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Murder! but How Foul? Determinism, Existentialism And Murder! But How Foul? Determinism, Existentialism and Rationalization in Twentieth-Century American Novels with Transgressive Protagonists John Dale A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in English, York University, Toronto, Ontario April 2014 © John Dale 2014 Abstract Humans tend to blunt the horror of transgressive violence by “containing” it in a potentially explicatory system. This thesis investigates whether a range of transgressive protagonists from canonical twentieth-century American novels are “contained” in this way by reference to philosophical or sociological systems powerful at the time of writing, and further whether the systems involved tracked the roughly mid-century switch of emphasis from determinism to philosophies valorizing individual autonomy (such as existentialism). These propositions were found to be broadly justified, but there were significant nuances. For example, Humbert Humbert, the protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, at first rejoices in his autonomy from normative ethical standards, but comes to realize that such autonomy can exists only as long as he confines himself to the world of the imagination. On the other hand, Clyde Griffiths, the socially and economically determined protagonist of Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy, achieves a kind of proto-existential isolation in his quest for an understanding of his “criminal” responsibility. Richard Wright, from mid-century, created both determinist and existential transgressive protagonists, but his work is most obviously characterized by a third element—a half-unexplained volcanic rage. In many of the novels examined it was found that horror at the crime of the transgressive protagonist was further derailed by narratological ploys, including the manipulation of the reader’s engagement with, or sympathy for, the protagonist— sometimes by the use of humour. Other cross-currents were apparent; the achievement of self-transcendence in some of the protagonists (e.g. Humbert ii Humbert and Clyde Griffiths), and the foregrounding of performativity in others (e.g. Tom Ripley in Patricia Highsmith’s Ripleiad). Most remarkably, all of the novels investigated demonstrate a tacit belief in the need to recuperate the protagonist, who is not only a transgressor, but also a humanist subject who is intrinsically of at least potential value. There is an almost unquestioned impulse to somehow address the protagonist’s fall from grace. It is further clear that this concern disappears from “anti-humanist” novels featuring transgressive protagonists from the end of the century, such as Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. iii Acknowledgements I gratefully acknowledge the patient and extensive help afforded me by the members of my Thesis Committee (Professors Susan Warwick and Marcia Macaulay), and especially by my Supervisor, Professor Art Redding—with whom it was indeed a pleasure to work. I also acknowledge with thanks the flexibility displayed by York University in admitting to its graduate programmes mature students whose first degrees date from some time ago. As always, I owe a great debt of gratitude to my wife. iv Table of Contents Abstract page ii Acknowledgements page iv Table of Contents page v Chapter 1: Introduction page 1 Chapter 2: Frank Norris’s McTeague page 37 Chapter 3: Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy page 61 Chapter 4: James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice page 85 Chapter 5: Richard Wright’s Native Son and The Outsider page 113 Chapter 6: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita page 145 Chapter 7: Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley Novels page 169 Chapter 8: Conclusion—And the Abandonment of the “Humanist Murderer” page 203 Notes page 226 Works Cited page 234 v Chapter 1: Introduction In 1924, half-way through his masterly summation in defence of the teenage murderers Leopold and Loeb, Clarence Darrow addressed the judge thus: “They killed him [their young victim, Bobbie Franks] because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped” (“trial,” Leopoldandloeb.com). Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, wealthy and gifted scions of Chicago’s upper class, had deliberately murdered 14-year- old Bobbie Franks—their apparent motivation being the desire to commit a perfect crime, although the quest for motive is complicated by the intensity of their homosexual relationship (Leopold later stated that he had participated in the murder mainly to please Loeb). Their guilt was swiftly discovered (Leopold lost a pair of spectacles with an unusual hinge near the body) and they were arrested. Public anger was predictably intense, and the death penalty was demanded in spite of their youth. Clarence Darrow was retained to defend them and immediately embarked upon a brilliant defence, motivated to some extent by his fierce opposition to capital punishment. He first changed their pleas to guilty, thus ensuring that the outcome of the trial would be decided by a judge rather than a jury. Equally remarkably, however, as illustrated by the quotation above from his summation and those that will follow,1 Darrow based his entire defence on the repeated deployment of the deterministic proposition that Leopold and Loeb could not be considered guilty because they were at the mercy of hereditary and environmental influences beyond their control. 