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. The novel grafts a very contemporary and almost anachronistic consciousness of rape culture and sex crime onto the nineteenth-century. Whether it is the invasive speculum of Victorian doctors examining the venereal prostitutes or the blade of Jack the Ripper, sexual violence, racism, and misogyny has become the main categorical image of the Victorian age. Our own habituation to graphic representations of violence and pornography across media may have originated in the nineteenth century.

My first prerogative for this dissertation – following from the ethical and aesthetic questions about the neo-Victorian genre that I raised in my M.Phil dissertation – was to find the balance between myth and reality. Matthew Sweet commences his 2001 book Inventing the Victorians by highlighting a typical bias in neo-Victorian adaptations:

viii

Suppose that everything we think we know about the Victorians is wrong.

That, in the century which has elapsed since 1901, we have misread their

culture, their history, their lives – perhaps deliberately, in order to satisfy our

sense of ourselves as liberated Moderns. It comforts us to imagine that we

have escaped their influence, freed ourselves from their corseted, high-

collared world, cast off their puritanism and prejudices. But what if they were

substantially different from the people we imagine them to have been? (Sweet

2001, ix)

Sweet attempts to re-imagine the Victorian age and re-interpret the available historical facts to counter the myths. His book allows one to see how the neo-Victorian justifies itself as a postmodern genre by often investing in deconstructive exercises for its own sake. Through obscure Victorian sources like advertisements, newspaper illustrations, biographies and testimonies, Sweet proves that the Victorians many not have been the prudes and racists they are made out to be. Their cultural preoccupations included reading crime fiction, going for walks, visiting shopping malls, and watching picture shows, thus making them reasonably

‘normal’ and even foundational for our culture. In his chapter “Monomaniacs of Love,”

Sweet conducts a thorough study of Wilde, homosexual pornography, and aestheticism and what it signified for the age. He concludes that Wilde’s behaviour was not scandalous at all but fairly typical of middle-class masculine behaviour. The Victorians were actually more progressive in terms of sexual and moral norms than the age that followed, because “the freedoms he (Wilde) enjoyed were not available to post-Victorian men” (Sweet 2001, 193).

One thing remains certain in all this, however, that the Victorian age invented a new paradigm of aesthetics that combined violence with pleasure. Judith Flanders in her

ix provocative book The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and

Detection and Created Modern Crime (2010) focuses on how the Newgate Calendar and execution ballads of the eighteenth century paved the way for the romanticization of the serial killer in penny dreadfuls, gothic and sensation novels. These popular literary forms unwittingly created a sort of ‘sympathy’ for the murderer and placed the reader in a complicated ethical position vis-à-vis pleasure. Ellen O’Brien discovers the same mechanic of sympathy for the murderer functioning in Browning’s dramatic monologues and Wilde’s essays on criminality, in her book Crime in Verse: The Poetics of Murder in the Victorian

Era (2008). According to her, genres like the murder ballads and penny dreadfuls emerged from the State’s treatment of an abhorred crime with an even more abhorrent mode of punishment. O’Brien categorizes the ballads into two types; the first-person lamentation of the criminal on trial, or the account of the murder witness. Both maintained the façade of moral distance by “submitting details for our interpretation … planning stages, explanatory letters, murderer-victim dialogues” (O’Brien 2008, 55).

Although the murder ballads seemed moralistic on the surface, O’Brien notes how the narrative of the criminal on trial could “punctuate, disrupt, or incite violence, and they frequently dramatise fragments of official discourse, such as coroner reports or signed confessions.” The 1869 ballad “Barbarous Murder of a Child by a Schoolmistress” for instance, was written from the perspective of an astonished witness “This Emma Pitt was a schoolmistress/ Her child she killed we see/ Oh mothers, did you ever hear/ Of such barbarity” (Cited in O’Brien 2008, 73). O’Brien states that the repetition of the word

“barbarous” in this ballad is only a tokenistic gesture of morality. If the deed was indeed so abject and indescribable then why does the witness provide such graphic details of the murder? The witness describes how Emma Pitt beat her infant to death with a “large flint stone” and cut out the tongue “from the tender roof of the infant’s mouth” (Cited in O’Brien

x 2008, 74). This image of gratuitous violence that – if witnessed in reality would produce nothing but abject horror and nausea – becomes somehow fascinating and sublime through the witness’s recapitulation of the event. The violent ripping of the infant’s tongue symbolically represents how an act of murder silences the victim irremediably.

The murder ballad’s “verbal technology” washed away the blood and chaos from the crime scene and gave it a narrative. O’Brien concludes “As stylised violence proliferates, aesthetic astonishment overtakes moral outrage as the genre’s epistemological mode”

(O’Brien 2008, 53). Flanders’s and O’Brien’s core arguments take off from Foucault’s assertion in his 1975 text Surveiller et punir that “from the adventure story to De Quincey, or from The Castle of Otranto to Baudelaire, there is a whole aesthetic rewriting of crime, which is also the appropriation of criminality in acceptable forms” (Foucault 1975, 69). Foucault is astounded by the power of words like “misfortune” and “lamentable” in the broadsides and murder ballads because they created sympathy for those “illustrious criminals” and transformed murder into a kind of fine art. In this dissertation, I take a step back from my research on neo-Victorian literature to reflect upon its concrete genealogical roots in the nineteenth century. I try to elaborate what exactly these “acceptable forms” or paradigms were that Foucault draws attention to. How did something as evil and abject as sex crime and serial killing be made beautiful or become a legitimate subject of aesthetic pleasure in the nineteenth century?

I began by investigating what the otherwise commonplace term ‘aesthetics’ implied for the Victorians. What was aesthetics and how did it approach crime differently from law, ethics, and history? What was the difference between the ‘perverse’ pleasure of committing murder and the ‘aesthetic’ pleasure of representing murder? What was the line that separated fiction, beauty, and pleasure from reality, ugliness, and the abject? Here, the Romantic writers Thomas De Quincey and Charles Baudelaire were particularly useful. Foucault also

xi begins his study of the “aesthetic rewriting of crime” with these two towering literary figures of the nineteenth-century. Between Baudelaire’s revision of the Kantian categories of ‘art’ and ‘beauty’ in Le Peintre de la vie moderne to De Quincey’s darkly parodic essay “On

Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” I found myself in an ethical quagmire.

Traditional critics from Aristotle and Kant onwards had defined aesthetisc purely as expressions of ethics. This gave occasion to an entire discipline devoted to the critical study of art and literature called “Aesthetics.” But how could murder – that utmost inexplicable, ineradicable, pathological, and abject of all realities – be “considered as one of the fine arts”?

What were the cultural wounds and traumas running through the nineteenth century that would prompt for such an extreme reversal in the category of aesthetics?

‘Aesthetics’ originated in the Greek aesthetikos that related to sensory perception and the pleasure accorded to the spectator. What a writer or artist represented in a work of art was at its fundamental and ontological level nothing but an imitation. Aesthetics in Aristotelian theory for instance, was defined as an essentially mimetic act or extension of the innate human tendency to imitate material reality. The degree of pleasure experienced by the spectator depended on the accuracy of this imitation or mimesis. A mimetic work was deemed a ‘work of art’ if it had a certain formulaic effects upon the spectator. From Kant,

Baumgarten, Schiller and the Enlightenment onwards, however, there was a significant shift in the philosophical and moral discourses surrounding beauty, taste, and spectatorship. Kant’s celebrated 1790 treatise Critique of Judgment and Baumgarten’s 1742 Metaphysics propelled the term aesthetics in a more contemporary direction. It cast aside its Greek roots and began to operate more evaluatively. The “beautiful” and “good” were not the same as the

“agreeable” or “sublime” because they complied with an a priori or transcendental category of judgement. Aesthetics was no longer that which generated the beautiful, as it had been for the Greeks, but became an ethical imperative emerging from the beautiful.

xii Baudelaire and De Quincey consistently betrayed their impatience with Kant’s notion of the a priori as well as Aristotelian concepts of mimesis and catharsis. In their own specific ways, they deconstructed the evaluative emphasis of the term aesthetics and reoriented it in a more value-neutral and productive direction. When De Quincey used the phrase ‘Fine Arts’ instead of ‘beauty’ to define the aesthetics of murder, he was pushing aesthetics in a Latin direction. For him, aesthetics came from the Latin verb ars that denoted method, style, skill, craftsmanship, technology, or treatment. Recall O’Brien’s phrase “verbal technology” to delineate how the murder ballads made violence appealing for the masses. The real gem of

De Quincey’s essay is his emphasis on how a writer or artist converts murder into a work of art – work being the operative term here. In his 1991 book Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in

Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture, Joel Black distinguishes between these two etymological strains within aesthetics:

There are two ways an object, idea, event or act can achieve artistic status.

On the one hand, the object can be created, the idea conceived, the event

engineered, or the act performed by the artist with the express intention of

making it a work of art, whatever the “artist” may mean or understand by

“art.” On the other hand, any object or idea may be experienced or

interpreted by a beholder (or witness, in the case of someone who is present

at an event or an act) as a work of art – again, according to whatever the

beholder’s definition of “art” may be. The first alternative is artistic, and

entails the artist’s production of an artefact. The second alternative is

aesthetic and refers exclusively to the beholder’s subjective experience,

regardless of whether or not the object of this experience was intended as a

xiii work of art or designed for the beholder’s aesthetic enjoyment. (Black 1991,

12)

In order to appreciate the complex role that the aesthetics plays in Western culture, Black dwells on “the extent to which our customary experience of murder and other forms of violence is primarily aesthetic, rather than moral, physical, natural, or whatever term we choose as a synonym of the real” (Black 1991, 3).

My primary datum in this dissertation – arising from an initial interest in Wilde and neo-Victorianism – is the acte gratuit or the motiveless act. I am intrigued by how Kantian notions of aesthetic autonomy came to be conflated with medico-legal theories of sexual pathology and perversion in the nineteenth century. By examining a wide intersection of visual, literary, and cultural texts that cluster around Jack the Ripper and the infamous

Whitechapel murders of 1888, I try to expand the scope of a purely ‘Victorian’ or ‘neo-

Victorian’ aesthetics of crime. I argue that to study the ‘aesthetics of murder’ as a discourse emerging from the nineteenth century – as countless well-established critics like Flanders,

O’Brien, and Black have done – is not to question whether the act of murder itself possesses

‘beautiful’ or ‘sublime’ qualities. Instead, it is to study the visual or verbal technology and treatment through which murder is made beautiful or pleasurable. It is also to question what is ethically at stake for the reader or spectator, who bears witness to such immense and incommensurable violence in these aesthetic representations? The main writers and artists I investigate in this dissertation are Charles Baudelaire, Thomas De Quincey, Oscar Wilde, and

Walter Sickert. By bringing together their distinctive aesthetic philosophies, I opt for an interdisciplinary theoretical approach.

Not only did the nineteenth century witness a radical cultural change in its perceptions of criminality, but the general attitude towards death also changed. Philippe Ariès’s book

xiv L’Homme devant la mort (1977) is important in this regard, as it collates literary, religious and historical sources to prove that the nineteenth century was the age of the beautiful death or la belle mort. The human corpse, that had once been so sacred and taboo, was reduced for the first time to an object of trade or commodity fetishism. Using literary sources like

Baudelaire and Brönte, Ariès effectively shows how the nineteenth century saw a collective numbing of the mass’s reaction to death and violence. In fact, by the time Jack the Ripper struck in the fall of 1888, the corpses of the murdered prostitutes were subject to a hypocritical ‘masculinist’ voyeurism. Patricia Cornwell’s significant work on Jack the Ripper and the early-twentieth century artist Walter Sickert alerted me to how murder, sex, and art became irrevocably linked in the nineteenth century. Consequently, any writer or artist who represented sex crime and serial killer sympathetically or aesthetically made himself vulnerable to charges of immorality and degeneracy. Lisa Downing’s book The Subject of

Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer (2013) and Elana Gomel’s

Bloodscripts (2003) functioned as useful correctives to these (much too) literal interpretations of the acte gratuit.

The conjunction of art and murder in the nineteenth century is most extensively examined in Black’s Aesthetics of Murder. He actually provides a diagram through which this aesthetics may be theoretically mapped:

xv Black rejects detective fiction on the ground that it is ‘inauthentic’ because it shifts the reader’s attention away from the corpse and entirely to the detective’s investigation. In the same vein, I disavow the detective genre and focus instead on three tropes – the murderer, corpse, and witness – through which serial murder and sex crime were aestheticized in the nineteenth century. Much of Black’s conclusions from this diagram are extremely original and significant but he fails to maintain (or at least, occasionally disregards) the ontological distinction between an act of murder versus its representation in a work of art. I aim to absolve these nineteenth-century artists and writers from being implicated themselves in the allegedly ‘immoral’ content of their works. I hope it will remain clear to my readers throughout that the aesthetics of murder does not necessarily promote or glorify murder.

Even if these writers and artists produced what O’Brien calls the “aesthetic astonishment of thr witness,” they do not erase or discount the witness’s “moral outrage.” In fact, De Quincey and Wilde transferred the ethical imperative to the reader. The reader is appointed in the role of a murder witness – who accidentally discovers the corpse on the crime scene – and is obliged to testify against the traumatic and violent content of these texts.

Let me return to my initial discussion on Brandreth and the meeting between Wilde,

Conan Doyle and Stoddart by way of conclusion. In Brandreth’s novel, Wilde seconds

Conan Doyle’s proposal to also contribute a “murder mystery” to Stoddart’s magazine. This comes, however, with the caveat that the murder mystery will be “somewhat different” than the conventional detective story. With this extremely provocative announcement, Brandreth knows that anyone who has read The Picture of Dorian Gray will understand what his character means here. It is worth clarifying, however, that the historical Wilde could not possibly have known at this point that he was going to write a ‘murder mystery.’ Wilde had not yet developed the core concept of The Picture of Dorian Gray and initially offered

Stoddart one of his fairy tales “The Fisherman and his Soul” for publication. Brandreth elides

xvi the fact that Stoddart had rejected this story on the ground that it was unsuited for the adult reader. Stoddart then urged Wilde to instead expand on the Faustian theme. Although Wilde attempted to fulfil Stoddart’s expectations, his first manuscript of The Picture of Dorian Gray could not pass the editor’s approval either. It was only a year later that Wilde decided to revise his manuscript along the lines of a detective story or “murder mystery.” The neo-

Victorian as a revisionist or adaptive genre is thus full of such historical elisions that one needs to be wary of.

Stoddart removed all references to the French Decadents, veiled metaphors of homoerotic love, and other signs of ‘moral’ transgression from Wilde’s original manuscript.

In spite of this, the novel faced harsh reviews and was taken off the stands in the fall of 1890.

Wilde decided to emend this version by adding five new chapters and attenuating some of the contentious references. The novel was republished a year later by Ward, Lock, and Co. and gradually assumed the version we read today. Last summer, I was given permission to access

Wilde’s original typescript submitted to Stoddart by The Morgan Library and Museum, New

York, where it is currently archived. What I found most striking, when I compared the two versions of The Picture of Dorian Gray there was that Wilde practically rewrote his original plot to make it more recognizably like a Victorian detective novel. He chose to retain the fact, however, that Dorian Gray would be brought to justice not by a detective or a lawyer for his crimes, but by a bereaved and vengeful witness James Vane. I was also intrigued by how

Wilde represented the peculiar ‘moral’ corruption of Dorian Gray’s portrait – whose canvas bore marks of trauma and abjection from having witnessed all his secret crimes. The portrait’s peculiar testamental relationship to these crimes is incredibly fascinating but continues to be quite difficult for literary critics to define or interpret.

I must acknowledge Nicholas Frankel’s invaluable contribution in this moral and legal matter of the two Dorian Grays. Frankel obtained this original manuscript of the novel

xvii from the Morgan Library and published it in 2011 as The Annotated and Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray. The more I delved into this exceptionally annotated text, I discovered that

The Picture of Dorian Gray was a missing link between the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ movements of the late-nineteenth century such as Impressionism, Aestheticism, and French Decadence, and early-twentieth century Modernism. It also bridged the gap between the Victorian detective novel and the Romantic trope of the murderer-as-artist. It blurred the distinction between real criminals like Jack the Ripper and fictional villains like Mr. Hyde. Certain complex keywords or archaic terms from nineteenth-century medico-legal culture became apparent to me – lustmörd, acte gratuit, mal, degeneration, leprous, testimony, habeas corpus, mens rea, witness, influence – and I was compelled to theoretically grapple with them. Consequently, I give Frankel’s edition its due importance in my final chapter on the

‘witness,’ which probes into notions of trauma, ethics, and incommensurabilty. Ultimately my dissertation seeks to effect a Wildean rapprochement between ethics and aesthetics without subsuming one to the other.

xviii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation is the culmination of a decade-long obsession with The Picture of

Dorian Gray; an ardour that was fanned by some of the best professors in the Department of

English at the University of Delhi, India. I must convey my gratitude to Brinda Bose who taught me the novel during my Masters degree and gave me valuable feedback on the first academic essay that I wrote on Oscar Wilde. Another formative moment was in the fall of

2013, when my M.Phil. supervisor Christel R. Devadawson drew my attention to the

“aesthetics of crime” during our discussion on Wilde and Conan Doyle. It opened an entirely new field of investigation for me, for which I am obliged to her. I must thank the members of my supervisory committee Yves Thomas, Jonathan Bordo, Suzanne Bailey, and James

Penney at the Department of Cultural Studies, Trent University. Jonathan went far beyond his obligations as supervisor and truly immersed himself into my work on Wilde. Much of my theorization on the reader as witness developed from his essays on the “specular witness” in contemporary art and film, and his dedicated cultural materialist work on Raymond Williams and keywords. I sincerely hope that the ideas expressed in this dissertation pertaining to

French Romanticism and the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ do justice to the depth and fervour with

Yves guided me. He was also kind enough to give me permission to use his photograph of

Walter Sickert’s painting Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom, which is currently on display at the

Manchester Art Gallery. The theoretical discussion on Gilles de Rais and evil owed much to

James’s book The World of Perversion and his expertise in ethics and psychoanalysis. I am also indebted to Suzanne for her unwavering support of my interest in Wilde, Victorian culture, and postmodernism.

xix I would like to acknowledge Michael Puett and Shoshana Felman, who graciously engaged with sections of the dissertation during my interaction with them at the 2017 summer session of The School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University. That summer, I was given access to the original 1890 manuscript of The Picture of Dorian Gray that is housed at the Sherman Fairchild Reading Room of The Morgan Library and Museum, New

York. Much of this dissertation was composed at Amusé Coffee Co., Peterborough. It would be an oversight indeed not to thank their staff for giving me such a wonderful space to work.

I would spend hours writing with a cup of their French madeleine latte and the Salomé curtain to my right. None of this would have been possible without the constant love and support of my parents who have always encouraged my literary ambitions and taught me the value of hard work and perseverance. Most of all, I want to thank my partner Pranav for his patience and precious literary input. He was uniquely capable of preserving my mental peace, happiness, and faith, particularly in the final months of writing when I became the most solipsistic. As he was also engrossed in writing his first novel at the time, I could candidly share my mood swings and the vagaries of the creative process. Finally, I must acknowledge the Ontario Trillium Foundation and Graduate Studies, Trent University for generously funding my research and thank my exceptional friends and colleagues who made time in

Canada infinitely rich and rewarding.

xx

CONTENTS

Abstract ...... iii

Introduction ...... v

Acknowledgements ...... xix

List of Illustrations ...... xxii

I. Murderer as Artist ...... 1

II. Corpses in Bloom ...... 87

III. Witness under Arrest ...... 171

Conclusion

Bibliography

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

James Ensor, 1888, “La Luxure,” Les Péchés capitaux (New York/SABAM, Brussels: Artists

Rights Society 2018) ...... 16

Alphonse Bertillon, 1896, Signaletic Instructions, Including the Theory and Practice of

Anthropometrical Identification (Chicago: The Werner and Company, Plate 41). From Nicole

Rafter, The Origins of Criminology: A Reader (Abingdon: Routledge 2009), 223 ...... 23

“Portrait of Lacenaire,” 1836, Lacenaire, Mémoires et autres écrits, ed. Jacques Simonelli

(Paris: José Corti 1991), Illus. 5 ...... 39

“Lithograph of Lacenaire’s head,” 1836, Lacenaire, Mémoires et autres écrits, ed. Jacques

Simonelli (Paris: José Corti 1991), Illus. 8 ...... 39

Walter Richard Sickert, circa 1906-07, Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom (Manchester: Manchester

Art Gallery). Picture courtesy Yves Thomas ...... 56

James McNeill Whistler, 1895, “Portrait Sketch of Walter Sickert” (Ireland: Dublin City

Gallery). From Patricia Cornwell, Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert (Seattle: Thomas and Mercer 2017), 474 ...... 60

“Photograph of Walter Sickert,” circa 1920s (London: Margaret Bentley Studio, Islington

Local History Centre). From Patricia Cornwell, Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert,

(Seattle: Thomas and Mercer 2017), 187 ...... 61

“An October 1889 letter sent by ‘Jack the Ripper’,” MEPO 3/142 ff 272-274 (UK: The

National Archives, and Patricia Cornwell Collection). From Patricia Cornwell, Ripper: The

Secret Life of Walter Sickert (Seattle: Thomas and Mercer 2017), 234 ...... 70

“Comparison of Sickert’s paintings to crime-scene photographs.” From Patricia Cornwell,

Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert (Seattle: Thomas and Mercer 2017), 319 ...... 73

Walter Richard Sickert, 1914, Ennui (London: The Tate Gallery) From Patricia Cornwell,

Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert (Seattle: Thomas and Mercer 2017), 141 ...... 76

“The official crime scene photograph of Mary Jane Kelly,” 8 November 1888. From Patricia

Cornwell, Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert (Seattle: Thomas and Mercer 2017),

175 ...... 95

“Elizabeth Stride, Annie Chapman, and Mary Ann Nichols.” From Patrick Knox, “Did Jack the Ripper escape London to carrying on his brutal killings in Yorkshire?” Daily Star, 28

August 2016 ...... 99

Eugène Delacroix, Odalisque (1825) ...... 105

Walter Richard Sickert, 1909, L’Affaire de Camden Town. The Royal Academy of Arts,

London. From Lisa Tickner, “Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Murder and Tabloid

Crime,” Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century (New

Haven and London: Yale University Press 2000), 17 ...... 116

Gustave Courbet, 1866, L’Origine du monde ...... 119

John Everett Millais, 1852, Ophelia ...... 142

“Mortuary Sketch of Mary Ann Nichols,” The Illustrated Police News (British Newspaper

Archive, British Library, 1888), LON 121A ...... 145

Paul Cézanne, 1872, La Femme étranglée. From André Dombrowski, “Cover illustration,”

Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life (US: University of California Press 2013) ...... 161

Paul Cézanne, circa 1866-69, Sketch illustrating Baudelaire’s “Une Charogne,” Département des Arts Graphiques, Musée du Louvre (Orsay, Paris). From Ainslie Armstrong McLees,

1989, Baudelaire’s “Argot Plastique”: Poetic Caricature and Modernism (Athens and

London: The University of Georgia Press), 24 ...... 166

“Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ward, Lock and Company, 1891.” From Brett

Beasley, “The Triptych of Dorian Gray (1890-91): Reading Wilde’s Novel as Three Print

Objects,” Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [en ligne] 84 (Aug 2016) ...... 196

Jan van Eyck, 1434, Arnolfini Wedding ...... 197

“Sketch of John Williams’s punishment.” From P.D. James and T.A. Critchley, The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders 1811 (London: Constable and Co. 1971),

118 ...... 221

“Autograph Manuscript of Chapter Five.” The Morgan Library and Museum, New York, MA

3149, accessed 24 July 2017 ...... 250

1

Chapter One

Murderer as Artist

Shall it be said that the influence of our contemporary literature has engendered a

unique monster?

Michel Foucault1

A question that haunted the nineteenth century, and continues to make ripples in contemporary media is – who was Jack the Ripper. This serial killer notoriously murdered six prostitutes in the fall of 1888 in London. As he was never apprehended, his motives remain unknown. ‘Jack the Ripper’ is the only available moniker or term of reference for the killer.

His victims were discovered on the streets of Whitechapel, in the East End of London, except for Mary Kelly who was found murdered in her bed. Their throats were cut almost to the point of decapitation, there were severe mutilations on their bodies, and the uterus and pelvic organs were ripped out. To this date, the killer’s acts mark the zenith of Victorian misogyny, and highlight the hypocrisy of public morality. One would expect a series of such gratuitous murders to invoke unambiguous moral outrage. However, the Victorian press blamed the victims for their promiscuity and even credited the ‘Ripper’ for purging the streets of

Whitechapel of their ‘corrupting’ presence. The press and working-class journals obsessively sensationalized the murders, and out of their speculations emerged one of the most complex and contradictory criminological profiles of a serial killer. London had witnessed its fair share of serial murders before 1888, even acts of sexual violence committed against prostitutes. But there was something truly excessive and exceptional about the Whitechapel murders, which is worth probing. Even contemporary adaptations of Jack the Ripper in London’s tourism industry and the BBC television and radio cultivate a sort of fascination or sympathy for the

2 serial killer. Since this cultural ambivalence over serial killers still persists, this chapter will explore how it originated and became such a dominant discourse of modernity.

One might consider John Williams, convicted of serial murder in 1811 in London, to be a precursor to the Ripper myth. Like the Whitechapel murders, the case against John

Williams is deeply shrouded in mystery. On 7 December 1811, Timothy Marr, a modest linen draper at 29 Ratcliffe Highway of the East End of London, ordered his maid to fetch oysters for dinner. She had been gone under twenty minutes but returned to find her repeated knocking at the kitchen door unanswered. She was certain that the family had not gone to sleep but when she received no response, she alerted the guard and one of Marr’s neighbours.

They broke in to the house and found Marr, his apprentice, his pregnant wife and suckling child severely hacked to death. The sheer inexplicability of this act – the slaughter of a nondescript working-class family without any discernible motive – made the event a sensation. A fortnight later, an elderly tavern owner by the name of Williamson, his wife, and cook were also killed in a similar fashion. In this case, there was an actual witness who claimed to have seen the murderer. The witness was a lodger at Williamson’s house and had caught a glimpse of a cloaked figure towering over the victims. He managed to escape out the window of his top-storey room by hanging a bed-sheet and roused the entire neighbourhood.

By the time they entered the house, the murderer had once more escaped. The East End was in uproar and put immense pressure on the meagre parish authorities at Shadwell to apprehend the perpetrator. After a crude investigation and some circumstantial evidence surmounted against an immigrant Irish sailor named John Williams, the case concluded with his suicide in prison.

The most extensive research on these murders appeared in 1971 in The Maul and the

Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders 1811 co-authored by the English historian T.A.

Critchley and crime fiction writer P.D. James. James and Critchley declare at the outset that

3 they want to deconstruct the verdict against John Williams. According to them, the real killer remained at large (much like Jack the Ripper) and that John Williams was merely a scapegoat. By committing suicide in custody, Williams had apparently ‘confirmed’ his guilt in the eyes of a rudimentary legal system that “had done no more than pronounce a confident, convenient and ghoulish judgement on a corpse” (James and Critchley 1971, 2). Williams had “cheated the gallows” and so the Home Secretary ordered that his corpse be nailed to a cart and dragged through the streets. As this corpse approached the homes of the victims,

James and Critchley note how “Williams’ head flopped to one side, as if he could not bear to look at the scene of the holocaust. One of the escorts climbed onto the cart and firmly placed the body so that the dead eyes seemed to be gazing into the house at the uneasy ghosts of his victims” (James and Critchley 1971, 158). Nonetheless, their descriptions do more to redeem

Williams than to create pity for the victims. James and Critchley go to great lengths to acquit

Williams by re-examining witness statements and introducing other suspects. They give an extremely sympathetic description of his trial and the post-mortem desecration of his corpse.

