SOURCE: Egan, Joseph J. “‘Markheim’: A Drama of Moral Psychology.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 20, no. 4 (March 1966): 377–84.

In the following essay, Egan discusses “Markheim” as a moral fable in terms of the psychological exploration of the main character.

Though “Markheim” has been called the “greatest of all Stevenson's short-stories,”¹ criticism of this tale has seldom gone beyond a summary of the plot. Ann Gossman alone has commented on the craft of Stevenson's story,² but her article is too brief to serve as a complete and thoroughly satisfying statement of “Markheim”'s artistic and thematic elements. The purpose of this paper is to show that Stevenson's intention in “Markheim” was to present not a short story as such, but a moral fable in the form of an exploration of his main character's mind. The entire atmosphere of the tale is presented as remote and preternatural in order to reduce the elements of...