1 Darrow’s determinism was broad in its allocation of blame for the “slippage” in the characters of the two young murderers. Again and again he cited hereditary influences, which he envisioned as being the result of a deleterious mutation carried forward through the generations of their ancestors. Claiming that “every human being is the product of the endless heredity behind him,” he suggested that “the mother of a Nathan Leopold or of a Richard Loeb…has to ask herself the question ‘How come my children came to be what they are? From what ancestry did they get this strain? How far removed was the person that destroyed their lives? Was I the bearer of the seed that brings them to death?’ ” Equally frequently, however, he visited the issue of malign environmental influences. Darrow claimed that these included mistakes made in Loeb’s childhood (he criticized, for example, Loeb’s governess for her stern and single-minded emphasis on academics: “This boy needed more of home, more love, more directing…Had these been given him, he would not be here today”), but he also suggested that at least two cultural influences were equally blameworthy. First he targeted Loeb’s uncontrollable fascination with detective stories, pointing out that “We have a statute in this state, passed only last year…which forbids minors reading stories of crime. Why? Because the legislature in its wisdom felt that it would produce criminal tendencies in the boys who read them.” In Leopold’s case, Darrow pointed to the baleful influence of Nietzsche, “who held a contemptuous, scornful attitude to all those things which the young are taught as important in life.” He described how Nietzsche’s philosophy took possession of Leopold: “Here is a boy at sixteen or seventeen becoming obsessed with these doctrines…It was not a casual bit of philosophy with him; it was his life. He believed in a superman. He and Dickie Loeb were the supermen.” 2 The deterministic basis of Darrow’s defence was overt; indeed, he foregrounded it. He repeatedly referred to a world in which “nothing happens without a cause” (the implication being that this would yield to analysis--at least at some point in the future), and he particularly applied this approach to crime: “Crime has its cause…Perhaps all crimes do not have the same cause, but they all have some cause.” He emphasized humankind’s helplessness in the face of the forces that grip him: “Nature is strong and pitiless. She works in her own mysterious way, and we are her victims. We have not much to do with it ourselves. Nature takes this job in hand, and we play our parts.” Sensationally--there was a riot outside the courtroom--Darrow prevailed with the judge, and thus saved his clients from the gallows. Advancing a half-century to the nineteen-sixties and –seventies, we encounter another criminological and penal controversy, but one that bespeaks an approach to human volition and actions more than somewhat at odds with Darrow’s determinism. In the mid-century, partly as a result of the increased stature of the concept of social engineering in the post-War years, partly as a result of experience with invasive personality-changing procedures such as lobotomy, but mainly because of the increased availability of new psychoactive drugs, the possibility began to be taken seriously that society could, indeed should, intervene Clockwork Orange-style to chemically or surgically modify the brains of persistently violent criminals in order to eliminate their aggression. In her comprehensive study The Search for Criminal Man, Ysabel Rennie sums up the attraction of these proposals as follows: “Now…at last, the criminal could be changed by acting directly on his brain and central nervous system so that he would no longer will to do wrong” (203). Clearly such an approach bespeaks a belief that the needs 3 of society take precedence over the rights of the individual. Rennie quotes Professor James V. McConnell of the University of Michigan as being of the opinion that “ ‘Somehow we’ve got to force people to love one another, to force them to want to behave properly’ ” (200) and as believing that “ ‘No-one owns his own personality’ ” (201). In the late nineteen-sixties and -seventies the interventions initiated in prisons and mental institutions (mainly in California and Maryland) included the widespread use of ataraxics (tranquilizers) and aversive behaviour modification therapy involving chemical and non-chemical agents.
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