house

A sex scandal – that too accompanied by charges of sodomy, doesn’t sound theoretically convincing enough to be lauded as the chief antagonist of a book that would elaborate the manners of the early seventeenth century English society.

The heinous nature of the scandal and the noble family it badly marred collectively demanded a thorough and scrupulous historical documentation that would serve as a bold yet honest evidence of the truth in times of secrecy and puritanical approaches. In A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven, Cynthia Herrup takes up a bold task of chronicling an emperor’s debauchery and the subsequent fall from grace.

On the surface, the book vividly records a tale of sodomy, rape, corruption and revenge. But Herrup goes beyond the notions of conventional morality, and excites the readers with an insightful telling of how a man of noble origin was incriminated by a system which was essentially naïve and passive.

Moreover, the case of the 2nd earl of Castlehaven directly implies the latent anxieties involved with the very structure of power, which can be applicable to modern societies as well. Mervin Touchet, the earl of Castlehaven, was charged with serious offenses of actuating the rape of his own wife and of performing sodomy on one of his servants.

This case received so much public attention that researchers have later on found evidential grounds to address to a number of social, religious and ethical issues involving the hindsight of power and authority, tyranny, deviance, legal entailments of suppression, and the inevitable implications of patriarchal domestic setups.

A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven captures the nature of governance that prevailed in the royal court of Castlehaven prior to the grisly events, and how it brought about the condemnation and beheading of the earl in 1631. In a way, the author discusses and explains the situations that led to the debauchery and disorder in the Castlehaven household.

It is to be clearly understood that Cynthia Herrup does not merely tell us a shameful event, but she actively engages our consciousness and awareness about the relevance of such an event in contemporary society by collating key points concerning sex, able governance and the role of a transparent and competent legal system. Hence the main thesis argument Cynthia Herrup tries to propagate in the book is not what happened, but why it happened.

The Touchets settled in the Castlehaven in 1620 and immediately exercised their sovereign power in the locality. There was an underlying wave of nobility and religious leniency about the way the head of the household directed both the internal as well as external affairs.

Despite being an old family dating back to the times of the Norman Conquest in England, the Touchets never really went out to establish a fortunate identity for themselves, partly because of their inheritance and injudicious trends of marriage.

Eventually it was the convicted earl’s father George Touchet who understood that “the surest path to wealth and status was a combination of service, supplication, and judicious marriage.” (p. 10) His expertise as a soldier and good administrator was well circulated, fetching him widespread recognition.

But his son’s escapades, as Herrup wants us to show, are not to be confused with his own status or credibility. Stuck in a perpetual state of dynamics in terms of religion, politics and law, the stage was almost set for the ensuing chain of events that would bring ignominy to the Castlehaven family. An act of sodomy, according to the Christian convictions, was extremely degrading and morally reproachable offense.

Long before the Castlehaven case, the English society was unrelenting in despising such activities. As history has it, the aristocrats in the Elizabethan times were frequently accused with similar charges, the most notable being in the cases of the Earls of Oxford and of Southampton. Due to the passive nature of the mass acceptance of crimes such as rape and sodomy, majority of these cases lay under cover and never really attracted too much attention other than a reviled broadcasting.

Even men hailing from blue-blooded families had the grit to stand up to the charges brought against them – presumably for testifying to their self-confidence and beliefs in a patriarchal supremacy. But according to the prevalent Protestant notions, sodomy was typically an un-English crime usually committed by the Italians and the Turkeys who were believed to have very little sense of self-restraint and moral values.

But Mervin Touchet was neither an Italian nor a Turkey, nor was he supposed to be stripped off the conventional Protestant values. So the logical question remains – why did he engage in such treachery?

Herrup attempts to guide us through the convoluted system of monarchy that somehow isolated many of the young earls in the beginning of their tenures. Lack of traceability in terms of peer connections and the general tenor of mistrust and passivity at the core of the family seemed to generate a deficient measure of ethics for the accused person in contention here.

Five chapters are assigned to this book, making the task of unfolding the events and their interpretations a smooth one. The first chapter recounts the history of the Castlehaven’s ancestry, their land acquisitions, and how the premonitions were about to unveil themselves.

From the perspective of a historian, this chapter is thoroughly required for the sake of critical research. Herrup introduces in this chapter the obvious difference that prevailed in the moral domains of two of the earls of Castlehaven, resulting in the disorderly affairs at Fonthill Gifford.

The second chapter directly goes into the central topic of the book, e. g. the allegations of assistance in rape and sodomy brought against the 2nd earl.

