How much of literature depends on undiagnosed sociopathy?

Better question: Does conflict in classic children’s literature depend on undiagnosed sociopathy?

The stories we read as kids—and, for many of us, continue to enjoy as adults—often feature the child protagonists being treated, well, badly by the adults around them. From Tom Sawyer to Harry Potter, from Hansel and Gretel to Oliver Twist, stories in which kids are disrespected, abused, even subject to being fattened for the slaughter, are popular. Perhaps that’s because kids tend to live in a world they don’t understand, but which often seems hostile to them?

Some of these stories depict characters like Voldemort, or Hansel and Gretel’s cannibal witch, who are just deranged and evil. But almost all of these stories also feature “normal” people who don’t receive a villain’s comeuppance, who are also pretty awful to the kids. The Dursleys in Harry Potter, not to mention a lot of Hogwarts faculty members, and the stepmother in—well, damn near any fairy tale. Anderson and the Brothers Grimm obviously were not concerned about their fiction being inclusive for blended families. (The Stepmothers sometimes did receive comeuppance.)

Voldemort and the witch are psychopaths, obviously. But do these stories not also depend on a subtler kind of evil, an evil accepted by the “normal” and well-meaning adults in the children’s lives–poor, dim adults that they are? By the standards of the times of Twain, the Grimms or Dickens, such people, who loved God but hated children, may have been considered “upstanding citizens.” But were they, in fact, sociopaths?

A sociopath is popularly defined as a person who lacks a conscience or empathy, but sociopathy is just that—a popular term, not listed in the DSM V, which is the authoritative listing of recognized mental disorders. What is in the DSM V is Antisocial Personality Disorder, and it aligns with the popular concept of sociopathy, being “characterized by a long term pattern of disregard for, or violation of, the rights of others. A low moral sense or conscience is often apparent, as well as a history of crime, legal problems, or impulsive and aggressive behavior.” (Wikipedia)

A site called Litreactor, a professional development site for writers, lists “Literature’s Ten Most Disturbing Sociopaths.” Their list includes gimmes like Hannibal Lecter and Alex from A Clockwork Orange. More subtly, it includes Iago from Shakespeare’s “Othello.” Its number one spot goes to the anti-hero of American Psycho, suggesting to me (not for the first time) that all an author needs to do to get his book called “literature” is kiss the right asses and cause the right people to say, “Oooh! I’ve never seen that done in lit’rature before!” (American Psycho is not a good work of fiction, much less literature; it’s the only book I’ve ever been literally tempted to touch with a lit match.)

But must a sociopath in literature be someone who winds up responsible for disaster on a grand scale? A mass murderer, or a jackass who causes a decent guy to kill his loving wife, leaving a trail of ancillary bodies in his wake? A despicable con artist? Indeed, does the author have to have intended to create a character with a mental disorder?

Is it possible that characters whose creators considered them “everyday folk,” “normal,” even common people, were, by today’s popular definition, sociopaths? Here I’m focusing more on their lack of conscience and empathy than on their predilection for murder, theft or deception. There are sociopaths, after all, who never commit murder, and who never lie to anyone but themselves.

The thought came to me while listening to, of all things, Anne of Green Gables. I mean, come on, how much more idyllic can a life be than that of “Anne with an E?” Anne is a dreamer and a misfit, whose vocabulary and wild imaginings leave the adults and children around her with their mouths agape. She likes to dress up, she likes to read out loud in public, she likes to pretend.

So where does the sociopathy come in? I thought of it when hearing this passage, which describes the reaction of a neighbor upon meeting—for the first time, mind you—a scared little girl who has just been adopted by her friends:

“Well, they didn’t pick you for your looks, that’s sure and certain,” was Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s emphatic comment. Mrs. Rachel was one of those delightful and popular people who pride themselves on speaking their mind without fear or favor. “She’s terrible skinny and homely, Marilla. Come here, child, and let me have a look at you. Lawful heart, did any one ever see such freckles? And hair as red as carrots! Come here, child, I say.”

Mrs. Rachel Lynde turns out, in the long run, to be a pretty decent person, if a bit narrow-minded and headstrong. I wouldn’t call her a sociopath based on all readers know of her. But I would call out her tendency to be cruel to people, especially children, as an anti-social habit. I find this especially true when you consider that she believes she has the right to say crass and hurtful things, and that children should not be entitled to respond in any way, or let on that their feelings have been hurt. In other words, children should have no feelings, or none that matter.

