You may find this rubric/checklist helpful as you prepare your final paper:
topic related to “crime and punishment”
pursuing your working thesis regarding “the criminal mind”
thesis focused and clearly stated in the first paragraph of the paper
each paragraph provides support for your thesis
using one or more criminal characters we have studied (fictional or non-fictional, or both)
incorporating quotations from the texts you chose to use
providing appropriate citations for quotations
providing a Works Cited list at the end of the paper
check that you have the appropriate word count
carefully proofread before submitting for errors in spelling, punctuation, or grammar
and, don’t forget a title!
THE WORKING THESIS THAT YOU WILL CHOOSE TO GO OFF OF WILL BE BELOW: (YOU WILL CHOOSE ONE)
“Inside the Criminal Mind,” by Dr. Stanton Samenow, is a highly regarded text in the field of criminal psychology. Based on many decades of experience, Dr. Samenow has identified characteristics of a “criminal mind” – many of which are applicable to the literary characters we are examining in this course. According to Samenow, the criminal . .
– thirsts for excitement by doing what is forbidden
n – needs to feel unique, powerful; sets himself apart, bullying others
n – is competitive: an arrogant winner or a revenge-seeking loser
n as a child, seeks to prove himself while struggling with carefully concealed fears
n to him, reputation is all important; will turn violent if feels his self-image threatened
n violence is his way of gaining, or regaining, control
n l l ies as a way of life, in order to preserve his self-image, for a sense of power over others; hides behind a mask of secrecy that few if any ever penetrate
n has no concept of obligation, rarely keeps promises; although there is an urgency to his every demand, he is none too quick to comply with request made of others
n takes, but rarely gives; has an inflated self-image, assumes people will do his bidding
n does not know true friendship, trust, love, loyalty, teamwork
n t there is a sensitivity and gentleness that is as sincere as his selfishness and destructiveness; he has a Jekyll & Hyde personality
n s scorns people who are hardworking and honest
n exploits people who are kind and trusting
n may be sentimental but rarely considerate; altruistic acts have sinister motives
n has little if any remorse,
n but knows right from wrong
n despite his actions, considers himself a good person
n i is rational, calculating, deliberate – chooses criminal peers and criminal behavior
n r rarely does career criminal stick to one type of crime
n c criminal behavior has its precedent in thoughts (of the crime)
n was sneaky and defiant, lying to parents; he gravitated toward adventurous, older kids; his crime is caused by conflicts that are rooted in childhood and remain unresolved.
BELOW WILL BE THE CRIMINAL CHARACTER THAT YOU WILL USE FOR THE ASSIGNMENT:
1. DOSTOEVSKY(SMALL EXCERPT BELOW) AND FEEL FREE TO DO A LITTLE BACKGROUND RESEARCH
CHAPTER 1
On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. Bridge.
He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase. His garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house, and was more like a cupboard than a room. The landlady, who provided him with garret, dinners, and attendance, lived on the floor below, and every time he went out he was obliged to pass her kitchen, the door of which invariably stood open. And each time he passed, the young man had a sick, frightened feeling, which made him scowl and feel ashamed. He was hopelessly in debt to his landlady, and was afraid of meeting her.
This was not because he was cowardly and abject, quite the contrary; but for some time past, he had been in an over-strained, irritable condition, verging on hypochondria. He had become so completely absorbed in himself, and isolated from his fellows that he dreaded meeting, not only his landlady, but any one at all. He was crushed by poverty, but the anxieties of his position had of late ceased to weigh upon him. He had given up attending to matters of practical importance; he had lost all desire to do so. Nothing that any landlady could do had a real terror for him. But to be stopped on the stairs, to be forced to listen to her trivial, irrelevant gossip, to pestering demands for payment, threats and complaints, and to rack his brains for excuses, to prevaricate, to lie–no, rather than that, he would creep down the stairs like a cat and slip out unseen.
This evening, however, on coming out into the street, he became acutely aware of his fears.
“I want to attempt a thing like that and am frightened by these trifles,” he thought, with an odd smile. “Hm . . . yes, all is in a man’s hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that’s an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most. . . . But I am talking too much. It’s because I chatter that I do nothing. Or perhaps it is that I chatter because I do nothing. I’ve learned to chatter this last month, lying for days together in my den thinking . . . of Jack the Giant-killer. Why am I going there now? Am I capable of that? Is that serious? It is not serious at all. It’s simply a fantasy to amuse myself; a plaything! Yes, maybe it is a plaything.”
The heat in the street was terrible: and the airlessness, the bustle and the plaster, scaffolding, bricks, and dust all about him, and that special Petersburg stench, so familiar to all who are unable to get out of town in summer–all worked painfully upon the young man’s already overwrought nerves. The insufferable stench from the pot-houses, which are particularly numerous in that part of the town, and the drunken men whom he met continually, although it was a working day, completed the revolting misery of the picture. An expression of the profoundest disgust gleamed for a moment in the young man’s refined face. He was, by the way, exceptionally handsome, above the average in height, slim, well-built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair. Soon he sank into deep thought, or more accurately speaking into a complete blankness of mind; he walked along not observing what was about him and not caring to observe it. From time to time, he would mutter something, from the habit of talking to himself, to which he had just confessed. At these moments he would become conscious that his ideas were sometimes in a tangle and that he was very weak; for two days he had scarcely tasted food.