From informative contexts, this chapter abounds in charges that eventually incriminate the earl on the ground of circumstantial as well as concrete pools of evidence. It was Lord Audley who first brought the disturbing charges against the earl, stating that he was purposefully denied of his inheritance as the earl had an unusual propensity to one of his servants Henry Skipwith.

This set the ball in motion as allegations of sexual perversion and provoked acts of sexuality started raining. The Privy Council intervened into the matter and questioned most of the family members, including the accused ones. Finally in 1631, charges against the earl were found legitimate after a prolonged trial and he was convicted of rape and sodomy.

Herrup inducts the evidences to support her arguments in the third chapter. The first thematic construct involves the obligation for men to control their emotive responses for the greater good of their families and loved ones. No doubt it was completely taunted by the Castlehaven to doom his own fate.

The second important argument concerns the faculty of self-respect and honor in dealing with potentially unruly confrontations. This too lacked in the case of the 2nd earl of Castlehaven. The third argument, same as the second one, brings into the forefront of consideration the need to remain firm to sacred religious beliefs.

All the three aforementioned arguments can be exemplified in a nutshell. As the head of a domestic setup infested with “sly servants and unruly women” (p. 74), Touchet engaged in disgraceful activities and supported the same in others (p. 79), and he was alleged to have questionable associations with Roman Catholicism and Ireland (p. 81). Hence the earl was comfortably drawn as debased and therefore, shamefaced for some reason.

For the readers, it is virtually impossible to decipher the extent of his guilt, and that is precisely what the author tries to say in the book. It is basically a trial which is to be closely examined in the contemporary social context of deviance, homosexuality, tyranny and power games. So it may easily be inferred that this book is for a select band of readers – those with idiosyncratic viewpoints and a commanding grasp over the Elizabethan history of England.

In House Keeping by Marilynne Robinson, the author uses feminist criticism to demonstrate the social construction of a family household that goes against the patriarchal structure or norm of a household. In the novel the main character of Ruthie is telling the story of her and her sister Lucille living at her grandma’s house in Finger bone, Idaho after her mom’s suicide. Right at the start it begins with the death of her grandfather due to a train wreck, then her mother happens to kill herself shortly after going over a cliff after dropping them off at grandma’s.

The story takes place in the 1950s and early 1960s and is told from first person point of view. After both of the girls’ mother’s death, the grandma Sylvia becomes their guardian, but eventually becomes ill and dies as well. Their grandmother was prepared for her death and made sure someone would watch over Ruth and Lucille after she was gone. Nona and Miss Royce are introduced in the story and become the girls’ guardians until they no longer feel they can take care of them and send a letter to Sylvie, the girls’ eccentric and unbalanced aunt to come watch them.

Sylvie comes to watch over her nieces and then the household begins to become somewhat chaotic. Ruth bonds well with Sylvie because she is free-spirited, but Lucille, on the other hand, yearns for stability in the household. Lucille wants the household to consist of the normal family viewed in society. Lucille finds refugee in her economics teacher and decides to go live with her, leaving Ruth and Sylvie alone. Shortly, Ruth’s safety is questioned by the courts because of the way Sylvie and her are living. They are both isolated from the outside world alone and without a man as the one in charge.

Eventually, Sylvie decides to leave Finger bone, Idaho and live on the road again and Ruth decides to go with her. Throughout the novel Ruth and Lucille face several abandonments as they grow up, but still have a home in which housekeeping is done and where a family is created. It may not be the usual household structure but it is a home in which the girls can come to at the end of the day. According to the CBIL, feminist literature also uses a range of different strategies such as psychological strategies that help understand feminist issues better. Ruth

does not mind living in the condition they have been with Sylvie, but Lucille eventually gets tired of it because she feels she will not be accepted in the society that seems normal to her, “I was content with Sylvie, so it was a surprise to me when I realized that Lucille had begun to regard other people with the calm, horizontal look of settled purpose with which, from a slowly sinking boat, she might have regarded a not-too-distant shore” (92). Robinson uses feminism criticism to demonstrate that a home can be created without any male role or the typical normal family.

In this home only women have lived in after the grandfather’s death and they have sustained the house together over the years a way or another. When Ruth and Lucille slept out of the house in the woods, Lucille seeked attention from Sylvie because she felt Sylvie did not put any house rules and it bothered her because she felt she did not have a home when in reality she did, “ She had put two folded quilts on the wood box behind the stove. She wrapped one of them around Lucille and one around me, and we sat down” (118).

Their home was not the regular home but it was because Sylvie would keep them comforted and warm, she showed them love. Robinson adds details like these to the novel to demonstrate that even alone a woman can create a home for two children. Through feminism criticism the young girls also act as a symbol of strength in the novel because so much has happened to them over the years. They have lost everyone who has come into their lives one at a time. The girls are seen as independent, always on their own and taking care of themselves.

