A Psychological Study of “The Lumber Room” by HH Munro Alias Saki
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Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities Review (JSSHR) Vol. 3, No. 4 (194-208) © Author(s) December 2018 ISSN: 2279-3933 Original Article DOI: http://doi.org/10.4038/jsshr.v3i4.21 Punishment as Misdirected Discipline: A Psychological Study of “The Lumber Room” by H.H. Munro alias Saki EA Gamini Fonseka1 Abstract ‚The Lumber Room‛ by Hector Hugh Munro(1870-1916),who wrote 1Department of under the penname ‚Saki‛, is a short story that covers the survival English and struggle of the juvenile Nicholas growing in the care of some Linguistics, authoritarian adults. The conditions Nicholas suffers in the story University of parallel with some details of Munro’s childhood that he spent in the Ruhuna-Sri Lanka custody of his aunts after the death of his mother. Based on what [email protected] transpires in the life of Nicholas as a child, this paper attempts to carry out a psychological study of punishment as misdirected discipline, in order to establish that the intelligent independently develop their own stance about the good and the bad, however much they are suppressed in society. From this general stance on Munro’s short stories, this paper investigates the psychological effects of punishment on the Aunt and Nicholas in their respective roles as the prosecutor and the offender in ‚The Lumber Room‛ in a situation of misdirected discipline. Keywords: punishment, discipline, psychoanalysis, frustration, childcare 194 Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities Review (JSSHR) Vol. 3, No. 4 (1-15) © Author(s) December 2018 ISSN: 2279-3933 Original Article INTRODUCTION “The idea that children have rights that Hector Hugh Munro,whose father was the state should protect may have Scotsman Charles Augustus Munro, seemed silly at the dawn of the an inspector-general in the Burma nineteenth century, but by the time police, lost his mother, Mary Frances Queen Victoria died in 1901, it had (née Mercer) in a tragic accident in gained significant support‛ (Gubar England with a runaway cow in 1872. 2005). Yet it takes time to get such an Thereafter, Hector and his two elder idea to be embedded in a society. siblings Ethel (1868) and Charlie (1869) Creative works of this type produced were sent to Broadgate Villa, in Pilton under the influence of personal village near Barnstaple, North Devon traumas, have undergone the where Charles Munro's widowed psychoanalytic screening of both mother lived with her two unmarried Freud (1905) who ‚treated literature as daughters, Charlotte and the expression of the author’s Augusta(Greenwell, 2018). His sister subconscious mind‛ (Selden 1988), Ethel in her Biography of Saki writes: and Jung (1930) who considered that ‚One of Munro’s aunts, Augusta, was ‚literature is drawn from ’primordial a woman of ungovernable temper, of experience’ transmitted through fierce likes and dislikes, imperious, ‘collective unconscious’‛(Selden 1988). and moral coward, possessing no Both their premises apply to the brains worth speaking of, and a perception of Munro’s narratives as a primitive disposition.‛Based on the byproduct of the realities recorded in traumas he sustained as a parentless the subconscious and the fantasies child at the hands of the two auntswho engendered by the collective were very strict disciplinarians unconscious. In this context, inclined to corporal punishment and Delahoyde’s (2011) premise that ‚One indiscriminate cruelty (E.M. Munro may psychoanalyze a particular 1924), Munro wrote his short stories character within a literary work, but it collected as Beasts and Super Beasts is usually assumed that all such (Munro 1914). characters are projections of the Thus the setting of ‚The Lumber author's psyche‛ is relevant. Room‛ is Edwardian England. Munro Accordingly, the psychological traits satirises the harsh practices the adults Munro’s characters manifest of the time followed at the domestic significantly determine their positions level long after the appalling in the personal relationships within narratives of child abuse in the the matrix of power fashioned under cottages, farms, poor houses, work the Edwardian value system. Through camps, orphanages, boarding schools, his work, Munro illustrates how the and factories in the novels by Dickens, impersonal conditions maintained by the Brontë sisters, Gaskell, Hardy, etc. social institutions related to law, government, religion, education, 195 Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities Review (JSSHR) Vol. 3, No. 4 (1-15) © Author(s) December 2018 ISSN: 2279-3933 Original Article industry, etc. affect personal in the cold weather while the others in relationships at the domestic level. the household, including the Aunt, had a tough time outside. Nicholas considers his plight being similar to THE STORY STRUCTURE that of the hunter and his dogs The story has a fine narrative cornered by a pack of wolves in the structure. It is set in a household