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Murder
A Tale of Modern American Life
By Sara L. Knox Duke University Press
Copyright © 1998 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7925-6
CHAPTER 1
Here There Be Killers
Things least to be believed are most preferred
All counterfeit as from truths sacred mint
Are readily believed if once put down in print.
John Clare, "St. Martin's Eve"
In 1866, early in that period of violent social change known as Reconstruction, a paper carried in its column of curiosities a snippet of news from Mobile, Alabama. In a vacant apartment a headless body had been found. Accompanying the corpse was a note that read: "To prevent identification I have hidden my own head where you will never find it." This anecdote is a perfect example of the conundrum of murder: the story of the lively corpse or the blithe murderer. The report provides no resolution to the mystery, its wry brevity attesting to the publishers' confidence in a reader's love of the paradoxical quality of the tale of murder — not necessarily the more orderly satisfactions gained from the narrative of crime, detection, apprehension, punishment, and redemption. By the "lyrical fiction" of this particular "murderer's song," the body in the vacant room becomes at once murderer and victim: a sign of its own disappearance. Any layperson knows that the best evidence of murder (upon which to hang a prosecution, at any rate) is a corpse, yet the modern tale of murder turns attention away from the victim to the murderer — the corpse becoming little more than a relic of another's transgression and transcendence. The metaphysics of modern murder makes the victim a sign of the murderer.
The cultural resonance of the narrative of murder arises from its uneasy position at the borderline of ethics and aesthetics. In a culture wherein the communication and entertainment media are more varied and accessible than ever before, the "fact" of murder and its representations grow close indeed: "That murder is the most unrepresentable and yet one of the most represented of acts in our culture points to the fact that rather than take one out of discourse, murder ironically leads one back into it, with a vengeance, to which the vast and ever-expanding plethora of murder literature bears witness: horror stories, detective stories, criminological literature, video nasties, and so on." Murder as a fundamental expression of immanence and abjection has a presence that consumes the corpse of victim and murderer alike. And yet the visceral, brute fact of murder is itself a false, or insufficient, foundation for narrative. All that is given in the tale of murder is the corpse; everything else remains to be found.
Murder belongs only partly to the juridical and penological realm, where it becomes, in the discourses of the modern social sciences, a "problem" effected by period and place, evidence of the changing relationships of power between classed, raced, and gendered actors. The disciplines of sociology, criminology, penology, law and, not least of all, forensic psychiatry have traditionally laid claim to scientific status (with the exception of the law, for which quite other truth claims are made). The positivistic assumptions at the root of the development of these disciplines are quintessentially ethical and implicitly political. The quest for topology and classification that underpins the disciplines of criminology, penology, and psychiatry can exist only on a discursive landscape against which the "discovered" object can have its form defined and its shadow cast. Every psychological classification for the "insane" murderer; every analysis of the degree or gravity of the crime; every determination on gradation, technique, or site of punishment for murder; and every study of the environmental milieu of the violent individual makes a decision about the meaning of murder: its origins, its impact, its "nature."
The crime story is a critically significant narrative frame in modern Western culture — whether the scripted broadsheet "confessions" of the murderer on the scaffold in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, or the compendium of sensational trials in the Ordinary of Newgate Account, or the detective fiction of Poe, Dickens and (later) Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane. The true crime genre that has enjoyed an unsurprising renaissance since the 1940s (and not only in the United States) is the direct descendant of a genre of crime reporting that treats the "facts" at issue as a good deal less important than the narrative rules of the genre.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there could not be said to be a clear demarcation between a high and low literature of crime, nor between the stories of actual and fictional murder. Thackeray satirized the style of the Newgate Chronicle, and Henry Fielding, in Jonathan Wild, drew on the Chronicle for a panoply of characters and crimes. The vogue of the crime story by the mid-nineteenth century should not be underestimated. What contemporaries perceived as the degenerative horrors of urban culture were enthusiastically chronicled from the 1860s in both Britain and the United States. By the later nineteenth century, eugenic thought — haunted by the spectre of the "born" criminal and atavistic degeneration — existed side by side with more progressive social analyses of violence. As the century waned, the tale of murder as fact or fiction moved progressively further from its description of the murderous act to an analysis of the murderer.
Between the early part of the nineteenth century and its apogee, the murderer grew in stature; the meaning of murder, its metaphysics, was no longer evident in the event but in its main actor. That discursive shift belongs to a more general historical process within which the individual subject grew more complex, and more affecting: the subject a synecdoche for the greater social "whole." As part of that epistemological shift inward from the world to the soul and psyche of the subject, the "murderer" was invented — along with (and, often, part and parcel of) the "hysteric," the "homosexual," the "adolescent," the "criminal," and the "psychotic."
