The Alienist

The opera serves as a symbol of New York City’s established social order. Powerful members of the city’s elite regard Kreizler’s theory of individual psychological context, which they confuse with mere determinism, as a threat to that order. The opera, therefore, highlights the social dimensions of the psychological debate over Free Will and Determinism.

Two important scenes occur at the Metropolitan Opera. In the first scene, Mayor Strong pays a visit to Kreizler’s box and warns the controversial alienist not to associate himself with the city’s police department. On this same evening, Moore notices that the great financier J. P. Morgan is at the opera. This foreshadows a later discussion at Morgan’s home, in which Morgan explains to Kreizler exactly why so many of the city’s elites regard the alienist’s ideas as dangerous. In the second scene, Kreizler and Moore attend the opera primarily as a diversion designed to lull their antagonists into complacency while they secretly slip out of the building to pursue Beecham. Even on this occasion, while trying to push his way through a crowd of wealthy and privileged opera attendees, Moore expresses sympathy with “the mind of a bomb-wielding anarchist” determined to wreak havoc on those “who have the money and the temerity to style themselves ‘New York Society’” (443).

Disfigurement constitutes an important symbol of the extreme violence at the heart of The Alienist. Because of the specific characters who each suffer some sort of disfigurement, this symbol highlights the Exploitation of Children.

Kreizler’s left arm is shorter than his right one. It is also noticeably deformed, so much so that at Harvard in the 1870s, when an offended Kreizler challenged Roosevelt to a boxing match as a matter of honor, Roosevelt “saw Kreizler’s arm” and then “offered to let him choose some weapon other than fists” (47). Kreizler’s disfigurement dates to a childhood injury at the hands of his drunk and violent father.

Whereas Kreizler’s trauma led him to pursue psychology as a field of study, two other characters’ childhood experiences with disfigurement led them down darker paths. Jesse Pomeroy explains that he had to begin killing other children because they would not stop staring at his harelip and what Moore calls his “milky, repulsive left eye” (232). As a child, John Beecham developed a pronounced facial tic due to his mother’s verbal abuse and general disdain for her son. Although neither Pomeroy nor Beecham endured direct physical violence from their mothers, there is, as Sara indicates, “more than one kind of violence” (206).

Some characters’ lives intersect with actual late-19th-century events involving large-scale violence. Due to the nature and scope of the historical violence, this motif helps illuminate the problem of Police Corruption and Brutality.

The events in question span more than three decades of US history. Adam Dury recalls that as a young child he witnessed some of the savagery of the brutal Minnesota Sioux War of 1862. Cyrus Montrose’s parents died at the hands of an angry, racist mob during the New York City Draft Riots of 1863. As a corporal in the US Army, Beecham helped suppress Chicago’s Haymarket Riots of 1886, one of the era’s many violent clashes involving organized labor.

All these events have some connection to officialdom. They involve large-scale violence carried out either by public authorities or, as in the case of the draft riots, in defiance of said authorities. The same sort of official violence characterizes the relationship between the New York City police department and the immigrant population in the tenements.