They look forward to the future and what lies ahead even though their lives have been filled with death and abandonment. Robinson uses Ruth and Lucille as role models to other women who have dealt with similar events. The girls stick together, but eventually separate also signifying that they make their own life decisions without any male telling them what to do. This novel sets a setting in which no men are present, which was uncommon at the time the story takes place. Men were freer to travel, and roam around, unlike women in which they stayed at home with their children.

A man-less household was far from uncommon, and in the novel Robinson only chose women as the main characters who lived alone. She created only women relationships to demonstrate that women were capable of coexisting with one another without a male. According to the CBIL, feminist critics use images of women to reflect the patriarchal structure by writing literature to achieve equality with men (1548). Robinson chose her protagonist to be the voice of a single woman, a woman in in her 20s looking back on her childhood and reflecting on it, “My name is Ruth.

I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters in law…” (3). Ruth’s character dictates the cast and the setting of the story. As Ruth re-enters her childhood, her concerns becomes those of a fatherless girl abandoned by her mother, or in her case a mother who committed suicide to escape her problems in life, “She thanked them, gave them her purse, rolled down the rear windows, started the car, turned the wheel as far to the right as it would go, and roared swerving and sliding across the meadow until she sailed off the edge of the cliff” (23).

Ruth in the novel has the choice to choose a mother figure in place of the one she has already lost. Ruth begins to bond well with her aunt Sylvie and Sylvie becomes that mother figure for Ruth as it shows that there is no male heroism in the novel, but rather a female hero. The wilderness becomes part of the feminist criticism as Robinson centers the novel on the lake, and the characters spend frequent time in the woods. By putting a female in the lead role, Robinson goes against tradition.

In “Laugh of the Medusa”, Helene is tired of seeing a man’s role in society in which the man tells the woman what to do. She wants women to give themselves their right place in society and become liberated from the restraint, therefore, Robinson like Helene, writes about feminine literature about women and decisions they have to make in a society where usually men made the decisions. The title of the novel is a big deal when viewing the novel through a feminist approach. “Housekeeping” in our culture signifies a clean household.

In the household women take a major role as they are the ones who clean, maintain the home, and stay at home with the kids. The house in the novel portrays a symbolic icon for female cultural existence, yet it is ruined in the novel. Sylvie does not keep the house like a culturally standard female would especially in the 1950s where women did not really work or have much to do. Sylvie keeps the house messy and does not act as a suitable mother would in society, “Yet this was the time that leaves began to gather in the corners.

They were leaves that had been through the winter, some of them worn to a net of veins. ” Yet, according to “Laugh of the Medusa” the best of a woman can only be given from another woman and Sylvie demonstrates the mark she leaves behind in society and the lesson she is teaching the girls about change and subversion against patriarchy. Housekeeping demonstrates that women are no longer the typical housewives and how society must accept that change. Society must move beyond conventional social patterns and the ideal image of a woman.

Robinson changes literature into feminist literature to change the perception of women. In Housekeeping, Ruth, Lucille, and Sylvie portray women who have to make life decisions because of their different lifestyle that goes against the stereotypical household norm. Ruth being the protagonist is portrayed as the main hero because she faces several events in which she faces hard decisions and makes them, even though society is against the choices and lifestyle she is living.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” has received wide praise for its accurate depiction of madness and the symptoms attributed to mental breakdowns (Shumaker 1985). While these symptoms may seem obvious from today’s psychological perspective, Gilman was writing at the close of the 19th century when the discipline of psychology was still emerging out of a rudimentary psychiatric approach to treating the mentally ill.

Though doctors have attempted to write about the treatment of insanity since ancient Greece, the history of madness has most often been characterized by a series of popular images, images that may have stunted the development of a medical model of mental illness: as a wild irrationality, an imaginative and corrupt gothic horror, a violent cruelty that must be confined in asylums, and lastly as a mere nervous disorder.

The critic Annette Kolodny suggests that contemporary readers of Gilman’s story most likely learned how to follow her fictional representation of mental breakdown by reading the earlier stories of Edgar Allen Poe (Shumaker 1985), and indeed we can locate these strata of historical representations in both “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

But where Poe’s depictions seem to confirm negative – and thus not therapeutically useful – stereotypes of madness, Gilman tempers her representations through the emerging psychological model, which allowed her to articulate a new image anticipating the 20th century hope of curing mental diseases through psychological expression. Background Gilman’s story depicts the mental collapse of a late 19th century housewife undergoing the Rest Cure, who grows increasingly obsessed with a disturbing wallpaper pattern.