They note how the ten thousand Londoners that had gathered to witness the spectacle of

Williams’s punishment watched in “speechless amazement that this frail body could have achieved so much horror?” The Maul and the Pear Tree, as a corrective historical account of the 1811 event, thus provides Williams some retrospective justice.

One must yet wonder what compelled James and Critchley to revisit a case that had otherwise been recorded as open-and-shut? There must have been something about John

Williams that had caught their attention or muddied the waters, so to speak? It is, after all, not easy to exonerate a man charged with effecting so traumatic a wound on English culture. The

Maul and the Pear Tree is premised on a literary text contemporary to John Williams’s trial, which was perhaps the first to shed a ‘sympathetic’ light on him. Although it did not question the verdict of the Shadwell court, it made a cult hero of Williams and went as far as calling

4 him a ‘genius.’ This is none other than Thomas De Quincey’s controversial essay “On

Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” published in 1827 in the Blackwood’s Magazine.

As per its provocative and paradoxical title, the essay elected something as abject and morally repugnant as serial killing to be an appropriate subject of aesthetic representation.

Taking off from Kant, Schiller, and Burke’s aesthetic theories, De Quincey wrote that murder could be approached from an ‘aesthetic handle.’ It was precisely the motivelessness and gratuitousness of the 1811 event that “exalted the ideal of murder to all of us” (De Quincey

2006, 10). De Quincey quipped that all previous murders paled in comparison to John

Williams’s ‘masterpiece,’ which made December 1811 a definitive moment of English modernity. Samuel Taylor Coleridge also remarked to De Quincey that following these murders, it became common practice to use the chain on the door before responding to a knock.2 The Romantics thus framed London’s East End as a stage or theatre of cruelty, where

Jack the Ripper would debut at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Where Kant, in his 1790 treatise Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, had separated the category of ‘beauty’ pertaining to a work of art from the category of ‘sublime’ produced by real instances of violence, De Quincey proposed that murder could be made beautiful if it fulfilled certain aesthetic requirements. He elaborated these requirements in a rather outlandish parody of Aristotle and Kant. For De Quincey, murder was in fact the topic for aesthetic representation as it made the most serious demand on a writer or artist to invent new paradigms of beauty. For instance, the 1811 event allowed De Quincey to imagine a “Society of Connoisseurs in Murder’” similar to the Kantian connoisseurship of art, who “profess to be curious in homicide; amateurs and dilettanti in the various modes of bloodshed; and, in short,

Murder-Fanciers. Every fresh atrocity of that class, which the police annals of Europe bring up, they meet and criticise as they would a picture, statue, or other work of art” (De Quincey

2006, 8). John Williams was no longer a villain upon whom suspicion fell for classist or

5 racist reasons. De Quincey used the Romantic idioms of ‘ideal’ and ‘exaltation’ to elevate him to the status of a tragic hero like Macbeth. By so doing, De Quincey connected Kant’s concept of aesthetic autonomy with the concept of criminal genius. This is not to say that these categories were totally opposed to one another prior to De Quincey’s intervention. His essay made overt references to Aristotle’s theory of catharsis but it also developed from

Schiller’s 1802 piece “Reflections on the Use of the Vulgar and the Lowly in Works of Art,” in which Schiller had subjected crime to the same criteria of aesthetic judgment as a work of art:

A man who robs would always be an object to be rejected by the poet who

wishes to present serious pictures. But suppose this man is at the same time

a murderer, he is even more to be condemned than before by the moral law.

But in the aesthetic judgment he is raised one degree higher and made better

adapted to figure in a work of art. Continuing to judge him from an aesthetic

point of view, it may be added that he who abased himself by a vile action

can to a certain extent be raised by a crime, and can be thus reinstated in our

aesthetic estimation. (Cited in Black 1992, 35)

De Quincey’s essay developed Schiller’s proposition by providing an actual model for the aesthetics of murder. It did not, however, accomplish this by calling any act of murder a kind of ‘fine art,’ as is frequently assumed of his heavily ironic title.

De Quincey’s satiric retelling of the 1811 event remains one of the most misunderstood theories of modern aesthetics. At no point does De Quincey sanction or justify the actual murder of the Marrs and Williamsons. Rather, he impresses upon himself the

“arduousness” of his task as an imaginative writer – to invent a means to aestheticize murder.

6

Being the editor of the Westmorland Gazette, De Quincey closely followed the trials and assize reports of famous serial killers like John Thurtell, William Burke and William Hare,

William Palmer, Madeleine Smith and Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. Robert Morrison notes that all of De Quincey’s writing was mediated through a “lens of crime, as when he observed that the archangel Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost must contend with an ‘angelic constable… or an inspector of police’ stationed at the gates of Paradise” (De Quincey 2006, ix). Historians like James and Critchley may call De Quincey’s essay a “black and white” account that “bears little relation to the truth” (James and Critchley 1971, 85), but it is almost entirely on the weight of this essay that they can even begin to create sympathy for John

Williams. It was through his “lens of crime” that De Quincey transformed murder from its real, ‘proletarian’ depths into an elevated work of art. When the Morning Chronicle published the grim report of the 1811 murders adjacent to an announcement of Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare, De Quincey saw it not as a ‘coincidence’ but a fact of modern life where horror and beauty, crime and aesthetics, John Williams and Macbeth become inseparable. It was no matter whether he was actually guilty of the murders or not; for De

Quincey, John Williams stood in symbolic relations to his age.

Another important historical intervention in this regard was the Marquis de Sade’s philosophy of crime and sexual libertinism from his 1785 novel Les 120 Journées de Sodome.

Despite the French text’s complex history of publication, translation and dissemination,

Sade’s concept of les passions meurtrières, or the murderous passions, was well known. By the time Jack the Ripper commenced his gratuitous acts of violence, Sade’s writing had set the precedent for what is now called a ‘sex crime.’ The Ripper’s crime scenes exhibited the same deliberation, luxuriance and eroticism of some of the rituals that Sade had depicted. It should come as no surprise thus that the Victorian press portrayed Jack the Ripper as a

‘Sadeian subject.’ Lisa Downing, in her book The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality,

7 and the Modern Killer (2013) observes that Sade’s writings were paradigmatic (much like De

Quincey’s) as they extended, for the first time, the urge for sex to the urge to kill. It was with the same ‘passion’ that the Whitechapel killer had gone about inflicting minute and myriad mutilations on his victims. Like the libertinism that grounded Sade’s philosophy, it was obvious that the Ripper had committed the acts for their own sake. But the Ripper broke even the boundaries of the Sadeian boudoir. He disavowed its inviolable and sacrosanct privacy and the contractual nature of violence. His victims were displayed on the streets of

Whitechapel like a grotesque tableau vivant. He had ensured that they couldn’t scream, struggle or attract the attention of pedestrians. He may even have crept up from behind the prostitutes with the instinct of a predator. Although there was no evidence that the prostitutes had been the victims of rape or uncontrolled sexual frenzy, there was something inexplicably

‘perverse’ and ‘sadistic’ about these murders.

It was this peculiar conjunction of murder with art via De Quincey, and murder with sex via Sade, which produced the complex criminal profile of Jack the Ripper. If art, sex, and murder were nothing but variations of the gratuitous act (acte gratuit), then the artist, the pervert, and the serial killer also became versions of each other in legal and criminological discourse. I must make an important clarification about this “Sadeian subject” here via

Downing – the Marquis de Sade was not himself a sadist and “it is Sade’s textual practices, rather than his acts, that have ensured the legend he bequeathed to us” (Downing 2013, 4).

Sade’s glorification of crime was merely a mode of philosophical critique against bourgeois morality and the ideals of the French Enlightenment. Downing’s categorical (and thereby, moral) separation of the writer from the work is a crucial corrective to the literality with which Sade’s writings were often read. Downing recognizes the tone of satiric irreverence with which Sade (and one might argue, De Quincey) “effectively refutes the belief of contemporaneous philosophes that the human being is naturally “good” until corrupted by

8 culture.” She notes how Sade’s actual crimes were no match for those of his libertine heroes, having briefly imprisoned his lover Rose Keller in his chateau in 1768 and non-fatally poisoned two prostitutes in 1772. The “Sadeian subject” or ‘murderer as artist’ is therefore, nothing but a fictional trope for philosophical and political critique. By the same logic, De

Quincey’s title “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” does not imply that an actual act of murder is a work of art but that even murder, like any other material or abstract object of experience, may be represented in works of art. De Quincey states quite explicitly that “I am for morality, and always shall be, and for virtue and all that; and I do affirm, and always shall, (let what will come of it) that murder is an improper line of conduct––highly improper; and I do not stick to assert, that any man who deals in murder, must have very incorrect ways of thinking, and truly inaccurate principles” (De Quincey 2006, 10). This pre- emptive qualification does not, however, prevent well-established critics from treating De

Quincey’s essay as a fully-fledged subversion of ethics.

The discursive slippage between real crime and its aesthetic representation culminated in the cultural equivalence between art, sex, and murder in the nineteenth century. Sade may have “succeeded in making pleasure through cruelty into a principle of transgression, widely recognized and celebrated as a philosophical and aesthetic blow against the petty social status quo and its conventions” (Downing 2013, 5), but this is completely different from a serial killer who implements this “principle of transgression” on real bodies. The actual killer of the

Marrs and Williamsons must therefore be separated from the myth surrounding John

Williams, whom De Quincey made into a Romantic hero. Similarly, the Whitechapel killer is not the same as ‘Jack the Ripper’ – a mythic figure invented as a “Sadeian subject” by the

Victorian press. The killer showed no fear or remorse for his actions, as would have been evident had he tried to cover his tracks. He posed his victims with a grossly misogynistic, exhibitionist, and ritualistic assertion of patriarchal power. There are six canonical victims of

9 the Whitechapel murders, though some critics limit or extend this number depending on their interpretation of the evidence. Martha Tabram was found on 7 August 1888 with thirty-nine stab wounds. A piece of Catherine Eddowes’s ear fell on its way to the mortuary on 30

September. Mary Kelly was so fervidly hacked to death that her face was unrecognizable, her organs spewed all across the bed, bedside table and floor. While the aesthetic and philosophical motives behind Sade’s celebration of the ‘murderous passions’ are reasonably transparent, the Whitechapel killer’s motives remain unknown. The volume of Mary Kelly’s blood splattered on the wall of her bedroom has confounded even the best contemporary pathologists and forensic experts.

Why did the Whitechapel killer attack working-class prostitutes? Why did he attack them in that particular manner and pose their corpses on the streets? These pressing unanswered questions gave the Victorian press its cue to fabricate the killer’s profile as a perverse dandy and regressed savage. How else but through an assertion of “exception and otherness” (Downing 2013, 17) could the killer have attacked these women thus? The murders went from the legal domain of crime and punishment to the theological domain of evil – a term still used to define the inexplicable or ineradicable act. At the heart of these questions was actually a deep-rooted cultural suspicion of the acte gratuit or an act committed without motive. Following Sade’s invention of ritual crime and De Quincey’s

‘aesthetics of murder,’ art and sexual pleasure were equated with serial killing so much so that it became difficult to separate these (erstwhile discrete) categories. The Victorian press regularly referred to the Whitechapel murders as ‘aesthetic’ acts and ‘lustful’ acts instead of

‘criminal’ acts. Unlike any other serial killer in the West, Jack the Ripper went from being a man to a phenomenon overnight because his crimes symbolized the fear of the acte gratuit.

None could explain the gratuitousness with which the killer had attacked some of his victims even after they were dead. The luxure of his acts – to use the French equivalent for the word

10

“lust” – his casual cutting of an earlobe or knifing of an eyelid, stood out for its motivelessness. Although the equivalence of art, sex, and murder may have originated in

English and Romanticism, it seems that nineteenth-century medico-legal discourses were equally invested in refashioning the serial killer as an ‘artist’ or ‘genius.’

Criminalizing the acte gratuit: Pleasure versus Perversion

The conflation of art, sex, and murder in the nineteenth century redefined serial killing to be a kind of perversion or pathological disorder, as opposed to being a specific transgression of a specific law. This is evident in how promptly the Victorian police handed over their investigation to medical doctors like Forbes Winslow and Thomas Bond. Faced with the severe lack of evidence, these doctors began conjure a ‘face’ for the killer that the police could look for. Bond contributed one of the earliest criminal profiles of the

Whitechapel killer in his November 1888 report to the commissioner. As a renowned syphilologist and expert in forensic science, Bond proposed that the killer chose prostitutes because he suffered from “satyriasis” – a medical condition whereby “he was oversexed and resorted to violence to satisfy his excessive sexual cravings” (cited in Walkowitz 1992, 226).

The main reason he was so effective at evading the police was because he was a “quiet, inoffensive man probably middle-aged, and neatly and respectably dressed.” Bond argued that concealed behind this appearance of gentility was a pathological urge to seek sexual pleasure not in the sexual act, but through murder and evisceration. Judith Walkowitz dedicates a significant portion of her chapter on “Jack the Ripper,” from her book City of

Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (1992), to Winslow and Bond’s medico-legal invention of sex crime. Like Bond, Winslow also believed that the murderer was “a homicidal maniac of the upper-classes of society” who possessed amateur medical knowledge. This allowed him to kill prostitutes with surgical precision and then wipe

11 his crime scenes clean. Consequently, the police shifted its focus from the usual suspects – the Jews and immigrant communities of the East End – and began to look for the Ripper within the highest echelons of the aristocracy and upper middle-class.

The Ripper’s criminal profile is but one instance of how Romantic archetypes of masculinity and genius were medically reconfigured as degeneracy. Where the “Sadeian subject” had flamboyantly practiced sexual libertinism, medico-legal authorities like

Winslow and Bond drove sex into hiding, secrecy, and darkness. Hence emerged the paradoxical composite of the modern serial killer as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. As time passes, the list of suspects and theories proliferate wildly but we are no closer to actually identifying who Jack the Ripper was or the source of his bloodlust. The word ‘bloodlust,’ particularly in the manner with which it is still used in criminological and forensic profiling to refer to the motive (or absence thereof) of a serial killer, has an interesting etymological history. It means, quite literally, a ‘lust’ or thirst for blood, which is abnormal because blood is so fundamentally abject and nauseating. Bulwer-Lytton used it as a hyphenated term in his

1848 novel Harold “Hear me, thou with the vulture’s blood-lust.”3 One may clearly see the savage, bestial and scavenging qualities that he metaphorically ascribed to the term.

However, the official medico-legal definition of the term came from Richard von Krafft-

Ebing’s book Psychopathia Sexualis. First published in 1886, two years prior to the

Whitechapel murders, it was an eminent psychological study of sexual deviance and crime.

Krafft-Ebing criminalized certain forms of sexual behaviour that had previously been discussed only in literature. He invented, for example, a type of sexual perversion called

‘sadism’ by listing the crimes depicted in Sade’s literary and philosophical works:

Following lust-murder and violation of corpses, come cases closely allied

to the former, in which injury of the victim of lust and sight of the victim’s

12

blood are a delight and pleasure. The notorious Marquis de Sade, after

whom this combination of lust and cruelty has been named, was such a

monster. Coitus only excited him when he could prick the object of his

desire until the blood came. His greatest pleasure was to injure naked

prostitutes and then dress their wounds. (Krafft-Ebing 2011, 254)

Krafft-Ebing was chiefly responsible for equating the writer Sade with his medico-legal definition of ‘sadism’ and may be said to have produced the modern category of sex crime.

Downing correctly indicts Krafft-Ebing for misreading the Marquis de Sade to be a literal embodiment of his literary philosophy. Psychopathia Sexualis was one of the earliest criminological texts to trace a fictional or aesthetic representation of a criminal act back to the author’s own ‘concealed criminality.’ In his preface, Krafft-Ebing casually juxtaposed blasphemy, immorality, and poetry in a formal assessment of the psychopath “He who makes the psychopathology of sexual life the object of scientific study sees himself placed on a dark side of human life and misery, in the shadows of which the god-like creations of the poet become hideous masks, and morals and aesthetics seem out of place in the “image of God”

(Krafft-Ebing 2011, iv). Psychopathia Sexualis dismissed all manifestations of the acte gratuit to be a kind of crime or perversion. What appeared on the surface to be motiveless was actually the symptom of a pathological or poorly repressed psychic drive. Krafft-Ebing identified two different types of sexual pathology; ‘inversion’ or deviation from sexual object versus ‘perversion’ or deviation from sexual aim. In the first category, he criminalized same- sex desire, sodomy, and bestiality, and under the latter were subsumed all forms of non- procreative sexual acts within a heterosexual relationship like masturbation, pornography, masochism and sadism. Downing draws attention to the fact that Krafft-Ebing’s theories drew from an intensely patriarchal, hyper-masculine, and heteronormative framework. Under

13 the guise of rational presupposition, he drew the boundaries of ‘normal’ sexual desire. Krafft-

Ebing’s primary aim for writing Psychopathia Sexualis, as he clearly stated in his preface, was to defend the “propagation of the human species.” He normalized masculine aggression and made the procreative act the sole motive of human existence. Krafft-Ebing glaringly omitted rape from his section on sadism, as it could potentially fulfil his prescribed teleological purpose for the female body. The rape of children found its place in a subsection on paedophilia and pederasty and the rape of animals in bestiality, but there was no mention of rape, torture, and sexual violence committed against wives and prostitutes as being

‘perverse.’

Downing proves that Krafft-Ebing’s hyper-masculine logic “comes perilously close to suggesting that women’s “natural” sexual passivity causes male sexuality to take an aggressive, violent form – effectively blaming the victim for the crime” (Downing 2013, 79).

As per Krafft-Ebing’s definition of normative sexual behaviour in men, there was nothing abnormal about the fact that the Whitechapel killer sought prostitutes to satisfy his sadistic drives. The male of the species was repeatedly absolved of its will to dominate since the

“woman remains passive” during sex, and it was but ‘natural’ for the man to occasionally overstep his limits with the aim to “conquer her” (Krafft-Ebing 2011, 59). Nevertheless,

Krafft-Ebing could not deny that there was something truly disturbing about the Whitechapel killer’s exercise of sexual violence sans sexual violation. There was no evidence at all that he had raped the prostitutes prior to or after he murdered them. Here, Krafft-Ebing coined the term “lustmörd” and gave it a whole host of ‘perverse’ connotations that endure in the contemporary word ‘bloodlust.’ He even amended Psychopathia Sexualis in 1888 to include a short case study of Jack the Ripper:

CASE 17. Jack the Ripper- On December 1, 1887, July 7, August 8,

14

September 30, one day in the month of October and on the 9th of

November, 1888; on the 1st of June, the 17th of July and the 10th of

September, 1889, the bodies of women were found in various lonely

quarters of London ripped open and mutilated in a peculiar fashion. The

murderer has never been found. It is probable that he first cut the throats of

his victims, then ripped open the abdomen and groped among the

intestines. In some instances he cut off the genitals and carried them away;

in others he only tore them to pieces and left them behind. He does not

seem to have had sexual intercourse with his victims, but very likely the

murderous act and subsequent mutilation of the corpse were equivalents

for the sexual act. (Krafft-Ebing 2011, 188)

Unlike the other detailed confessional entries in Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing’s analysis of the Ripper stands out for its brevity and vagueness. He had never actually seen or interviewed the killer unlike his other case studies. There was also no proof that the victims had been raped or subjected to necrophilia. The acts seemed to have been committed for their own sake. This surprising lacuna in the Ripper’s sadism – that the victims were not sought to satisfy the sexual urge but rather, for the satisfaction of one’s pleasure – prompted Krafft-

Ebing to conclude in his analysis that “the murderous act and subsequent mutilation of the corpse were equivalents for the sexual act.” A more appropriate translation of the original

German for ‘equivalent’ would be that the Whitechapel killer’s ‘normal’ desire for sexual consummation had been metonymically substituted by the desire to kill or mutilate.

While ‘lust’ needed to be cultivated in men for the procreative goal, Krafft-Ebing believed that it originated in a savage instinct for gratuitous pleasure. ‘Lust’ was not only meaningless if allowed to run its natural course in civilized society, but it was dangerous and

15 potentially criminal. By arguing that murder became the ‘equivalent’ for sex, Krafft-Ebing explained why Jack the Ripper felt the need to stab Martha Tabram thirty-nine times. Where the law had failed to determine the Ripper’s motives, Krafft-Ebing created a new category of sexual perversion called lustmörd or lust-murder “If potent, the impulse of the sadist is directed to coitus, coupled with preparatory, concomitant or consecutive maltreatment, even murder, of the consort (“Lust murder”), the latter occurring chiefly because sensual lust has not been satisfied with the consummated coitus” (Krafft-Ebing 2011, 154). Krafft-Ebing’s employment of the prefix ‘lust’ in lustmörd was not sexual in origin but intensity. It was not a prerequisite for the ‘normal’ procreative act but became its proxy or ‘equivalent.’ The prefix is closer in signification to the French word luxure – which adds to the sexual urge, suggestions of excess or exceeding boundaries. Take for example, the painting La Luxure from James Ensor’s collection Les Péchés capitaux (Fig. 1). Composed the same year as the

Whitechapel murders, it depicts a bedroom where a young man imposes himself upon a naked woman of large proportions. Her hair is golden, the colour of which is mirrored in the decadent pillars of the bedstead and the frame of a painting on the wall that depicts an orgy.

These blond coils of hair are long and flowing like a Botticelli Venus but the woman symbolizes the opposite of the virginity and beauty of an academy nude. Death is also personified as a third-party witness in this picture of excess, with its mythic wings and long scythe, accompanied by other demonic minions. This lends to the sexual act depicted, the strange sterility and monstrosity of lustmörd.

16

Figure 1. James Ensor, 1888, “La Luxure,” Les Péchés capitaux (New York/SABAM, Brussels: Artists Rights Society 2018)

In The Subject of Murder, Downing confirms that theoretically there was no such thing as an acte gratuit or an act committed purely for its own sake in the nineteenth century.

Even the heteronormative sexual urge was medically reconfigured to be a rational act with procreation as its purpose. All else was recast as pathological, ‘perverse,’ or monstrous:

Ultimately of course, the acte gratuit, itself is a sophistry since even “the

desire to commit a perfect crime” and “the desire to act irrationally,

unmotivated by gain” are in themselves, motives even if not pragmatic

ones. The acte gratuit, then, is “just” an idea but an idea particularly

exciting to the modern imagination because it hints at a (masculine)

subject acting out a form of radical freedom that is antibourgeois, anti

17

positivistic, and that elevates the aesthetic above the ethical. (Downing

2013, 14)

This suggests that in cases of serial murder, motive need not be extracted using formal confessions. All one needed was to medically establish an a priori ‘normal’ masculine subject. Downing’s book explains, to a certain extent, why the boundaries between art, sex, and murder were so indistinguishable in the medico-legal discourse; they were all the acts committed by an idealized male ego. Since the woman was constantly placed in an immanent, passive, or subordinate position vis-à-vis the man, Downing argues that “the notion that both creating art and killing others are means of exercising power is central to this

– very masculine – fantasy” (Downing 2013, 12). It was in “the figure of Sade,” Downing writes, that “the ideal of pure Enlightenment “reason” becomes corrupted by the extravagant taint of murderous lust” (Downing 2013, 6). Sade created a new aesthetic paradigm that had until the eighteenth century remained impossible. What was the nature of this new criminal subject that combined the sexual pervert, the serial killer, and the artist into one brilliantly precise image of degeneracy? If the nineteenth century saw the medico-legal pathologization of sex and murder through the figures of Sade and Jack the Ripper, then what was to prevent the pathologization of art and literature as well?

A noteworthy example of this new criminal subject comes from R.L. Stevenson’s novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which came into circulation the same year as Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. In it, the respectable and mild-mannered doctor

Henry Jekyll finds himself unable to reconcile “a certain impatient gaiety of disposition” with the moral expectations of his unvarying bourgeois life. He can neither “conceal these pleasures” (Stevenson 2002, 55) nor enact them, so he fashions a chemical potion that splits his self into two distinct personalities. Contrary to how the novel was perceived at the time,

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Stevenson portrayed Jekyll to be the monstrous psychopath, not Hyde. Jekyll is a “Sadeian subject” who wants to exceed the limits of bourgeois morality purely for the sake of pleasure.

Unlike Sade’s libertine, he does not want to be held accountable for his acts. His hypocritical creation of a depraved alter ego gives him an alibi for all his crimes. Stevenson’s use of the word “pleasures” is as striking as Krafft-Ebing’s term “lustmörd.” What are these “pleasures” that Jekyll is so anxious to satisfy? Stevenson’s chilling answer is that they are for all nothing. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde commences with one of the most inexplicable or evil scenes of Victorian literature. As Hyde returns home late one night, he accidentally collides with a young girl, possibly a street urchin, who fails to see him approach as she runs through the fog. One would imagine that Hyde could either extend his hand to help the girl up or he condemn her for interrupting his progress. But the manner with which

Hyde responds confounds all readerly expectations “the man trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground. It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see” (Stevenson 2002, 7).

Hyde walks over the girl not out of any motive to hurt or punish her. Her body and existence simply mean nothing to him. Hyde goes on to murder a gentleman named Sir

Danvers Carew whom he, once more, casually encounters on the street. There is no cause or motive given for why Hyde suddenly tramples him to death. Stevenson does not make the reader privy to the details of the brief verbal exchange between them, nor does show that

Jekyll may have harboured a secret hatred for Carew. The murder occurs with the same inexplicability and gratuitousness that Victorian London would witness two years later at

Whitechapel. Stevenson’s novel is peppered with such instances of what Robert Mighall calls

“the pathological intensification of the normal impulse which underlies the sexological classification of immorality.” In his essay “Diagnosing Jekyll: The Scientific Context to Dr

Jekyll’s Experiment and Mr Hyde’s Embodiment” Mighall locates the conjunction of ‘lust’

19 with ‘murder’ in the overt motivelessness of Hyde’s crimes:

There is the ‘ape-like fury’ with which he attacks Carew without (apparent)

provocation, and we learn that ‘Once a woman spoke to him, offering, I

think, a box of lights. He smote her in the face, and she fled.’ Hyde ‘strung

to the pitch of murder, lusting to inflict pain,’ is almost a textbook

description of what was sometimes called ‘lust-murder.’ His acts turn

towards the monstrous because Jekyll has renounced the ‘opposing ideas’ of

moral restraint by allowing Hyde release: ‘My devil had been long caged,

he came out roaring.’ (Stevenson 2002, 157)

Stevenson’s novel allowed the Victorian press to make sense of Jack the Ripper two years later. Newspapers used references from Strange Case to describe the serial killer’s lack of motive at Whitechapel. In light of a stalled police investigation, the press had no choice but to invoke fictional images of criminality to give the killer a face. Most prominent was W.T.

Stead, the editor of the The Pall Mall Gazette, who called Jack the Ripper “A Mr Hyde of

Humanity” in his article “Murder, and More to Follow,” printed on 8 September 1888.

