73 pages • 2 hours read
Caleb CarrThe Alienist
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Free Will and Determinism
Content Warning: This section includes references to graphic descriptions of violence against children and the commercial sexual exploitation of children. Furthermore, because the novel is set in 1896, it includes dialogue that reflects the language of that era.
The psychological debate between free will and determinism revolves around one fundamental question: Are human beings free to choose their courses of action? Proponents of free will argue in the affirmative, while advocates of determinism insist that human behavior is a product of factors more complex than mere choice. The American philosopher William James breathed new life into this old debate in 1884, at Harvard Divinity School, with a lecture titled “The Dilemma of Determinism.” In the lecture, James argues against determinism as leading into an amoral abyss in which the powerful can justify any cruelty by claiming that it could not have been otherwise—an argument that later seemed to anticipate the ideologically driven horrors of the 20th century. In The Alienist, Dr. Kreizler advances a semi-deterministic view of behavior that emphasizes habits and assumptions forged in childhood, often through trauma. This view guides Kreizler and his team of investigators as they hunt for a serial killer, but it also brings them into direct conflict with powerful people who regard determinism as a threat to the established social order.
The most dramatic illustration of this conflict occurs when Kreizler and Moore are forced at gunpoint into a hospital ambulance and then driven to the home of J. P. Morgan, New York City’s most powerful financier. Morgan himself is horrified to learn of the abduction, apologizes to Kreizler and Moore, and appears open to hearing Kreizler’s view of things. When Kreizler explains his psychological theories, Anthony Comstock, the irritable and self-righteous postal inspector, interrupts to exclaim, “Rank determinism!” (301). Comstock regards determinism as incompatible with freedom, for it implies, at least to his mind, that human beings are not accountable for their actions. Kreizler assures Morgan, however, that “every man is responsible before the law for his actions” except in rare cases where genuine insanity prevails, and Kreizler has “no argument” with freedom “as a political or legal concept,” though the “psychological debate” happens to be “far more complex” (301).
This exchange between and among Kreizler, Comstock, and Morgan is key to understanding why powerful people bristled at deterministic theories. While Morgan does not share Comstock’s moralizing zealotry, the great financier nonetheless explains to Kreizler that there are large and volatile forces at work in America, that immigration is changing both the city and the country at a faster rate than anyone can process, and that the US economy will not be able to survive such changes if it is “retarded by foolish political ideas born in the ghettos of Europe,” ideas such as socialism and communism (306). Since these ideas diminish the role of individual freedom in society, they might gain traction and upset the social order if theories such as Kreizler’s prove tenable.
On balance, however, The Alienist presents the free will versus determinism debate as more nuanced than dichotomous. Kreizler, for instance, prefers the word “context” to “determinism,” for while the latter implies a direct and irresistible causal relationship between experience and behavior, the former merely acknowledges an individual’s unique view of the world. For instance, while encouraging Moore to help her continue the investigation without Kreizler, Sara tells her colleague to “[r]emember what Kreizler himself taught us—context” (372). When Kreizler asks Paul Kelly why the gangster takes an interest in the murder investigation, Kelly jokes that perhaps Kreizler “could find something in the—the context of my life that would explain it” (278).
Furthermore, Kreizler’s friends and supporters do not embrace his theories without reservation. Roosevelt met Kreizler at Harvard in the 1870s, when Kreizler, then a graduate student, engaged in a public debate with Professor William James, the famous philosopher and proponent of free will. Roosevelt initially chafed at Kreizler’s theories and sided with James. As police commissioner 20 years later, however, Roosevelt proved that he “possessed a heart and a mind expansive enough” to entrust Kreizler with the investigation (486). Likewise, after viewing the mutilated body of young Ali ibn-Ghazi, Sara struggles to accept Kreizler's assertion that such butchery is the product of childhood trauma on an otherwise sane mind. Even Moore, Kreizler’s closest confidante, loses his composure when the now subdued murderer Beecham behaves like a frightened child, for in that moment Moore cannot reconcile such behavior with the adult perpetrator of savage crimes.
Police Corruption and Brutality
Kreizler’s investigation would never have occurred were it not for the leadership of Theodore Roosevelt, and Roosevelt would never have become president of the board of police commissioners were it not for the New York City police department’s appalling record of corruption, as well as its toxic relationship with the immigrant population in the tenements. From the moment Georgio Santorelli’s body is discovered atop the western anchor of the Williamsburg Bridge, The Alienist makes it clear that the police never even bother to investigate such crimes. Roosevelt and Kreizler, therefore, face not only a determined and capable killer but an old order inside the police department that does not want to see Kreizler’s investigation succeed.
The symbol of this old order is ex-inspector Thomas Byrnes, Roosevelt’s corrupt predecessor, “a shadowy man who had amassed a large fortune during his tenure” (58). Byrnes appears as the architect of the abduction that brings Kreizler and Moore to J. P. Morgan’s home on Madison Avenue, where Byrnes assails Kreizler’s methods and insists that there is no need to solve the murders, for the immigrants need only to be told that they must stay in line, obey the law, and bad things will not happen to them. When Byrnes leans over Moore’s chair in a threatening manner, Moore notes that “[i]t was impossible not to remember at such a moment that you were dealing with a man who’d personally beaten dozens of suspected and de facto criminals senseless”—that Byrnes himself had coined the phrase “the third degree” to describe his own interrogation tactics (303). No one was more interested than Byrnes in seeing the “cowboy police commissioner” Roosevelt fail (304).