It has been suggested that contemporary readers would have read the story as either a Poe-like study of madness, yet most modern critics focus on a feminist reading in which the wallpaper intentionally represents the “oppressive patriarchal social system” (Thrailkill 2002). Jane Thrailkill, in her essay about the psychological implications of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” argues that this feminist reading may actually block the work done by the story to shift 19th century medical conventions surrounding mental illness (Thrailkill 2002).

Gilman stated that everything she wrote was for a purpose beyond mere literary entertainment, and that “The Yellow Wallpaper” was written in order to highlight the dangers of certain medical practices, particularly to convince Weir Mitchell to change the method of his Rest Cure for nervous ailments (which Gilman herself had unsuccessfully undergone) (Shumaker 1985, Thrailkill 2002).

In Gilman’s words, the story was, “…intended… to save people from going crazy, and it worked” (Thrailkill 2002). Like Gilman, Poe may also have suffered from mental illness, but following the concerns of his historical moment, Poe seems to have been more interested in the construction of aesthetic effects instead of how those effects might change social and scientific perspectives.

The only mention of a cure in Poe’s tale is the “vague hope” that reading a book will relieve excitement (Poe 2003). Nonetheless, Gilman’s methods of representing madness clearly derive from Poe; they both use an “inspired manic voice,” unnamed narrators, nervous characters with no diagnosable illness, a rebellious foregrounding of the imagination, and a haunting mood with rational design that has been considered Poe’s signature style (Davison 2004).

Published sixty years earlier, Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” in particular seems to anticipate “The Yellow Wallpaper” in its manor setting and mad characterizations, and thus can serve as an opening point from which to trace the 19th century transitions in cultural and scientific representations of madness that culminate in Gilman’s tale. Analysis In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” an unnamed narrator, visiting his old friend Roderick Usher, attempts to describe Roderick’s madness through both external and internal signs of irrationality.

Most immediately, Roderick’s hair is described as “wild” and of “Arabesque expression,” which the narrator is unable to connect “with any simple idea of humanity” (Poe 2003). Similarly, Roderick’s manner strikes the narrator with “an incoherence – an inconsistency,” and his voice is compared to that of “the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium” (Poe 2003), all of which mark his social difference as not understandable.

After the entombment of his sister, Roderick’s external madness intensifies: he roams with “unequal, and objectless step,” has a “more ghastly hue” of face, a “species of mad hilarity in his eyes,” a “restrained hysteria in his whole demeanor,” and speaks in a “gibbering murmur” (Poe 2003). But all of these are, as the narrator puts it, “the mere inexplicable vagaries of madness” (Poe 2003). When it comes to representing the internal process of mental breakdown, Poe (at least in this story) still only describes Roderick’s irrationality from an external and stereotypical position.

Roderick describes his condition as a “deplorable folly” that will force him to “abandon life and reason,” he is “enchained by certain superstitious impressions,” and suffers from “melancholy” and “hypochondria” (two terms associated with earlier misunderstandings of madness) (Poe 2003). The only time we see the irrational thought process represented is in Roderick’s monologue about entombing his sister alive, which uses dashes, italics, and capitalization to indicate a nervous desperation, as in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”.

In contrast, Gilman drops almost all of these external and stereotypical descriptions of madness in her story, focusing instead on a faithful rendition of irrational thought processes, in particular the narrator’s growing obsession with the yellow wallpaper. Early in the story, the narrator declares that she’s fond of her room, “all but that horrid wallpaper,” but within a few pages this statement is turned around; the narrator becomes fond of the room “perhaps because of the wallpaper.

It dwells in my mind so” (236). The wallpaper gradually takes over the narrator’s thought process, breaking into other observations without transition, as when the narrator looks out her window and sees “a lovely country, full of great elms and velvet meadows. This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern…” (235). Eventually she “follows that pattern about by the hour” until there are few passages in the text that are not about the wallpaper (238).

As her obsession grows, the narrator becomes paranoid that her husband and stepsister are “secretly effected by it,” and she’s thus “determined that nobody shall find [the pattern] out but myself” (239). Despite her original loathing of the wallpaper pattern, by the end of the story the narrator’s obsession is so consuming that she claims, “I don’t want to leave until I have found it out” (240). Instead of being directly told that the narrator is enchained by her impressions like Roderick Usher, we are more realistically shown those irrational impressions at work in the mind.

Another method for representing irrationality is to cast it against a more rational perspective, which both these stories do. Poe’s narrator, for instance, claims to rationally explain away the otherwise inexplicable events of “The Fall of the House of Usher” while documenting Roderick’s breakdown (Gruesser 2004). The house’s peculiar atmosphere “must have been a dream;” his nervousness is “due to the bewildering influence of the gloomy furniture;” the storm is “merely an electrical phenomena” (Poe 2003).