In the following chapters I will be examining both the representation of actual murder and murder in fiction. By dismantling various narratives of murder it will become possible to expose the cultural meaning given to murder, that irreplaceable taken-for-granted quality of a murder that, when narrated, says so much about what a culture knows and what it will not let itself know. While this work is in part a general analysis of the compelling quality of murder narratives in the West, it is also an investigation of the interestedness of modern and contemporary American culture in the tale of murder. Americans consume murder as a daily fare, sometimes — during the trial of O. J. Simpson, for instance — to the point of biliousness. Most states have legislation allowing trials to be televised whole or in part, and an adept channel surfer can always find a murder covered in detail: on the news; in "true crime" miniseries; in the urban folklore of programs like Unexplained Mysteries; in the tabloid format of disaster and police work series; and, of course, on twenty-four hours a day of Court T.V. Television talk-show hosts regularly address the topic, programming fatal violence along with more banal, folksy wisdom on the control of weight, excess or insufficient body hair, and relations with one's in-laws. How can one not be riveted by Oprah Winfrey's tongue-in-cheek questioning of a woman deeply smitten by the younger of the Menendez brothers, a man she knows only from a miniseries, from news and Court T.V.? Oprah on "Woman in Love with Serial Killers," or Donahue railing at the National Rifle Association, or Sally Jesse Raphael on adolescent drug use, all have in common their reference to a popular understanding of how violence is lived in contemporary America. To say that Americans have an interest in murder is to use "interest" both as a noun and a transitive verb, to show "curiosity" and "concern, affect, and relation to," to signify the "personal" and "public." It is to show the implication of the curious in the object of their curiosity. And yet that "interest" is not a unitary one, shared by one and all in a unified, undifferentiated culture. "Cultural interestedness" is a general term that embraces a varied set of local effects, as evidenced, say, by the difference between pro- and anti-death-penalty lobby groups (not to mention the difference of both of these again from the people most likely to find themselves on death row).
Michel Foucault has observed that the relationship of power to death in modern democratic societies is, in appearance, benevolent or, at least, passive. It may "foster life or disallow it to the point of death." The main business of technologized power is to maintain and extend life, and that preoccupation has been accompanied by a kind of "occulting" of death. Death is sequestered in modern Western culture, becoming private in its actuality yet increasingly public as representation. Death, like power, has become dispersed. It is everywhere and nowhere. In a culture that has located so much meaning in self-identity, in individuality and in the body as "person," it should not be surprising that it is the psyche of the criminal, rather than the crime itself, that fascinates. Death takes up residence in the figure of the murderer. Execution — killing the killer — is contrived to exorcise the presence of death, but such a presence cannot be exorcised (for where can death go?). Death is a symptom, and, like the symptom in psychoanalytic practice, it is all there effectively is — the limit and extent of meaning, yet a limit that points beyond itself (What is death?). Execution, as the last great secular ritual surrounding death in American culture, is still important, if not critical, to that culture's sense of its own life.
The last chapter of this book will deal more closely with the question of execution and with the stature of the murderer as death's "agent" in contemporary American culture. That discussion demands an analysis of one of the most recent, and exemplary, works on the place of murder in American culture: Wendy Lesser's Pictures at an Execution. Two earlier critical works also deserve attention, for despite their quite different preoccupations with murder in (or as) literature, both David Brion Davis and Joel Black provide ample evidence of the cultural importance of the murder narrative. The differences between the two texts suggest the historical contingency and particularity of the tale of murder. Davis's is a liberal text produced during the Cold War, one concerned with the social values exposed by American literary accounts of murder from the Revolution to the Civil War, and Black's a "postmodern" account that ranges through the fiction of four languages and two countries to arrive at an analysis of "hyperrealized violence" in contemporary American culture. Both works are motivated by presentist and manifestly "social" concerns, notwithstanding their historical, comparative, and more or less "literary" subjects. Both works treat, in different ways, a familiar question: How does an individual act of violence relate to the culture that gives rise to it, and how is that act of one (the murdering individual) owned by the community of others? Davis's work addresses this conundrum as a question of "social values." Black, on the other hand, considers the interchange between representation and "reality" and, in choosing to study simultaneously fictional texts and sensational cases, opts for an interrogation of the aesthetic approach to murder. The problem of murder that looms large for Davis is the problem of a society that gave birth to the collective domestic homicide called the Civil War. His is not a simplistic conception of the "mind" of society (in the form of its "imagination"), for he does recognize the unpredictable and contradictory nature of the symbolic level of his texts. But the movement of meaning remains one-way: killings stay in the world and are mimicked in texts; the texts themselves are never murderous.