Walkowitz cites Stead’s article at length in her book:

Stead used repeated allusions to R. L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr

Jekyll and Mr Hyde as well as to evolutionary anthropology, to

characterize the ““real-life” murderer in Whitechapel as an evolutionary

throwback and sadist. The crime was a “renewed reminder of the

potentialities of revolting barbarity which lie latent in man”; it was

committed by a “Mr. Hyde of Humanity,” a “Savage of Civilization” from

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“our slums,” as capable of “bathing his hands in blood as any Sioux who

ever scalped a foe.” Animated by a “mania of bloodthirsty cruelty which

sometimes springs from the unbridled indulgence of the worst passions”

this midnight murderer might well be a “plebeian Marquis de Sade at large

in Whitechapel,” who, Stead warned, may not confine his activities to the

East End.” (Walkowitz 1992, 206)

Stead was at the head of the mass hysteria and sensationalism surrounding the Whitechapel murders. Journalists like him were just as culpable as the medico-legal profession for producing the stereotype of the modern serial killer as a beast or degenerate who killed for sport or the satisfaction of the “worst passions.”

It is no wonder that the most disturbing fact about the Whitechapel murders was that the killer did not have a face. The fundamental question, however, is not who the real killer was but why the Victorians were so obsessed with giving him a face at any cost. Jack the

Ripper has now passed from history to legend; he is the enigmatic composite of atavistic as well as aristocratic desires, a beast and a dandy, a ‘Hyde’ and a ‘Jekyll.’ Interestingly,

Madame Tussaud’s 1980 wax exhibit “The Jack the Ripper Street” featured effigies of the murdered prostitutes but the killer himself was an absent presence – “nowhere to be seen” – only a disappearing shadow, whose “signature” was the mutilated body of a woman”

(Walkowitz 1992, 1). Tussaud’s descendants wanted to maintain the authenticity of the

Chamber of Horrors and did not give in to popular stereotypes. They used illusionist effects to create the gloomy, sordid atmosphere of Whitechapel but refrained from “invent(ing) a face” for the Ripper even at the risk of “the frequent “surprise” of visitors on failing to find him there” (Walkowitz 1992, 2). There are two striking things of note in Walkowitz’s summary of Tussaud’s exhibit. First, her use of the aesthetic term “signature” to denote the

21 murderer’s modus operandi invokes that crucial equivalence between art and murder highlighted by De Quincey. Second, the exhibit’s refusal to “invent a face” for Jack the

Ripper proves their dismissal of a medico-legal discourse that was invested in doing precisely that.

The complexity of Stead’s sensationalist portrait of Jack the Ripper must be deconstructed in order to examine the different strands within nineteenth-century criminology. The reference to Hyde is fairly plain, but Stead’s use of the phrase “Savage of

Civilisation” and his comparison of the Ripper’s acts to a beast of prey, like a “Sioux who ever scalped a foe,” was a reference to an important criminological text. The Italian positivist

Cesare Lombroso wrote about the “born criminal” in his 1876 work L’uomo delinquente.

Murderers (like the Ripper) were not rational, volitional subjects who exercised their masculine autonomy but instead animals or regressed beings incapable of mastering a pathological need for violence. With his theory of congenital criminality, Lombroso replaced the acte gratuit with instinct, an atavistic drive, and psycho-physiological traits of degeneration. Lombroso was the progenitor of this medico-legal discourse, having

‘discovered’ that the criminal’s body had certain traits that were similar to that of animals.

This meant that the criminal was closer to his remote simian ancestor than ‘normal’ men. For instance, Lombroso found that rodents and criminals had the same dent on the roof of their spine. He documented this ‘empirical’ observation with rhetorical flourishes to rival even

Sade and De Quincey’s hyperbolism:

At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of all sudden, lighted up as a

vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal –

an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of

primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained

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anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheek-bones, prominent superciliary

arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle-

shaped or sessile ears found in criminals, savages, and apes, insensibility

to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies,

and the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to

extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and

drink its blood. (Italics added) (Rafter 2009, 122)

Nicole Rafter in her anthology The Origins of Criminology: A Reader (2009) credits

Lombroso for his theory of congenital criminality but also for being the first scientist to use positivist and empirical methods to study the criminal body. By creating control groups, making anthropometric records of the criminal’s face and body, recording their reactions to shock therapy, and even analyzing their handwriting, Rafter avers that Lombroso’s “criminal anthropology, an amalgam of anthropology, medicine, psychiatry, psychology, and sociology, became the foundation for the Positivist or Italian school of criminology” (Rafter

2009, 161). His theories influenced the work of others like Francis Galton, Max Nordau, and

Alphonse Bertillon. Bertillon developed a new system of photographic profiling (Fig. 2) with the aim of making police records at the Paris Prefecture more sophisticated.

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Figure 2. Alphonse Bertillon’s classification of criminality by head shape Alphonse Bertillon, 1896, Signaletic Instructions, Including the Theory and Practice of Anthropometrical Identification (Chicago: The Werner and Company, Plate 41). From Nicole Rafter, The Origins of Criminology: A Reader (Abingdon: Routledge 2009), 223

Lombroso classified the “born criminal” as being almost entirely void of

Enlightenment ideals of reason, will, and autonomy. If the eighteenth century had extolled the ‘Sadeian subject’ as an agent of individual exceptionality, an aristocrat, a sexual libertine,

24 or an artist, then by the turn of the nineteenth century, there was another set of competing discourses that reinvented the criminal as a product of biological degeneration. Lombroso made it possible to identify the “born criminal” through certain physical and physiognomic anomalies. Apparently, the criminal wore ‘sin’ as a leopard wore spots. Downing calls this “a language of animality and teratology” (Downing 2013, 17) that originated in Darwinian and

Lamarckian theories of evolution. But Lombroso’s theory of congenital criminality stood out for progressing not from fact to conclusion – the correct positivist method – but from the preconceived notion that atavism and bestiality were signs of civilizational failure to the

‘fact’ that a person born with these qualities could become a criminal. If sexual violence and murder appeared motiveless, then Lombroso located their origin in the very body of the “born criminal.” Unlike any other disease or pathology, however, congenital criminality could not be cured. The criminal could at most be identified through certain traits so that he may be segregated from ‘normal’ society. The main thrust of Lombroso’s positivist method – to observe the traits, aberrations, and atavistic qualities of the “born criminal,” which would no doubt recur in the species – paved the way for the modern institutionalization of repeat- offenders in hospitals and psychiatric wards. It also produced the physiological emphasis of modern criminology, with its use of handwriting analysis, fingerprinting, and facial scanning to build a ‘body’ of evidence against a suspect. The conspiracy theories that called Jack the

Ripper both a “Savage of Civilization” as well as a “plebeian Marquis de Sade” became a curious admixture of science and fiction.

The Hand of Lacenaire: A Literary Geneaology

Jack the Ripper’s ‘face’ was a composite of congenital criminality, sexual perversion, and aesthetic autonomy, all because his acts appeared gratuitous or motiveless. Downing clarifies that “despite the apparently contradictory character of the 19th century discourse of

25 murderer-as-artist, on the one hand, and murderer as “beast” on the other, these ideas were, in fact, intimately linked and not mutually exclusive. They were harnessed together by the idea of exception and otherness that accrued to the murderer, whether as a noble mantle of superiority or as the beacon of sickness (Downing 2013, 17). The serial killer’s “beacon of sickness” came out of new Lombrosian discourses of congenital criminality. The Romantic legacy in popular Victorian art and literature was on the other hand, responsible for constructing his “noble mantle of superiority.” Take for instance Maldoror – the post-

Romantic hero of Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (1868-69) – who is represented both as a “born criminal” and “Sadeian subject.” Lautréamont’s obscure but important text heavily influenced the French Surrealists and provided some key concepts of modernism, violence, and desire. Georges Bataille claims in his 1957 work La Littérature et le mal that through a text like Maldoror, modern literature may acknowledge that it is ‘evil’ and it can

‘plead guilty.’ This confessional sentiment is certainly echoed in Lautréamont’s narrative wherein the hero openly declares “Quand je voulais tuer, je tuais” – “whenever I wanted to kill, I killed.” Through six lengthy cantos, Maldoror flits from one act of violence to the other. These acts are extreme to the point of hyperbolic absurdity, but do not consciously aim to violate any particular good or ethical category of behaviour. This is because (Lautréamont was mocking Darwinian and Lombrosian advances in science here) Maldoror was apprently born evil “Il s’aperçut ensuite qu’il était né méchant … il se jeta résolûment dans la carrière du mal.”1

Maldoror could not have evaded this “career of evil” any more than a stone could escape the laws of gravity. Yet at several moments in the text, Maldoror exercises a rational and autonomous will and remains in full control of the acts he commits. He does not appear

1 Sourced from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12005/12005-h/12005-h.htm He noticed that he had been born evil, an extraordinary fatality! He flung himself resolutely into a career of evil. (Lautréamont 1988, Loc. 24)

26 to be only an agent of congenital criminality or atavistic drives. The chapter that best illustrates this dual impulse within the hero is the shipwreck scene of the second canto.

Maldoror sees a young man struggling to rescue himself from the waves but instead of rushing to his aid, he picks up a rifle and calmly shoots him. This act is committed in full possession of his faculties. Maldoror is then, not so much ‘born evil’ as he actively craves to be identified as evil “Moi, si cela avait pu dépendre de ma volonté, j’aurais voulu être plutôt le fils de la femelle du requin, dont la faim est amie des tempêtes, et du tigre, à la cruauté reconnue: je ne serais pas si méchant.”2 Lautréamont grants him this bizarre wish by transforming Maldoror into an abject or abhuman creature in this scene. After shooting the sole survivor of the shipwreck, Maldoror watches a group of sharks approach the drowned victims to ravage and consume them. They are led by a particularly ravenous female shark, in which Maldoror recognizes his kindred spirit. Lautréamont’s post-Romantic idiom stretches itself to describe how the hero dives into the sea, transforms into a male shark, and regards the female shark with amorous desire and narcissism “dans une vénération profonde, chacun désireux de contempler, pour la première fois, son portrait vivant.”3 Then, in one of the most

‘perverse’ scenes of nineteenth-century French literature, Maldoror engages in sexual intercourse with the shark.

In a chapter titled “Evil and Science: Lautréamont and Zola” from his book Evil: A

History in Modern French Literature and Thought (2013), Damian Catani writes “By refusing to pin his flag to mast of Scientific Positivism or Republicanism, Lautréamont’s interpretation of evil, however, possesses the multi-facetedness and flexibility necessary to allow for the existence of man as both independent, self-reflexive moral agent, and as a

2 If I had any choice, I would rather have been born the male of a female shark, whose hunger welcomes tempests, and of the tiger, whose cruelty is well-known. (Lautréamont 1988, Loc. 142)

3 …and they hold their breath in deep veneration, each one wishing to gave for the first time upon the other, his living portrait. (Lautréamont 1988, Loc. 1131)

27 biological organism who is also prone to a more physiologically driven, unmotivated type of evil” (Catani 2013, 63). Catani states that in order to achieve this absurd criminological hybridity, Lautréamont invented a new literary form called “scientific prose poetry”:

Two philosophically and epistemologically incompatible paradigms for

interpreting evil are thus paradoxically set side by side: Darwin’s secular

notion of man as a physically finite being governed by instinct alternates

with the Augustinian theological model of evil that posits man as a

morally responsible sinner whose suffering is determined by God.

Lautréamont, as we shall see, pushes this contradiction to breaking point.

(Catani 2013, 67)

In another gruesome incident that uncannily prefigures Jack the Ripper’s gratuitous crimes,

Maldoror murders a young girl in a park like “ce loup, au mufle monstrueux” or a monstrous snouted wolf. The victim’s bereaved mother recounts this horrible incident. She describes how Maldoror was walking his dog when he saw her daughter sleeping under the shade of a tree. At the first impulse, he imposed himself upon her and raped her. Then he commanded his dog to tear at the girl’s flesh but even the animal recoiled at the prospect of such an abhuman act. Maldoror then used a penknife to gut the weeping, protesting girl’s stomach and vagina and pulled out her intestines and reproductive organs “De ce trou élargi, il retire successivement les organes intérieurs; les boyaux, les poumons, le foie et enfin le cœur lui- même sont arrachés de leurs fondements et entraînés à la lumière du jour, par l’ouverture

épouvantable.”4 The mother finally concludes her tearful recollection of the girl’s murder and

4 From the widened hole he pulls out, one after one, the inner organs; the guts, the lungs, the liver and at last the heart itself are torn from their foundations and dragged through the hideous hole into the light of day. (Lautréamont Loc. 1988, 1360)

28 eviceration by saying that there had been no precedent for such an ‘exceptional’ and ‘evil’ act. The character of Maldoror may be considered to be another important literary influence on the complex criminological profile that was constructed for Jack the Ripper in the fall of

1888.

Maldoror, as his name suggests, signifies pure evil or the epitome of evil. Although the manner with which Sade and Lautréamont employ the root term mal in their works loosely translates as ‘evil,’ this particular English term does not fully incorporate the French connotations of disease, pathology, perversion, luxure, and congenital criminality. In fact,

‘evil’ needs to be actively distinguished from ‘mal.’ Evil is the negative supplement of the word ‘good’ and belongs to a hierarchical oppositional linguistic and religious binary. Since good is a positive, explicable, and knowable category of ethical behaviour, evil encompasses any act, desire, or behaviour that goes against it; it is both inexplicable and ineradicable. It remains a linguistic and philosophical derivative of its positive supplement ‘good.’ A better accompaniment for ‘evil’ would be the word ‘perversion’ – derived from a directional Latin term perversio meaning “deflection from a right or true course” or a “deviation which, notably, is logically dependent on the norm from which it deviates” (Penney 2006, 2). The

French root ‘mal’ has several additional usages, including pain and misfortune and most importantly, disease or pathology. To appreciate this subtle difference between ‘evil’ and

‘mal,’ it is worth reading James Penney’s book The World of Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Absolute of Desire that offers a psychoanalytic history of perversion. In his chapter “Epistemologies of Perversion,” Penney elaborates that the “psychoanalytic concept of perversion in the theory of sexuality inherits directly from the concept’s previous incarnation in the related terms “sin,” “concupiscence,” and indeed “evil,” all of which, naturally enough, depend on the idea of a Good from whose respectable course they reliably depart” (Penney 2006, 2).

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Penney’s analysis of perversion reveals the discursive intersection between sex, murder and art, particularly in his invocation of Kant’s definition of radical evil. Penney uses

Kant to discuss the trials of the medieval child rapist and serial killer Gilles de Rais, who had fought alongside Jean d’Arc in the Hundred Years War. He dabbled in witchcraft, Satanism and the black arts and murdered over a hundred children to submit their corpses to disturbing necrophiliac rituals of strangulation, decapitation, and dismemberment. He was given the menacing moniker ‘Bluebeard’ and his crimes are far more legendary than Jack the Ripper’s.

Gilles de Rais never contested the accusations made against him at his 1440 trial. He confessed to all his ‘perverse’ acts so flamboyantly that even the witnesses testifying against him were driven to tears. The more the legal authorities tried to create a spectacle of his punishment, the more Gilles de Rais was able to use his confession to manipulate the jury’s sympathy. Where Downing argues that the nineteenth-century murderer’s exceptionality was a paradoxical combination of “sickness” and “superiority,” Penney’s study of Gilles de Rais reveals that he was not exceptional at all but actually made an “unqualified claim in favour of the universal “banality” of perversion” (Penney 2006, 37). It was not his Maldoror-like

‘otherness’ that overwhelemed the jury, but their own complicity in all of his crimes. This produced in them an ambivalent kind of sympathy or identification with the drives of a serial killer. Penney calls this a “counterintuitive transferential fascination” (Penney 2006, 43), using the psychoanalytic theory of identification. This uncalculated sympathy or fascination for the murderer’s narrative of his own crimes prevented “the church authorities from differentiating categorically between his own spectacular deviations and those of the audience’s ordinary believers” (Penney 2006, 37).

What bothered the Church the most about Gilles de Rais’s crimes – why he had committed them or how they could be accounted for within the knowable purview of human conduct – became increasingly irrelevant to the trial proceedings. Penney notes the

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“disarming simplicity” of Gilles de Rais’s sole response to the inquisition’s repeated interrogation of his motive. He stated that he had committed the acts purely for their own sake or “according to his imagination and idea, without anyone’s counsel and following his own feelings, solely for his pleasure and carnal delight, and not with any other intention or to any other end” (cited in Penney 2006, 55). Such a candid confession of “carnal delight” or conscious acknowledgement of one’s perverse drives effectively defuses the medico-legal theories of madness and congenital criminality that would develop in the nineteenth century.

What the inquisition was unwilling to accept was that all human subjects are ‘born evil’ but may choose to be good. This is what Penney means by the “banality” of evil; it is radical not in its ‘otherness’ but in its essential embeddedness or ineradicability from the human. Gilles de Rais is the perfect candidate for Penney’s theory of perversion as he “conjoins the properly sexual significations of the perverse which, though identifiable in the language used in the trial, have become predominant only since the mid-nineteenth century, with the moral and theological valences of the concept as expressed through the semantically related notions of sin, guilt, and concupiscence” (Penney 2006, 37). Here, Penney quotes Kant’s notion of radical evil from Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793). According to Kant, the evil act was an extension of the aesthetic act in the sense that it truly demarcated the human from the animal (and not, as Lombroso would have it, connected the human to the animal).

Kant’s definition of radical evil as a purely autonomous act, which combines the contradictory qualities of “innateness” and “responsibility,” is an important philosophical precedent to the paradoxical composite of the nineteenth-century murderer as both an ‘artist’ and a ‘beast.’

In a helpful reduction of Kant’s concept of radical evil, Penney states that it:

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…is not a natural predisposition which inheres in the concept of humanity

in such a way that it determines the actions of agents; rather, evil is a

propensity: a function of the maxims, in other words, according to which

we acquire responsibility for what we choose to do. Though evil is the

subjective ground of the will, and thus the product of a freely determined

choice, it is nonetheless so deeply in- grained in experience that Kant is

able to claim that it is “rooted in humanity itself. (Penney 2006, 56)

Following from these speculations, one may aver that the religious overtones of the term

‘evil’ in the Victorian context evolved from the Roman and medieval law of mens rea. It basically guaranteed that a crime required the presence of a ‘human’ agent. There was a clear demarcation between motive as a product of rational intention rather than a symptom of drive, instinct, passion. It did not recognize the acte gratuit or motiveless crime. Peter

Hutchings cites the Victorian jurist James Fitzjames Stephen, who distinguished between murder and manslaughter by invoking mens rea. In his book The Criminal Spectre in Law,

Literature and Aesthetics: Incriminating Subjects (2001), Hutchings delves into the

Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment sense of mens rea. He clarifies that a ‘human’ subject became a ‘criminal’ subject not because he broke the law but because he was aware that he had broken the law. Without this confession of motive, the criminal could not be reformed or punished (hence the inquisition’s insistence on motive in Gilles de Rais’s trials). Hutchings states “To commit murder, one must come under the legal narrative of the human, and a psychological narrative of volition and intention involving mens rea, a guilty mind, a classic requirement of a crime” (Hutching 2001, 54). Mens rea thus assumed that in order for a criminal to be evil, he must be categorically aware of what is ‘good.’

The French lexeme mal is far richer in connotation as it appends to the English binary

32 of good and ‘evil’ – Jekyll and Hyde – the additional medico-legal implication of disease, madness, and pathology. A ‘criminal’ is a patient or malade suffering or possessed by ‘evil,’ that is defined as a maladie. A more appropriate term to define a character like Maldoror within the French tradition then is malfaiteur or malefactor. The entry “mal” in the 1931 edition of the Larousse du XXe Siècle includes many other significations that cluster around this keyword. The first is ‘pain’ – souffrance physique as well as the more abstract douleur morale. An example given of the latter in the dictionary is of “la jeunesse romantique.” They were a group of nineteenth-century French writers and artists who expressed dégôut or discontent for bourgeois life and norms. Romanticism was the literary and cultural movement in France that from Chateaubriand’s René (1802) to Charles Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris

(1869) was called le mal de siècle or the sickness of the century. It was carried forward by

Pétrus Borel, Philothée O’Neddy, Charles Lassailly, Gérard de Nerval, Alexandre Dumas, and Théophile Gautier whose writings were interpreted to be the confessions of madmen or the morally insane. This was because the Jeunes-France or “Bouzingos,” as they were acerbically referred to by the French press “held a well-ordered life in contempt, as well as the conventional morality of the bourgeois regime. They preferred to live for Art alone- Art with a very large A” (Starkie 1960, 27). With their attraction for sexual androgyny and pleasure, exotic names, and obscure fashions and symbols, these writers and artists banded together in 1829. The Romantic impulse emphasized the artist’s drive or instinct for pleasure; motive was nothing but a motif or leitmotif of art. If Romanticism was indeed the le mal de siècle, then art and literature were semantically linked in the nineteenth century to biological disorders like males semaines or menstruation, incurable and congenital diseases like epilepsy – mal de Bright, and venereal disease like syphilis – mal de Venus.

Romanticism was perceived as a deep cultural affliction or contagion that needed to be ‘cured’ by the medico-legal authorities of the age. Pétrus Borel (originally Pierre) was the

33 uncontested leader of la jeunesse romantique. He wrote under the alter ego “Champavert” or

“le lycanthrope” – an obvious satire on the assumed bestiality and depravity of the Romantic poet. Much of the black humour of Borel’s Champavert: Contes Immoraux (1833) resurfaces in Lautréamont’s portrayal of Maldoror. In the text, Borel admits that he adopted the pen name “le lycanthrope” in response to the allegation that he was a Republican. If was indeed a

Republican, Borel jested in his preface that his was a Republicanism of the lynx, the werewolf, or a monster in human guise. ‘Le lycanthrope’ became his vantage point to criticize bourgeois morality and law, much as Sade had used the character of the libertine. It is interesting to see how in the nineteenth century, the very language of monstrosity that the

Romantics had used to critique mens rea and the religious concept of the ‘human’ became literalized and turned against them in criminology. Downing lays out the historical significance of la jeunesse romantique for the medico-legal discourses that accrued around

Jack the Ripper and the modern serial killer. She identifies Borel’s hyperbolic style as being characteristic of “la littérature frénétique,” the adjective ‘frenetic’ being seen a symptom of madness. Borel commenced Champavert by stating that the author had committed suicide having recently murdered his lover, and the reader remains unclear who exactly is this author

– “Pétrus Borel,” “le lycanthrope,” or “Champavert”? Downing writes “The writing is hyperbolic to the extreme, but the idea that the murderer is the figure most fit to critique the complacency and moral turpitude of society is a conceit which is carried over to the treatment of Lacenaire” (Downing 2013, 42).

Downing’s reference to Lacenaire, a murderer who was executed in 1836 for a series of petty crimes and misdemeanours, is formative for any discussion on evil and the Romantic

‘aesthetics of murder.’ She traces the genealogy of the modern serial killer in the West back to the mythic figure of Lacenaire. This is because Pierre François Lacenaire was that rare instance of a murderer and an artist; he identified with both these aspects of his identity in

34 equal measure. Born in 1803, Lacenaire distinguished himself as a scholar of ancient history and poetry at Lyon and Saint Chamond. He then moved rapidly from one professional class to the other; heading a seminary and a college, working briefly in a bank, enlisting in the army, and finally defecting in 1829. He was arrested for desertion and in prison began think of crime as kind of ‘fine art.’ It is no coincidence that De Quincey wrote his essay “On

Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” in 1827, so close to Lacenaire’s trials. Lacenaire met his accomplices Avril, Bâton and Chardon at the Poissy prison in 1830 and began educating them in the ‘art’ of murder. Four years after his release, Lacenaire killed Chardon and his mother and resisted neither his public arrest nor trial for murder. He infamously called the prison a ‘school of crime’ and shortly before his execution, wrote the Mémoires of his life as a poet-assassin. It is as Joel Black claims in his book The Aesthetics of Murder: A

Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture (1992), “If any human act evokes the aesthetic experience of the sublime, certainly it is the act of murder. And if murder can be experienced aesthetically, the murderer can be regarded as a kind of artist – a performance artist or anti-artist whose specialty is not creation but destruction” (Black 1992, 12).

The title of Black’s book provocatively draws from important sources like De

Quincey, Sade, and Lacenaire. As his analysis of Romanticism progresses, however, it becomes clear that Black’s concept of the ‘aesthetics of murder’ is focused more on actual accounts of murder that belong to the Burkian category of the sublime. He does not dwell adequately on precisely how Romantic writers like De Quincey, Sade and Lacenaire invented a new paradigm of aesthetic representation using murder. He does make an extremely important caveat, however, that “an important distinction needs to be made between the criminal-as-artist and the artist-as-criminal” (Black 1992, 36). Where neither his poetry nor his murders were particularly exceptional, Black believes that it was his identity as a ‘poet- assassin’ that made Lacenaire a striking figure. Downing calls him “the most frenetic of all

35

Romantics” (Downing 2013, 44), while Black claims “the hand of the artist-assassin does not create, but it destroys or creates by destroying” (Black 1992, 115). It must be clarified though that the former chooses to focus on Lacenaire’s poetry and locates him squarely within la littérature frénétique. Lacenaire’s poems mounted a symbolic rebellion against the July monarchy, prompting Dumas and Gautier to visit him in prison. They defended Lacenaire’s elevation of murder as a supreme act of individualism and aesthetic autonomy – “he fulfilled the role of a talismanic hero, a symbol of the transgression of artistic and lawful limits”

(Downing 2013, 38). The tone of Lacenaire’s poetry resonates with the satiric disavowal of bourgeois life in Champavert where Borel claims to “…disséquant la vie, les passions, la société, le lois… il me prit un hoquet de dégoût devant tant de mensonges et de misères”5

(cited in Lacenaire 1991, 10). The poet Charles Lassaily reported that Lacenaire had expressed similar sentiments to Jacques Arago, another significant writer of the period.

Lacenaire indubitably influenced the morbid sensibility of Lautréamont and Baudelaire at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Paris.

Jacques Simonelli in his introduction to Lacenaire’s Mémoires undertakes a detailed comparison of Lautréamont and Lacenaire’s poetry. The fourth canto of Maldoror describes an incident with a scaffold similar to one of Lacenaire’s childhood memories, albeit with a twist:

Là, mon père s’arrêta, et me montrant l’échafaud avec sa canne: Tiens, me

dit-il, regarde, c’est ainsi que tu finiras si tu ne changes pas.6 (Lacenaire

1991, 13)

5 dissecting life, passions, society, laws, the past and the future, breaking the deceptive optical glass and the artificial lamp illuminating it, we were sickened with disgust before so many lies and miseries. (Borel 2013, 217)

6 There my father stopped, and showing me the scaffold with his stick: “Here,” said he, “look, that is how you will end if you do not change.” (My translation)

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O père infortuné, prépare, pour accompagner les pas de ta vieillese,

l’échafaud ineffaçable qui tranchera la tête d’un criminel précoce, et la

douleur qui te montrera le chemin qui conduit à la tombe.7

As opposed to Simonelli and Downing who highlight Lacenaire’s impact as a poet, Black sees Lacenaire exclusively as a practitioner of crime. He quotes the Revue de Paris that credited Lacenaire for inventing “the metaphysics of murder” (Black 1992, 114). Clearly, the most important aspect of Lacenaire’s life for Black was that he had committed murder. In order for this to be relevant, Lacenaire’s crimes should be exceptional. In reality, however,

Lacenaire was more of a folk hero, a petty thief and street fighter, whose murders were not perverse, gratuitous, or even serial like Jack the Ripper. Lacenaire did not invent the

“metaphysics of murder” from his crimes, but rather, from his dandified pose as a post- assassin. Downing accurately critiques Black’s book for blindly taking “its subject matter as its critical position” (Downing 2013, 12). Simply because Lacenaire was “a master of praxis rather than only of theory” does not automatically imply that “the sheen of authenticity glimmered more convincingly about his name” (Downing 2013, 45). By emphasizing the fact that Lacenaire had used his hands to kill, Black falls into the same discursive trap – the slippage between reality and representation – that he initially sets out to critique. Instead of being able to “distinguish between the criminal-as-artist and the artist-as-criminal,” Black actually ends up resurrecting the equivalence between art, sex, and murder that pervaded nineteenth-century criminology. Using Lacenaire as exemplar, Black postulates that it was possible for the murderer-as-artist to “create by destroying” … but to “create” what exactly?

