Irregularity

Use in the book

Section 723 initially offers a problem of inference. When an observed angle cannot be trusted to represent the rest of a body, recognition becomes less convenient and movement more hazardous. These difficulties matter in the fictional world. The narrator's leap is to treat their existence as proof that the person who presents them is morally defective and should be excluded or killed.

The feared Irregular often combines different class-signs: a triangular front with a polygonal back, or the reverse. Such a body disrupts not only spatial planning but the agreement between visible appearance and social credit. The shopkeeper who sees a prestigious front might extend goods on false assumptions. The nightmare is therefore partly that privilege could cease to be securely legible. The Irregular reveals how much supposed trust in persons is actually trust in a classification.

Abbott allows the opposing view an unusually sustained speech. It moves through the household, employment, surveillance, marriage and enforced residence, asking whether mistreatment may produce the resentment later cited as evidence of innate perversity. Its sequence gives a life-history where official taxonomy supplies only a shape. The narrator reports the argument accurately enough for readers to find it persuasive, then dismisses it by invoking the state's safety and the majority's convenience.

The result is a conflict between explanations. One treats behaviour as the effect of bodily deviation; the other asks what institutions do to a person whose body has already occasioned rejection. The narrator's assertion that he has never met a morally sound Irregular cannot decide between them, since the society he describes systematically creates the conditions the reformers identify.

His closing moderation intensifies the exposure. He does not favour immediate destruction in every case, because genius might be lost and treatment might succeed. The potential victim's value is measured by possible service to the state. When recovery seems improbable, the recommended killing is called merciful. Irregularity thus tests the difference between reducing suffering and removing the person who suffers, a distinction the official vocabulary tries to close.

Places to read

1. §723“a combination of moral obliquity and criminality”
2. §723“no necessary connection between geometrical and moral Irregularity”
3. §723“the interests of the Greater Number”
4. §723“a clerk of the seventh class”
5. §723“a hypocrite, a misanthropist”
6. §723“painlessly and mercifully consumed”

In this edition

Notes 77–83234567 discuss moralised bodily difference, humanitarian argument, majority-interest reasoning and the final euphemism. These are Diotimos interpretations of the 1884 text. The vocabulary of disability can illuminate the exclusion described, but Irregular should not be reduced to a single modern diagnostic or social category.

Abrogation

Formal repeal or abolition of a law. Advocates seek the abrogation of the Irregular Penal Laws, so their challenge is directed at the legal structure of persecution rather than merely at individual acts of unkindness. Printed form: abrogation (§ 723). See Irregularity.

Conformation · § 4

The bodily shape or arrangement of parts. The Square derives women’s alleged mental incapacity directly from their conformation, turning an anatomical description into an explanation that claims to settle questions of judgment, memory, and moral agency. Printed form: conformation (§ 423). See Irregularity.

Immured

Shut in or confined, literally enclosed within walls. The mildly Irregular survivor is immured in a Government Office, where employment is also compulsory residence, surveillance, and the denial of an independent adult life. Printed form: immured (§ 723). See Irregularity.

Moral obliquity

Crookedness of conduct or departure from what is right, drawing on obliquity’s literal sense of slanting. Flatland fuses the figurative and geometrical senses by treating an irregular bodily outline as equivalent to moral fault and criminality. Printed form: moral obliquity (§ 723). See Irregularity.

Penal Laws

Laws imposing penalties and civil disabilities on a defined group. The Irregular Penal Laws institutionalise suspicion of bodily difference through restrictions on work, marriage, movement, and survival, making exclusion part of the constitution of ordinary life. Printed form: Penal Laws (§ 723). See Irregularity.

Philanthropy

Concern for human welfare, here organised humanitarian advocacy for changing the treatment of Irregulars. Calling it falsely named lets the narrator dismiss sympathy as mistaken sentiment while presenting the suffering of a minority as necessary policy. Printed form: Philanthropy (§ 723). See Irregularity.

Promulgators of paradoxes

People publicly advancing propositions that contradict received belief. This dismissive designation introduces reformers who argue that persecution produces the Irregular’s hostility; the label prejudges their case even while the text gives their argument considerable force. Printed form: promulgators of paradoxes (§ 723). See Irregularity.

Scouted

Rejected with contempt, not reconnoitred. An Irregular is scouted by his parents from birth, placing family repudiation at the start of the reformers’ account of how organised mistreatment may deform character. Printed form: scouted (§ 723). See Irregularity.

Stipend

A fixed regular payment for service. The miserable stipend of the confined government clerk makes the ostensibly spared Irregular’s life one of coerced labour rather than ordinary employment. Printed form: stipend (§ 723). See Irregularity.

The interests of the Greater Number (contextual phrase)

“the interests of the Greater Number” (§ 723)

The phrase makes numerical predominance a warrant for the suffering of a minority. It follows the reformers’ account of the Irregular’s exclusion from family, marriage, meaningful work, and ordinary trust. Rather than refuting that account, the narrator answers that the majority requires such a life to be hard. Greater Number consequently changes the question from whether the treatment is just to whether accepted arrangements should be inconvenienced. The subsequent examples include doors, theatre admission, military service, and commercial credit, all organised around predictable bodies. The supplied editorial note identifies the language of utilitarianism; the passage’s particular distortion lies in treating existing conveniences as decisive while excluding the minority’s welfare from serious comparison. A claim about general benefit licenses very particular harms. See Irregularity, Regularity, and Doors and houses.

Painlessly and mercifully consumed (contextual phrase)

“painlessly and mercifully consumed” (§ 723)

Consumed means put to death, but its passive form leaves the executioner and the physical act unnamed. Painlessly describes the proposed manner of killing; mercifully assigns it a moral character before the reader can judge the policy. The phrase completes the Square’s advertised middle course between immediate destruction at birth and unrestricted tolerance. He would postpone the decision until the body begins to set and medical recovery is judged improbable. That delay looks moderate only because the child’s right to survive remains conditional on achieving an approved shape. The Medical Board supplies procedural authority, while the soft adverbs convert a political decision into a supposed act of care. The passage exposes how a reform in timing can preserve the underlying principle of elimination. See Surgery and extermination, Irregularity, and Nature and law.