SCRIPT:
The short story “Mad House” was written by Richard Matheson and was composed in January and February of 1953. Set in Durango, Colorado during the year 1953, Matheson tells the story of Chris Neal, a miserable English professor and failed writer who is extremely prone to uncontrollable spells of rage. Although Chris’s source of anger comes from his failure as a writer, he allows every minor inconvenience to irritate him. His anger begins to control his life as he projects his negative energy on his wife, students, and surroundings. While his dispersal of negative energy affects everyone and everything around him, he is so consumed with his own rage to notice how it is affecting others. His detachment from reality drives him to delusion and eventually insanity. Richard Matheson uses personification of household objects and symbolism to emphasize the myriad of self destructive ways: Chris becomes a prisoner to his own poisonous anger, while stressing to readers the dangers of allowing anger to control one’s life.
In the first scene, Chris battles with his typewriter as he struggles to click the correct keys. He becomes so irrationally frustrated with this task that he eventually gives up. He proceeds to take on different tasks, such as flossing and shaving. However, these tasks do not calm him down, but rather rile him up even more than the first time. We are transported to the kitchen table where Chris is sitting down with his wife to eat dinner. His failed attempt at drawing his dull knife through the tough meat, again, sparks his anger. He proceeds to launch the dull knife across the room before his wife, Sally, is introduced as “the woman” and reacts to the outburst with “alarm etching transient scars on her forehead” (Matheson 53). Matheson repeatedly suggests to readers that “Her husband is beyond himself… Her husband is shooting poison through his arteries… Her husband is releasing another cloud of animal temper”(Matheson 53). Although the entire story is told in third person, this is the only passage in the story that refers to the protagonist, Chris, as ‘her husband’ and his wife, Sally, as ‘the woman’. At this point in the story, the audience has already identified Chris as ‘he’ and Sally as ‘his wife’. This bizarre shift in tone is both representative of Sally’s experience of Chris’s negativity but also acknowledges just how forceful his anger is
Continuing with this characterization, by comparing Chris’s anger to poison shooting through his arteries, and this poison to a cloud of animal temper, Matheson refers to this venom as ‘it’. He writes “It is mist that clings. It hangs over the furniture, drips from the walls. It is alive. So through the days and nights” (Matheson 53). This personification is indicative of Chris’s negative energy polluting the life around him. His anger is not just a feeling, but a supernatural element. The introduction of these supernatural/fantastic elements emphasize how powerful Chris’s rage is to the world around him. These metaphors suggest that his anger has transcended into a dangerous energy. Matheson goes on to extend this metaphor by comparing the wind that is his anger to “frenzied axe blows in his house” and “sprays of teeth-grinding hysteria clouding his windows and falling to his floors”. As he further describes this anger, he writes “Oceans of wild, uncontrolled hate flooding through every room of his house; filling each iota of space with a shifting, throbbing life” (Matheson 53). Through his stylistic choices, Matheson’s personification manifests his household objects as recipients to his horrific rage and brings his evilness to life. His metaphors emphasize the extensive evil and horrific nature of his actions.
Throughout the body of the story, we find that Chris declines the opportunity to fix things time and time again. He is able to acknowledge the consequences of his choices, however, and describes them by saying “every time I speak I build higher the walls of hatred and bitterness around me until I cannot escape from them” (Matheson 62). From the chance to apologize to his students, make amends with Dr. Ramsay, or fix his marriage by apologizing to his wife when given a second and third chance, he instead chooses to dig a deeper hole for himself. When Chris successfully alienates himself from from his wife, she storms out of the house, leaving him alone with his thoughts. His experiences turn into delusions and his household items are again channels for his behavior. Desperately trying to confront his overwhelming emotions, Chris finds himself refusing to accept the fear that invokes inside him. He “ignored the menace that seemed to thicken the very air” which ‘hummed’ (Matheson 79). In an attempt to collect his throbbing thoughts, he decides to try and write. Before he was able conceptualize what was going on, his dangerously malfunctioning keyboard began attacking him.
Matheson does a beautiful job of using his language to transform Chris’s very real human delusion into imaginative fiction. This stylistic choice introduces supernatural/fantastic elements that emphasize how powerful Chris’s rage is to the world around him. Matheson’s stylistic choices here brilliantly shift the audiences attention from Chris’s complex character to the way his behavior is infecting everything around him. This leaves the audience unable to excuse his abuse of others. Matheson’s increased use of figurative language suggests that Chris’s behavior, which is villainous and abusive to everyone, is what ultimately ends his life.
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Featured Image:
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