7 Sourced from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12005/12005-h/12005-h.htm Oh unfortunate father, prepare, to accompany the footsteps of your old age to the indelible scaffold that will slice the head of a precocious criminal, and that pain will show you the path that leads to the grave. (My translation)

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When Lacenaire’s Mémoires were posthumously published in 1836, the medical expert Hippolyte Bonnelier in Autopsie physiologique de Lacenaire “insert(ed) lines of doggerel attesting sensationally to the qualities of Lacenaire – poet and murderer both … the proximity of his artistry and criminality” (Downing 2013, 36). A physiological and phrenological analysis of Lacenaire’s body was conducted; his brain was measured post- mortem (Fig. 4), his handwriting was analyzed, and his poems were interpreted almost exclusively to be confessions of his congenital criminality. Bonnelier declared that Lacenaire was not a real murderer because he possessed the will to commit murder but required an accomplice to enact it on his behalf. This was allegedly because he was a Romantic poet and wanted to remain exclusively within the realm of the imagination. But Lacenaire bested these criminologists by emphatically calling his memoir not a confession but a ‘dissection’:

I could not be other than astonished when one of those learned professors

who made their observations and mental judgements only from lumps

and bumps said of me: “Lack of courage has always inclined him to be

content with directing the crime and having it carried out by an

accomplice. The sentence, so often repeated at the trial, comes to mind:

Lacenaire was the head, Avril was the arm”. No doubt it is very

ridiculous of me to claim a greater part in crime than has been allowed to

me, but as I am putting myself forward for judgment of my feelings and

intellectual qualities on my skull, I must explain everything. You

phrenologists say Avril was the arm. Was he the arm at V— in Italy?

Was he the arm at No. 8 in the Rue de Faubourg Saint-Martin when I

struggled alone for a quarter of an hour with a victim who was saved by

one of those things that only happen once in a lifetime? You say I was

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content to direct the crime and have an accomplice carry it out! Yes, I

directed the murder of Chardon, but who carried it out? Who alone struck

the mother? … if I have one quality of which there can be no shadow of

doubt, it is courage. I have never known fear in my life. This is what

happens when, in a hypothetical case, people try to reconcile their

reasoning with fact and no one takes the trouble to go any deeper. You

must seek another theory to exploit messieurs, if you want me to fit into

your phrenological fantasies, this one won’t do.” (Cited in Black 1992,

117)

Lacenaire wrote his memoir because he wanted to have the last word about his life and escape “positivistic and pathologizing dissections of his motivations.” By calling murder a kind of art, “Lacenaire wished his poetry, his crimes, and his own highly stylized self to be received by the world as the avid Romantic critic receives the artwork: appreciated or subject to disapproval only as beautiful objects, according to purely aesthetic criteria” (Downing

2013, 50). The Romantic zeal for the acte gratuit and to live for art and pleasure alone redefined nineteenth-century art and literature as an expression of that reality for which there is as yet no form or paradigm, “It “is” never art in the present, but always art that cannot yet be; it is a demand for what in our time remains impossible” (Mieszowski 2004, 38). Kant’s emphasis on the autonomy or purposelessness of the work of art in his Third Critique maintained that art itself had no a priori aim – it was an acte gratuit – it existed purely to move things forward, beyond, or counter to the way they are.

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Figure 3. Portrait of Lacenaire, 1836 Figure 4. Lithograph of Lacenaire’s head Lacenaire, Mémoires et autres écrits, ed. Jacques Simonelli (Paris: José Corti 1991), Illus. 5, 8.

It was actually Gautier who, in an 1852 poem “Étude de mains,” was the first to give up this ominous logic of the both/and vis-à-vis art and murder. By calling Lacenaire a “true murderer and false poet,” Gautier countered “the perceived impossibility of dissociating the murderer’s acts from his textual production” (Downing 2013, 54). Gautier’s poem on

Lacenaire maintains the distinction between the ethical and the aesthetic that Lacenaire had

(perhaps too successfully) collapsed by calling himself a ‘poet-assassin’:

Criminelle aristocratie,

Par la varlope ou le marteau

Sa pulpe n’est pas endurcie,

Car son outil fut un couteau.

Saints calus du travail honnête,

On y cherche en vain votre sceau.

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Vrai meurtrier et faux poète,

Il fut le Manfred du ruisseau !8

Gautier insisted that Lacenaire was first and foremost a murderer, then a poet. It was his pose of aesthetic dandyism or “criminelle aristocratie” that distinguished him as a Romantic hero like Byron’s Manfred. This would explain why Lacenaire was not himself an actual member of la jeunesse romantique, but drew their attention only when he became a celebrity criminal.

The poem describes how Lacenaire’s hand traversed an interesting route from being chopped off at the gallows, to phrenological analysis at the autopsy table, and finally, to being displayed as a curio at Maxime du Camp’s salon. Gautier wrote how shrunken and unremarkable this embalmed hand looked, wherein one could see still the residual signs of a criminal, not a poet. Here, Gautier both invoked as well as parodied the phrenologists who studied the lines on Lacenaire’s palm and conducted handwriting analyses to find clues to his criminality “Tous les vices avec leurs griffes / Ont, dans les plis de cette peau / Tracé d’affreux hieroglyphs / Lus couramment par le bourreau.”9 Gautier showed how reading

Lacenaire’s palm for criminological evidence was not the same as reading his poems for their literary or aesthetic merit. With Gautier’s (and Downing’s) categorical distinction between art and life in mind, it becomes a little easier to separate the Whitechapel killer from the myths and stereotypes surrounding Jack the Ripper. It also becomes possible to deconstruct

8 Criminal aristocracy, Neither plane nor hammer Has hardened its skin For his instrument was a knife. For sacred calluses of honest labour One searches in vain the trace Real murderer and false poet He was the Manfred of the gutter. (Cited in Downing 2013, 35)

9 All the vices with their claws Have, in the folds of this skin, Traced frightful hieroglyphs, That were read fluently by the executioner. (My translation)

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Black’s controversial conclusion that the murderer-as-artist could “create by destroying.”

The image of Lacenaire’s preserved hand from Gautier’s poem resurfaces in the

Victorian context via Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890-91). Composed just two years after the Jack the Ripper struck, the novel revolves around a young aristocrat

Dorian Gray who finds himself in an unusual moral situation that allows him the autonomy to do as he pleases. Where Stevenson had fashioned a chemical potion to enable Jekyll’s moral degradation, Wilde dramatized a gothic exchange between Dorian and his life-size portrait.

Dorian discovers soon after this portrait is painted that, by some bizarre force, the portrait ages in lieu of his body. If Dorian commits a crime, the portrait displays a corresponding physiological change. His own body remains free of moral blight and the ravages of mortality. In an age that sought to define criminality by physiognomic and physiological aberrations, Wilde showed how Dorian’s eternally young, beautiful, and unscathed face becomes his alibi. Subsequently, the portrait becomes a diseased and rotting archive of

Dorian’s sins. Dorian may not have been born a criminal, but his innocent face conceals a depraved soul. Dorian launches into “la carrière du mal” like Maldoror – an unbridled pursuit of pleasure for the sake of pleasure, aesthetic dandyism, decadence, drug-addiction, and finally the murder of the artist Basil Hallward who had painted his portrait. Dorian’s criminality is further reinforced by Wilde’s reference to Lacenaire. Immediately after he commits murder, Dorian retires in his study with a copy of Gautier’s Émaux et Camées. Here he encounters Gautier’s poem on Lacenaire and in a remarkable moment where fiction mirrors history, Dorian Gray compares his murdering hands to that of the poet-assassin “As he turned over the pages his eye fell on the poem about the hand of Lacenaire, the cold yellow hand ‘du supplice encore mal lavée,’ with its downy red hairs and its ‘doigts de faune.’ He glanced at his own white taper fingers, shuddering slightly in spite of himself ”

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(Wilde 2011, 138). Dorian understands for the first time, that even though they may look

‘innocent,’ his murdering hands belong to Lacenaire’s legacy.

An Artist’s Confiteor: The ‘Strange Case’ of Walter Sickert

The Picture of Dorian Gray bridged the gap between Romanticism and French

Decadence – the two early iterations of the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ in the Continent. Dorian Gray was a descendent not only of the Romantic Lacenaire, but also of Jean des Esseintes from

J.K. Huysmans’s Decadent masterpiece À Rebours (1884). Roughly translated as ‘against nature’ or ‘against the grain,’ Huysmans’s novella was deemed the ‘bible’ of French

Decadence and its protagonist des Esseinted branded a sort of Decadent everyman. Wilde introduced the chief tenets of French Decadence to his predominatly Victorian audience though the idea of Dorian’s concealed sins and transgressions. He was deeply influenced by

Huysmans’s portrayal of des Esseintes who stood apart from the conventional heroes of the

Victorian bildungsroman that sought virtue in material progress. Huysmans criticized Charles

Dickens for producing “the opposite effect from what he had expected: his chaste lovers and his puritanical heroines in their all-concealing draperies, sharing ethereal passions and just fluttering their eyelashes, blushing coyly, weeping for joy and holding hands, drove him to distraction. This exaggerated virtue made him react in the contrary direction” (Huysmans

2003, 208). Instead, his novel À Rebours explored the mysteries of the infinitely desiring but finite self; a trope that Huysmans may have inherited from Zola and Lautréamont. Des

Esseintes is beautiful and youthful yet sickly and effeminate, sullen yet passionate, asexual yet oversexed, sociopathic in his self-absorption and narcissism and yet obsessed with collecting ephemera and practicing arcane rituals. He slowly progresses from being a dandy cloistered in his castle to a Maldoror-like criminal who subverts the law purely for the sake of pleasure.

43

Towards the middle of À Rebours, des Esseintes takes on a working-class boy named

Auguste Langlois as his protégé with the sole intent of making him a dandy like himself. He trains him in the ‘art’ of crime, much as Lacenaire had done with Avril and Chardon in prison. Des Esseintes becomes the ‘head’ and Langlois the ‘arm,’ in a bid to prove that all crime was the product of an inherently unequal society:

But by bringing him here, by plunging him into luxury such as he’s never

known and will never forget, and by giving him the same treat every

fortnight, I hope to get him into the habit of these pleasures which he

can’t afford. Assuming that it will take three months for them to become

absolutely indispensable to him – and by spacing them out as I do, I

avoid the risk of jading his appetite – well, at the end of those three

months, I stop the little allowance I’m going to pay you in advance for

being nice to the boy. And to get the money to pay for his visits here,

he’ll turn burglar, he’ll do anything if it helps him on to one of your

divans in one of your gaslit rooms. ‘Looking on the bright side of things,

I hope that, one fine day, he’ll kill the gentleman who turns up

unexpectedly just as he’s breaking open his desk. On that day my object

will be achieved: I shall have contributed, to the best of my ability, to the

making of a scoundrel, one enemy the more for the hideous society that

is bleeding us white.” (Huysmans 2003, 176)

Des Esseintes’s concluding emphasis on the ease with which a boy with no previous history of crime could fall from virtue is reworked in Dorian Gray career of evil. Huysmans made it quite explicit that des Esseintes was not born with these perverse or decadent tendencies but

44 acquired them from exposure to the tenets of the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ – from reading the beautifully amoral works of Gautier, Baudelaire, Flaubert, d’Aurevilly, and the de Goncourt brothers. In comparison to his denunciation of Dickens, des Esseintes strongly upholds

Baudelaire and Gautier’s defence of the autonomy of the artist:

The more des Esseintes reread his Baudelaire, the more he appreciated the

indescribable charm of this writer who, at a time when verse no longer

served any purpose except to depict the external appearance of creatures

and things, had succeeded in expressing the inexpressible – thanks to a

solid, sinewy style which, more than any other, possessed that remarkable

quality, the power to define in curiously healthy terms the most fugitive

and ephemeral of the unhealthy conditions of weary spirits and

melancholy souls. (Huysmans 2003, 271)

Charles Baudelaire believed that the function of modern art and poetry was not to cultivate the bourgeois ideals of good taste or virtue, but to cultivate an abiding sense of pleasure and mystery. The impulse of an artist or writer to create a work of art had little to do with upholding truth, utility or morality. It had no purpose other than pleasure. It could produce this effect by transforming an ordinary object or “inexpressible” idea into an eternal work of art. Pleasure, rather than imitation or mimesis, thus became the truth of modern art and poetry. According to Baudelaire, this ‘pleasure for the sake of pleasure’ enabled the artist’s autonomy to create a visionary or extra-sensory perception of the world.

Baudelaire and Gautier (and Wilde in their footsteps) argued that there was no such thing as an a priori ‘beautiful’ object. It was the modern artist’s imperative to seek beauty in the unlikeliest of places, even create it where it did not previously exist. Baudelaire wrote that

45 the aesthetic impulse was defined by excess and the breaking of limits – it went beyond man’s basic quest for survival and distinguished him from the animal. In a piece called “Le

Confiteor de l’artiste” Baudelaire revealed how this impulse could elevate the ordinary into the extraordinary:

Et les choses renaissent sur le papier, naturelles et plus que naturelles,

belles et plus que belles, singulières et douées d’une vie enthousiaste

comme l’âme de l’auteur. La fantasmagorie a été extraite de la nature.

Tous les matériaux dont la mémoire s’est encombrée se classent, se

rangent, s’harmonisent et subissent cette idéalisation forcée qui est le

résultat d’une perception enfantine, c’est-à-dire d’une perception aiguë,

magique à force d’ingénuité !10

A work of art thus created or found new forms, patterns and connections in nature. Poetry provided man with an idiom to communicate ineffable and “inexpressible” ideas. There was nothing essentially beautiful about a red rose, for example, but Baudelaire argued that to ascribe this elevated quality to an ordinary object or to distil the ‘phantasmagoria from nature’ was the mark of aesthetic genius. This did not mean, however, (as was often assumed of Baudelaire) that he was pathologically attracted to ugliness and immorality. Just as he did not believe in an a priori beautiful object, he did not believe that even a rotting corpse was an essentially ugly object or unfit for aesthetic representation. This was what set the ‘Art for

Art’s Sake’ movements apart from other styles in the nineteenth century; by invoking the

10 Sourced from https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Confiteor_de_l%E2%80%99artiste And things seen are born again on the paper, natural and more than natural, beautiful and better than beautiful, strange and endowed with an enthusiastic life, like the soul of their creator. The weird pageant has been distilled from nature. All the materials, stored higgledy-piggledy by memory, are classified, ordered, harmonized, and undergo that deliberate idealization, which is the product of a childlike perceptiveness, in other words a perceptiveness that is acute and magical by its very ingenuousness (Baudelaire 2008, 25).

46 autonomy of the artist, it could transform even ‘dirt’ into ‘gold’ “Tu m’as donné ta boue, et j’en ai fait de l’or” (cited in Starkie 1960, 34). Baudelaire stressed that it was the highest aim of the modern poet and artist to idealize precisely those elements of life that had been abjected as ‘strange’ or ‘ugly.’ An affinity for strangeness and violence made the poet a visionary figure or agent of social critique.

To that end, Baudelaire, Huysmans, and Wilde espoused dandyism as a counter- institution to bourgeois virtue, utilitarianism and pragmatism. As a new cultural order, with its own set of well-defined rules, dandyism drove masculinity and morality into crisis at the turn of the century:

Si je parle de l’amour à propos du dandysme, c’est que l’amour est

l’occupation naturelle des oisifs. Mais le dandy ne vise pas à l’amour

comme but spécial. Si j’ai parlé d’argent, c’est parce que l’argent est

indispensable aux gens qui se font un culte de leurs passions ; mais le

dandy n’aspire pas à l’argent comme à une chose essentielle ; un crédit

indéfini pourrait lui suffire ; il abandonne cette grossière passion aux

mortels vulgaires. Le dandysme n’est même pas, comme beaucoup de

personnes peu réfléchies paraissent le croire, un goût immodéré de la

toilette et de l’élégance matérielle. Ces choses ne sont pour le parfait

dandy qu’un symbole de la supériorité aristocratique de son esprit.11

11 Sourced from https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Peintre_de_la_vie_moderne/IX If I speak of love in the context of dandyism, the reason is that love is the natural occupation of men of leisure. But the dandy does not consider love as a special aim in life. If I have mentioned money, the reason is that money is indispensable to those who make an exclusive cult of their passions, but the dandy does not aspire to wealth as an object in itself; an open bank credit could suit him just as well; he leaves that squalid passion to vulgar mortals. Contrary to what a lot of thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind. (Baudelaire 1964, 56)

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Inspired by Baudelaire’s defence of dandyism and the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ in Le Peintre de la vie moderne (1885) and Huysmans’s lengthy exposition of French Decadence in À Rebours,

Wilde created his English counterpart to the French dandy in the character of Dorian Gray.

The ‘poisonous yellow book’ that Lord Henry Wotton gifts Dorian in the previous chapter was Wilde’s subtle reference to À Rebours. Dorian learns from this book how to go ‘against the grain’ and reinvent himself as a dandy. Wilde had initially given the ‘poisonous yellow book’ the overtly Decadent title “‘Le Secret de Raoul’ par Catulle Sarrazin” (Wilde 2011,

56), but his editor removed this title as it might offend the English bourgeois sensibilities.

The name Raoul is of course, borrowed from the androgynous heroine Raoule of Rachilde’s novel Monsieur Venus (1884). Catulle Sarrazin is a hybrid of Catulle Mendès and Gabriel

Sarrazin, both pioneering French Decadent artists of the nineteenth century. Chapter nine of

The Picture of Dorian Gray is also an interesting interpolation of Huysmans’s principles of dandyism and Decadence. Filled with Decadent and homosexual argot that deliberately alienate the ‘philistine’ or unworthy reader, this lengthy and rather arcane chapter shows

Dorian cloistered in his boudoir like des Esseintes. He is completely immersed in the study of fashion, jewels and gemology, perfumery and mysticism, the ritual pageantry and messianic practices of High Catholicism. Dorian also engages in covert criminal activities that the reader is not made privy to, such as drug addiction, sexual profligacy and perversion, and finally, the murder of the artist who painted his portrait.

Dandyism was a recognized mode of aesthetic and moral subversion by the time

Wilde was writing The Picture of Dorian Gray in the fall of 1889. From Beau Brummell and

Lord Byron’s aristocratic disdain and fashionable cynicism to Thomas Carlyle’s parody of the ‘dandiacal body’ as a superficial ‘clothes-wearing man’ in his 1836 book The Life and

Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh, the Victorians were familiar with the promise and peril of dandyism. The dandy’s celebration of hedonism, libertinism, crime, and pursuit of pleasure

48 for its own sake developed from the principles of the ‘Art for Art’s Sake.’ Hence, Dorian

Gray accomplished for English culture what Lacenaire had achieved for the French. And for that, Wilde and the other dandies who belonged to this coterie faced intense moral censure from the Victorian public. Robert Buchanan published an essay in 1871 titled “The Fleshly

School of Poetry” which was a scathing critique of English Aestheticism and the Pre-

Raphaelite Brotherhood. The main line of critique was the moral depravity of its proponents, particularly A.G. Swinburne and D.G. Rossetti. He began his analysis not by looking at their actual works but with a tirade against the rampant sexual depravity of these artists and how the ‘infection’ had come from France. Buchanan called Swinburne a ‘dandy of the brothel’ and a ‘Brummell of the stews’ simply because his poetry revealed a clear debt to Baudelaire.

Buchanan perceived Baudelaire’s redefinition of beauty to be a kind of perversion or diabolism that the English aesthetes were blindly aping. Enid Starkie writes that Buchanan

“described the abnormal types of ‘diseased lust and lustful disease’ to be found there, and he likened the poets to a sort of demi monde, not composed, like the one in France, of simple courtesans, but of men and women of indolent habits and aesthetic tastes, artists and literary persons” (Starkie 1960, 109).

Another text that is important in this regard is quoted by Josephine McDonagh in her stimulating essay “Do or Die: Problems of Agency and Gender in the Aesthetics of Murder.”

She draws attention to one of Rossetti’s lesser-known poems “The Paris Railway Station”

(1849) whose theme confirms much of Buchanan’s moral condemnation of the Pre-

Raphaelite Brotherhood. The poet is held up on a railway journey from Paris to Belgium, and suddenly discovered the rotting corpse of a murder victim on the tracks. The poet briefly enters the mind of the murderer and imagines him to have stood close by to admire “the effect of his last work” – “You fancy him / Smoking an early pipe / And watching, as / An artist, the effect of his last work” (Cited in McDonagh 1992, 222). McDonagh notes that, in

49 the poet’s nonchalant identification with the murderer, both their concealed criminality becomes apparent. Writers like Swinburne and Rossetti certainly gave centrality to the dark and criminal aspects of ordinary life, but Buchanan accused them of suffering from the same darkness that they represented. Buchanan wrote that Swinburne was an “intellectual hermaphrodite” whose poetry reflected his own morbid attraction for the ‘fleshly’ and

‘diseased lust.’ Barely a decade later, a concrete medico-legal term called lustmörd would be invented for it. McDonagh makes an important clarification here “At issue between the aesthetic of murder and this critique is the relationship between representation and power; while the critique asserts that both writer and murderer gain empowerment through their acts, producing and reproducing power and control, the aesthetic of murder is constructed with a sense that both acts lead only to disempowerment and loss of self in the ceaseless circulation of social institutions” (McDonagh 1992, 223). McDonagh’s brilliant analysis of the “aesthetic of murder” further raises important ethical questions about the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ movements of the nineteenth century “What is the relationship between a relationship and its effects? Is it necessary or possible to control representations, and what is to be gained or lost by doing so?”

Buchanan was not the only critic in the nineteenth century to conflate a representation of murder with the actual act of murder. Max Nordau in his 1892 book Entartung invented medico-legal jargon to diagnose the poets and artists of the ‘Art for Art’s Sake.’ While

Nordau began as a criminologist under Lombroso, his magnum opus reads more along the lines of literary criticism and censorship like Buchanan’s essay. As a direct consequence of

Nordau’s theory of degeneration, the nineteenth-century artist, sexual pervert, and serial killer merged to produce a new criminal subject called the “degenerate.” Nordau postulated that “the artist who complacently represents what is reprehensible, vicious, criminal, approves of it, perhaps glorifies it, differs not in kind, but only in degree, from the criminal

50 who actually commits it” (Nordau 1993, 326). The degenerate was a fusion of multiple

“morbid deviations from the norm.” The murderer was a criminal because he actually enacted his violent drives, but the artist was a “degenerate” because he lacked the will to commit the crime. Nordau’s denunciatory tone throughout the books obliges the reader to agree with him that the “degree” that separated an artist from a murderer may indeed be negligible. Nordau powerfully countered Lombroso’s opinion that even though some artists were born with criminal traits, they could be exonerated because they channelled their drives into beautiful works of art. Instead, Nordau wrote in his preface:

Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists and

pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists. These, however,

manifest the same mental characteristics, and for the most part, the same

somatic features, as the members of the above-mentioned anthropological

family, who satisfy their unhealthy impulses with the knife of the assassin or

the bomb of the dynamiter, instead of with pen and pencil. (Nordau 1993

vii)

The main source of Nordau’s anxiety was that a poet or artist did not actually commit crime because he was content with its mere representation. This made it impossible to use legal or positivist methods of apprehension, since the artist never actually broke the law. Nordau recommended that instead of examining the degenerate artist’s physiognomy for criminal traits – as Hippolyte Bonnelier had done with Lacenaire’s head and hand – the degenerate poet or artist’s works of art must be examined for ‘evidence’ of his concealed criminality.

On the weight of this genealogy of the murderer-as-artist from Lacenaire to Dorian

Gray, it becomes a little clear why such paradoxical qualities made up Jack the Ripper’s

51 criminal profile. Since he came out of Lombrosian training, Nordau subjected literary and aesthetic works of the nineteenth century to the same criminological analysis. If the murderer’s body contained clues of his innate depravity, then couldn’t an artist’s body of work be treated as a formal confession of his sins? In “Le Confiteor de l’artiste,” Baudelaire self-reflexively pondered on his moral and emotional relation to his work “Ah ! faut-il

éternellement souffrir, ou fuir éternellement le beau ? Nature, enchanteresse sans pitié, rivale toujours victorieuse, laisse-moi ! Cesse de tenter mes désirs et mon orgueil !”12 The poet confesses that the aesthetic process was a constant duel between the perverse desires and stimulations that ‘Nature’ aroused in him versus his moral conscience. However, when these desires were channelled into a work of art or poetry, they could distil an experience of beauty or pleasure. Where Baudelaire admitted that he wants to overpower his biggest rival ‘Nature’

(a guilt that is reflected in Stevenson’s Henry Jekyll and Wilde’s Dorian Gray), Nordau could only see evidence for pathological narcissism, “egomania,” and perversion. Baudelaire was no doubt satirizing the Christian word “Confiteor” here, but medico-legal authorities like

Nordau insisted on reading the tenets of the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ far too literally.

An important French Decadent novella that explores the moral ambivalence of the

‘artist’s Confiteor’ is Huysmans’s sequel to À Rebours. Là-bas was published in 1891 alongside Wilde’s revised edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray and reflects the same moral dynamic between a work of art, a dandy, and his morbid fascination with murder. It constructs this dynamic, however, not by depicting the dandy or murderer directly. Unlike the perverse hero of his previous novel Des Esseintes, the protagonist of Là-bas is a nondescript and unassuming novelist named Durtal. Like Huysmans himself, Durtal wants to construct the aetiology of evil through a history of dandyism and decadence in France. Là-bas, which

12 Oh, must one either suffer eternally, or eternally flee the beautiful? Nature, you pitiless enchantress, you always victorious rival, leave me alone! Stop arousing my desires and my pride! The study of the beautiful is a duel, one that ends with the artist crying out in terror before being vanquished. (Baudelaire 2008, 7)

52 has been variously translated as “down there” or “the damned,” brings self-reflexive attention to a writer’s struggle to aestheticize murder. Huysmans thus maintains the crucial distinction between committing a crime versus an aesthetic representation of a crime. Durtal’s decision to trace French dandyism back to the mythic figure of Gilles de Rais is an interesting retrospective manoeuvre. What disturbs Durtal the most is the motivelessness of Gilles de

Rais’s crimes. He sees a version of this motivelessness in French Decadence and its valorization of pleasure and lust:

None of the theories of modern writers such as Lombroso and Maudsley

go anywhere near explaining the terrible crimes of Gilles de Rais. It is

obviously right to classify him as a kind of monomaniac, if by that term

we mean everyone who is dominated by a fixed idea. But then every one

of us, more or less, is a monomaniac, from the businessman, whose

thoughts all converge on the one goal of making a profit, to the artist

absorbed in the creation of his oeuvre. But what was it about the Marechal

that made him turn into a monomaniac? How did he become like that? All

the Lombrosos in the world can’t supply an answer to that question.