He was so badly dressed that even a man accustomed to shabbiness would have been ashamed to be seen in the street in such rags. In that quarter of the town, however, scarcely any short-coming in dress would have created surprise. Owing to the proximity of the Hay Market, the number of establishments of bad character, the preponderance of the trading and working class population crowded in these streets and alleys in the heart of Petersburg, types so various were to be seen in the streets that no figure, however queer, would have caused surprise. But there was such accumulated bitterness and contempt in the young man’s heart that, in spite of all the fastidiousness of youth, he minded his rags least of all in the street. It was a different matter when he met with acquaintances or with former fellow students, whom, indeed, he disliked meeting at any time. And yet when a drunken man who, for some unknown reason, was being taken somewhere in a huge waggon dragged by a heavy dray horse, suddenly shouted at him as he drove past: “Hey there, German hatter!” bawling at the top of his voice and pointing at him–the young man stopped suddenly and clutched tremulously at his hat. It was a tall round hat from Zimmerman’s, but completely worn out, rusty with age, all torn and bespattered, brimless and bent on one side in a most unseemly fashion. Not shame, however, but quite another feeling akin to terror had overtaken him.
“I knew it,” he muttered in confusion, “I thought so! That’s the worst of all! Why, a stupid thing like this, the most trivial detail might spoil the whole plan. Yes, my hat is too noticeable. . . . It looks absurd and that makes it noticeable. . . . With my rags I ought to wear a cap, any sort of old pancake, but not this grotesque thing. Nobody wears such a hat, it would be noticed a mile off, it would be remembered. . . . What matters is that people would remember it, and that would give them a clue. For this business one should be as little conspicuous as possible. . . . Trifles, trifles are what matter! Why, it’s just such trifles that always ruin everything. . . .”
He had not far to go; he knew indeed how many steps it was from the gate of his lodging house: exactly seven hundred and thirty. He had counted them once when he had been lost in dreams. At the time he had put no faith in those dreams and was only tantalising himself by their hideous but daring recklessness. Now, a month later, he had begun to look upon them differently, and, in spite of the monologues in which he jeered at his own impotence and indecision, he had involuntarily come to regard this “hideous” dream as an exploit to be attempted, although he still did not realise this himself. He was positively going now for a “rehearsal” of his project, and at every step his excitement grew more and more violent.
With a sinking heart and a nervous tremor, he went up to a huge house which on one side looked on to the canal, and on the other into the street. This house was let out in tiny tenements and was inhabited by working people of all kinds–tailors, locksmiths, cooks, Germans of sorts, girls picking up a living as best they could, petty clerks, etc. There was a continual coming and going through the two gates and in the two court-yards of the house. Three or four door-keepers were employed on the building. The young man was very glad to meet none of them, and at once slipped unnoticed through the door on the right, and up the staircase. It was a back staircase, dark and narrow, but he was familiar with it already, and knew his way, and he liked all these surroundings: in such darkness even the most inquisitive eyes were not to be dreaded.
“If I am so scared now, what would it be if it somehow came to pass that I were really going to do it?” he could not help asking himself as he reached the fourth storey. There his progress was barred by some porters who were engaged in moving furniture out of a flat. He knew that the flat had been occupied by a German clerk in the civil service, and his family. This German was moving out then, and so the fourth floor on this staircase would be untenanted except by the old woman. “That’s a good thing anyway,” he thought to himself, as he rang the bell of the old woman’s flat. The bell gave a faint tinkle as though it were made of tin and not of copper. The little flats in such houses always have bells that ring like that. He had forgotten the note of that bell, and now its peculiar tinkle seemed to remind him of something and to bring it clearly before him. . . . He started, his nerves were terribly overstrained by now. In a little while, the door was opened a tiny crack: the old woman eyed her visitor with evident distrust through the crack, and nothing could be seen but her little eyes, glittering in the darkness. But, seeing a number of people on the landing, she grew bolder, and opened the door wide. The young man stepped into the dark entry, which was partitioned off from the tiny kitchen. The old woman stood facing him in silence and looking inquiringly at him. She was a diminutive, withered-up old woman of sixty, with sharp malignant eyes and a sharp little nose. Her colourless, somewhat grizzled hair was thickly smeared with oil, and she wore no kerchief over it. Round her thin long neck, which looked like a hen’s leg, was knotted some sort of flannel rag, and, in spite of the heat, there hung flapping on her shoulders, a mangy fur cape, yellow with age. The old woman coughed and groaned at every instant. The young man must have looked at her with a rather peculiar expression, for a gleam of mistrust came into her eyes again.
“Raskolnikov, a student, I came here a month ago,” the young man made haste to mutter, with a half-bow, remembering that he ought to be more polite.
“I remember, my good sir, I remember quite well your coming here,” the old woman said distinctly, still keeping her inquiring eyes on his face.
