East End Prostitution and the Fear of Contagion: on Body Consciousness of the Ripper Case

Chapter 9 East End Prostitution and the Fear of Contagion: On Body Consciousness of the Ripper Case

Chung-jen Chen

One day men will look back and say that I gave birth to the twentieth century.1 Jack the Ripper ∵

Both in and outside Great Britain, “Ripperology,” the study of the Jack the Ripper murders, has captured the imagination of both criminal investigators and the general public for at least a century. Because of this prolonged fascination, Jack the Ripper and his milieu of East End London have been made the subject of not only serious studies but also popular entertainment includ- ing comics, novels, drama, musicals, and most significantly, films.2 Yet despite the surfeit of academic studies and popular representations of the case, there seems to be little sign that interest in the case has been exhausted. This article explores the geographical and biological representations of East End London in narrative accounts of the serial murders committed by the man known as “Jack the Ripper.” In revealing the necessarily uneven, incomplete, and inconsistent narrative of the social body of the city and the female bodies of prostitutes, this article attempts to challenge the institutionalized methods

1 The origin of this famous quote is unclear. Although it is often attributed to one of the Ripper letters, it may have been an invention of the 1979 Ripper film Time After Time, and it was popularized as an authentic quote from the Ripper only by the influential graphic book From Hell and its film adaption. See the discussion on the Casebook website: “One Day Men Will Look Back and Say…” Casebook: Jack the Ripper, 2010, accessed July 25, 2018, http://www. casebook.org/forum/messages/4923/7670.html. 2 Denis Meikle’s study Jack the Ripper: The Murders and the Movies analyzed 63 movies from 1915 to 2001. 2001 alone saw the release of the movie From Hell and three other movies on the Ripper: Bad Karma, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, and Ripper: Letter From Hell. More than a hundred years after his crimes, the Ripper remains a popular subject for the film industry. See Denis Meikle, Jack the Ripper: The Murders and the Movies (London: Reynolds & Hearn, 2002), 212–235.

196 Chen of observing the pathologized and victimized female bodies. Through narratives of prostitution that surfaced during media coverage and official coroner autopsies, I argue that the fascination with the Ripper cases is heavily shaped by somaesthetic transformative cultivation of both the individual and collective body. In the Ripper narratives, the urban space of the serial murders was explicitly associated with the victimized and pathologized bodies of the prostitutes. The fascination with the mutilated female bodies described by coroner reports also shows a growing interest in the physiological features of contagion, as Victorians increasingly looked at the Ripper’s victims (and women like them) from the vantage point of the social body, adopting a mentality of governance. The associations between geography and biology in the Ripper narratives demonstrate that the emphasis on eliminating excess and waste from the living environment also extended to society as a whole. The eternal fascination with the Ripper is rooted in the ambivalence of medical authority toward defining clean and normal bodies, a discursive operation that was chal- lenged, furthered, and amplified in the dissections of the sexualized bodies of prostitutes. Just as the bodies of the prostitutes become subject to obsessive scrutiny, initial responses to the Ripper case, motivated by a collective fascination with the slums, continually constructed and reconstructed the geographic setting of East End London. I examine the process through which fascinations with the East End are configured through the collective imagination of the urban body. Jack the Ripper became synonymous with the East End, which in turn became identified with unclean sex with cheap prostitutes, and the lust, wan- tonness, excess, and filth that surrounded that act. The figure of the Ripper was associated with sexuality, a lack of sanitation, and discipline – each of these aspects serving to make him ever more infamous. The Ripper case as depicted in journalistic accounts, street literature, and autopsy reports, became an urban allegory of a morality of the body that demanded the purge of whatever is unclean, excessive, and immoral – such as the bodies of prostitutes – through violence, if necessary. I contend that this fascination with the Ripper has developed into an industry of body consciousness, a term which I borrow from Richard Shusterman and his pioneering work in somaesthetics. The moralistic metaphors created by the corporeality of body images continue to power academic research, artis- tic creation, and even entertainment surrounding the Ripper case. The critical study of how we experience and use “the living body” as well as the metaphori- cal construction of the urban body as “a site of sensory appreciation” and “cre- ative self-fashioning” gives us new and powerful insights into the narratives of