And yet the uncertainty of events displayed in this narrative unreliability suggests that the narrator might himself be going mad. After describing Roderick’s wild appearance, the narrator says, “it was no wonder that his condition terrified – that it effected me,” and begins to feel “the wild influences of [Roderick’s] own fantastic yet impressive superstitions” (Poe 2003). This inability to rely on his own perceptions causes the narrator to flee aghast when the house collapses, where a more rational or unaffected person might first summon the servants or police (Gruesser 2004).

According to John Gruesser, the challenge in Poe’s use of unreliability is that he sets reason in opposition to the supernatural, straddling the Gothic/Fantastic genre where supernatural events are more likely than their rational explanations. This supernatural possibility seems to lessen the question of whether madmen are always delusional or can speak the truth, which becomes central for Gilman’s story. “The Yellow Wallpaper” also uses a rational perspective in the character of her husband and physician John, who is “practical in the extreme.

He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition” (235). Not only does John explain away the unsettling nature of the house as a draught, but he also attempts to explain away the narrator’s mental illness, calling it “a temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency” (234). As we will see, this explanation of madness as merely nerves will become a large concern for 19th century discussions on mental illness, and as such comes off as far more scientifically realistic than explaining madness through the supernatural.

Gilman also has her narrator attempt to rationalize her own madness, beginning the story with her claim of being “ordinary people,” and continuing this attempt to rationalize even through her mental deterioration: “it is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness I suppose” (238). While this use of unreliable explanations is similar to Poe’s, it reads as more realistic because Gilman frames her story in a way that denies the Gothic discourse of supernatural explanations.

Despite its eventual medical ineffectuality, the label of “nerves” is one of the clearest literary representations of madness attempting to explain or deny its mental character. “True! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am;” claims the narrator of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “but why will you say that I am mad? ” (Poe 2003). The Usher family madness in “The Fall of the House of Usher” is likewise coded; Roderick attempts to pass off their “constitutional and… family evil” as a “mere nervous affection” (Poe 2003).

He has an excessive “nervous agitation… and acute bodily illness,” and “a morbid acuteness of the senses” that makes most food, garments, odors, light, and sounds intolerable (Poe 2003). Madeline is diagnosed with a “settled apathy, a gradual wasting away,” because whatever is actually wrong with her “long baffled the skill of her physicians” (Poe 2003). Whether or not these characters are actually mad, one gets the feeling that the word “nerves” is used by Poe to explain or make legible the Usher family condition for the mid-19th century reader, indicating that it may be a biological rather than moral or supernatural disorder.

The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” also articulates her condition as nervousness, but within the late-19th century occlusion of madness as merely nerves, this term seems to indicate less an explanation as much as an excuse or denial of any deeper mental problem. As the narrator says in what is easily read as a flippant tone, “I never used to be so sensitive, I think it is due to this nervous condition,” and “of course it is only nervousness” that causes her actions to require a greater effort (235).

Though her husband has told the narrator that her nervous case is not serious, she expresses a new dissatisfaction with this diagnoses; “these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing” (236). This almost ironic but clearly critical representation of nervous disorders marks a break from Poe’s story, but even more importantly indicates the struggle Gilman went through in her own life against the American medical industry’s changing view of mental illnesses.

Though “The Yellow Wallpaper” was written to specifically address the Rest Cure, as Thrailkill suggests, the story helped shift the medical paradigm from looking at the patient’s body to listening to their words (Thrailkill 2003). The story is permeated with this desire to talk beyond the traditional psychiatric model: not only is the narrator forbidden to write, but her physician husband only sees her physical improvements of “flesh and color,” paternally dismissing any of her objections (240).

To write, however, is the one thing the narrator consistently feels would make her well; it is a relief to “say what I feel and think”. Thrailkill offers a reading that Gilman’s narrator at first emulates Mitchell’s physiological approach in looking at the wallpaper, which then shifts to the articulation of a narrative surrounding the woman in the paper, essentially equating the narrator to a medical text (Thrailkill 2003).

We do not need to stretch so far however, as the story is already framed as a diary or journal, that is, it claims to be the expression of a person’s actual experience. Though the narrator has difficulty writing, she continues to write, honestly detailing the thoughts, feelings, and visions attending her mental breakdown in a manner that anticipates the 20th century psychological recognition that madness contains a truthful lucidity (Davison 2004).

