Fighting like a wildcat

Abstract

This article draws upon a hermeneutic tradition of interpreting a cultural testimony like The Jack-Roller, and the text is revealed from a psychoanalytically inspired perspective. The unconscious meaning of the text is approached through the reader's irritations and reactions to the tale by a method that is called `scenic understanding'. Finally we see different passages or scenes throughout the narrative being connected via a basic conflict in Stanley's life: his struggle for social recognition as a man and his longing for love and care as a child overlap in the ambivalent position of perpetrator and victim. This is related to a not-yet-contained experience of loss and mourning which fundamentally structures what Shaw calls Stanley's `selfjustificatory attitude'.