(Huysmans 2011, 95)

Durtal studies the life and trials of Gilles de Rais only to conclude that he might have been a precursor to the modern dandy or a “Des Esseintes of the fifteenth century” (Huysmans 2011,

42). Huysmans’s striking decision to temporally reverse the signifier and the signified here – to use the fictional character des Esseinted to explain the historical Gilles de Rais’s crimes – reveals a deep desire to sympathize with him.

53

At the level of the interpretive act, both Huysmans and Lombroso want to explain how Gilles de Rais could commit such horrible acts. But the main point of difference between them is that the criminologist distances himself morally from his object of study using the empirical mode whereas the writer creates a kindred connection between himself and his object of representation. Huysmans actively critiqued Zola and the Naturalist school during the year he was composing Là-bas for blindly aping the distance of the criminological mode:

I’m weary of the ideas of my good friend Zola, whose absolute positivism

fills me with disgust. I’m just as weary of the systems of Charcot, who has

tried to convince me that demonianism was just an old wives’ tale, and

that by applying pressure to the ovaries he could check or develop at will

the Satanic impulses of the woman under his care at La Salpêtrière … I

want to prove that the Devil exists, that the Devil reigns supreme, that the

power he enjoyed in the Middle Ages has not been taken from him for

today he is the absolute master of the world. (Cited in Huysmans 2008,

xxiii)

Like the nineteenth-century criminologist, Durtal also finds himself on the frontier of the pathological in his quest to write a biography of Gilles de Rais. Durtal believes that the only way to write about Gilles de Rais is to ‘sympathize’ with his acts. Unlike the criminologists, whom Durtal denigrates for pathologizing Gilles de Rais through medico-legal discourse,

Durtal uses a “spiritual naturalist” style through which a writer may “preserve documentary veracity, the precision of detail, the rich and sinewy language of realism; but it was also necessary to sink a shaft into the soul and stop trying to explain away life’s mystery in terms of a sickness of the senses” (Huysmans 2008, 6). Durtal even allows himself to be

54 overpowered by the darkness of Gilles de Rais and by so doing, experiences the same

“counterintuitive transferential fascination” (Penney 2006, 43) of the jury and witnesses at the 1440 trial. It is clear that Huysmans’s novel Là-bas is not invested in depicting the gradual devolution of a dandy into a degenerate. What Huysmans gives us here instead is an ethical exposition or confession of vagaries of the creative process.

Instead of appreciating the self-reflexive irony of the ‘Artist’s Confiteor,’ Nordauvian critics of the nineteenth century erased the difference between representing a crime and committing one. Just as the portrait of Dorian Gray, an exalted work of art, would slowly become a legal and criminological archive of Dorian’s sins, Nordau was convinced that art and literature could be read as a litany of the artist’s sins. Nordau asked “Ought art to be at present, the last asylum to which criminals may fly to escape punishment?” (Nordau 1993,

326). It is the same profound question that not only disturbs the American crime fiction writer Patricia Cornwell, but also grounds her allegation that the fin-de-siècle artist Walter

Sickert was responsible for the Whitechapel murders. In her book Ripper: The Secret Life of

Walter Sickert (2017), Cornwell alleges that the Victorian police never suspected Sickert of being the Whitechapel killer because they did not look for clues in the ‘correct’ place. Since some of Sickert’s paintings bear a strong resemblance to the crime scene photographs and mortuary sketches of the murdered prostitutes, Cornwell believes that he was the actual perpetrator of these heinous crimes. She reads the content of his works of art to be a literal confession of his misogyny and pathological disorders. Even at the conclusion of the book,

Cornwell underplays the fact that she discovers no real evidence to link Sickert to the crime scenes or letters that Jack the Ripper allegedly sent to the police. For her, the real evidence is in his paintings. Cornwell’s book takes Nordau’s aim to pathologize the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ movements of the nineteenth century to its next logical step by making a scapegoat of

Sickert.

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Sickert was a disciple of the American painter, printmaker and dandy James McNeill

Whistler. He belonged to a coterie of artists including Aubrey Beardsley, Claude Monet,

Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Edgar Degas and writers like Wilde, Henry Irving,

Max Beerbohm, Henry James and André Gide. Sickert hobnobbed with these dandies and aesthetes who were perhaps the last adherents of the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ in Europe. He fell out with Monet and Whistler quite early on in his career, as he was not interested in merely painting colours, shadows and impressions from nature. Sickert was one of the prominent artists of the period to render Jack the Ripper on canvas even though there were no sound physical descriptions of the killer. His 1907 work Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom is fairly representative of the grimy urban impressionism of his more famous Camden Town Murder

Series (1907-1909). Where the legal and criminological authorities of the nineteenth century had systematically failed to capture Jack the Ripper, Sickert’s painting comes closest to providing a portrait of the killer. Laced with a Baudelairean or Wildean kind of irony, the portrait reveals as little as was actually known about the killer. The background of the painting was inspired by the interior of Sickert’s own apartment at 6 Mornington Crescent set in contre-jour light. There are a few grey and flesh-coloured tints to offset the otherwise dark canvas. At the centre of the canvas is located a woman’s dresser with a grimy mirror (Fig. 5).

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Figure 5. Walter Richard Sickert, circa 1906-07, Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom (UK: Manchester Art Gallery)

There is nothing but a blur beyond the window and so the mirror reflects the strange simulacrum of a cloaked figure standing before it. This could very well be a reflection of the spectator standing before the painting. One can slightly discern a red scarf or handkerchief around the figure’s throat. This was the only real clue available from witness statements in the fall of 1888. Catherine Eddowes was last seen with a man wearing a red handkerchief at

1:35 am on 30 September and Mary Kelly was also seen with a man who offered her a red handkerchief on 9 November, the night she was found murdered in her bedroom.

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There is a wealth of such gossip and cultural ambiguity in Sickert’s painting. It cleverly shows how the only way to know who Jack the Ripper was was precisely through the web of myths spun about him. It is no secret that Sickert was obsessed with the

Whitechapel murders for a significant period of his life. He took up accommodation at 6,

Mornington Crescent between 1905-07 precisely because the landlord had asserted with some conviction that its previous occupant was Jack the Ripper. Naturally, there was no real basis for this claim except that the previous occupant had been a quiet young veterinary student who would disappear for a significant length of the night, some nights coinciding with the six canonical murders of 1888. Sickert also possessed a red handkerchief that he valued above everything, at least, according to his friend Marjorie Lilly’s 1973 memoir Sickert: The

Painter and his Circle. Lilly wrote that Sickert wore it around his neck during the years he was living in ‘Jack the Ripper’s bedroom.’ It became a “lifeline to guide the train of his thought” while painting the Camden Town Murder Series. Lilly notes that if Sickert wasn’t wearing it, he “hung it on a peg or door knob where he could see it while he was working”

(Cited in Fuller 2003, Loc. 910). Sickert obviously identified with the Whitechapel killer and could inhabit the mind of a murderer like Durtal in Là-bas. This does not, however, mean that

Sickert was Jack the Ripper. Any connection between him and Jack the Ripper is tenuous or entirely of his own fanciful making. He became a prime suspect only as late as 1976, when

Stephen Knight published Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution. Knight proposed that Sickert was complicit in a royal conspiracy involving the Duke of Clarence and the Royal surgeon

William Gull. He argued that they were collectively responsible for killing the prostitutes at

Whitechapel in 1888.

Knight’s theory was carried forward in Jean Overton Fuller’s book Sickert and the

Ripper Crimes (1990) but with a crucial modification. According to Fuller, it was Sickert alone who was the actual perpetrator of the Whitechapel murders. She bases this hypothesis

58 on a testimony from her mother who knew Sickert’s colleague Florence Pash. Fuller’s book builds this allegation against Sickert on the strength of a few vague suggestions and whispered exchanges between her mother and Pash. It is worth reasserting here that there is absolutely no concrete evidence to link Sickert to the Whitechapel murders aside from the few ‘hints’ that he himself circulated among his friends. He lived flamboyantly in ‘Jack the

Ripper’s bedroom’ and openly immortalized the space on canvas. He was so particular about the red handkerchief that his landlady was not allowed to clean or interfere with it. Sickert reportedly told Pash and Lilly in his later years that he knew who Jack the Ripper was and had seen all the victims. On the weight of such apocryphal knowledge, Fuller concludes that

Sickert must have been the murderer himself. Fuller also makes much of the fact that Sickert was familiar with the terrain of the East End. He and his first wife Ellen were known to frequent the music halls of Hoxton, Shoreditch, Camden Town, Islington and Hampstead, when they had lived in that area briefly. Fuller gives undue importance to a random excursion into Whitechapel described in Lilly’s memoir:

One foggy January morning in 1918, Sickert said suddenly: ‘let’s go to

Petticoat Lane’ ... He had seemed so happy and so busy, resurrecting a

battered old Gladstone bag, to which he was greatly attached, from the

basement in order to paint on it his new address ... They went to Warren

Street Underground Station. He gave the impression he had never used the

Underground before, but said he wanted to go to Aldgate, and was

directed. At Aldgate they all three got out. Whether they ever reached

‘Petticoat Lane’ (i.e. Middlesex Street), she never knew. The district was

unfamiliar to her. The fog was now so thick they could not see the names

of the streets, and had no idea where they were. Sickert seemed to know

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and ‘every now and then darted down a side street’ after something that

caught his interest. He was claiming to see paintable subjects. (Fuller

2003, Loc. 946)

According to Fuller, Sickert was leading them deep into Ripper territory, Aldgate being located near Miller’s Court, where Mary Kelly’s corpse was found.

This constitutes, at least in Fuller’s estimation, as solid ‘evidence’ that Sickert was re- enacting his foggy descents into Whitechapel with a bag that may have contained more than mere art supplies. Incidents like this, which only prove Sickert’s familiarity with the

Whitechapel district, are also cited in Cornwell’s book as ‘evidence’ of his concealed criminality. Much as the Victorian journalist W.T. Stead had resorted to fiction to describe the Whitechapel killer in 1888, Cornwell also adds a reference to Stevenson’s novel:

Walter Sickert was a man of the night and the slums. He would have had

good reason to know exactly what a bull’s-eye lantern looked like because

it was his habit to wander the forbidden places after his visits to the music-

halls. During what is called his Camden Town period in the early 1900s,

when he was producing some of his most blatantly violent works of art, he

used to paint murder scenes in the spooky glow of a bull’s-eye lantern.

This was witnessed by a fellow artist and friend Marjorie Lilly, who

shared his house and one of his studios. She described his behaviour as

“Dr Jekyll” assuming the “mantle of Mr Hyde.” (Cornwell 2017, 130)

Cornwell includes another incident from one of Sickert’s biographies to build her case against the artist. Denys Sutton had mentioned in his biography how, on one of his nocturnal

60 visits to Whitechapel, a group of girls on Copenhagen Street had fled from Sickert’s approaching figure in terror yelling “Jack the Ripper! Jack the Ripper!” Subsequent biographers have conceded that the only source for this rather dramatic bagatelle could have been Sickert himself. He liked to dress the part of the dandyish villain in a long check coat

(Fig. 7) or in “a pair of pink pants, carpet slippers, and broad smile under a Billycock hat.”4

He often carried a small black bag in conscious mimicry of Jack the Ripper. But Cornwell blindly accepts Sutton’s report and asserts that had she met Sickert herself, she would have found him “devastatingly attractive, entertaining and charismatic” (Cornwell 2017, 475). She acknowledges how Sickert could be “flamboyant and fascinating” and it allowed him to conceal his criminality in plain sight.

Figure 7. James McNeill Whistler, 1895, “Portrait Sketch of Walter Sickert” (Ireland: Dublin City Gallery). From Patricia Cornwell, Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert (Seattle: Thomas and Mercer 2017), 474

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Figure 8. Walter Sickert posing in tweed suit with bamboo walking case “Photograph of Walter Sickert,” circa 1920s (London: Margaret Bentley Studio, Islington Local History Centre). From Patricia Cornwell, Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert, (Seattle: Thomas and Mercer 2017), 187

Matthew Sturgis denounces Cornwell’s project in his biography Walter Sickert: A Life

(2005) by emphatically stating that “Walter Sickert was not Jack the Ripper” (Sturgis 2005,

Loc. 13167). He faults Cornwell for furnishing evidence against Sickert when he was actually in France for the most part of the Whitechapel murders. Cornwell, like Fuller before her, is prepared to “strain credulity” to fit her hypothesis, and so Sturgis writes that “in the absence of anything concrete, Cornwell attempts to accumulate a body of ‘circumstantial evidence’ with which to implicate him. She invents an imagined history for Sickert” (Sturgis 2005, Loc.

13329). The key phrase in Sturgis’s critique of Cornwell’s book is that she ‘invents an imagined history.’ Krafft-Ebing had invented the medico-legal category of lustmörd to define

Jack the Ripper’s gratuitous acts and Nordau had invented traits of degeneracy to condemn

62 the ‘Art for Art’s Sake.’ Similarly, Cornwell pathologizes otherwise normal aspects of

Sickert’s personality, which she gleans from his biographies. She also subjects Sickert’s paintings to forensic analysis and DNA testing with the same Nordauvian suspicion that his art concealed the clues of his crimes. She employs nineteenth-century paradigms of criminological study even as she constantly belittles the age for its outdated and primitive methods of detection. One would imagine that Cornwell’s longstanding professional connection to mortuaries and forensic labs, and her parallel career in writing crime fiction, would uniquely equip her to appreciate the ‘degree’ of difference between an artist who

“complacently represents what is reprehensible, vicious, criminal, approves of it, perhaps glorifies it” versus the a “criminal who actually commits it.” But like Nordau, Cornwell fails to (or perhaps, prefers not to) separate the work of art from an actual act of murder.

What is most unusual about Cornwell’s methodology is how fluidly she alternates between talking about the historical killer at Whitechapel and talking about the artist Walter

Sickert. The reader is often unsure who is being referenced, for instance, when she studies the letters that Jack the Ripper apparently sent the police:

In a September 1889 letter, the Ripper jots his return address as “Jack the

Rippers hole.” Sickert could have kept whatever he wanted in his secret

hovels. It’s impossible to know what he did with his morbid detritus, but

body parts would have begun to decompose and stink unless he chemically

preserved them. In another letter, the Ripper writes of cutting off a

victim’s ear and feeding it to a dog. He also mentioned frying organs and

eating them. Sickert might have been inordinately curious about the female

reproductive system that had given north to his malformed anus or penis or

both. He couldn’t study organs in the dark while eluding police. Perhaps

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he took prizes from the slaughter back to his lair and studied them there.

(Cornwell 2017, 273)

For Cornwell, Jack the Ripper and Walter Sickert are the same person … and so it gradually becomes for the reader of Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert. This is perhaps why

Cornwell’s book makes for such a compelling read and has sold over a million copies. The cultural willingness to accept Sickert as a prime suspect, even in light of circumstantial evidence, intensely disturbs the historian in Sturgis. In his concluding thoughts on Cornwell, he ruefully admits:

No rebuttal of any theory, however, will now serve to break the link

between Sickert and Jack the Ripper in the popular mind. The connection,

while not an established fact, is that more insidious thing – an established

fantasy. In the absence of evidence, probability, and indeed possibility, it

endures. Sickert most certainly was not a mass murderer. He was not a

murderer of any sort. But by a quirk of fate he has been dragged into the

swamp of Ripperology, and once enmired it is impossible to escape.

(Sturgis 2005, Loc. 13478)

It is worth asking why it is so easy to believe Cornwell’s hypothesis – that the most notorious serial killer was also one of the most prominent modern artists who gave painting lessons to

Churchill? Why, of all the persons of interest who have been historically suspected for the

Whitechapel murders, does no one fit the so-called bill as well as Sickert? Therein lies the rub. At the core of these questions is not what the truth was, but the insidious power of medico-legal discourse to actually produce what the ‘truth’ is. It matters very little who Jack

64 the Ripper was, despite Cornwell’s well-intentioned aim to bring retrospective justice to the victims. Rather, one must wonder why nineteenth-century artists like Sickert, who in some capacity subscribed to the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ or attempted to represent new realities like lust-murder on canvas, continue to be seen as differing only in ‘degree’ from a real killer?

Sickert reportedly said “Oh it is splendid to be accused of things. I have been accused of everything and I have always pleaded guilty” (Cited in Sturgis 2005, Loc. 13167). This was

Sickert’s ‘Confiteor,’ delivered with the same level of self-reflexive irony as Baudelaire, which Cornwell reads to be an actual confession of his ‘crimes.’

Condemnation to Comprehension: Thomas De Quincey on “Sympathy”

An invaluable theoretical examination of how medico-legal discourses make and unmake ‘monsters’ is Michel Foucault’s I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother,

My Sister and My Brother: A Case of Parricide in the Nineteenth Century (1978). Foucault compiles a dossier of legal and criminological documents around the murderer’s own narrative of the event. In a short case study of himself, the young Pierre Rivière composes an explanation of his desire to murder his mother and sister. He provides the reader with a concrete rationale for his plans. As one progresses through the narrative, however, Rivière does not appear a “born criminal” or “degenerate” but resembles a Romantic hero like

Manfred. He portrays himself as an intellectual, imaginative and impressionable boy, trapped within a rustic, patriarchal family drama. Elana Gomel states in her book Bloodscripts (2003)

“if the self is a story told to an internalized audience, the violent subject adapts to his interlocutor’s expectations by casting himself in the role of the bad guy. Within the subject’s phantom community, cultural narratives of selfhood become internalized as scripts of behaviour” (Gomel 2003, xvi). The other documents in the dossier engage in what Foucault calls a “strange contest, a confrontation, a power relation, a battle among discourses and

65 through discourses” (Foucault 1978, x) with Rivière’s ‘bloodscript.’ Even as he tries to make an eloquent case for his motives, the competing medico-legal discourse divests him of a rational, volitional selfhood that can narrate itself. The coroner’s report that Foucault appends in his dossier, for instance, focuses on the act in gruesome detail but underplays Rivière’s role in the massacre:

[…] a huge pool of blood extended around the head; the right side and the

front part of the neck as well as the face were so slashed that the cervical

vertebrae were wholly severed from the trunk, the skin and the muscles on

the left side still retaining the head; the parietal bone on the right side was

completely crushed; the blow extended toward the crown of the skull and

so deeply that the greater part of cerebral substance was separated from it;

several other blows had been struck all over the face and with such

violence that the bones and muscles appeared as reduced to a mere pulp.

Since the woman was with child, we proceeded, at the request of the

authorities, to conduct an autopsy; an incision having been made and the

uterus opened, we found a female foetus which had reached about six and

a half months of gestation. (Foucault 1978, 5)

Under the guise of empirical accuracy, the coroner’s report generates sympathy for the pregnant mother and discursively produces Rivière as a psychopath or creature driven by instinct.

As if these forensic details were not enough to rig the jury against him, the coronal judge also looked for physical traits in Rivière that could be deemed congenitally criminal.

Rivière’s ‘awkward gait,’ ‘vacant smile,’ ‘strange laugh,’ occasional bouts of schizophrenia,

66 and romantic delusion were collated into a brilliantly precise image of psychopathy. The chief medical examiners Bouchard and Vastel fabricated a “wholly specific semiology of madness” (Foucault 1978, 124) to pathologize Rivière’s body and everyday behaviour. They collected aspects of his ordinary personality and classified them as signs of mental and moral dysfunction or a “primary feebleness in the faculty of thinking.” Vastel wrote “I became deeply and fully convinced that Rivière was not sane and that the act which the prosecution considered to be an atrocious crime was simply the deplorable result of true mental alienation” and went on to characterize these traits. Rivière’s external appearance was that of an ‘idiot,’ his responses to direct questions was ‘slow’ or with a ‘vacant smile.’ Vastel also highlighted the fact that Rivière came from a long line of family members suffering from mental illness. The frenzy with which he slaughtered his family was called hereditary or congenital and could be predicted in future generations as well. Vastel also stressed how

Rivière was prone to fantasy and delusion and had schizophrenic tendencies “The devil and the fairies held an important place in his diseased brain, and by dint of thinking of them he came to believe that he saw and heard them. He held conversations and made paces with them, and, terrified by his own visions, he often fled in terror crying out: alas! the devil, the devil!” (Foucault 1978, 128).

Note how Vastel identifies Rivière’s mind as a “diseased brain.” A singular act of evil was redefined as a malady or symptom of moral insanity in the nineteenth century. What strikes Foucault as truly exceptional about Rivière’s case is that the medico-legal authorities refused to see him as a viable criminal subject:

They told me to put all these things down in writing, I have written them

down; now that I have made known all my monstrosity, and that all the

explanations of my crime are done, I await the fate which is destined for

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me, I know the article of the penal code concerning parricide. I accept it in

expiation of my faults; alas if only I could see the hapless victims of my

cruelty alive once more, even if for that I must suffer the utmost torments;

but no it is vain, I can only follow them; so I therefore await the penalty I

deserve. (Foucault 1978, 121)

It was only by emptying him of his narrative or “bloodscript” that they could produce him as a psychopath or degenerate. His physiological aberrations and a “diseased brain” became the true confessors of his criminality. If at all, the district prosecutor drew attention to Rivière’s narrative, it was merely to add it to a list of ‘traits’:

Some notable traits emerge from a study of Pierre Rivière’s physique: He

is short, his forehead is narrow and low; his black eyebrows arch and meet,

he constantly keeps his head down and his furtive glances seem to shun

meeting the gaze of others, as if for fear of betraying his secret thoughts;

his gait is jerky and he moves in bounds, he leaps rather than walks.

(Foucault 1978, 11)

Foucault clarifies that all these qualities that were noted post-actum became predictive of a criminal type. Anyone born with such traits could become a suspect for a potential crime he may commit in the future. The specific details of Rivière’s narrative did not matter as much as the fact that he had decided to write it “The narrative of murder settles into this dangerous area; it provides the communication between interdict and subjection, anonymity and heroism; through it, infamy attains immortality” (Foucault 1978, 206).

I, Pierre Rivière is a useful corrective to Cornwell’s ‘imagined history’ for Walter

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Sickert. Without the Foucauldian theory of the medico-legal production of criminal subjects, the only way to criticize Cornwell’s project is for the contrived nature of its evidence and her occasional lack of veracity. This line of critique (as Sturgis adopts against Cornwell) is bound to be ineffective for two reasons. First, it continues to uphold ‘truth’ as a transcendental absolute, much like Cornwell herself, but the truth becomes particularly problematic in the

Whitechapel murders. Second, it is forced to go into the minutiae of Cornwell’s allegations in order to debunk them with the ‘correct’ facts. This, however, does nothing to deconstruct the very foundation of a Nordauvian and Lombrosian legacy embedded within Western criminology. Cornwell’s book is a bestseller because like the coronal judge who condemned

Rivière in 1835, she resorts to law and science – the twin bastions of truth – to corroborate her allegations against Sickert. The coronal judge urged those closest to Rivière to revaluate all his actions as per the medico-legal narrative. Many testimonies made against him do not actually describe what happened on the day but ramble instead on how Rivière was always already degenerate. One of Rivière’s neighbours Genevieve recounts a small incident:

Five or six years ago, I was at the Rivières’ and found Prosper Rivière,

then six or seven years old, sitting in front of the fire on a chair, his feet

tied to the pothook and beneath his feet a flame that was drawing and

would soon burn him; the child was already feeling the heat and was

weeping; his father’s aunt, who had her back to the fireplace, was so deaf

that she heard nothing; Pierre Rivière was walking round the room

laughing heartily, a strange laugh, the laugh of idiots. (Foucault 1978, 30)

Foucault also shows here how medico-legal discourse criminalized the acte gratuit. When the coronal judge asked him why he sometimes tortured animals and small children or crucified

69 frogs and birds, Rivière’s response was “I took pleasure in them.” This proved beyond a doubt that he was born with an “instinct of ferocity” (Foucault 1978, 35).

Cornwell combines the authenticatory power of witness statements with medical and forensic reports to support her truth-claims about Sickert. Like Krafft-Ebing and Lombroso, she claims that Sickert was born with sexual deformities like a “fistula of the penis,” a ‘fact’ that she collects from John Lessore who was Sickert’s nephew by marriage. Again, it is impossible to actually verify this but Cornwell doesn’t need verification. There is no other way for her to explain Sickert’s misogyny and perverse interest in genital anatomy and mutilation, if he is to be squeezed into the mould of Jack the Ripper. Cornwell wildly speculates “It’s almost certain that the surgeries he required when he was a young child would have traumatized him and likely left him disfigured if not mutilated. He may have been incapable of an erection. He may not have had enough penis left for penetration. He may have had to squat like a woman to urinate” (Cornwell 2017, 12). Despite her repeated use of the auxiliary verb “may have,” it is important to note that the reader of her book begins to gradually internalize Cornwell’s hypothesis. It does not matter whether or not Sickert actually suffered from these physiological and sexual disorders. As per Cornwell’s seductive circular logic – if sexual impotence was common among ‘lust-murderers’ and Jack the Ripper was a ‘lust-murderer’ – then it must follow that Walter Sickert also “had his privy member destroyed” 5 in childhood. Cornwell even goes on to imagine the moments leading up to

Martha Tabram’s murder “All Martha had to do was reach between his [Ripper/Sickert?] legs and say exactly the wrong thing” (Cornwell 2017, 33). This appears ‘true’ not only because it adheres to that paradoxical composite of the serial killer so laboriously constructed by nineteenth-century medico-legal discourse, but it also satisfies the victim-blaming logic of patriarchy.

Cornwell examines Sickert’s handwriting (like Lombroso and Bonnelier) and compares

70 its syntax and style to the letters that the Victorian police and press received from Jack the

Ripper. This was a doomed exercise to begin with because Sickert was an expert calligraphist and often changed his handwriting. It also looks as if the letters that were allegedly sent from the Whitechapel killer vary so intensely in their style, syntax, and handwriting that they could not have been written by the same person (Fig 9). The academic consensus is that an unscrupulous journalist or group of journalists, looking to intensify the media sensationalism surrounding the case, must have composed them. The language is a strained imitation of the

Cockney vernacular of the East End. Whoever wrote them wanted to feed the stereotypes that the Victorian press had invented. Even the two partial fingerprints that Cornwell subjects to forensic analysis yield no result. In her own words “Jack the Ripper was a forensic scientist’s worst adversary. He was like a twister tearing through a lab. He created investigative chaos with his baffling variety of pens, papers, paints, postmarks and disguised handwritings”

(Cornwell 2017, 233).

Figure 9. An October 1889 letter sent by ‘Jack the Ripper’ MEPO 3/142 ff 272-274 (UK: The National Archives and Patricia Cornwell Collection)

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Nevertheless, this “investigative chaos” does not prevent Cornwell from concluding that the hand that murdered the prostitutes at Whitechapel was the same hand that wrote these letters and further, was the hand of Walter Sickert. If these letters were indeed written by

Sickert, they admit to such a plethora of sexual perversions that would have confounded

Krafft-Ebing himself! In one letter, the Ripper writes that he is impotent “I have caught the pox and cannot piss” (Cornwell 2017, 13), in another he admits to cannibalism “I send you half the Kidne I took from one woman prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise” (cited in Roland 2010, 102) and in yet another, he goes into gleeful detail about the pleasure he felt upon cutting up the prostitutes. These letters own up to so many often self- contradictory perversities that they testify to nothing but the prevailing stereotypes about the serial killer. Ripperologists like Paul Roland insist that the Whitechapel killer did not compose these letters:

Only an irresponsible journalist would have no reservations about re-

inventing a depraved serial killer as a daring rascal. The murderer is more

likely to have viewed his bloody spree in vainglorious terms, perhaps as a

holy crusade to rid the world of disease-riddled ‘undesirables’. He would

have been insulted to think that the more popular press viewed him as a

music-hall villain (Roland 2010, 98).