A mentally unstable person’s journal thus represents exactly the kind of “irrelevant story” that can cure, and which any sympathetic reader can understand as a valid psychological experience of someone who is no longer seen as socially other or “mad, bad, and dangerous. ” Consequently, while Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” comes off as simply an entertaining story about some stereotypical madmen, Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is ultimately a psychologically real portrayal of the subjective experience of someone going mad.

Introduction

It will be critically analysed in this study whether the ruling of the House of Lords in ‘Howe (1987) 1 AC 417’ was acceptable and whether the notion that duress is not a defence to murder should continue to apply. Various academic opinion will be analysed and a review as to whether some change ought to be made will be considered. Thus, it will be demonstrated that although duress should not be a complete defence to murder, it should be a partial defence as there are some situations which lead to injustice on the basis that this defence is not available to them.

Main body

Duress is a common law defence that seeks to protect individuals that have been forced or compelled to commit a crime. The defence of duress provides an exception to the rule that a person shall be held responsible for any crimes they commit on the basis that they had not done so voluntarily. As the defence is open to abuse, caution needs to be taken by the Courts when allowing the defence to be submitted. Accordingly, restrictions are needed to ensure that the level of threat the defendant has been subjected to is not menial. Hence, as noted by Spain; the defence of duress “fails to recognise the reality that one will not need to be subjected to a specific type or level of threat for one’s will to be overborne.”[2] Furthermore, it is also important that the crime is not disproportionate to the threat in order for this defence to prove successful. This will prevent an abuse of the defence from occurring as individuals will not be able to take advantage of the defence in all circumstances.

An example of this can be seen in relation to murder where the defence of duress is not generally accepted by the Courts. This is because, it is difficult to persuade the Court that a person has been forced or compelled into committing a crime when the harm that has been caused, is greater than the harm that has been threated. In deciding whether a defendant can use this defence, nonetheless, the Courts will have to use the proportionality test, which is both subjective and objective. In R v Howe it was held that a jury should consider whether;

• a) the defendant acted in this way because he honestly believed that his life was in immediate danger;
• b) a reasonable person of the same characteristics of the defendant would have acted in the same way. Here, it was, nonetheless, found that duress could not be a defence to murder. This decision has been the subject of much controversy over the years with conflicting views as to whether the defence of duress should in fact apply to murder.

On the one hand, it is believed by Shankland that duress should serve as a valid defence to murder on the basis that a murder which has been committed as a result of duress should be distinguished from a murder that was pre-meditated. On the other hand, it was said by Toczek that defendants should not be able to rely upon the duress defence for murder as this could not be deemed a ‘reasonable’ belief as required by the Court in Howe.Accordingly, it would be difficult to establish that a person’s belief to commit murder was ‘reasonable’ on the basis that they were subjected to duress. The Court in the more recent case of R v Hasan agreed with the Howe decision and made it even more difficult for the defence of duress to be successfully raised in all criminal cases. Here, it was argued that rather than merely finding that the defendant had a ‘reasonable’ belief, it must be shown that they had an ‘actual’ belief in the efficacy of the threat which compelled the defendant to commit the act.

Arguably, it became apparent from this decision that rather than defendants demonstrating that they had a reasonable belief, they are now required to show that the reasonable belief was also a genuine one. The Law Commission have also expressed their concerns as to whether duress should apply to murder and have considered including duress as a partial defence to murder.This would mean that first degree murder could be reduced to second degree murder, whilst second degree murder could be reduced to manslaughter. Whilst this would provide some protection to those individuals who have genuinely feared for their own or families life in committing the crime, it would prevent the scope being broadened too far. Accordingly, it has been said that moral involuntariness should be excused and that regardless as to what crime the defendant had committed, duress should be capable of being used as a defence.Hence, it is said that the defendants fear or lack of courage should be given due consideration as these are central to the rational of the defendant.

Conclusion

Overall, it is evident that there are mixed opinions as to whether duress should be used as a defence to murder, yet whether this would broaden the scope too far is likely. This is because the defence would most likely be open to abuse if it could be used in circumstances such as this. Individuals would be capable of demonstrating that they had been subjected to duress in order to escape criminal liability for murder. This would be unjust in many situations as it cannot be said that the life of a human being is proportionate to a threat that has been made. Nevertheless, in order to ensure that complete liability is not imposed upon defendants in circumstances where they genuinely feared for their life, it could be said that duress should be used as a partial defence to murder. This would prevent defendants from completely escaping liability, yet it would provide the Courts with some leeway when considering certain cases that would require a defence, such as domestic violence victims.

