SOURCE: Jones, Douglas. “Double Jeopardy and the Chameleon Art in James Hogg's Justified Sinner.” Studies in Scottish Literature 23 (1988): 164-85.

In the following essay, Jones argues against psychoanalytic interpretations of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, concentrating instead on the narrative's concern with subjectivity, ambiguity, circularity, and disguise.

Critics of James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner have often cited Coleman Parson's observation that, for Hogg, the supernatural is “a corridor leading to the ultimate strangeness, that the individual is both tempter and tempted.”¹ The (critical) temptation which follows is that of treating Gil-Martin as Robert Wringhim's psychological double, and the text as a tension between supernatural and psychological explanations for the action. Such a reading is not implausible. But locating Justified Sinner within a Romantic/psychological doppelganger tradition is finally too easy—and to say that the story teeters on the edge...