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By Root 576 0

Instead of horror at this realization, the Dexter of the novels experiences delight: “I found myself wanting it to be true. I wanted [Cody] to grow up to be like me—mostly, I realized, because I wanted to shape him and place his tiny feet onto the Harry Path . . . I knew it was wrong—but what fun it would be!” (Dearly Devoted Dexter). The Dexter of the books experiences a reproductive urge, but the urge is aimed at psychological rather than biological offspring: he wishes to pass on the Code of Harry. (In Dexter By Design, he has an internal struggle about this choice, which apparently quickly passes.) The Dexter of the TV series has a more complex relationship with the Code, in part because he recognizes how much it has kept him isolated from other people and from a “real” life. However, it is hard to imagine that Dexter will escape the fatalistic conclusion that young Harrison will grow up to be like him: not only was Harrison born of Dexter’s DNA, but his presence at Rita’s murder site carries the expectation that his personality will be similarly “born in blood.”

Dramatically Deceptive Dexter

The idea that we derive knowledge about the self by observing the reactions of important social others holds a central place in many influential classic theories, including the symbolic interactionism of sociologists like Charles Cooley and George Herbert Mead, the pragmatic philosophy and psychology of William James, and the psychoanalytics of Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan. One logical consequence of self as a social construction is that an individual is typically highly sensitive to the perceptions of other people. James (one of my favorite psychological thinkers) distinguished between “self as subject” and “self as object.” Self as subject refers to the singular, continuous, embodied self perceived during reflective consciousness: you are in some sense the same person today as you were yesterday; you are distinguishable from other people. Self as object refers to the multiplicity of constructions existing in the minds of relevant social others: you are different things to different people. For example, I am a son, a younger brother, a husband, a friend, a colleague, a teacher, or merely the faceless author of the text you’re reading. Dexter Morgan is a son, a brother, a husband, a father, a forensic technician, and a murderer. In James’s words: “a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.”17 In Dexter’s: “Brother, friend, boyfriend . . . All part of my costume collection” (“Let’s Give the Boy a Hand,” 1-4).

Echoes of these older ideas are found in modern social psychological theories. For example, self-discrepancy theory (SDT)18 predicts specific emotional and motivational consequences from contrasting our current self (our “actual self,” in the language of SDT, keeping in mind that our self-view may not always be objectively accurate) with our positive aspirations (our “ideal self ”), what societal pressures compel us to be (our “ought selves,” of which there may be many, analogous to the Jamesian “social selves”), and perhaps even what we dread becoming (the “feared self”).19 Dexter has tried on various personas, to varying degrees of comfort and success. Like all of us, he has internalized values from significant others. Much of the change we see in him during the series has resulted from his looking to these other people, who represent externalized versions of Dexter’s different selves, for inspiration on how to live. Harry, who comes to personify Dexter’s conscience, represents an ought self. Arthur Mitchell changed in Dexter’s eyes from an ideal self (the prolific serial killer who has everything under tight control) to a feared self (the monster who terrorizes his own family to maintain that control).

There is also a long tradition of using the metaphor of theatrical presentation when discussing social behavior. Erving Goffman, a pioneering intellect in micro-sociology—the study of individual and small-group interactions—was a strong proponent of this dramaturgical perspective.