References

1. E Spain., The Role of Emotions in Criminal Law Defences: Duress, Necessity and Lesser Evils, (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
2. The Law Commission., Murder, Manslaughter and Infanticide: Project 6 of the Ninth Programme of Law Reform; Homicide, (The Stationary Office, 2006).
3. G Williams., ‘Necessity: Duress of Circumstances or Moral Involuntariness?’ Common Law World Review, Volume 43, Issue 1, 1.
4. L Toczek., ‘A Case of Duress’ The New Law Journal, Volume 155, Issue 7173, 612.
5. M Sorarajah., ‘Duress and Murder in Commonwealth Criminal Law’ (1981) The International and Comparative Law Quarterly, Volume 30, No 3, 660-661.
6. R Shankland., ‘Duress and the Underlying Felony’ (2009) Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Volume 99, Issue 1227.

Edgar Allen Poe is a name that conjures up images of haunting dark rooms and dreary landscapes. His poems and short stories explore the inner workings of the human imagination, the parallelism of life and death, the fine line between sanity and madness, the delicate balance of beauty and terror, and the hesitation between a natural and a supernatural explanation of unusual events. “The Fall of the House of Usher” examines these themes in a collision and intermingling of manifold, complex circumstances.

Poe uses duality and mirror images, symbolism, and a Gothic tone to convey the terror and fear that overwhelms and finally destroys the House of Usher. Studying the characters and the connections established between them, the symbolism and duality throughout the story, and most importantly the way in which the story is told, provides insight into the deeper meanings and true significance of the story. A part of the terror of this story is its vagueness. Rather than directly exploring the internal causes of the Ushers’ illnesses, it presents these characters to the narrator and the reader as an impenetrable mystery.

While many have tried to decipher the twin motif, this paper serves to explore how the events effect the narrator, and in turn, effect the reader. As the reader tries to interpret the story and make sense of the strange events that unfold, the reader finds himself experiencing feelings that mirror the narrator’s. This is an often overlooked meaning and purpose to “The Fall of the House of Usher. ” A study of the opening paragraph is a crucial element to understanding the significance of the story.

The opening paragraph not only introduces the conflict between the natural and supernatural, but gives insight into the narrator’s reason for telling this story. First, it sets up an opposition between the narrator’s experience of a force that may be supernatural and his insistent interpretation of this experience as explainable according to obscure psychological laws or else illusory, the mere product of nerves. After struggling to rationalize his immediate “sense of insufferable gloom” upon merely glancing at the House of Usher, he acknowledges that worldly things can sometimes give shape to the mind.

He tries to change his perspective to shake his gloomy feeling, but looking into the tarn and seeing the reflection of the house provides no relief and instead deepens his terror. This experience contradicts his beliefs. The conflict between the reports of his senses and his interpretations of these reports persists when he reasons that being conscious that one is giving way to superstition accelerates the speed at which one gives way. This is “the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. Parallel to the narrator’s conflict is a subtle opposition that becomes increasingly stronger and important as the story progresses. Unlike many of Poe’s other works, the opening provides no statement of the narrator’s purpose in telling this story. Even though the narrator is never explicit about why he tells this story, he reveals his reasons indirectly from the very beginning. This narrator imagines a listener as conveyed by his conversational tone. The narrator mildly resists his own story, trying rhetorically to dissociate himself from it.

The frequency of his assertions of the present tense increases at crucial points in his narrative: when he recounts his perception of the atmosphere, when he discusses Usher’s artistic productions, and especially, when he reports Usher’s belief in the sentience of all things. This resistance suggests that he is telling this story to convince himself, or rather have the reader confirm that he is not mad. The purpose for the narrator’s visit to the Usher House is to alleviate Rodrick from his suffering by means of his cheerful disposition.

Upon discovering the physical similarities between Rodrick and the house, suggesting that both are essentially living corpses, alleviation seems futile. When Usher acknowledges these resemblances by asserting that the “physique” of the house affects the “morale” of his existence, he indicates that at the center of his malady is a growing dominance of the material world over his spirit, a world that includes both his house and his body. Rodrick’s house and body have become his prison.

Madeline’s presence later in the conversation triggers yet another unaccountable oppression and after finding Usher with his face buried in his hands, he feels helpless. Mid story consists of a succession of of images of Usher’s imprisonment in his world and of the narrator’s attempts to resist the oppressive feelings that attack him. Rather than attempting to change Rodrick’s point of view, the narrator only persists resistance to becoming “ushered. ” The narratology shifts focus to the image of Rodrick.

He proclaims his fear of going mad. In his mind, the house is causing him, body and soul, to mirror itself. The narrator, attempting to rationalize once again, concludes that Rodrick’s condition is the condition of his world. It cause is in the nature of things. Rodrick hesitantly admits “a more natural and far more palpable origin,” hence why he send for the narrator as a aversion. As the days go on, Rodrick entertains the narrator with art and poems, all of which the narrator observes reflect the polarities of Rodrick’s mental state.