While Byrnes both directed and personified the police department’s old order, The Alienist features numerous instances of police corruption at every level. When Moore and Marcus appear at the Golden Rule Pleasure Club, which caters to men with a fetish for young boys dressed as girls, the club’s “madam,” Scotch Ann, complains that “I already pay two precinct captains five hundred bucks a month each to let me stay open” (172). Moore later spots Paul Kelly outside his New Brighton Dance Hall, accompanied by “a police sergeant—in uniform—who was laughing and counting a wad of money” (477). At the scene of Georgio Santorelli’s murder and mutilation, when a police sergeant named Flynn expresses reservations about Commissioner Roosevelt’s order to bring Biff Ellison to police headquarters for questioning the next day, an indignant Roosevelt turns to Flynn and asks, “Is Mr. Ellison not one of your primary sources of graft” (18)?
Everywhere in the novel’s version of New York, there is evidence of the loss of authority that comes with rampant corruption. Unable to claim credibly that they represent the law, the police can command obedience only through intimidation. In the tenements and elsewhere, law-enforcement figures inspire reactions ranging from mockery and contempt to sheer hatred. After Sergeant Flynn harasses a defiant Stevie Taggert, Moore jokes with Stevie that “[s]tupidity goes with the leather helmet” (13). Moore later describes his colleague Marcus Isaacson as “dogged as any detective I’d met” and “considerably more intelligent” (170). At Sing Sing Prison, inmate Jesse Pomeroy startles Kreizler and Moore by drawing a sharp piece of glass from his boot and then barring the door, but Pomeroy assures them that he only wants to “have a little fun with that big idiot outside,” a reference to a prison guard named Lasky (237). While Pomeroy taunts Lasky from inside the room, Lasky beats down the door, disarms Pomeroy, and then begins pounding on the inmate with his fists, prompting Kreizler to intervene on Pomeroy’s behalf and yell, “It’s got to stop, Lasky!” (238). Outside the Santorellis’ tenement on the Lower East Side, a German-speaking resident overhears that Mr. Santorelli has been injured and reacts with anger: “Damned cops. I hate those damned guineas, but I’ll tell you, I hate cops more!” (80).
The Alienist is not anti-police. Roosevelt, Sara, and the Isaacsons are all members of the police department, and together they represent an ideal for how policing should operate, serving as a counterpoint to the corruption, brutality, and resistance to reform seen in the city’s police force more broadly. The depiction of the police department in the book illustrates what happens when an organization entrusted with power on behalf of the people instead uses that power to serve its own ends. The department’s historic corruption and brutality, however, meant that children in the New York City of 1896 could be purchased as sexual commodities and that the murders of immigrant children were never investigated.
Exploitation of Children
All the 1896 murder victims in The Alienist are children—young boys, in fact, who wear makeup and girls’ clothing and survive by selling their bodies to adult men. Even for children who did not suffer such degrading, traumatic, and gruesome fates, The Alienist describes a late-19th-century world in which the modern concept of childhood did not exist, and children—especially those of the lower social classes—were seen merely as especially powerless adults and easily exploited.
Moore finds the plight of the children deeply unsettling. When he meets Joseph at the Golden Rule Pleasure Club, for instance, he tries to convince the boy, no more than 10 years old, to leave the club and seek refuge at the Kreizler Institute, but the boy—given his experience—has no faith in institutions of any kind. Moreover, “Joseph’s decision was unappealable,” for no law or government agency existed to protect him because “childhood has never been viewed by most Americans as a separate and special stage of growth” requiring special protections (180). The murder of 13-year-old Georgio Santorelli prompts similar reflections. As he looks toward the “dark, miserable tenement ocean” to the west of Williamsburg Bridge, Moore laments the fact that children such as Santorelli are “more completely on their own than anyone unfamiliar with the New York City ghettos of 1896 could possibly imagine” (19). When Moore and Sara visit the Santorellis’ tenement building, they find a crying baby, covered in its own feces, lying unattended in the dark hallway. Nor did the city’s self-styled moral crusaders seem to notice the worst of the abuses. After days spent pursuing leads on the killer through charity societies, a “hostile” and “cynical” Moore observes that “the only group of outcasts in the city” that lacked any “privately funded and nobly titled” organization to improve its general condition “was the very one that was currently in such grave danger” (397): children being commercially sexually exploited.
Kreizler’s own work underscores the situation’s urgency. Having grown up with an outwardly respectable yet violent father, Kreizler believes that childhood trauma explains much of adult behavior. As he explains to J. P. Morgan, Kreizler’s professional work has “focused on the multitude of sins that can often be concealed by the family structure” (301). At the Kreizler Institute, where children are referred to as “students” rather than “patients,” the “most important goal” is to give “troubled children a new environmental context” (67). Kreizler’s empathy wins him the love and loyalty of nearly all the children who come through his institute, including Stevie and Mary, who committed crimes as children, and whom Kreizler rescued from the city’s penal system to take on as domestic servants. Even Cyrus, who committed his crime as an adult, experienced relevant childhood trauma that brought him to Kreizler’s special attention and care.
One particular scene highlights the plight of the children by way of contrast. When Moore and Sara visit the Roosevelt home on Madison Avenue, they are greeted by Edith Roosevelt, the police commissioner’s wife, and the four Roosevelt children: Kermit, Ethel, Ted, and Alice, all of whom exude an age-appropriate measure of confidence and playful joy. When Roosevelt himself emerges from his study, the children mob him and vie for his attention, prompting Edith to sigh and shake her head at what Moore calls “the miracle of her husband’s relationship to his children” (382). The distance between Madison Avenue and Mulberry Bend was the distance between the Roosevelt children and the children of the tenements.