Not only was Cornwell’s forensic comparison of Sickert’s handwriting to these letters inconclusive, but even the results of the DNA tests that she received from the Bode

Technology Group were only a “cautious indicator” (Cornwell 2017, 226). As the letters themselves revealed nothing, Cornwell’s last resort in her book is to lash out against Sickert

72 for not leaving behind adequate DNA traces. Since Sickert “left almost no trail” (Cornwell

2017, 7) either in the form of a journal, fingerprints on his paintings, or even a body that could be exhumed and swabbed for DNA samples, Cornwell believes that Sickert had a dirty secret to hide.

Even the most naïve of readers cannot overlook how manufactured Cornwell’s deductions are. She often admits that her suspicion of Sickert yield no concrete result, but when it comes to her moral interpretation of his paintings, the general reader has no choice but to take her word for it. She states “I’m sure there are sound artistic explanations for all of

Sickert’s works. But what I see is morbidity, violence and a hatred of women. I find much of his art disturbing” (Cornwell 2017, 486). In one of his self-portraits, for example, Cornwell detects “an inner malignancy.” It is through his paintings that Cornwell believes Sickert pleads guilty to the spectator. She is adamant that they are not works of fiction or representation but confessions of the violent acts and sexual fantasies that Sickert actually performed on prostitutes. She highlights how many of Sickert’s portraits of prostitutes bear a strong resemblance to the Ripper’s crime scenes (Fig. 10):

From the beginning of my research on Sickert and the Ripper, I began to

see unsettling parallels. Some of his art bears a chilling resemblance to

mortuary and scene photographs of Ripper victims (like Mary Ann

Nichols). I noticed murky images of clothed men reflected in mirrors

inside gloomy bedrooms where nude women sit on iron bedsteads. I saw a

diabolically creative mind, and I saw evil as I began adding layer after

layer of circumstantial and physical evidence. (Cornwell 2017, 486)

Note the positivist emphasis of Cornwell’s statement “I saw evil” – note how motif becomes

73 motive. There is no denying that some of Sickert’s paintings fetishize and erase the sovereignty of the female body. But Cornwell believes that the “inner malignancy” that she

‘sees’ in these paintings reveal an “inner malignancy” in Sickert himself – what in Rivière’s case had been identified as an “instinct of ferocity” (Foucault 1978, 35). Cornwell cannot shake off her unease and even goes on to speculate that Sickert was also responsible for the

Camden Town murder of 1907, where a prostitute named Emily Dimmock was found murdered in her bedroom like Mary Kelly, and perhaps even the murder of his second wife

Christine (who actually died of tuberculosis). The first thing she did to test these suspicions was to make significant purchases of Sickert’s original paintings “During the early years of this investigation I acquired more than one hundred of his prints, sketches and paintings. I hung some of them in my own house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and quickly discovered that

I didn’t enjoy the company I was keeping” (Cornwell 2017, 486).

Figure 10. Cornwell’s comparison of Sickert’s paintings with crime-scene photographs Patricia Cornwell, Ripper:The Secret Life of Walter Sickert (Seattle: Thomas and Mercer 2017), 319

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In her analysis of the 1914 version of Ennui, one of Sickert’s best-regarded paintings currently exhibited at the Tate, Cornwell sees a “hint of how the Ripper attacked his victims.”

As she is bent on interpreting Sickert’s paintings as confessions of actual crimes, she begins her analysis not by looking at the work of art itself but with the coroner’s report of one of

Jack the Ripper’s victims Mary Ann Nichols:

In the scenario Dr. Llewellyn describes the killer would have been facing

Mary Ann when he launched the attack. Either they were standing or the

killer already had her on the ground. Somehow he managed to keep her

from shrieking and thrashing as he shoved up her clothes and started

cutting through skin and fat, all the way down to her bowels. It’s difficult

to envision because such a scenario is awkward and defies logic. A

calculating and stealthy killer like Jack the Ripper wouldn’t slash open a

victim’s abdomen first. Imagine her ferocious struggle as she suffered

unimaginable terror, panic and pain. Imagine her screams ... Maybe the

killer didn't approach her from the front. Maybe he never said a word to

her. Maybe she never saw him. (Cornwell 2017, 137-140)

By using information from the Ripper files that might corroborate her false logic of equivalence, Cornwell produces her ‘imagined history’ of Sickert’s crimes. In her own words, Sickert’s paintings unveil the complex inner workings of his mind and “offer insight into the many components that create the alchemy of a monster” (Cornwell 2017, 473). There are multiple versions of Ennui but Cornwell chooses to work with the version that most complies with her theory (Fig. 11). She focuses (quite literally, using forensic methods of magnification) on a detail in the painting that shows her how Sickert/Ripper may have

75 attacked his victims. There is a painting within Sickert’s painting, the details of which change significantly depending on which version Sickert was working on. In the one that Cornwell chooses, the painting hangs on the wall directly facing the spectator in a shabby-genteel home. It features a noblewoman in a reddish-brown evening dress that leaves her shoulder, cleavage, and upper arms bare. Behind her is a white crescent shape that Cornwell sees as the side-profile of a killer:

Behind her is a curious vertical crescent, rather fleshy-white with a slight

bump on the left side that looks very much like an ear. What we see in an

image is subjective. But it appears to me that this crescent could be a

man’s face half in shadows, and the woman is barely turning as if she

senses his approach. Under low magnification the half-shadowed face of

the man is more apparent and the woman’s face begins to look like a skull.

(Cornwell 2017, 140)

Based on this minute hazy detail within Sickert’s painting, Cornwell ‘sees’ the whole secret of his modus operandi as a serial killer.

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Figure 11. Walter Richard Sickert, 1914, Ennui (London: The Tate Gallery). From Patricia Cornwell, Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert (Seattle: Thomas and Mercer 2017), 141

Rather than challenging Cornwell’s interpretation of Sickert’s painting, the historical and cultural relevance of its title ‘ennui’ must be examined. Ennui was Baudelaire’s keyword for aesthetic dandyism; it was a psychological condition of boredom or detachment that was required for the creative process. In his 1936 essay “The Storyteller: Reflections of the Works of Nikolai Leskov” Walter Benjamin observes “If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience” (Benjamin 1968, 367). Benjamin shows how ennui was the state that prefaced aesthetic desire and production. For the storyteller or artist, it was a moment of intense self- awareness through which he could encounter himself as an auto-poetic autonomous being.

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Benjamin’s essay explores how boredom belonged to pre-modern rhythms of European life.

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, this relaxed aesthetic mode of existence was replaced by the unvarying routine of industrial repetition and labour. This tyranny of routine is best represented in Sickert’s painting, wherein a man and woman are posed in an interior space facing away from each other. The man casually smokes a cigarette while the woman gazes into a corner of the room, her head resting on her hand. Like Baudelaire, Sickert loved to capture the squalor and dullness of urban working-class life. In his commentary on

Sickert’s painting, Quentin Bell states “The thing was that he delighted in squalor, in semi- squalor, in false gentility, in the damned-heel achievements of the not-very-well-off. Think of that couple in Ennui; no sign of any kind of elegance of mind or person, they’re really pretty grubby. That’s what he loves.”6

Such a state of listlessness or inactivity was the opposite of the ennui of a dandy or creative artist. It was essential for the pleasure that he derived from committing actes gratuits. Sickert’s painting reflects some of the darker overtones of ennui that Baudelaire presents in his prefatory poem “Au Lecteur” – “C’est l’Ennui! / L’œil chargé d’un pleur involontaire / Il rêve d’échafauds en fumant son houka.”13 Ennui is personified here, as a diabolical figure that smokes a pipe and dreams of tears and executions, much like the central male figure in Sickert’s painting. Baudelaire’s poem is reminiscent of Philothée O’Neddy’s poem “Spleen”:

O ! combien de mes jours le cercle monotone

Effare ma pensée et d’ennuis la couronne !

Que faire de mon ame et de ses saints transports

13 It is Ennui! The eye waters as though with tears It dreams of scaffolds as it smokes its pipe. (My translation)

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Dans cet air étouffant qui pese sur la ville

Au milieu d’une foule insouciante et vile

Où dort l’enthousiasme, où tous les ceurs sont morts !14

(Cited in Starkie 1944, 361)

Such a diabolic state is also featured in Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror. Ennui is compared to a form of ‘vile insouciance,’ a state of glacial immobility, and finally, to immondes charniers or charnel houses where corpses decompose slowly. Ennui was the drive behind the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ movements of the nineteenth century, which safeguarded the autonomy of art and literature to stand beyond good and evil. Wilde remarked in the preface to his revised The Picture of Dorian Gray “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all” (Wilde 2006, 3). Sickert also echoed this sentiment “the artist is he who can take a piece of flint and wring out of it drops of attar of roses.”7 Ennui was a state of meditative withdrawal from the world so that the visionary artist may re-envision it anew. Nordau avowed instead that the artist’s ennui almost always led him towards vices like alcoholism, drug and sexual abuse. He pathologized the condition of ennui in the same manner as he had converted the artist’s self-absorption and self-reflexivity into a medical disorder called “egomania.” If ennui was the precondition of an artist’s heightened aesthetic desires, might it not also lead him to commit an actual murder?

At great personal expense and physical risk to Sickert’s paintings, Cornwell had them transferred from her home to the Virginian Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine. There, she set herself upon the task to rectify the Victorian police’s monumental ‘oversight’ by

14 Oh! How many of my days will this circle of monotony Exhaust my thoughts and trouble my head! What can be done of my soul on its spiritual routes In this heavy air that weighs on the city In the midst of vile insouciant crowd Where passion sleeps, where all hearts are dead! (My translation)

79 subjecting Sickert’s paintings to forensic analysis. As a final insult to injury, her investigation resulted in an accidental damage to Sickert’s painting Broadside. Cornwell feels absolutely no qualms in ‘ripping’ up one of Sickert’s most important works of art “What you should know however is that I would not hesitate to “cut up” a Sickert or anything else if it was the only way to expose a terrible crime and ensure justice. No work of art is worth as much as a human life” (Cornwell 2017, 256). She argues that it was not only the violent and misogynistic themes of Sickert’s paintings that point to his crimes, but even the violence with which he treated his own works of art:

Sickert was known for slashing to tatters unworthy or failed works of art,

and according to Sitwell, on one occasion Sickert instructed his wife Ellen

to go out and buy two long sharp knives with curved blades like the ones

she used for pruning. He needed them to cut up paintings Whistler

supposedly was discontented with. Symbolically, an artist destroying a

painting could be viewed as analogous to a killer destroying the face and

body of a victim. The destruction could be an effort to eradicate what

causes frustration and rage or an attempt to ruin what one cannot possess,

whether it is artistic perfection or the object of lust. (Cornwell 2017, 331)

An artist destroying his own painting was common practice in the nineteenth century and in fact, a strong leitmotif of the ‘Art for Art’s Sake.’ There is an overt reference to it in the very first chapter of The Picture of Dorian Gray:

‘Harry, I can’t quarrel with my two best friends at once, but between you

both you have made me hate the finest piece of work I have ever done, and

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I will destroy it. What is it but canvas and colour? I will not let it come

across our three lives and mar them.’ Dorian Gray lifted his golden head

from the pillow, and with pallid face and tear-stained eyes looked at him,

as he walked over to the deal painting-table that was set beneath the high

curtained window. What was he doing there? His fingers were straying

about among the litter of tin tubes and dry brushes, seeking for something.

Yes, it was for the long palette-knife, with its thin blade of lithe steel. He

had found it at last. He was going to rip up the canvas. With a stifled sob

the lad leaped from the couch, and, rushing over to Hallward, tore the

knife out of his hand, and flung it to the end of the studio. ‘Don’t, Basil,

don’t!’ he cried. ‘It would be murder!’ (Wilde 2006, 26)

In Cornwell’s analysis, motif is motive; the palette knife of the artist is interchangeable with the blade of a serial killer, the work of art with the body of the victim, and corpse with corpus. Her book may seen as the culmination of nineteenth century medico-legal discourse that pathologized art, sex, and murder,8 allowing Sickert to become the last and furthest gone of the degenerates.

Nordau asserted in Degeneration that even if one “leaves uncontradicted the assertion of the Parnassians that poetry has not to trouble itself about morality” it was difficult to overlook the fact that the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ rarely subscribed to their own model of

“absolute impartiality” (Nordau 1993, 274). Instead of representing both good and evil in equal measure, Nordau lambasted Baudelaire for almost exclusively “sing(ing) of carrion, maladies, criminals and prostitutes,” Gautier for “harking back to savage sexuality,” and certain French Decadent writers like Verlaine and Huysmans for their active “delight in crime” and their “absolute predilection for vice and aversion of virtue” (Nordau 1993, 275).

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Nordau argued that Baudelaire assumed the diverse personas of dandies, voluptuaries, drug and sex addicts, and criminals in his poems because he was born evil “Moi je dis: la volupté unique et suprême de l’amour gît dans la certitude de faire le mal. — Et l’homme et la femme savent de naissance que dans le mal se trouve toute volupté.”15 As per this restrictive logic,

Nordau believed that the ‘degenerate’ artist created fictional alter egos to fulfil his perverse desires vicariously. Stevenson conjured Hyde in his novel, des Esseintes was a figuration of

Huysmans’s own morbid fascination with dandyism and Satanism, Dorian Gray was a version of Wilde’s concealed homosexuality, Rachilde’s heroine Raoule an embodiment of her own sapphism and sexual androgyny, and so on. Cornwell’s moral condemnation of

Sickert’s paintings emerges out of this long tradition of criminological approaches to art and literature in the nineteenth century. With this exhaustive list of invented physiological and psychological traits of degeneracy, Cornwell concludes her case against Walter Sickert.

Evidently, the Romantic discourse of the ‘murderer-as-artist’ had devolved into its opposite – the ‘artist-as-murderer’ – by the end of the nineteenth century. At the core of this discursive reversal was the criminalization of the acte gratuit. The strange confluence between art, sex, and serial murder endures well into the contemporary moment. It grounds

Patricia Cornwell’s allegations against Sickert and urban impressionism. Where the ‘Art for

Art’s Sake’ developed primarily as a challenge to the dominant Scientific Naturalist literature of the period, Max Nordau treated this as a ‘morbid deviation from the norm.’ In the same vein, Cornwell and Fuller interpret Sickert’s style to be a confession of his own morbid desires. In a collection of essays called A Free House, or the Artist as Craftsman (1947),

Sickert defended his impressionistic style against other derivative models of art “The realist has over the derivative painter this advantage. The realist is incessantly provisioning himself from the inexhaustible and comfortable cupboard of nature. The derivative romantic, on the

15 I have always said: the most unique and supreme pleasure or love lies in the certainty of doing evil. And men and women know from birth that all pleasure is in evil. (My translation)

82 other hand, can hardly expect such varied and nutritious fare if he restricts himself to the mummies he can find in another man’s Bluebeard closet” (Sitwell 1947, 280). Note Sickert’s definition of the artist as a ‘craftsman’ with a well-defined métier that allows him to manufacture a work of art. It recalls De Quincey’s essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” where he distinctly uses the word ‘fine arts’ rather than beauty or aesthetic judgement to define the aesthetic impulse. By elevating the lowly Irish sailor John Williams wrongly accused of horrific crimes into a handsome dandyish hero, De Quincey elaborated precisely how a writer could turn ‘dirt’ into gold’ or distil the essence of roses from ‘a piece of flint.’ Instead of dismissing murder to be an inherently unsuitable topic, De Quincey predicted that murder would become the subject par excellence of modern art and poetry. It would give rise to the cult surrounding Jack the Ripper and gradually reconfigure respectable

Anglo-Saxon society into ‘connoisseurs of murder.’

G. K. Chesterton called De Quincey “the first and most powerful of the decadents, and that any one still smarting from the pinpricks of Oscar Wilde or James Whistler will find most of what they said, said better in “Murder as One of the Fine Arts” (cited in De Quincey

2006, xxvi). Likewise, in his book Aesthetics of Murder Black reads De Quincey’s essay to be a “quasi-philosophical rationale for homicide” (Black 1992, 34). De Quincey made an extremely important clarification about his aesthetics of murder, however, that is often overlooked by such critics. In an earlier essay called “On the Knocking at the Gate in

Macbeth” (1823), De Quincey wrote:

Murder in ordinary cases, where the sympathy is wholly directed to the

case of the murdered person, is an incident of coarse and vulgar horror;

and for this reason – that it flings the interest exclusively upon the natural

but ignoble instinct by which we cleave to life. Such an attitude would

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little suit the purposes of the poet. What then must he do? He must throw

the interest on the murderer: our sympathy must be with him (of course I

mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into

his feelings, and are made to understand them, – not a sympathy of pity or

approbation). (De Quincey 2006, 4)

A “sympathy of comprehension” for the murderer is what De Quincey wished to cultivate in his reader through the Romantic idiom. This was of course, a difficult thing to achieve given that he was retelling a historical murder. On its own, the murder could not be ‘beautiful’ but was at the most ‘sublime,’ as Kant and Burke had defined the category. But with the

Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811 and John Williams, all De Quincey had at his disposal was a “monster” who had slaughtered six nondescript members of working-class people and a baby. In keeping with his own mandate, however, De Quincey shows little concern for the victims. The ‘sympathy’ that a modern writer or artist could potentially produce for a creature as abhorrent as this serial killer designated the true value of art and literature. This

‘sympathy’ was not one of “approbation” for his crimes and misdemeanours. Nor was it a confession of the writer’s own concealed criminality or vicarious identification with the killer’s perverse drives. All that this “sympathy” generated was a gap, a pause, an aporia, or a moment of critical reflection in the reader that evil may not be so altogether Other after all.

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Notes

1 The epigraph is taken from the Sunday, November 15, 1835 article of the Journal de Rouen et du Departement de la Seinelnferieure titled “Calvados Assize Court: Lacenaire and

Riviere,” which is cited in Michel Foucault’s I, Pierre Rivière, 147.

2 This interaction between Coleridge and De Quincey is reported in the lengthier “Postscript” to “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” that was appended to the essay in 1854:

Coleridge, whom I saw some months after these terrific murders, told me, that, for

his part, though at the time resident in London, he had not shared in the prevailing

panic; him they affected only as a philosopher, and threw him into a profound

reverie upon the tremendous power which is laid open in a moment to any man who

can reconcile himself to the abjuration of all conscientious restraints, if, at the same

time, thoroughly without fear. Not sharing in the public panic, however, Coleridge

did not consider that panic at all unreasonable; for, as he said most truly in that vast

metropolis there are many thousands of households, composed exclusively of

women and children; many other thousands there are who necessarily confide their

safety, in the long evenings, to the discretion of a young servant girl; and if she

suffers herself to be beguiled by the pretence of a message from her mother, sister, or

sweetheart, into opening the door, there, in one second of time, goes to wreck the

security of the house. However, at that time, and for many months afterwards, the

practice of steadily putting the chain upon the door before it was opened prevailed

generally, and for a long time served as a record of that deep impression left upon

London by Mr Williams. (De Quincey 2006, 99)

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3 Oxford English Dictionary Online: bloodlust n. intense desire for bloodshed; bloodthirstiness.

1848 E. Bulwer-Lytton Harold I. iii. ii. 175 Hear me, thou with the vulture's blood-lust.

1942 W. Lewis Let. 25 Oct. (1963) 338 He [sc. a soldier] would be disgusted and amazed to find us all foaming at the mouth, our eyes full of bloodlust.

4 From Quentin Bell’s interview in the 1994 documentary by Jake Auerbach & Hannah

Rothschild titled “Sickert’s London: The Father of Modern British Painting” https://trentu.kanopystreaming.com/video/sickerts-london

5 Cornwell notes that in many of the letters that the police received from Jack the Ripper, there were “multiple phallic allusions in words and in drawings. Not all of these mocking missives were signed “Jack the Ripper.” He used different names, and I believe some of the letters supposedly sent from concerned citizens are actually from him. An example of this is a letter dated Oct 4, 1888. The writer speculates, “My theory of the crimes is that the criminal has been badly disfigured—possibly had his privy member destroyed—& he is now revenging himself on the sex by these atrocities,” The letter is written in purple pencil and signed “Scotus.” which could be the Latin for “Scotsman.” Scotus can mean “a shallow incision” or “to cut.” Nov 11, 1888, the Ripper writes, “I have caught the pox and cannot piss.” (Cornwell 2017, 3).

6 From Quentin Bell’s interview.

7 From an obituary that Sickert wrote for Spencer Gore called “A Perfect Modern” in the

New Age issue of 9 April 1914. It is cited in Osbert Sitwell’s collection of Sickert’s essays A

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Free House: The Writings of Walter Richard Sickert (London: Macmillan and Co. 1947),

277.

8 It is quite ironic that Cornwell excludes herself from this genealogy even though her own immensely popular Kay Scarpetta series is no less violent or graphic than some of Sickert’s paintings. She connects Sickert’s act of slashing his paintings to his alleged slashing of prostitutes, but defends herself against the charge of ‘ripping’ Sickert’s painting Broadstairs.

If the same Nordauvian lens were turned upon her, wouldn’t her assertion “I would not hesitate to “cut up” a Sickert or anything else” appear just as narcissistic and delusional as her portrayal of Sickert?

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Chapter Two

Corpses in Bloom

Death is the sanction of everything the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his

authority from death.

Walter Benjamin1

Of the six canonical victims of the Whitechapel murders, Mary Kelly’s crime scene photographs mark the crescendo of Jack the Ripper’s violence. Unlike his other victims whose were found on the streets of Whitechapel, Mary was murdered in her residence at

Miller’s Court on 9 November 1888. She was last seen with a pale dandyish man with dark hair, eyebrows and moustache dressed in a felt hat and dark coat trimmed in astrakhan. As they were about enter her home, he gave Mary a red handkerchief. Mary’s ‘hermetically sealed’ boudoir then allowed Jack the Ripper to work at his pleasure. Her death was caused by the signature incision to the carotid artery that severed her neck almost to the point of decapitation. The mutilations and lacerations on her face and body surpassed the scale of the previous victims, revealing the Ripper’s perverse desire to obliterate her identity completely.

Her fate has now come to epitomize the precarious condition of all the ‘unfortunates’ and

‘streetwalkers’ – Victorian slang for the prostitutes of the East End – who were forced to roam the streets of London at night. Her murder is a testament to the killer’s extreme misogyny born of an age that sanctioned such gross economic and patriarchal inequality.

How else would it have been possible for hapless young women to invite killers into their homes, all for the sake of a ‘tuppeny’? Mary Kelly’s corpse, however, exerted a strange power over popular imagination to exceed even the myths surrounding Jack the Ripper. Her ravaged body refused to be silenced and generated instead, a paradoxical affect of horror and pleasure, disgust and fascination. This chapter explores what exactly was the nature of this

88 affect that was generated through aesthetic representations of the murdered prostitute in the nineteenth-century.

The streetwalker posed a civic and moral threat to Victorian middle-class respectability. She was often subsumed within the category of habitual criminals like roving madmen, drug-peddlers, body snatchers, murderers and vagabonds. The main issue with these ‘criminal classes’ was that it was impossible to circumscribe them within a concrete legal jurisdiction. Prostitutes, like the Ripper’s early victims Mary Ann Nichols and

Catherine Eddowes, transgressed not only the sexual norms of Victorian culture but also its civic limits, as they frequently moved from parish to parish. Because of the prevalence of syphilis and venereal disease, the prostitute was held single-handedly responsible for destroying the institutions of marriage, the military and the navy. She challenged the ideals of bourgeois femininity due to the solicitous nature of her trade, disavowed the proverbial home and hearth, the safety of the interior space, and its requisite fidelities and proprieties.

The prostitute in the Victorian age signified “dirt” beyond all measure – to use Mary

Douglas’s anthropological term from her book Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966). Dirt is commonly understood to be something identifiable or absolute that must be eradicated for a good and healthy existence. But Douglas clarifies that

“there is no such thing as absolute dirt … eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organise the environment” (Douglas 1984, 2). This implies that by identifying what constitutes as ‘dirt,’ a community creates the category of the ‘clean’ and normative thereby produces itself. Douglas observes, just as there can be no “absolute dirt” there is no absolute norm. Dirt is threatening because it draws attention to how contrived and mutable the boundaries of a particular culture are, based on all that has been forcibly excluded from it.

The violent expulsion of ‘dirt’ from culture is best evidenced in how Victorian urban

89 planners and social scientists compared the prostitute’s body to rotting drains, disease, and other civic menaces that plagued London. William Acton’s treatise Prostitution; Considered in its Moral, Social and Sanitary Aspects published in 1857 (and revised in 1870) used three predominant metaphors to describe the streetwalker. The first metaphor of the rotting drain or a “mass of syphilis” (Acton 1870, 10) reflects the medical misconception that venereal disease was born exclusively in the prostitute’s body. Acton believed that her genitals were not only the progenitors but also the primary vessels of syphilis. Streetwalkers were brought under strict medical regulation to prevent venereal disease from spreading “It is time to check the evil. Diseased prostitutes can no longer be permitted to infest the streets and spread contagion and death at their good pleasure. They cannot be kept off the streets except by being placed in confinement” (Acton 1870, 240). The term s “infest” and “contagion” reveal the second level of signification whereby the prostitute was compared to a virus.

Acton called her a source of “deadly contagion” and “a grave internal malady” that lurked deep within the body of London. If the prostitute was legally persecuted in one parish, Acton noted with resignation that she could migrate to another. Acton’s research was not an isolated venture. The 1850s saw a sudden rise in the moral condemnation of prostitution in medical literature, especially in the works of W.R. Greg, Henry Mayhew and William Tait in England, and Philippe Ricord and Parent-Duchatelet in France. Prostitution was not a new or unfamiliar social practice, but the inclusion of the prostitute’s body into the residuum of criminal bodies was certainly a product of the Victorian age.

The third and final metaphor that Acton employed to denigrate the prostitute’s body was to compare her sexual organs to a sewer or garbage dump “shall dirt be allowed to accumulate, only because it is dirt?” (Acton 1870, 33). In his vivid descriptions of brothels and the temporary lodging houses of the streetwalkers, Acton wrote that “stupid from beer or fractious from gin, they swear and chatter brainless stuff all day, about men and millinery,

90 their own schemes and adventures and the faults of others of the sisterhood” (Acton 1870,

11). Acton concluded “as a heap of rubbish will ferment, so will a number of unvirtuous women thus collected deteriorate” (Acton 1870, 12). The Contagious Diseases Act passed by Lord Clarence Paget in 1864 commissioned a full study of the army, navy, and prominent upper-class areas of London to study the extent of the venereal threat. Consequently, the

Inspector-General of Hospitals in 1865 estimated that there were 929 venereal prostitutes out of 7,339, in eleven garrison and port towns. An 1869 Army Medical Department Report

(appended in Acton’s revised edition) declared that one out of three enlisted men at the

Aldershott district had a venereal complaint. This ratio was a staggering two-and-a-half times greater than the French militia. Gonorrhoea had destabilized the English infantry and artillery, which incurred the most expenditure for cure and replacement. Instead of monitoring the lascivious tendencies of the soldiers, the Contagious Diseases Act created a special police that brought prostitutes to hospitals for inspection. Acton wrote how this undercover police force worked the notorious Haymarket, Whitechapel and Ratcliffe

Highway districts of London’s East End. Any woman who looked the least bit unhealthy or meretricious was a likely suspect, leading Acton to observe quite poetically how the prostitutes would flee these police rounds “like birds to the arrival of a hawk” (Acton 1870,

116).