As the narrator tells of his and Rodrick’s activities and of Rodrick’s behavior, his tone becomes increasingly desperate and his efforts to remind the reader of his presence, rather than just reporting the events, increase exponentially. He describes their artistic pursuits: “his long, improvised dirges will ring forever in my ears,” “I hold painfully in my mind,” “(vivid as their images now are before me). ” The narrator’s very efforts to escape into the present of the narration betray him, for what he wishes to escape in the past awaits him in the future.

Towards the end of the story, the narrator starts to mirror Rodrick. He appears to be telling his story to deny the significance upon which his story insists. As he resists his story, so his story resists him, refusing to take the shape he desires for it. His story mirrors the House of Usher. The narrator thus reveals his obsession. Could he convince his listener that what he has experienced is illusion, he might perhaps convince himself and so exorcise the story. He is compelled to tell his tale, but compelled by inner necessity to be free of the tale, to save himself.

After Madeline’s death, he claims he has been infected by Usher. After the account of Madeline’s burial, the narrator’s efforts at identifying with his listener are less frequent and less desperate. The death of Madeline is followed by the disappearance of all light from Usher’s eyes and by rhetorical hopelessness in the narrator. Usher roams without object from chamber to chamber and gazes “upon vacancy for long hours,” as if listening (95). Soon the narrator is doing the same.

When Rodrick enters the narrator’s room his “mad hilarity” appalls the narrator, but the narrator welcomes his presence rather than being alone. Usher has come to show him something, the peculiar storm outside, which the narrator at first thinks sublimely beautiful. Upon further observation, he concludes that Usher must not look at it. He reaches this conclusion when he notices that the seemingly living whirlwind appears imprisoned within “the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion” (96).

For the first time, the narrator reports direct resistance to Rodrick’s perception and a direct attempt to explain it away as “merely electrical phenomena not uncommon” or as the result of the miasma of the tarn. As a diversion, he suggests reading. As the narrator attempts to entertain Rodrick with a hopeful sounding story he is not diverted. As Usher’s arrival in the narrator’s room mocks the narrator’s earlier arrival at Usher, and as the revelation of the storm emphatically affirms Usher’s world view, so Madeline’s escape from the tomb mocks “The Mad Trist,” and her appearance turns the screw of the horror of Usher’s world view. The Mad Trist,” while it may, as the narrator asserts, lack imagination, speaks rather directly to Rodrick’s despair. The story, in the portion the narrator tells, is of the reconquest of a palace of gold, which had been reduced by a dragon into a hermit’s hut, a hut with most of the characteristics of the haunted palace of Usher’s poem. Ethelred’s progress, then, suggests the possibility that King might retake his lost kingdom and don again the purple for which he was born.

However, in the background is the opposite horror, the echoing series of events leading up to the destruction of the metaphorical king, Rodrick, and his palace. Madeline’s escape from her tomb is a mockery of the recovery of reason. Soon the narrators surrounded by dualities: the twins, the reelings, the usherings, the collapses, the doublings of storm and house. He flees, but as the his rhetoric has already revealed, he cannot escape. He is infected. The House of Usher utters him with its last breath, and he is expelled into a space identical in meaning with those he has left.

Were the narrator speaking rather than being spoken, he might seize his last opportunity to assert that with the destruction of the house and the appearance of the natural light of the moon, Usher’s disease disappears from the earth. But it is clear from the manner of his telling as well as from his vision of the moon that the narrator has not yet accomplished this exorcism. The moon insists upon being unnatural, “a wild light … a gleam so unusual … the full, setting, and blood-red moon,” which bursts upon his sight. Usher is dead and yet, in the narrator, Usher lives on. Turn where he might, he sees only Usher.

In the effort to throw off this burden, he tells his story, asking his implied listener to confirm his fruitless assertions that his experience was illusory, but in the very act of telling, he is again caught up in the compelling vision of Madeline’s return and the doubled collapse of the house. Implicit in his attempts at persuasion has been the promise that the tale would come to an end and that his unaccountable experiences would be explained. The final image of the tarn’s waters closing over the fragments of the house violates probability, and the narrator offers no explanation for it.

If the opposition between the narrator’s rational explanations and his unaccountable experiences is to be resolved, the reader must do so without the help of the narrator, and the immediately available alternatives are not satisfactory. The reader’s natural response is to re read or relieve the text, trying to rationalize what has just been presented, thus mirroring the role of the narrator. As he has failed in his pursuit to alleviate Usher from his madness, the reader in turn fails to make sense of the narrators experience.