“And here . . . I am again on the same errand,” Raskolnikov continued, a little disconcerted and surprised at the old woman’s mistrust. “Perhaps she is always like that though, only I did not notice it the other time,” he thought with an uneasy feeling.
The old woman paused, as though hesitating; then stepped on one side, and pointing to the door of the room, she said, letting her visitor pass in front of her:
“Step in, my good sir.”
The little room into which the young man walked, with yellow paper on the walls, geraniums and muslin curtains in the windows, was brightly lighted up at that moment by the setting sun.
“So the sun will shine like this then too!” flashed as it were by chance through Raskolnikov’s mind, and with a rapid glance he scanned everything in the room, trying as far as possible to notice and remember its arrangement. But there was nothing special in the room. The furniture, all very old and of yellow wood, consisted of a sofa with a huge bent wooden back, an oval table in front of the sofa, a dressing-table with a looking-glass fixed on it between the windows, chairs along the walls and two or three halfpenny prints in yellow frames, representing German damsels with birds in their hands–that was all. In the corner a light was burning before a small ikon. Everything was very clean; the floor and the furniture were brightly polished; everything shone.
“Lizaveta’s work,” thought the young man. There was not a speck of dust to be seen in the whole flat.
“It’s in the houses of spiteful old widows that one finds such cleanliness,” Raskolnikov thought again, and he stole a curious glance at the cotton curtain over the door leading into another tiny room, in which stood the old woman’s bed and chest of drawers and into which he had never looked before. These two rooms made up the whole flat.
“What do you want?” the old woman said severely, coming into the room and, as before, standing in front of him so as to look him straight in the face.
“I’ve brought something to pawn here,” and he drew out of his pocket an old-fashioned flat silver watch, on the back of which was engraved a globe; the chain was of steel.
“But the time is up for your last pledge. The month was up the day before yesterday.”
“I will bring you the interest for another month; wait a little.”
“But that’s for me to do as I please, my good sir, to wait or to sell your pledge at once.”
“How much will you give me for the watch, Alyona Ivanovna?”
“You come with such trifles, my good sir, it’s scarcely worth anything. I gave you two roubles last time for your ring and one could buy it quite new at a jeweller’s for a rouble and a half.”
“Give me four roubles for it, I shall redeem it, it was my father’s. I shall be getting some money soon.”
“A rouble and a half, and interest in advance, if you like!”
“A rouble and a half!” cried the young man.
“Please yourself”–and the old woman handed him back the watch. The young man took it, and was so angry that he was on the point of going away; but checked himself at once, remembering that there was nowhere else he could go, and that he had had another object also in coming.
“Hand it over,” he said roughly.
The old woman fumbled in her pocket for her keys, and disappeared behind the curtain into the other room. The young man, left standing alone in the middle of the room, listened inquisitively, thinking. He could hear her unlocking the chest of drawers.
“It must be the top drawer,” he reflected. “So she carries the keys in a pocket on the right. All in one bunch on a steel ring. . . . And there’s one key there, three times as big as all the others, with deep notches; that can’t be the key of the chest of drawers . . . then there must be some other chest or strong-box . . . that’s worth knowing. Strong-boxes always have keys like that . . . but how degrading it all is.”
The old woman came back.
“Here, sir: as we say ten copecks the rouble a month, so I must take fifteen copecks from a rouble and a half for the month in advance. But for the two roubles I lent you before, you owe me now twenty copecks on the same reckoning in advance. That makes thirty-five copecks altogether. So I must give you a rouble and fifteen copecks for the watch. Here it is.”
2. THOREAU (SMALL EXCERPT BELOW) FEEL FREE TO DO A LITTLE BACKGROUND REASEARCH
Excerpt From Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Found in McDougal Littell’s The Language of Literature: American Literature (California
Edition)
(from) “Where I Lived and What I lived For”
When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my nights as well as days
there, which, by accident, was on Independence day, or the fourth of July, 1845, my house was
not finished for winter, but was merely a defense against the rain, without plastering or chimney,
the walls being of rough weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at night.
The upright white hewn studs and freshly planed door and window casings gave it a clean and
airy look, especially in the morning when its timbers were saturated with dew, so that I fancied
that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them….
I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord
and somewhat higher than it, in the midst of an extensive wood between that town and known to
fame, Concord Battle Ground; but I was so low in the woods that the opposite shore, half a mile
off, like the rest, covered with wood, was my most distant horizon. For the first week, whenever
I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom
far above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly
clothing of mist, and here and there by degrees, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily
withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal
conventicler. The very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later into the day than usual, as on the
sides of mountains….
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,
and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had
not lived. I did not wish to live what was no life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice
resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of
life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath
and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to
be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the
world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in
my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether
it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that is the chief end of man
here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men;
like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue
has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail.
An honest man has hardly need to count more that his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may
add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as
two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep
your accounts on your thumbnail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the
clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has
to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, be dead
reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of
three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce
other things in proportion…. Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?
Be sure to provide a parenthetical citation for each quotation!!!