This reinforces Acton’s definition of the prostitute as a woman who was ‘dirty’ because she was visible, active, and sought to stand out in the crowd. Acton strongly denounced the gaudy attire and make-up of the streetwalkers to be “a sort of whitewashed sepulchre, fair to the eye, but full of inner rottenness” (Acton 1870, 30). The Latin word for prostitute is meretrix, which comes from the root merere.2 When applied to the traditionally

‘masculine’ concepts of genius, autonomy, and rational intellect, it etymologically produces words like emeritus. However, the picture of the venereal prostitute that Acton painted

91 brought forth pejorative connotations of merere like meretricious meaning superficiality and excess. As part of his puritanical disavowal of any excess or pleasure for the sake of pleasure, Acton advised that the prostitutes in the lock wards of his clinic be given a uniform to make them appear ‘comely’ and ‘womanly.’ All the inmate’s belongings, particularly her gaudy clothes, were confiscated and sterilized. There were many within the medical community who flatly refused to treat venereal disease in prostitutes for ethical reasons because they believed that it punished their ‘sins.’ The syphilologist and gynaecologist thus became a state-sponsored replacement for the parish priest in the nineteenth century. Acton produced such moral statistics of the poor and working-class population of London by incorporating within the medico-legal discourse, the religious anathema against prostitution, adultery, and sexual libertinism. The body of the venereal prostitute (like the body of the born criminal in Lombroso) combined moral repugnance and rational empiricism. Acton exemplified this dual gaze in his book, when he expressed his distaste for displaying the prostitute’s body to his young male students on the one hand, but on the other, comfortably prescribed the use of a speculum to examine her genitals.

The statistics through which Acton enumerated different symptoms of venereal disease reinforced the moral bias of the medico-legal profession. The notion was that sexual excess and perversion could not be concealed from the law. It revealed itself in the very body of the criminal through visible stigmata like ‘sores,’ ‘eruptions,’ ‘ulceration,’ ‘swelling,’

‘excoriation,’ ‘discharge,’ ‘chancre,’ and ‘bubo.’ Acton’s book repeatedly used words like

‘elevated,’ ‘extended,’ ‘raised,’ or ‘extensive’ to describe the venereal prostitute’s genitals.

This was how she stood out with her ‘unfeminine,’ monstrous, and Medusan body. Many doctors prescribed uterine ablutions and water injections as if the ‘dirt’ could literally be cleansed from the ‘source.’ Ironically, these vaginal injections aided the spread of venereal infection to the uterus and caused severe pelvic discomfort and inflammation. We have

92 already seen how Judith Walkowitz in City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual

Danger in Late-Victorian London (1992) compared the Ripper’s misogyny to that inherent in sexology and gynecology. The fact that the Ripper was eviscerating prostitutes in that particular surgical fashion was nothing but the culmination of a chain of ‘masculine’ penetrations. The knife of the serial killer, the doctor’s speculum, and the blade of the anatomist were all the same in temrs of misogyny. It is no wonder that some of the prime suspects for Jack the Ripper in the fall of 1888 were doctors and medical men, who had in their own way, defined the illegitimacy of the female body by subjecting it to moral definition, manipulation, and violence.

Take for instance, the voyeurism concealed in Dr. Bond’s post-mortem report of Mary

Kelly’s corpse:

The body was lying naked in the middle of the bed, the shoulders flat but

the axis of the body inclined to the left side of the bed. The head was

turned on the left cheek. The left arm was close to the body with the

forearm flexed at a right angle and lying across the abdomen. The right

arm was slightly abducted from the body and rested on the mattress. The

elbow was bent, the forearm supine with the fingers clenched. The legs

were wide apart, the left thigh at right angles to the trunk and the right

forming an obtuse angle with the pubes. The whole of the surface of the

abdomen and thighs was removed and the abdominal cavity emptied of its

viscera. The breasts were cut off, the arms mutilated by several jagged

wounds and the face hacked beyond recognition of the features. The

tissues of the neck were severed all round down to the bone.3

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This kind of detached and misogynistic voyeurism was justified by the allegedly lower moral status of the victim. If in life, the Victorian prostitute was already a source of ‘dirt’ as a class and sexual subaltern, then in death, her body became doubly threatening to the normative cultural apparatus of bourgeois respectability. Compare Bond’s ‘masculine’ distance from Mary Kelly’s corpse with the ‘feminine’ terror of the primary witness John

McCarthy who failed to recount what he saw in a comprehensive oral testimony:

The sight I saw I cannot drive away from my mind. It looked more like

the work of a devil than a man. The poor woman’s body was lying on the

bed, undressed. She had been completely disembowelled, and her entrails

had been taken out and placed on the table. It was those that I had seen

when I looked through the window and took to be lumps of flesh. The

woman’s nose had been cut off, and her face gashed beyond recognition.

Both her breasts too had been cut clean away and placed by the side of

her liver and other entrails on the table. I had heard a great deal about the

Whitechapel murders, but I declare to God I had never expected to see

such a sight as this. The body, was of course, covered with blood, and so

was the bed. The whole scene is more than I can describe. I hope I may

never see such a sight again. (Cited in Roland 2010, 82)

McCarthy had sent Thomas Bowyer to collect rent from Mary Kelly in the early hours of the morning of 8 November 1888. When the boy rushed back to alert him of her death, he proceeded to investigate the crime scene himself. He had barely looked within Mary’s bedroom window when he saw a corpse he could not “drive away from his mind.” The crime scene photograph of Mary Kelly’s corpse generates a similar affect. Even as it

94 attempts to focus on forensic and medical details of her eviscerated body like the coroner’s report, it does not allow the spectator any safe ‘masculine’ distance from the corpse.

The photograph remains one of the most haunting artefacts of Victorian modernity

(Fig. 1). It was released from the Scotland Yard archives a year after Mary Kelly’s murder and published in an 1889 French text Vacher l’éventreur et les crimes sadiques by

Alexandre Lacassagne. However, in spite of the initial shock and horror that this crime scene photograph generates even today, there is something inexplicably fascinating about Mary

Kelly’s corpse that invites the gaze to linger. There is a playful or performative element to her ‘pose.’ Her face is turned towards the viewer seductively and one is unsure if this signifies her last moments or if the killer had posed her corpse thus, or if it was the crime- scene photographer himself who had shifted her face thus to create a dramatic effect.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to define the precise and paradoxical affect generated when we look at Mary’s defaced face ‘smiling’ back at us like any other portrait.

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Figure 1. The official crime scene photograph of Mary Jane Kelly, 8 November 1888 Patricia Cornwell, Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert (Seattle: Thomas and Mercer 2017), 175

Much as Jack the Ripper had sent letters to the police taunting them to ‘catch me if you can,’ the bizarre expression on Mary’s face raises the same question albeit from the irretrievable and unrepresentable standpoint of the murder victim. The compelling presence of her corpse in the Ripper files shows the impossibility of closure or justice in these exceptional crimes.

The viewer cannot maintain a safe objective distance from this photograph or derive any

‘masculine’ and voyeuristic pleasure from its representation of violence. The viewer feels trauma, guilt, and ethical obligation when confronted by the blank gaze of this Medusan body.

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The affect produced by this photograph is best-described using Roland Barthes’s term

“punctum” from his book Camera Lucida (1980). Barthes argues that the photograph as a medium is not like any other mimetic mode of representation because it actually captures or arrests a moment of reality on the page. All photographs are a kind of memento mori or

‘murder’ since they ensure the death or passing of the moment they seek to represent. Each photograph has a concealed or repressed element which, when discovered, suddenly shakes the viewer out of his or her normal viewing habits. Barthes terms this element the

“punctum.” In her essay “Murder in Black and White: Victorian Crime Scenes and the

Ripper Photographs,” Megha Anwer uses Barthes’s term to describe Mary Kelly’s gaze:

Yet even as the photograph does all this, it can also enhance our emotional

sense and experience of the crime scene. For me, the photograph’s

“punctum” – the pre-existent yet unnoticed detail that provokes a “tiny

shock” (Barthes 49), “the incongruous gesture [that] ... arrest[s] my gaze”

(51) – resides in the fact that Mary Kelly’s face is bizarrely turned toward

the camera. She is “looking” directly at us through her battered, swollen

eyes. This creates the eerie sensation that she, a dead woman, has shifted the

angle of her head to gaze directly into the camera – as though to return the

photographer’s gaze. It makes one imagine Kelly turning her head to watch

her murderer walk about the room as he prepared to mutilate his victim.

Somehow, this innocuous minor detail has the capacity to make us alive to

her torment much more than any postmortem report can. (Anwer 439)

Anwer goes on to add that the punctum renders Mary Kelly’s corpse ‘alive’ in a manner that is directly opposed to the language of the post-mortem report, which mainly uses the past

97 tense for the victim. The coroner analyzes her corpse by looking at the constituent parts of her body as the killer himself would have seen her. Instead of dying peacefully in the presence of a priest and loved ones, Mary Kelly’s sudden and mysterious murder impresses upon the viewer the abject horror and finality of death. Through the wounds on her body and the scattering of her viscera across the photographic canvas, she mocks the legal and ethical foundations of a culture that failed to punish her killer. Anwer astutely notes that the main source of this failure was not a dearth of evidence on the crime scene, but rather, the victim- blaming propensities of the Victorian police and press whereby a murdered prostitute was

“less the crime’s victim and more its provocation” (Anwer 434).

What was most appalling about the Whitechapel murders of 1888 was not the unprecedented violence practiced on the prostitutes but the public’s hypocritical censure of their ‘criminal’ status. It was widely believed that Jack the Ripper was a messiah who had accomplished what the law had been unable to do; purge the streets of Whitechapel from the

‘dirty’ and ‘corrupting’ presence of prostitutes and pimps. Popular newspapers, illustrated magazines and crime journals of the period rarely questioned why the killer had attacked the prostitutes in that particular manner. As far as they were concerned, the Ripper had done them a service. Not only had he provided enough fodder for generations of sensational journalism and criminological research, but he had also redressed the civic menace of prostitution that social scientists like Acton had targeted. It should come as no surprise therefore that there are striking similarities between the photographs and mortuary sketches of these murdered prostitutes and the police mug shots of wanted criminals:

The ghostly portraits of the Ripper’s victims seem to operate more as mug

shots for a police line-up than as bodies photographed for details of the

injuries they have suffered. Furthermore, they resemble portraits of

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sleeping women, photographed clandestinely, voyeuristically, without

their knowledge. All that is required from us, the viewers, is a slight

associative legerdemain, and the sleeping women transform into the

women who sleep around (Anwer 434).

Anwer sees a congruence between police mug shots of habitual and wanted criminals and the angles at which the murdered prostitutes at Whitechapel were photographed. Instead of covering the entire expanse of the corpse in a single shot, or even focusing on the severity of their wounds, most of the mortuary pictures zoomed in on the victim’s face (Fig. 2). They were shot in the same manner as the poster of a wanted criminal, repeat offender, or born criminal. Anwer correctly avers that these photographs fed the popular puritanical opinion that the Whitechapel prostitutes had got what they ‘deserved.’ It mirrored the reticence of syphilologists and surgeons to cure venereal disease in prostitutes. Social science, photography, and popular journalism were collectively invested in the discursive production of the prostitute’s criminality and subaltern status in society.

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Figure 2. L-R: Elizabeth Stride, Annie Chapman, and Mary Ann Nichols Patrick Knox, “Did Jack the Ripper escape London to carrying on his brutal killings in Yorkshire?” Daily Star, 28 August 2016.

Since these ‘meretricious’ women provocatively displayed themselves on the streets of

London, it was only a matter of time before a perverse man like the Ripper would also display their bodies on the streets like a work of art.

The Flower of Evil: Representations of Murdered Prostitutes

Years before Jack the Ripper was painting the town ‘red’ with his gratuitous crimes,

Charles Baudelaire wrote a poem “Une Martyre,” which was published in his 1857 collection Les Fleurs du mal. The poem is remarkably prescient of Mary Kelly’s crime scene photograph as the central figure is a young woman lying murdered in her bed. Where

Mart’s neck was cut from ear to ear, the murdered woman in Baudelaire’s poem has her head entirely severed and grotesquely arranged on the bedside table. This violently decapitated head is the poem’s frontispiece, prompting the poet to observe how it gushes

100 blood “comme un fleuve” onto the table with the vivid and warm colours of summer:

Au milieu des flacons, des étoffes lamées

Et des meubles voluptueux,

Des marbres, des tableaux, des robes parfumées

Qui traînent à plis somptueux.

Dans une chambre tiède où, comme en une serre,

L'air est dangereux et fatal,

Où des bouquets mourants dans leurs cercueils de verre

Exhalent leur soupir final.

Un cadavre sans tête épanche, comme un fleuve,

Sur l’oreiller désaltéré

Un sang rouge et vivant, dont la toile s’abreuve

Avec l’avidité d'un pré.1

By opening the scene with intricate details of the furniture and environment, the poet sets up

1 Amid the flasks of scent and sequined fabrics, Rich furnishing of a space that holds Statues and paintings and long perfumed robes Trailing in sumptuous folds.

In a warm chamber where the hothouse air Hangs heavy with mortality, And, coffined under glass, limp flowers exhale Their last expiring sigh.

A headless corpse spills out a stream of blood, To make a red expanding stain On the white pillowcase that soaks it up As a thirsty field drinks rain. (Baudelaire 2016, 229)

101 the parameters for his empirical examination of the corpse. Instead of looking for clues left by the murderer (who has has mysteriously disappeared from the scene like Jack the Ripper) the poet’s gaze ends up sexually objectifying the woman’s headless corpse. His eye lingers on erotic details like the jewels in her hair, the pattern of her rose-coloured stockings and garter, all of which indicate the woman’s own ‘criminal’ identity as a prostitute. The air is compact like a “cercueils de verre” or hothouse, with the scent of dying flowers. The poet admits that it would be hypocritical of him to pretend that his gaze was empirically detached and not voyeuristic. The woman’s naked limbs were so delicately that it could arouse in any

‘masculine’ viewer, a perverse and necrophiliac urge.

The poet lulls the reader’s entry into this horrific crime scene by comparing the woman’s corpse to a flower – “comme une renoncule.” He describes the languor of her pose with soothing words like “repose” and “vide de pensers” (Baudelaire 2016, 228). But this languor or pornographic gaze is countered when the reader realizes that the object being compared to a flower is actually the bleeding decapitated head of the woman:

Sur la table de nuit, comme une renoncule,

Repose; et, vide de pensers,

Un regard vague et blanc comme le crepuscule,

S’échappe des yeux révulsés.

Sur le lit, le tronc nu sans scrupules étale,

Dans le plus complet abandon,

La secrète splendeur et la beauté fatale

Dont la nature lui fit don.2

2 Rests like a buttercup upon

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This Medusan head with its coils of serpentine blond hair, which the murderer has violently uprooted from the woman’s “le tronc” or torso, reminds the poet of a vase of wilting buttercups on a nightstand. Although Baudelaire frequently brought together images of death, flowers and femininity in his poetry, he was particularly invested in revealing the patriarchal and misogynistic tensions inherent in conventional representational systems. For him, death and femininity came together not as signifiers of ‘beauty’ but as symbols of mystery, violence, and commodification, all of which constituted his very revision of the category of beauty. In another poem called “Hymne à la beauté” – Baudelaire personified beauty as a whore-like creature that walks on corpses and wears murder as a jewel upon her breast:

Tu marches sur des morts, Beauté, dont tu te moques;

De tes bijoux l’Horreur n’est pas le moins charmant,

Et le Meurtre, parmi tes plus chères breloques,

Sur ton ventre orgueilleux danse amoureusement.3

It is important to note that the corpse of the murdered prostitute in Baudelaire’s poem is by no means a passive recipient of the ‘masculine’ voyeuristic gaze. She remains as provocative

A table by the bed; a gaze Empty of thought, unfixed and blank as twilight, Escapes its upturned eyes.

Splayed on the bed, the naked trunk reveals, In the most sheer abandonment, The secret splendour and the fatal beauty That nature chose to grant. (Baudelaire 2016, 229)

3 Beauty, you walk upon the dead you mock, Horror is not the least of your bright gems; Murder, another trinket you hold dear, Gilds your proud belly with its dancing charm (Baudelaire 2016, 45)

103 and powerful in death as she had been in life. The poet compares her sinuous waist to a snake poised to strike or “Ainsi qu’un reptile irrité.” The reference to her coils of hair and snake- like waist collectively construct the mythic image of Medusa, rather than the customarily passive and polished postures of female corpses in traditional Western art. The decapitated woman in Baudelaire’s poem is not a symbol of virtue or renunciation. She is not a martyr but a prophet with magic powers whose body could cure the ennui of her clients and satisfy their “amour ténébreux”:

Le singulier aspect de cette solitude,

Et d'un grand portrait langoureux,

Aux yeux provocateurs comme son attitude,

Révèle un amour ténébreux.4

The title of the poem “Une Martyre,” a reference to the ecclesiastical honour bestowed posthumously on those with significant spiritual achievements, is ironically applied to the body of the murdered prostitute. Baudelaire thus contrasted the moral hypocrisy of the medico-legal discourse with a painful sympathy generated for this abject and grotesquely violated body. He also clarified that the image he describes is not an actual crime scene but one that has been portrayed in a painting by an unknown artist or “un Maître inconnu.” This immediately replaces the ethical position of the reader of the poem with the aesthetic position of a spectator in an art gallery. It is unclear whether the maître had painted the corpse from imagination or if, like the crime scene photographer in Mary Kelly’s bedroom, he was representing an actual crime scene. Nonetheless, it allows the poet to distance himself from

4 The languorous pose and the provoking eyes Of a portrait hanging above Combine with this singular solitude To suggest an unspeakable love. (Baudelaire 2016, 231)

104 the corpse using several layers of aesthetic distance; it becomes a poem about a painting possibly based on a crime scene.

One may speculate that the “Maître inconnu” who inspired Baudelaire to write this poem may have been the painter Eugène Delacroix. Baudelaire wrote extensively on

Delacroix in “The Salon of 1845” and “The Salon of 1846” that were posthumously published in 1868 as Curiosités esthétiques. For Baudelaire, Delacroix was “le vrai peintre du

XIXe siècle” or the most consummately modern artist of the age. His paintings redefined the traditional category of beauty to be a combination of mystery and melancholy – qualities that

Baudelaire prized the most. Baudelaire wrote that even something as seemingly ugly or un- aesthetic as the body of a murdered woman became more than mere “jolies femmes” or a passive object of voyeurism in Delacroix’s works of art. There are striking similarities between the setting of Baudelaire’s “Une Martyre” and Delacroix’s 1825 painting Odalisque, which represents a female nude reclining on a divan in an ornate room (Fig. 2). The title highlights the sensuality and exoticism of the scene; ‘odalisque’ being an exotic term to refer to Turkish chambermaids and prostitutes. Regardless of whether the woman in Delacroix’s painting is dead or sleeping, her pose is not one of peaceful rest. Her half-open eyes are dark caverns of horror that contrast the blood-red tapestry beneath her.

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Figure 2. Eugène Delacroix, 1825, Odalisque The image is freely available in the public domain.

Baudelaire observed that Delacroix’s nudes were not beautiful but possessed a quality that could suddenly revolt the spectator “Presque toutes sont malades, et resplendissent d’une certaine beauté intérieure.”5 He may even have consciously tried to replicate Delacroix’s aesthetics in “Une Martyre” – where the voyeuristic gaze of the poet is aroused by the prostitute but thwarted by the horror of her Medusan gaze “un regard vague et blanc comme le crepuscule.” The title highlights the deeply embedded misogynistic desire to martyr sexually dangerous and transgressive women and contain the threat of their bodies. “Une

Martye” becomes a literary counterpart of Delacroix’s vision of death and desire, of whom

Baudelaire wrote “C’est non seulement la douleur qu’il sait le mieux exprimer, mais surtout, prodigieux mystère de sa peinture, la douleur morale !”6

5 Sourced from Curiosités esthétiques https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Baudelaire_- _Curiosit%C3%A9s_esth%C3%A9tiques_1868.djvu/122 Almost all are sick, and yet, shine with an inner beauty. (My translation)

6 Sourced from Curiosités esthétiques https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Baudelaire_- _Curiosit%C3%A9s_esth%C3%A9tiques_1868.djvu/123

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In their essay “Dead or Alive,” Jennifer and Lorraine Webb (the former a contemporary writer, the latter a painter) grapple with the dilemma of representing a human corpse in art and literature. They examine how artists and writers depict death using an actual corpse even though corpses are not “beautiful subjects (though the works may depend on the imagination and the material world, corpses do not generally meet the conventions of beauty), nor are they sublime subjects (insofar as they privilege tangible form over pure reason, and the material over the absolute)” (Webb and Webb 2004, 217). It seems that an aesthetic representation of a corpse is inherently contradictory and impossible. In order to accomplish this otherwise incommensurable feat, the artist must gaze upon the corpse as Perseus looked at Medusa. Jennifer and Lorraine Webb recall how Athena had instructed Perseus to approach Medusa by looking away from her face to avoid the paralytic and debilitating power of her gaze. Perseus used the reflective surface of his shield to conquer Medusa and this apotropaic gesture saved him from being ‘castrated’ by Medusa’s monstrous femininity.

Similarly, an artist or writer must use a Persean mirror to represent the corpse – never directly but only through layers of aesthetic mediation and framing. Through this process the corpse becomes “something that produces its own self-presence by the act of framing and forming it as thing in itself: the subject of the work” (Webb and Webb 2004, 219). Therefore, they advise that the writer or artist must employ a kind of “two-handed looking” instead of the direct realistic gaze. Such a “two-handed” gaze “has the ability to restore normalcy to the corpse simply by pointing out that the dead body is a “subject like any other subject.” This, at least according to Jennifer and Lorrain Webb, enables writers and artists to represent the human corpse with the aim that “studying death, exploring death, confronting death offer the possibility of understanding it” (Webb and Webb, 2004 217).

The essay assumes that this “two-handed” gaze is nothing but an extension of the

It is not pain alone that one knows best, but above all, the grand mystery of his painting- the pain of a moral conscience. (My translation)

107 normal process of aesthetic representation. In order to represent any reality or material object, no matter how inherently horrifying, Jennifer and Lorrain Webb advocate that the artist must:

[…] retain some ice in the heart in order to maintain the objective distance

necessary to overcome pity and fear, appropriate the raw stuff of human

experience, break it down to component parts, and return it in the guise of

art. The chill of this gaze provides a mediated space in which the artist can

work more effectively, because too close an identification with the dead

body would mean the risk that the work would become pathological, self-

indulgent, or incoherent.” (Webb and Webb 2004, 219)

Note how they use words like “pathological,” “self-indulgent,” and “incoherent” to describe a

‘failed’ work of art, versus the apparent normalcy of the “chill” gaze or “two-handed” looking. “Pathological” was of course, the Victorian medico-legal term par excellence for behaviours, acts and desires that were inexplicable, ambiguous, threatening, or ‘dirty.’ They were identified as such under the broad category of disease or degeneration. It is striking that

Jennifer and Lorraine Webb should use such an archaic moral term to describe a work of art that fails to adequately distance itself from the corpse during the process of aesthetic representation. But one must ask, is it a sign of failure if the “pathological” style echoes pathological content such as perhaps, the gratuitous murder of a prostitute without any discernible motive? How can anyone “retain some ice in the heart” when confronted by Mary

Kelly’s corpse and Jack the Ripper’s other crime scenes? Is it even advisable to be so empirically and emotionally distanced from the atrocities committed upon these corpses?

Doesn’t this distance imply a kind of ‘masculine’ power as Perseus had exercised upon

Medusa? What is ironic is that even as they promote a “two-handed” looking, which can

108 apparently render the corpse “safe” and “legitimized,” ultimately Jennifer and Lorraine Webb cannot unseat it from its throne of abjection. Consequently, their formula for “two-handed looking” becomes inadequate and unsuccessful in cases like sex crime and serial killing.

The essay focuses almost exclusively on works of contemporary art that do not actually portray the corpse of a murder victim or represent the biological reality of death and decomposition. It also steers clear of subjects like lustmörd that became an important theme for Baudelaire and the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ movements of the nineteenth century leading up to Walter Sickert. Writers like Sade, Baudelaire, and De Quincey elevated these extraordinary acts of violence to be the subject of modern art. The corpse of the murdered woman was best suited for aesthetic representation and poetic idealization because it was strictly associated with taboo, horror, ugliness, and abjection. By representing these corpses, these nineteenth-century writers and artists drew self-reflexive attention to how oppositional categories of ‘beauty’ and ‘ugliness’ are discursively produced within a specific culture.

Baudelaire and the proponents of the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ consciously sought objects like

“carrion, maladies, criminals and prostitutes” (Nordau 1993, 275) in order to reinvent the category of beauty itself. Instead of looking away from the violent encounters that emerged from inhabiting the modern city, Baudelaire confronted this violence headlong by turning the mirror directly upon its abjection. Thus Jennifer and Lorrain Webb’s theory of framing the corpse through a distanced, empirical, and ‘masculine’ gaze is not only inoperable, but it also reflects the misogynistic distance of the nineteenth-century medico-legal discourse. The most valuable aspect of their essay is the original question that troubles them as practitioners of art and literature – how may an artist or a writer represent the corpse without resorting to the extremes of the apotropaic or the necrophiliac gaze?

The critic Walter Benjamin observes in his essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”

(1939) that at the centre of Baudelaire’s aesthetics lay something called “chockerfahrung” or

109 shock experience. The shock emerged from the fear inhabiting an inherently violent city combined with the dread of revisiting that violence in representation. In many ways

Benjamin’s term “chockerfahrung” is nothing but an earlier iteration of Barthes’s “punctum” as it also seeks to navigate through the violence embedded or concealed at the centre of a photograph. There is no possible distance or safe “two-handed” gaze in such representations.

The blank stare of the decapitated prostitute in “Une Martyre” is one such source of shock experience as it confounds the voyeuristic gaze of the ‘masculine’ poet, and by extension, the reader. Baudelaire produces this shock through his poetic invention of ‘le fleur du mal’ … the flower of evil. Instead of using the flower as a signifier of nature, femininity, regeneration, peaceful consummation and other a priori connotations of beauty, Baudelaire brought it in incongruous metaphorical juxtaposition with the decapitated head of a murdered prostitute.

By so doing, Baudelaire deconstructed beauty both as signifier and signified and produced an entirely new paradigm of beauty more suited to modern life and its everyday quality of its violence. Baudelaire’s flowers do not grow in nature but bloom out of the dregs of the city, its sickness, disease, and degeneration, in other words, out of mal. Baudelaire’s aestheticization of murder through the symbol of the flower of evil in his poems comes from a deep awareness of his own complicity. This guilt – compounded by the empathy and disillusionment that he could not remove the violent social inequalities of his age – lead

Baudelaire to create a rather neurotic image of the nineteenth century where beauty was not an unequivocal source of aesthetic pleasure but intensified that very neurosis.