In the prosperous but still ideologically troubled United States of the mid-1950s it is not surprising to find Davis arguing that a study of the literary treatment of murder should "elucidate more general problems in American civilization." His aim is to establish a kind of intellectual history of both American aggression and the sanctions against it; to explain the contradictory nature of a "sparkling, smiling, domestic land ... where it is estimated that a new murder occurs every forty-five minutes." Yet Davis's attention to a discretely American culture of violence makes his concern no less universal than an examination of the extent and range of reasons put forward for mankind's "extraordinary capacity to kill." By examining the reasoning, reflective, and mimetic art of literature, Davis strives to produce an empiricist account of murder's reason. Significantly, this account of reason becomes, by its own critical strategies, an inescapably gendered one.
As part of his discussion of the triumph of the tale of seduction, Davis analyzes a notorious homicide in New York in 1836. James Gordon Bennett provided extensive and detailed reporting for the New York Herald concerning the murder of Helen Jewett, a cultured and successful prostitute, by a disgrunded client, Richard Robinson. Jewett was axed and then, in a failed attempt by the murderer to dispose of the evidence, her body was slightly burned. Despite the brutality of the murder, Bennett dwelt at length upon the beauty of the corpse:
The body looked as white, as full, as polished as the purest Parian marble. The perfect figure, the exquisite limbs, the fine face, the full arms, the beautiful bust, all surpassed, in every respect, the Venus de Medici.... For a few moments I was lost in admiration of the extraordinary sight, a beautiful female corpse, that surpassed the finest statue in antiquity. I was recalled to her horrid destiny by seeing the dreadful bloody gashes on the right temple.
Although "recalled to her horrid destiny," Bennett goes on to enumerate the other accomplishments of the victim, now a corpse. Davis describes Bennett's minute attention to Jewett's rooms — from the furnishings and the tides of the books on her shelves to the beautiful penmanship and delicate turn of phrase of her private letters. The scene of death in this way becomes an extension of the "beautiful female corpse." In his discussion of the Jewett case and its successive mediators — from Bennett and H. R. Howard through to the fictional study of the Jewett case by Joseph Holt Ingraham — Davis shows the shift of emphasis, enacted through the aestheticization of the corpse, from the victim to the murderer: a naive boy beguiled by the harlot's accomplishment and beauty. An excess of stimulation deranges the murderer's previously controlled passions. The reversed tale of seduction, in which female corruption dislodges male reason and is thereby punished, vindicates the murderer while banishing the victim to the borders of the moral frame. In Bennett's early "true crime" narrative, an ugly act — the outcome of two degraded lives in collision — begets a scene of "beauty."
Recent scholarship on the tropic relationship of femininity and death in Western culture suggests that the feminine partakes of much of death's "allusive" qualities: its "unrepresentability" as well as its immanence. Death, like femininity, is both "limit and excess." While Death is nowhere, Woman is simply not. As Sarah Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen put it, "[O]ur culture posits death and the feminine as what is radically other to the norm, the living or surviving masculine subject; they represent the disruption and difference that ground a narcissistic sense of self." While an analysis of the allegorical relationship of Woman and Death is a fascinating project in and of itself, what most concerns me here is the insight that relationship provides to a reading of certain historically contingent tales of murder. If, as Goodwin and Bronfen point out, "femininity and death are Western culture's two major tropes for the enigma," then women would seem to be killed (both in and out of texts) not because they are dispensable objects, but because they are indispensable. To put it another way, the instability of the category of the Feminine is essential to the maintenance of an illusory stability of the Masculine. In concrete terms this perhaps means that Woman (as sign and substance?) is indispensably dispensable. The ineluctable symbolic quality that attends the flesh made feminine is part and parcel of the murder narrative, because — in a sense — where Death appears so too must the Feminine. The gendered tropic strategy of the tale of murder appears in and around the interrogation of the murder's origin in the murderer's psyche. It appears in the discussion of the victim's sexuality, class, and race, all categories which are themselves coded by the pathologizing of the murderer into the idiosyncratic rather than the social: "character," "predisposition," or "environment." The following work is, if you like, a way to return the idiosyncrasy of violence to the context of its culture. The act of narrating murder, for all its drive to make that act an aberration, and its actor pathological, makes murder culturally intelligible by reference to things known: that which is taken for granted, everyday, familiar, and common to all. Murder is part of an everyday grammar, its mark acute, but final only for the one killed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Murder by Sara L. Knox. Copyright © 1998 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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