing women, getting in trouble for chasing women, getting a girl knocked up, disappearing on her for fear of responsibility, changing his name, marrying someone else, having kids with her, disappearing on them too, deciding he needed to flee the country, getting involved in crime to sponsor his escape from the country, getting betrayed by his partner in fraud, murdering said traitorous partner, and...well, that's pretty much it.

The police know that Morphy is on this train line. There will be cops waiting for him at every station along the way. He does not believe he can evade them. If arrested, he will most likely be executed, and if not then he'll at least be given a multi-decade jail sentence. In either case, if the state gets ahold of him then everything he's done will become a matter of public record, and his wife(s?) and children will learn the truth about the "long business trips" he's always on. He doesn't want to do that to them. He knows that some, at least, would be broken by it. His mentally ill mother has also been doing a bit better lately, and he fears what the news would do to her as well.

As far as possibilities for miraculous redemption go, well...it ain't happening. Morphy has zero faith in himself. He knows he'd do it all again, given the chance. He doesn't regret killing his fellow fraudster (in Morphy's mind, the rat deserved it). He does regret abandoning his family(s), but he knows he'd only keep doing it. He's always regretted it, but that never stopped him before, so there's no reason it would start to now.

So. Here's what it comes down to. Morphy is not going to make it to the next station. He's going to throw himself off the train and onto the barren grass and heather far from the nearest town. The fall alone might only break a bone or two instead of killing him, though, so before he jumps he's going to ingest the contents of the bottle of rat poison he has with him. Rat poison is a slow, horribly painful way to go. Dying of it alone in the rain and cold with one or more broken bones will surely be even worse. But, it's the best he was able to get his hands on at short notice. He's searched the train for anything else he can use to kill himself with, and there's nada.

The alienist has a big jar of morphine, though. If Morphy chugged that stuff before jumping, he'd be too blissed out to feel anything at all when he hit the ground, and the overdose would subsequently kill him in his sleep without him ever registering the cold and the hurt.

He can't take the morphine by force. Morphy might be a violent man, but he's also older and less healthy than the college-aged and athletically inclined alienist, not to mention just being shorter and slighter of build to begin with. He doesn't have a weapon. In fact, just by telling the alienist his story he's put his plans at risk, because if the alienist decided to take his rat poison away and turn him over to the police at the next station Morphy probably wouldn't be able to stop him. But, he had to take the risk. Just because he doesn't want his death to be such long and immense physical and psychological torture.

So. Please sell him the morphine.

The alienist believed strongly that every individual's life and body should be their own, so, luckily for Morphy, the thought of trying to take the rat poison away wasn't one he entertained. At the same time though, the alienist strongly disapproved of suicide, and absolutely did not want to encourage or facilitate it. So, unpleasant though the rat poison prospect might be, the alienist refused.

Morphy walked him through the premises and the logic that follows from them. Does the alienist agree that Morphy is a fucked up guy in a fucked up situation? Yes. Does he think that Morphy has anything to live for, or that anyone else would benefit from his continued existence at this point? Probably not. Does he agree that it would be far better for his wives, children, and mother if he mysterious disappeared and left an unidentified corpse by the railroad tracks rather than be in the papers? Yes, it's hard to dispute that logic. Well then, why not give him the morphine?

The alienist hesitates to answer. He doesn't care to be the instrument of Morphy's self-destruction, but when he's just agreed that Morphy's self-destruction is the least bad option it's pretty hard for him to justify why he won't be that instrument. Morphy readily admits that he's a terrible person, but he doesn't think he's so terrible as to deserve such a horrific death when it would be easy to give him a painless one. The alienist concurs with that assessment too; there are people who have done far worse things than Morphy who the alienist still wouldn't wish the rat poison in the rain on. So, why not?

After a long, difficult meditation, the alienist says, he took the morphine back out, left it on the tray table, and walked out of the compartment. He did briefly wonder if he'd simply been taken in by a cunning drug addict with a flair for the dramatic, despite his fine-tuned psychologist senses telling him that the man was in earnest, but the papers a day later confirmed Morphy's intentions. His body was found, and matched to his most recent non-existent assumed identity, with the cause of death determined to be morphine overdose.

...

Returning to the framing present, the boat passengers hearing the alienist's story are...sceptical, to put it mildly...of its veracity. He tells them that it doesn't matter if the story is actually true or not, it's just a point of consideration. Which, heh, voice of the author there, but also kind of a pointless intrusion of the author's voice since the reader already knows this is fiction heh.

Anyway. The eugenics journalist says that he'd have left him with the rat poison, but couldn't have bared to give him the morphine. Lol, okay jackass. The prosecutor, unsurprisingly, thinks that he should have made a citizen's arrest and handed Morphy over to the police, trusting society to handle the fallout with his family. The woman in the sailor hat maintains that the alienist did the right thing, though she isn't sure she'd have had the nerve to go through with it and make herself complicit in a death in his place. The aristocrat makes a sexist comment while contributing a lot of fluff and nothing of substance.

The alienist himself closes the story by saying that he does feel a murderer, and does consider himself a murderer. But, he supposes, there is such a thing as a conscientious murderer.


Before I say anything else about this story, I'm pretty sure that there's something going over my head. The way it written makes me feel like it's a commentary on something specific. Some hot-button issue or news story of its day. It just has that vibe to it. I wasn't able to find out what this context might have been with the amount of time I was willing to spend googling it, though, and my general knowledge of the time period doesn't have anything jumping out at me aside from the very general crawl away from Victorian-era ethics and toward the rise of the 20th century "isms." So, with that gap in context, I'm almost certainly missing something important.

With that said, looking just at what I can get out of this story and what it's trying to say, my gut reaction is to tilt my head back, wrinkle my nose, and sneer the word "Weak."

That isn't addressed at the author, necessarily. More at the entire argument that her story appears to have been participating in (and also, relatedly, the one it depicts in the framing narrative). Maybe she was every bit as frustrated at having to write this as I feel while reading it. The way the story seems to toss shade at its fashionable, pearl-clutching, shellfish-gorging peanut gallery suggests that she might well have been.

Not one single character wondered why it would be more acceptable for the state to have someone kill Morphy than letting him do it himself, or helping him do it himself. They're having this protracted discussion about whether it could ever be ethical to take a human life, whether society should allow it or not, while taking it as a given that it IS ethical for society to actively take human lives as long as there's a piece of paper with the right stamp on it. This isn't even a point of contention that they have with the law. Several of the characters refer to "our system" and defend it as such, even while taking issue with minor policy and cultural details. No one questions the ethics of execution. Or points out that the acceptance of execution is a big part of what created the alienist's dillemma in the first place.

I wonder if perhaps the alienist was vainly hoping that one of the listeners would realize the contradiction. Maybe the author didn't intend for him to be that much more self-aware than them. Or maybe she herself wasn't, though like I said I doubt that.

It would be fun to watch someone telling this crowd that a big part of what sent Morphy down his dark path was everyone expecting him to be monogamous like a bunch of rock-banging monkeys. Heads would probably explode.

On one hand, I have a privileged position relative to the author and her contemporaries on account of how far philosophy has advanced over the century between then and now. On the other, I *know* that some of these were already solved problems in the philosophical realm by 1899. Not in the social or legal realm, obviously (they aren't today either), but philosophically. This just seems so incredibly basic.