MURDER MOST FOUL: THE KILLER AND THE AMERICAN GOTHIC IMAGINATION by Karen Halttunen. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998. 322pp.
Reviewed Lawrence M. Friedman, School of Law, Stanford University.
This is a bold and imaginative study of what the jacket describes as a "treasure trove of creepy popular crime literature." Halttunen’s book is based on her close study of brochures, pamphlets, and narrative accounts of murders and murder trials in the United States, from the colonial period roughly to the middle of the 19th century. The main source for the earlier period consists of so-called execution sermons. These were sermons delivered either the Sunday before the hanging, or on the day of the hanging; the condemned criminal would be present in church, in chains, to hear these inspiring words. The subject of the sermons was sin and redemption; the sermons paid very little attention to the crime itself, or any of its bloody details. The sermons were meant to point a religious moral, to tell a tale about the human condition. Of course, society condemned the killer--indeed, society was willing, even eager to put him to death; yet the murderer was not treated as a monster; rather, he "was regarded as a moral representative of all of sinful humanity" (p. 9); evil was "intrinsic, endemic, radical" (p. 26); it was inherent in woman and man; and the punishment and redemption of killers was meant to teach a lesson to the whole community. All of us were sinners, all shared in the guilt of original sin. The drama of execution was the "intimate drama of an exemplary sinner standing before compassionate spectators who joined with him in a collective struggle against sin" (p. 23). The sermons were often printed for the edification of the masses. Sometimes the texts included the story of how the criminal had at last seen the true faith, together with warnings not to follow him down the slippery slope to perdition.
Nineteenth-century crime narratives--and there were dozens and dozens of these-- were entirely different. They were, for one thing, no longer sermons. They were written for quite a different purpose. Many of them were accounts of criminal trials. They dwelled with almost lip-smacking lust on the details of the crime, the crime-scene, the gore, the blood, the depravity and viciousness of the acts of murder; how this one or that was hacked or bludgeoned to death, how bodies were chopped up and disposed of, how gruesome the corpse--it was a kind of weird pornography of violence. And the murderer was not now described as a member of the flock who had gone astray, but as something different, extrinsic, alien, as a moral monster, a "distortion of normal human nature" (p. 59). Gothic "horror" was the "characteristic response to evil in a culture that provided no systematic intellectual explanation for the problem" (p. 59). Horror and mystery--the idea that evil was incomprehensible, that normal men and women could never fathom it--underlay this literature, as indeed it underlay works of Gothic fiction.
Halttunen tries to connect this "Gothic" development with other aspects of 19th century social life. It was a period that considered "pain... to be intolerable" and death to be "repulsive;" yet at the same time, reading about pain and death were "a source of dreadful pleasure, precisely because their unacceptability made them obscene" (p. 66). Many crimes were also described as "mysterious;" and this was, after all, the generation that invented the detective story. "Human transgression" was treated, in other words, "as a dark secret lying buried beneath the deceptively serene surface of American social life" (p. 123). These "mysteries" replaced the moral and religious certainties of the colonial period. Cities were obscure, troubled places, each with a seamy underside, a layer of horror underneath a glittering surface. The family, usually a nest of coziness, could also harbor secret horrors: tales of husbands hacking wives to death, or of wives poisoning husbands, were powerful stories "enhanced by the excitement of uncovering appalling evil in that very place where evil was theoretically to be least expected" (p. 143). Some of these brutal family crimes also signaled, Halttunen thinks, a kind of troubled transition in family life. The shift from a patriarchal to a "sentimental" family did not go uncontested, and the creaks and strains in the shift sometimes erupted into bloody murder.
Women were often though not always the victims of these horrendous crimes. For this reason, Halttunen explores the gendered aspects of the literature, and what she calls the "Gothic construction of female sexuality" (p. 191). She claims that the 19th century, in some ways, made women’s bodies into a kind of pathology, so that even "normal female processes were seen as gory, diseased, and even criminal" (p. 193). This was, in a sense, the flip side of the notion of women as virtuous (and passionless); women who deviated from the norm, who exposed to the light their dark side, or even glorified in it, were seen as particularly virulent monsters. This new "gynecology of guilt" even at times tended to shift the guilt of the woman victim "from her killer to herself" (p. 207).
Since the "monsters" described in the literature were so far outside the norm, to what extent could the law hold them accountable? A good question: one partial answer was the development of the insanity defense in criminal trials. The doctrine of insanity performed an important piece of "ideological work;" it protected a benign view of human nature by erecting a category of madmen, who stood on the other side of the "great gulf separating the normal and law-abiding from the moral alien" (pp. 234-5). Thus the concept protected and cushioned a benign view of human nature-- a notion that MOST people were warm, benign, rational. As for the others, they had to be "quarantined," in prisons and mental hospitals. Hence the "Gothic narrative of the crime of murder" played an important part in creating and fostering these institutions.
As you can imagine, this book is fun to read; and it is genuinely enlightening. It is, in many ways, cultural history at its best. Halttunen is a brilliant reader of texts. At times, she seems to go over the top; but I suppose that is one of the perils of the trade. Nor does she avoid some of the vices of her genre. If we stand back from these texts, and ask what we are after here, what is it we are trying to explain, one answer (at least it is my answer) is that we want to understand the complex relationship between social structures and the imagery, institutions, and literatures these structures stimulate or engender. But Halttunen does not tell us very much about the economic, political, and cultural transformations that underlay the changes in forms of literature. The Gothic "imagination" did not come out of nowhere. What was it about the 19th century that fostered this kind of "imagination?" If pain and death were redefined, what was it in the social background that led to the redefinition?
Halttunen’s imagination, her interpretive skills, are enormously fruitful. But I personally have to confess to an incurable appetite for numbers, or if not numbers, some bow in the direction of rigor. It seems almost churlish, but I cannot help wondering about the data base. How many of these pamphlets and trial accounts were there? Do we have all of them (as far as we know), or are large numbers of them hidden or lost? Did the numbers of pamphlets go up or down over time? Did Halttunen read all of them? Did she sample? If so, on what basis? Were there systematic differences between the texts of, say, 1800, and those of 1840? And the crimes themselves: was there more gore, more horrible, brutal murders, in the 19th
century than before? Or was it simply that people were more willing to wallow in gory detail? Do we know, or is the data impossible to get? I see no references to the historians of crime that have tried to answer these questions. In short, I would have liked to see at least some attention to methodology. Without it, we have to take much of what Halttunen tells us on blind faith.
Which I am, frankly, on the whole quite willing to do. Willing because of the obvious intelligence and insight
she brings to the subject; and because of the power and plausibility of her arguments. I enjoyed reading the book;
and I learned from it. It is excellent and enlightening (like all of Halttunen’s work); and my basic complaint
is that I wanted more. In any event, I recommend it highly to everyone interested in the history of law, crime,
and the American soul.