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Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics of Murder

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Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics of Murder Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics of Murder: Jack the Ripper to Dorian Gray A dissertation submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Science Trent University Peterborough, Ontario, Canada © Copyright by Anhiti Patnaik 2018 Cultural Studies Ph.D. Graduate Program September 2018 For my father; the poetical policeman ABSTRACT Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics of Murder: Jack the Ripper to Dorian Gray Anhiti Patnaik This dissertation examines how sex crime and serial killing became a legitimate subject of aesthetic representation and mass consumption in the nineteenth century. It also probes into the ethical implications of deriving pleasure from consuming such graphic representations of violence. Taking off from Jack the Ripper and the iconic Whitechapel murders of 1888, it argues that a new cultural paradigm – the aesthetics of murder – was invented in England and France. To study the ‘aesthetics of murder’ as countless influential critics have done is not to question whether an act of murder itself possesses beautiful or sublime qualities. Rather, it is to determine precisely how a topic as evil and abject as murder is made beautiful in a work of art. It also questions what is at stake ethically for the reader or spectator who bears witness to such incommensurable violence. In three chapters, this dissertation delves into three important tropes – the murderer, corpse, and witness – through which this aesthetics of murder is analyzed. By examining a wide intersection of visual, literary, and cultural texts from the English and French tradition, it ultimately seeks to effect a rapprochement between nineteenth-century ethics and aesthetics. The primary artists and writers under investigation are Charles Baudelaire, Thomas De Quincey, Oscar Wilde, and Walter Sickert. In bringing together their distinctive styles and aesthetic philosophies, the dissertation opts for an interdisciplinary and comparative approach. It also aims to absolve these iii writers and artists from a longstanding charge of immorality and degeneracy, by firmly maintaining that the aesthetics of murder does not necessarily glorify or justify the act of murder. The third chapter on the ‘witness’ in fact, elucidates how writers like De Quincey and Wilde transferred the ethical imperative from the writer to the reader. The reader is appointed in the role of a murder witness who accidentally discovered the corpse on the crime scene. As a traumatized subject, the reader thus develops an ethical obligation for justice and censorship. Keywords: Murderer, Corpse, Witness, Aesthetics, Ethics, Censorship, Abject, Sublime, Differend, Catharsis, Trauma, Victorian, Romantic, Decadent, Wilde, Baudelaire, De Quincey, Sickert. iv INTRODUCTION One of the unlikeliest literary associations of the nineteenth century was forged on 30 August 1889 between the Anglo-Irish writer Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle, the Scottish physician who invented the timeless detective Sherlock Holmes. The editor J. M. Stoddart, of the Philadelphia-based Lippincott’s Magazine, invited them to dine at the Langham Hotel in London to discuss potential contributions. This historic moment was commemorated only as recently as 2010, when the City of Westminster in collaboration with the Oscar Wilde Society and Sherlock Holmes Society of London, installed a plaque at the Langham Hotel that read “Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle dined here with the publisher of ‘Lippincott’s Magazine’ on 30 August 1889, a meeting that led to ‘The Sign of Four’ and ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray.’ ” Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four appeared in the February 1890 issue of Lippincott’s while Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, being far more controversial, was bowdlerized and published in July. The two texts are rarely read in tandem with each other – the former being classified as crime fiction while the latter, an iconic work of the Victorian Gothic and French Decadence. But it cannot be denied that this editorial meeting had a reciprocal impact on both authors. There is perhaps more Wilde in Sherlock Holmes and more Conan Doyle in Dorian Gray than has traditionally been acknowledged. Gyles Brandreth, a contemporary British journalist, writer and radio personality, brought attention to this historic moment in his neo-Victorian novel Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders (2008). The very first installation in the series begins with that fateful encounter between Wilde, Stoddart, and Conan Doyle at the Langham. Conan Doyle is struck by Wilde’s genius and Wilde, by the depth of Conan Doyle’s knowledge in matters of science and ethics. Brandreth then casts Wilde in a Holmesian role of crime-solving instead v of Conan Doyle, following which, the similarities between the historical Wilde’s dandyish wit and insouciance and Sherlock Holmes’s indolence, asexuality, and obsession with detail becomes apparent. What is immensely valuable about Brandreth’s neo-Victorian adaptation is that it emphasizes an otherwise underrated literary alliance in the Victorian age. By bridging Wilde’s oeuvre with that of Conan Doyle’s, among other important writers and artists of the period like Bram Stoker, E. W. Hornung, Walter Sickert, and John Gray (all of whom make an appearance in his novels), Brandreth breaks free of many generic and temporal restrictions that dictate the Victorian canon. His murder mysteries enable a productive and postmodern comingling of these writers and artists whose works spanned the ‘long’ nineteenth century, instead of separating them as ‘Victorian,’ ‘Romantic,’ ‘fin-de- siècle,’ or ‘Decadent.’ This demonstrates how so many of their anxieties and desires bleed into our culture. The M.Phil. dissertation I submitted in the summer of 2014 to the English Department at the University of Delhi was titled “Neo-Victorian Aesthetics of Crime.” Here I began to interrogate for the first time how the seemingly opposed or incongruent categories of violence and aesthetics come together in contemporary culture. One of my chapters was on Brandreth’s neo-colonial depiction of homosexuality and transgender identity in Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol (2012). This chapter was published in the journal of Neo- Victorian Studies in the summer for 2017 for its special issue on “Neo-Victorian Sexploitation.” It is definitely worth investigating why Victorian attitudes towards sexual dissidence and crime have resurfaced so powerfully in popular film and television. One has only to look at the proliferation of BBC shows like Jekyll (2007), Sherlock (2010-17) and Ripper Street (2012-16), and other productions like Penny Dreadful (2014-16) and The Frankenstein Chronicles (2015-present) to appreciate this. Then there are post-goth and steampunk adaptations of the nineteenth century in visual art such as Alan Moore’s critically vi acclaimed graphic novels. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) and From Hell (2001) were extremely popular as films despite the racy and violent content. My dissertation studied the race and gender politics of these adaptations to establish why characters like Sherlock Holmes and Dorian Gray continue to be so well loved and relevant. Neo-Victorian adaptations use sexual content in liberal, violent, and often gratuitous ways. Brandreth’s murder mysteries revolve around characters that are serial killers, fetishists, prostitutes, rent boys, and criminals. These previously marginalized figures within Victorian society take centre stage. The neo-Victorian as a genre also relishes giving the respectable and prudish characters from Victorian novels a secret or perverse life. In the BBC Sherlock for instance, Holmes and Watson harbour a homo-curious or “homosocial” attraction for each other, to use Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s critical term from her 1985 book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Holmes and Moriarty also feel a ‘perverse’ desire for each other despite being on opposite ends of the moral spectrum. Finally, even a non-consequential character like Mrs. Hudson is portrayed as a drug addict. Perhaps Michel Foucault is to be blamed for this; his reduction of the Victorians into a hypocritical or repressed culture in L’histoire de la sexualité: La Volonté de savoir (1976) has somewhat sealed their fate in our minds. We are no longer pacified by the heteronormative, patriarchal families, knitting heroines, and foxhunting heroes represented in Victorian novels. Perhaps neo-Victorian writers believe that by travelling back in time to the so-called ‘source’ of sexual repression in the West, they may prevent it from ever having happened. If the Victorians could be made to freely articulate their repressed desires, it might somehow legitimize the abject and marginalized communities that are still fighting for sexual rights and legal recognition. The neo-Victorian becomes relatable to the contemporary reader through the illusion that historical repression and censorship has been redressed for a more vii ‘realistic’ picture of the period. In 1918, Lytton Strachey began this trend by studying Victorian culture in his book Eminent Victorians with a mix of solemnity and satire. From Strachey’s depiction of Florence Nightingale as a hapless melancholic creature possessed by inner “demons” to more modern conspiracy theories that the Prince of Wales may have been Jack the Ripper, it is clear that the need to excavate the demonic in the Victorian and truss it up as the ‘truth’ only reflects the demonic in us. Michel Faber’s novel The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) warns the reader in the very first page: Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them. This city I am bringing you to, is vast and intricate, and you have not been here before. You may imagine, from other stories you’ve read, that you know it well, but those stories flattered you, welcoming you as a friend, treating you as if you belonged. (Faber 2002, 3) But as the reader progresses through Faber’s neo-Victorian portrayal of the dark and seedy underbelly of Victorian London, we realize that we do belong.
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