This is a sociopath’s dream—and entire class of people who are not entitled to feel. Because, you know empathy is hard, and sociopaths should not have to worry so much about hurting the feelings of others. It keeps them from feeling good about themselves. Which, I imagine, is also hard, although I’ve never been inside the mind of a sociopath to find out.

I have long experience of adults who think that children’s feelings don’t matter when it comes to adults speaking their minds. The old adage, “Children should be seen and not heard,” which I despised as a child, points to a belief, ingrained in our society when I was growing up, that children are not people. They are robots who, like computers, we expect to follow instructions, especially instructions they are not given. “They’re just supposed to know better!” I’ve heard parents say about children who were behaving exactly the way the parents did.

Have things improved? Not really. Mine was a generation of kids expected to be regimented, to suppress our egos, to not have feelings, at least none that showed. Now we have, “Children should be seen and heard, but not brought to the table with the adults.” Now we have a generation of kids who expect the world to move the hell out of their way while they run screaming down its streets, observed by chuckling parents who are, deep down, afraid of their children and unable to influence their behavior. But they’re still given their own, separate world, with little meaningful interaction with the adults around them. Because children should interact with children. Young adults should interact with young adults. Seniors should interact with seniors. Only at the intersection of parent and child should the generations meet, and there parents must observe all the timid care of ambassadors of rival powers.

In both cases, you have children who aren’t being treated as developing adults. Children are property to be bragged about and fought over, until they reach a “certain age.” And then the adults in their life wonder why age has not just magically transformed them into stable, mentally and emotionally healthy, productive members of society.

Adults don’t get kids, even though they used to be kids. And that’s probably because adults don’t get themselves. But a lot of literary examples don’t really seem to question why the adults are hostile or cruel—they just are. Oliver Twist’s Fagin uses boys to steal and make him a dishonest living, and he comes off as a creepy potential child molester in the bargain. The Artful Dodger is a Fagin-in-training—more style, but just as predatory. Bill Sikes is a victim of abuse and a former subject of Fagin’s misuse… and a killer. The cycle of abuse is displayed, but not questioned or explained. Not that that’s a flaw in Dickens’s work. The absence leaves us a lot to talk about.

Similarly, Jane Eyre is considered a burden by her relatives, the Reed family, who mistreat her, as Cinderella was mistreated by her step-sisters. This suggests that it’s a kind of tribalism that causes children to be treated with hostility, but tribalism doesn’t explain the uncaring Brocklehurst, head of the boarding school Jane attends. Brocklehurst, in the 1940s film adaptation, makes Jane and her best friend walk in the pouring rain as punishment for having opinions, leading to the death of the best friend.

Of course, these examples lean heavily on the idea of not caring about someone’s feelings, and being arrogant about that lack of sympathy—usually because the non-carer is so convinced of his or her own moral rectitude and status. Maybe that’s not sociopathy. Maybe that’s just meanness.

But it’s also illustrative of borrowing one’s status and self-worth almost entirely from one’s age, one’s relative advantage over another. And most of these examples come from England, or its child-cultures in the U.S. and Canada. So that sense of status is likely rooted in the very class and hierarchy-conscious nature of our societies.

The most important point, for me, is that that status is underserved. You are not better than someone just because you’ve lived longer. Just as it’s idiotic to expect a child to become a successful adult just by aging, it’s idiotic to assume that a person of a certain age has become a successful adult. Both deny the feelings and individuality of the person.

The fact that someone knows less than you do, or has not had the chance to live most of their life yet, does not make their feelings unimportant. Scratch the surface of someone who believes otherwise, and I think you’ll find a person who was badly treated themselves as a child, and who, rather than taking away the lesson, “That’s a terrible way to treat people,” took away the lesson, “When I’m grown up, I can act like that too.”

They key to breaking this cycle and ending this behavior is recognizing that feelings, emotions, are a legitimate function of the human brain. We have them for a reason. They’re a positive, a value-added, if we understand them and if we recognize that they exist in others just as they do in us. Those of us who mistreat children, ignoring their feelings or pretending they’re somehow not valid, would mistreat everyone if they thought they could get away with it. At the core of these people’s being, at the root of their behavior, is that they reject all feelings in others and that they do not understand their own.

Feelings are hard. Individuality is hard. Both make up who we are. Reject their existence is mental laziness, and not the sign of a successful adult.