run tapestry and chooses silence as the by a headstrong woman whose solution to all his problems. behaviour leads to an interminable conflict between the adults and the children. The protagonist Nicholas is a A Punishment Inflicted through Psychological Torture boy with a questioning mind. The story opens in a setting where With the announcement of a Nicholas argues with the Aunt on punishment imposed on Nicholas, the being left behind as a punishment story opens in a claustrophobic court- while the other children have gone out room like atmosphere. In order to on an excursion. Then the story goes penalize Nicholas for an offence on to an elaboration of the offence committed at the breakfast table, the Nicholas has committed to deserve other children are ‚to be driven, as a such a punishment. Thereafter it special treat, to the sands at reveals how Nicholas turns his Jagborough‛ So, while Nicholas’ boy- punishment into an exploratory cousin and girl-cousin and his ‚quite expedition inside the lumber room, a uninteresting‛ younger brother are to forbidden quarter of the house. Later it enjoy an outing, Nicholas is ‚to stay at relates how the Aunt, out of curiosity home‛. Munro provides a description looks for Nicholas in the gooseberry of the punishment procedure of the garden, and falls into a rainwater tank. house as follows: This follows a dramatization of the ‚His cousins’ aunt, who Aunt’s repeated order to Nicholas to insisted, by an unwarranted help her out and Nicholas’ repeated stretch of imagination, in refusal on the grounds that he has styling herself his aunt also, been prohibited to enter the garden by had hastily invented the the Aunt herself. At last, when the Jagborough expedition in order other children return in utter to impress on Nicholas the frustration due to bad weather and delights that he had justly various physical pains, silence forfeited by his disgraceful dominates the atmosphere of the conduct at the breakfast- house. Nicholas recalls what he has table‛(Munro 1914). observed in the tapestry he saw during It is clear that the Aunt has improvised his visit to the lumber room. He feels this tour simply to hurt Nicholas. In thankful that he did not have to go out 196 Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities Review (JSSHR) Vol. 3, No. 4 (1-15) © Author(s) December 2018 ISSN: 2279-3933 Original Article that sense Nicholas’ punishment can extravagances, the Aunt ignites be defined as ‚solitary confinement frustration in them. Pretending to be plus sensory deprivation‛ which, concerned about the children’s according to Grassian (2006), ‚can welfare, she uses rumours of fabulous cause severe psychiatric harm.‛ While entertainment events in the the others are supposed to play on the neighbouring towns to instigate unrest sands at Jagborough, he is supposed to and antagonism among the children. spend his time in isolation. This type Those who are rewarded are thus of punishment brutalizes the convict made to suffer from the dislike of their further, inculcating hatred and deprived peers who assume them to jealousy in him against those who be the cause of their deprivation. Thus, enjoy privileges prohibited to him, but the Aunt plays the classical colonizer’s the so-called ‚older and wiser and game of divide-and-rule in her small better people‛ in the house do not colony of dependents. understand it. Munro explicitly states Nicholas’ Offence: Subversion of the how the Aunt has incorporated the Adults’ Authority particular penal strategy in the The terms used in the communication management of her household on a between the adults and the children routine basis: within this particular household It was her habit, whenever setting are meant to inculcate in the one of the children fell from minds of the children the idea that the grace, to improvise something adults are ‚older and wiser and better of a festival nature from people‛ and that the food they offer is which the offender would be always ‚wholesome‛ and that the rigorously debarred; if all the complaints the children make are children sinned collectively invariably ‚nonsense‛. This implies they were suddenly informed that the children have to accept of a circus in a neighbouring everything the adults say or do town, a circus of unrivalled without reservation or inquiry. merit and uncounted Nicholas seems to subvert the elephants, to which, but for authoritarian pseudo-judicial practice their depravity, they would of the house. As Turiel (2003) explains, have been taken that very ‚Resistance and subversion are day‛ (Munro 1914). common because social arrangements Through this strategy she inculcates a and practices often embody constant fear of deprivation in the inequalities. ... However, this is not children which would kerb their only in the usual sense of people natural playfulness in the long run. At acting in line with societal the same time, by engendering desires expectations; social conditions evoke in the children for various types of opposition, resistance and subversion‛ (Turiel 2003).