Jean Paul Sartre comes closest to interpreting Baudelaire’s ineffable symbol of the flower of evil in his 1946 essay on Baudelaire. He writes “When on top of everything else poetry takes evil for its subject, the two forms of creation which are based on limited responsibility are brought together and merge into one another, and we suddenly get a fleur du mal” (Sartre 1967, 73). Sartre is not interested in the flower of evil as a poetic device but

110 as a mode of ethical and philosophical subversion. He writes that Baudelaire’s symbol “is a work of luxury which is gratuitous and unpredictable” because it seeks to represent evil as productive and ineradicable. Sartre maintains that such a conscious gravitation towards evil is by its very nature paradoxical, or rather “pathological,” because “the deliberate creation of

Evil, in the sense of wrong, is an acceptance and recognition of Good. It pays tribute to Good and by describing itself as wicked admits that it is relative and derivative, that without Good it would not exist” (Sartre 1967, 73). Something similar may be seen to be at work in Oliver

Twist, Charles Dickens’s 1838 magnum opus on crime, prostitution, and murder. His consistent portrayal of the streetwalker Nancy as a victim of her circumstances in the twisted underworld of London’s East End pre-empts the painful empathy with which Baudelaire would penetrate the brothels of nineteenth-century Paris. In his depiction of Nancy’s gruesome murder at the conclusion of the novel, Dickens transformed the horror that he saw every day on the streets of London into a work of art. Initially, Dickens had planned to end

Oliver Twist on a positive note – with the young Oliver and his friends being rescued from the criminal Fagin’s home by Nancy. However, the year that Dickens was struggling to finish his novel a young prostitute named Eliza Grimwood was found brutally murdered in her bed.

This horrific incident convinced Dickens to conclude Oliver Twist on a more ‘realistic’ note.

Dickens realized that there could be no happy ending for a streetwalker in Victorian London no matter how ‘good’ or ‘pure’ she essentially was.

One of the most sensational murders in Victorian history, barring the grim reputation of

Jack the Ripper, was Eliza Grimwood’s in 1838. Known to practice prostitution on occasion,

Eliza was discovered murdered in her apartment in the East End by her landlord. Witness reports stated that Eliza had entered her home late the previous night with a mysterious man, who may have been the murderer since no one else had been seen to follow. Her throat was slashed and there were multiple stab wounds on her chest. It was evident from the lack of

111 blood on the scene that the murderer had continued to hack into Eliza’s body long after death had set in. It certainly wasn’t a crime passionnele that the newspapers could write off by blaming Eliza’s ‘immoral’ profession. There was no ostensible motive for the murder and certainly no explanation for why the attack had continued post-mortem. It possessed the mysterious darkness and gratuitousness of Krafft-Ebing’s category of lustmörd. At the time of the murder, Dickens was a journalist at The Morning Chronicle and must have been traumatized by the incident. When the Whitechapel murders began fifty years later, the Daily

Telegraph reportedly compared them to the Grimwood murder, thus clearly establishing

Eliza’s death as a precedent to Mary Kelly’s. Rebecca Gower’s book The Twisted Heart

(2009) is an interesting neo-Victorian investigation into the Grimwood murder and the effect that it had on Dickens. In recently discovered letters, Gowers finds evidence that Dickens had struggled to conclude Oliver Twist but after the Grimwood murder occurred on 25 May, he claimed that he had found the direction for the dénouement.

Gowers’s book is worth reading as it describes in detail the intention with which

Dickens posed Nancy’s corpse in the same position that Eliza Grimwood was found; lying on her back on the bed with her legs tucked underneath. While the nitty-gritties of Eliza’s case are shrouded in mystery, Dickens interpreted the posture of her corpse to be one of prayer or supplication. Towards the end of Oliver Twist, her pimp and lover Bill Sikes discovers

Nancy’s plot to rescue Oliver, forces himself into their home in a blind rage, and clubs her to death. Nancy accepts her tragic fate the moment she sees Sikes enter the room and dies like a martyr. Dickens wrote with impassioned sympathy how Nancy “breathed one prayer for mercy to her Maker” on bended knee before Sikes struck her down. She dies on the first blow but Sikes continues to beat her with his club in a bestial rage. The narrator condemms this gratuitous act of violence no doubt in a reparative gesture for Eliza Grimwood:

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Of all bad deeds that, under cover of the darkness, have been committed

within wide London’s bounds since night hung over it, that was the worst. Of

all the horrors that rose with an ill scent upon the morning air, that was the

foulest and most cruel. The sun – the bright sun, that brings back, not light

alone, but new life, and hope, and freshness to man – burst upon the crowded

city in clear and radiant glory. Through costly-coloured glass and paper-

mended window, through cathedral dome and rotten crevice, it shed its equal

ray. It lighted up the room where the murdered woman lay. It did. He tried to

shut it out, but it would stream in. If the sight had been a ghastly one in the

dull morning, what was it now, in all that brilliant light!4

Dickens ensured in the narrative that Sikes could not escape unpunished. Haunted by the horrifying memory of Nancy’s crumpled corpse, he falls in a ditch and dies. Dickens was obsessed with Eliza Grimwood’s murder because he simply couldn’t fathom why the murderer had continued attacking her body after death. As per the realist conventions that his novels subscribed to, there was no such thing as an acte gratuit. All his characters were motivated by their class, gender and social type but Eliza Grimwood’s killer was ‘evil.’ This was the difference between life and art, which Dickens successfully bridged with his aesthetic representation of Nancy’s murder.

After his rage subsides, Bill Sikes tosses his bloodied club into the fire and contemplates on Nancy’s corpse. He is distracted by the sound of some strands of Nancy’s hair burning in the fire, stuck as they are to the blood-congealed club “There was hair upon the end, which blazed and shrunk into a light cinder, and, caught by the air, whirled up the chimney. Even that frightened him, sturdy as he was; but he held the weapon till it broke.”5 A few wisps of bloody hair are all that remain of Nancy. They do not, however, disappear

113 without piercing her murderer with fear and guilt. Without representing literal expanse of

Nancy’s corpse in a forensic or medico-legal manner, Dickens reinforced the horror of this murder with nothing but a trace detail. There is a strange beauty or poignancy in this moment, which immortalizes Eliza Grimwood’s death. It becomes apparent especially when one compares Dickens’s portrayal of Oliver’s aunt Rose Maylie with that of Nancy. By naming her Rose and surrounding her with the constant presence of fresh flowers, Dickens constructs Rose’s character using conventional images of femininity, beauty, and unstained virtue “There were tears in the eyes of the gentle girl, as these words were spoken; and when one fell upon the flower over which she bent, and glistened brightly in its cup, making it more beautiful, it seemed as though the outpouring of her fresh young heart, claimed kindred naturally, with the loveliest things in nature.”6 Nancy’s virtue, by comparison, may be restored only in death. The wisps of her hair crackling in the fire signify a perverse or paradoxical kind of beauty that attracts even as it repels … it is a flower of evil. Though the truth behind the Grimwood murder is lost to time, Eliza’s memory is preserved through

Nancy’s martyrdom.

As Victorian London progressed towards new heights of civilization, this trace detail from Nancy’s corpse in Oliver Twist was enough to highlight the cost at which this progress was achieved. It is important to note how influential this brand of grimy Victorian realism was for burgeoning aesthetic movements of the early-twentieth century. Walter Sickert developed a visual counterpart to the flower of evil in the early 1900s, best seen in his

Camden Town Murder Series. These paintings depict his typical masculine-feminine pair of figures arranged in a vertical-horizontal foil. The central figure is a naked woman lying on a wrought-iron bed. Her face is blurred and expressionless or sometimes turned away from the spectator. The male figure stays close, dressed in shabby genteel garb. He gazes upon the woman’s body from the ‘masculine’ position that the spectator would assume vis-à-vis the

114 female nude. There is no way to tell if the man is the perpetrator who, like Bill Sikes, momentarily ponders upon the atrocity he has just committed, or if it is a detective surveying the crime scene. These paintings also derived their referent from an actual murder that took place a few blocks from Sickert’s flat at 6 Mornington Crescent. At the dawn of 12

September 1907, a young prostitute named Emily Dimmock was found murdered in her bed in Camden Town. Like Mary Kelly, her throat was spliced from ear to ear and like Eliza

Grimwood, she was posed on the bed with her legs tucked beneath her leaning slightly to the left side. Her naked body was awkwardly covered by the blood-soaked sheets.

A stone’s throw from this crime scene, Sickert was painting prostitutes in his signature nude pose on his wrought-iron bed, with the “red Bill Sykes handkerchief dandling from the bedpost’” as Marjorie Lillie would state in her biography. Jack the Ripper had become so iconic by the time Emily Dimmock was murdered that her death was treated as a sex crime despite there being no evidence of rape. Lisa Tickner’s excellent essay “Walter Sickert: The

Camden Town Murder and Tabloid Crime” recognizes that by rendering the cultural trauma of Emily Dimmock’s murder into a series of paintings, Sickert was exploring the possibility of modern art representing the altogether new and unrepresentable category of lustmörd. By so doing he was not, however, confessing to his own complicity in these murders, as Patricia

Cornwell and Jean Overton Fuller would have us believe. When Dimmock’s case became public it generated a mass hysteria like the Whitechapel murders, causing people to come out in droves to attend the funeral and trial. The Penny Illustrated called it “the most remarkable criminal trial held within the past fifty years,” (cited in Tickner 2000, 21). London had developed a taste for blood, gore, and drama and there was “something unspeakably disgusting in this ravenous appetite for carrion, this vulture-like instinct which smells out the newest mass of social corruption” (cited in Flanders, 2011 371). This taste for blood recalls

De Quincey’s satiric comment on the nineteenth-century middle-class reader as belonging to

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“The Society of Connoisseurs in Murder.” The nineteenth century not only saw some of the worst historical instances of sex crimes, but also a movement in art and literature that earnestly sought to aestheticize it. By the turn of the century, it became difficult to distinguish crime in the newspaper from crime in high art and literature.

Tickner studies Sickert’s paintings of the Camden Town murder in depth and sheds light on the avant garde strategies he developed to capture lustmörd on canvas. It was not as if death or prostitution were new subjects for art, but the combination of the two in the category of lustmörd was a product of the medico-legal discourse emerging out of the

Whitechapel murders. Tickner notes “No one had painted this yet. It was a new subject, and it was to become, alas, one of the principal sexual narratives of the twentieth century. How was it to be pictured?” (italics added) (Tickner 2000, 36). Sickert’s paintings raised questions like was it possible or even desirable to aesthetically represent a woman who was no longer

‘woman’ because she had been so gruesomely defaced, deflowered, hacked into pieces? The same question, when retrospectively applied to Baudelaire’s poetry, yields his poetic invention of the flower of evil. Sickert developed what Tickner calls, a “new pictorial equivalent to such literary precedents as Flaubert or Maupassant” (Tickner 2000, 19) and to that one may add Baudelaire. SIckert was obsessed with the aesthetic effects produced by fracturing the female body, as Baudelaire had done in poems like “Une Martyre,” and painters like Picasso would subsequently explore on canvas. Many of his nudes were made of lumps of flesh like the ones that John McCarthy found so impossible to describe in his witness statement for Mary Kelly. Tickner observes how the corpse of the murdered prostitute in L’Affaire de Camden Town, a 1909 painting that belongs to The Camden Town

Murder Series, does not even look like a female body aside from the vaginal slit that directly solicits the viewer’s gaze (Fig. 3). She cites Wendy Baron’s comment that it resembles more

116 of a leg of mutton than a woman’s body, obviously drawing attention to the misogyny inherent with traditional representational systems of Western art.

Figure 3. Walter Richard Sickert, 1909, L’Affaire de Camden Town The Royal Academy of Arts, London Lisa Tickner, “Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Murder and Tabloid Crime,” Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2000), 17

How exactly did Sickert manage to balance the forensic realism of lustmörd with the trappings of an elevated modern work of art? Can his paintings of Emily Dimmock’s murder be considered art at all? Sir William Blake Richmond of the Royal Academy was quick to

117 censure Sickert’s provocative new style because it threatened to bring ‘dirt’ and abjection into the civilized borders of art “worse than slum art, worse even than prostitution because it was done by a man who should know better … should not sully his hand with these rather grimy looking nudes.”7 Sickert’s earnest efforts to defetishize the Academy nude came out of the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ movements of the nineteenth century. His particular iteration of urban impressionism liberated the female body from the confines of beauty, respectability, and harmonious form. Tickner observes how L’Affaire de Camden Town directed the viewer’s gaze down a single diagonal path from the murdered prostitute’s hands (joined in prayer like Dickens’s Nancy) down to her breasts, torso, pubis, a leg folded under the other, and finally, to the little white chamber pot beneath her bed. She calls this a “punishing de- fetishising of the Academy nude” (Tickner 2000, 37) but I would argue that it is also a corresponding defetishizing of the viewer’s voyeuristic or ‘masculine’ gaze vis-à-vis the female nude. Perhaps the reason why critics were (and continue to be) so offended by the misogynistic manner with which Sickert posed his models was that it highlighted the misogyny implicit within their own gaze. Tickner also draws an important distinction between how the popular newspapers and crime novels of the period sensationalized murder versus the castrating effect of the murdered prostitute’s corpse in Sickert’s Camden Town series:

This is the nude – and the victims in the Illustrated Police News and

Budget are still recognisably nudes – turned corruptible flesh. This is the

underside, the abject, the ‘gleam of warmth and light and life’ run into the

ground; not the bounded body of the classic nude, a matter of form and

contour, but the body with orifices, the body that leaks and dies. (Tickner

2000, 37)

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The male figure in L’Affaire de Camden Town is not guaranteed a kind of voyeuristic or sublime distance from the woman’s corpse. He is situated at the head of the bed – in the opposite direction to the woman’s sexual organs. His arms are crossed pensively and face is slightly turned away.

In a 1910 essay titled “The Naked and the Nude,” Sickert emphatically stated that the female nude had become a cliché in painting because of the classical tradition that had converted its material form into an ideal or abstraction. Instead of actually looking at the body of real women or representing the violence committed upon them with fidelity, it used exotic and mythological creatures like goddesses, nymphs, and odalisques. Sickert chose instead to paint working-class prostitutes of London’s East End on the stark wrought-iron bed of his studio apartment at Mornington Crescent. Instead of focusing on the beauty and erotic details of their bodies, which the academy justified by invoking the low moral status of prostitutes, Sickert depicted frumpy, middle-aged, corpulent, and unhealthy women in a contre-jour light. This forced the viewer to look away from their bodies and absorb instead, the poverty, ‘dirt,’ and reality of the environment in which these women lived and worked every day. Sickert also opted for a surreptitious or keyhole perspective that emphasized the perverse and patriarchal nature of the gaze. Rather than attempt to pose or ‘clothe’ the female nude with mythology and contrived narratives of pleasure, Sickert’s women remained

‘naked’ on canvas. The angle at which the murdered prostitute’s corpse is staged in L’Affaire de Camden Town is reminiscent of Gustave Courbet’s controversial 1866 painting L’Origine du monde (Fig. 4).

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Figure 4. Gustave Courbet, 1866, L’Origine du monde The image is freely available in the public domain.

While moralistic critics believe that this indicated Sickert’s own misogyny, the unflattering light with which he chose to portray these women actually challenged the voyeuristic and pornographic impulse embedded within classical art. Sickert asserted that the female nude had to be situated instead in a ‘real’ light to bring a fresh perspective to modern art. He did not believe in severing form from content and his paintings became a sort of aesthetic testimony to the ugliness of a prostitute’s life – to the relentless onslaught of venereal disease, poor diet, alcoholism, sexual abuse and extremely harsh working conditions.

Sickert’s impulse to unite a violent form with content may be traced back to

Baudelaire’s themes in Les Fleurs du mal. Instead of keeping an empirical or medico-legal distance from the body of the murdered prostitute, Baudelaire showed a conscious gravitation towards the evil, the pathological, the ‘naked’ versus the ‘nude.’ Sickert’s hybrid style combined the disparate approaches of his predecessors James McNeill Whistler and Edgar

Degas, who had focused on form and content respectively. It allowed him to navigate the paradox of aestheticizing crime and ugliness into an elevated work of art. In a 1910 essay

120 titled “The Study of Drawing” Sickert openly mocked the static and contrived postures of the traditional nude who was “dressed up as a lady,” turned to the left or right, placed behind “a curtain or a mirror or a black hole.” In direct opposition to this, Sickert staged his hypothetical model “Tilly Pullen” in her natural surroundings so that he could draw out the depth of her unique life:

But now let us strip Tilly Pullen of her lendings and tell her to put her own

things on again. Let her leave the studio and climb the first dirty little

staircase in the first shabby little house. Tilly Pullen becomes interesting at

once. She is in surroundings that mean something. She becomes stuff for a

picture. Follow her into her kitchen, or, better still, for the artist has the

divine privilege of omnipresence, into her bedroom; and now Tilly Pullen

is become the stuff of which the Parthenon was made, or Dürer, or any

Rembrandt. She is become a Degas or a Renoir, and stuff for the

draughtsman.8

The same effort at realism was reflected in Sickert’s use of a painterly technique called camaieu. In some ways, it mimicked Baudelaire’s poetic symbol of the flower of evil. It employed the juxtaposition of light and darkness to call into question both the signifier and the signified. Sickert created flat areas on the canvas of contrasting light and dark colours. He used a single dirty window in an enclosed apartment to be the only source of light. He then positioned his model contre-jour or against the light.

The main action of L’Affaire de Camden Town is communicated via a mass of white and black marks and swirls on the wallpaper that resist interpretation. Sickert wanted to use painting as a mode of narrative rather than mimetic representation:

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Sickert’s milieu is electric with violence but nothing is happening. He

paints the stasis before or after; it is not clear which. Form is conjured and

cancelled at once in the flickering web of his painterly hatchings and

crusty facture; features, gestures, setting, accessories are buried or blurred.

The scribbled and crumbly impasto insists in the modernist fashion on its

presence as paint. Dragged, stiff-bristled strokes produce a flecked,

animated, tactile surface. (Tickner 2000, 32)

This tendency towards narrative rather than portraiture was accomplished by exaggerating stylistic conflicts within the medium. In traditional representations of murder, Tickner notes how there was the option of choosing either the before or the after of the event. But Sickert’s bizarre bloodless corpses stand out of a teleological or temporal moral framework, with their

“leaden flesh” and “sightless gaze.” The collective effect of this gross viscerality and darkness is a menacing and monstrous female nude. Her body drags the aura of the Academy down to the forensic realism of a crime scene. What is further striking is that Sickert coated his paintings with a particular kind of varnish that progressively darkened the canvas over time. It is almost as if he wanted his canvases to expose the slow rot and corruption of an unsolved murder … of corpses that could not be silenced because they have not received justice. The corpse of the murdered prostitute – from the Medusan stare of her severed head to the castrating necrotic cavern of her sex – is a flower of evil – “we cannot forget to pause at the eye: Medusa-Gorgon cannot be viewed, her look petrifies, her eye brings misfortune; an evil eye, it kills. Female vulva, Medusa’s head is a slimy, swollen, sticky eye, a black hole, its immobile iris surrounded by ragged lips, folds, pubic hair.”9

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Aesthetics and Abjection: The Corpse in Popular Culture

If one accepts Virginia Woolf’s famous assertion that “on or about December 1910, human character changed”10 because of Roger Fry’s London exhibition of Manet, Matisse,

Gaugin and Van Gogh, one might also say that “on or about 1863, human ethics changed” when Baudelaire’s prose poem “La Corde” was published in Le Figaro. Inspired by the suicide of Manet’s apprentice Alexandre, “La Corde” is set at an unnamed artist’s studio whose apprentice hangs himself with a rope. Alexandre is best known for posing for Manet’s

1859 painting Gamin aux cerises, which is fictionally recapitulated when Baudelaire’s narrator declares “Il a posé plus d’une fois pour moi, et je l’ai transformé tantôt en petit bohémien, tantôt en ange, tantôt en Amour mythologique. Je lui ai fait porter le violon du vagabond, la Couronne d’Épines et les Clous de la Passion, et la Torche d’Éros.”7 As time passes, the stark contrast between the artist’s decadent studio, filled with liqueurs and pleasures, and his working-class home becomes unbearable for the young apprentice. The aura of the studio puts his own poverty into sharp relief. He cannot reconcile the grandeur of posing for Cupid or Christ in the morning and returning to the streets of Paris at night. Thus driven to manic depression and suicide, the boy finally escapes the dissonance between life and art in death. Baudelaire dedicated “La Corde” to Manet and read it out to a gathering of poets and artists at his 1859 salon. Imagine the stir it must have caused when the narrator discovers the boy’s corpse suspended by the rope in the center of his studio. But the horror of the tale doesn’t end here. When the narrator summons the apprentice’s parents to come and collect the boy’s corpse, his mother makes rather a peculiar request. She begs the artist not to throw away the rope that the boy had used to hang himself. The artist surrenders the rope only to realize the next day that it was not a relic of mourning at all. He receives several

7 Sourced from https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/La_Corde I transformed him sometimes into a little Gypsy, sometimes into an angel, sometimes into the mythological Cupid. I made him carry a vagabond’s violin, the Crown of Thorns and the Nails of Passion, and the torch of Eros (Baudelaire 2008, 63).

123 letters asking to see, touch or purchase the instrument of the boy’s death “un morceau de la funeste et béatifique corde.”8

Up until the Middle Ages in England and France, the corpse had been cast out of the civic limits of the community but by the sixteenth century, certain parts like the skull, hand, and hair began to be collected and sold as relics. When Baudelaire was writing in the 1850s, there was a fully-fledged commercial and medical industry that dealt with corpses.

Baudelaire’s narrator reveales that the letters he received requesting the rope were from friends and well-established acquaintances, not the lower ‘vulgar’ classes that had long been associated with these morbid tastes. If the boy’s indigent mother could no longer rely on his apprenticeship for survival, she could at least make some money by selling the rope. It is worth asking how the corpse progressed from being something taboo to being something so desirable? Philippe Ariès probes into this very question in his extensive study L’Homme devant la mort (1977). He collects literary, religious and historical sources that testify to this cultural change in France and England. Ariès begins with the Middle Ages, which he calls the age of “the tame death” (Ariès 2008, Loc. 90) – a death couched within the knowable, familiar, and communal. People in the Middle Ages normally died at home surrounded by formal representatives of their church and family. Death was the final spiritual experience that a soul prepared for. Ariès claims “once the period of mourning was over, the other was quickly forgotten. Death is a passing over, an inter-itus” (Ariès 2008, Loc. 80). Suicide and murder were unnatural and heretical and marked the victim’s body with religious anathema.

Dying alone and unmourned was feared above all, and dying at one’s own hands was considered the worst sin. Suicide and murder forced upon this pre-modern culture “the idea of an absolute negativity, a sudden, irrevocable plunge into an abyss without memory” (Ariès

2008, Loc. 80). The corpse was thus perceived to be a residue of the soul (as per Mary

8 A piece of the deathly and beatific rope (Baudelaire 2008, 66).

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Douglas’s definition of dirt) and was relegated to ossuaries on the outskirts of the city or provincial town.

Ariès quotes Paul the Jurist as having said “No dead body may be left in the city, lest the sacra of the city be defiled.” In the original Latin, the phrase “be defiled” was ne funestentur, which constitutes the etymological root for the word ‘funeral’ “Ne funestentur” –

“defiled” by death: the word clearly expressed the intolerance of the living. Funestus, which is the root of the weaker French word funeste (deadly, fatal, baneful), did not originally mean profanation in general but specifically the kind caused by a corpse. Funestus comes from funus, which means “funeral service,” “corpse,” and “murder” (Ariès 2008, Loc. 99). How did the profane word “funeste” appear so casually alongside the sacred word “béatifique” in

Baudelaire’s “La Corde”? It seems that by the sixteenth century, the corpse had invaded the core of French provincial culture because the bodies of saints, martyrs, and noblemen began to be buried under the churches. This may still be seen at the basilica of Notre-Dame-de-

Tours and les Saints-Innocents (Ariès 2008, Loc. 157). Those who could not afford a proper burial or had been excommunicated by the Church were piled one on top of another in mass graves and putrid charnel houses. Since the church was situated in the city centre, around which the market and entertainment sector developed, the cemetery became “the place for strolling, socialising, and merrymaking. It took the place of a mall” (Ariès 2008, Loc. 204).

The cemetery was henceforth subsumed to the commercial gaze of the modern pedestrian.

The installation of communal ovens at Lanrivoiré made it possible for one to buy bread and see the dead at the same time. With the corpse as the locus of commercial modernity in

France, Ariès wonders “was it the cemetery or the cloister that provided the model for the square or rectangular park flanked by shopping arcades: the plaza mayor of Spain, the place des Vosges, or the galleries of the Palais-Royal in Paris?” (Ariès 2008, Loc. 209). If one

125 takes Ariès at his word, then it would certainly explain the cold indifference and curiosity for la corde in Baudelaire’s morbid tale.

Ruth Richardson’s Death, Dissection and the Destitute (1989) balances Ariès’s overtly literary picture of French attitudes to death. She establishes the fact that “over the course of the eighteenth century, increased interest in human anatomy and physiology, alongside a growing demand for good doctoring, promoted a black market in corpses”

(Richardson 1989, xv). Anatomy, as an emergent medico-legal discipline, brought with it its own set of moral rules. The dead were literally put in service of the living as it was only by penetrating the mystery of death that the secret of life could be understood. Richardson observes how market terminology was used to describe corpses in medical circles. In

Scotland for instance, students could gain admission into medical schools by paying tuition with corpses (Richardson 1989, 54). The corpse became a kind of currency or commodity from the sixteenth century onwards. Anatomy gave it utilitarian value; Henry VIII had decreed that doctors could use the corpses of hanged murderers for vivisection. Vivisection constituted as a kind of post-mortem punishment for the souls of these criminals and produced an underground industry of relic gathering and body snatching. By 1800,

Richardson notes that it was quite common for relic gatherers to descend on the corpses of hanged murderers to collect the execution rope, clothes, nails, and hair for the black market.

Another interesting book on the subject is Judith Flanders’s The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime (2011). She shows how William Corder’s corpse undertook a strange journey from the scaffold to the anatomist’s table to the pocket of a death-connoisseur:

After the execution it was transported to the town’s Shire Hall, where

‘Two incisions were made in the breast, the skin taken of [sic], and the

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muscles exposed to view.’ Then the body was displayed on a table in the

middle of the Court, ‘quite naked, with the exception of the trowsers,

shoes, and stockings’. ‘Many thousands’ were admitted. For those who

couldn’t be there, ‘two eminent artists, Mr Mizotti of Cambridge and Mr

Child of Bungay’, made plaster casts. The following day the body was

taken to the County Hospital and wired up to a battery to make it twitch in

a demonstration of galvanic power, while the phrenologists, quack

scientists who read character from the shape, or bumps, in the skull,

competed for a cast of the head. Only after that did dissection proceed, for

the benefit of the medical students…the skin has been tanned, and a

gentleman connected with the hospital intends to have the Trial and

Memoirs of Corder bound in it. The heart has been preserved in spirits.’

Many years later the pickled scalp was displayed by a leather-seller in

Oxford Street. (Flanders 54)

Likewise, recall how the murderer Lacenaire’s hand was chopped off after his execution in

Paris in 1836. It was analyzed by anatomists and criminologists and then displayed as a fashionable curio in Maxime du Camp’s salon where Gautier first encountered it.

One must further interrogate how this Jehovan culture that had started out by exclusively punishing hardened criminals and murderers with vivisection became so comfortable scavenging an innocent boy’s corpse by the time Baudelaire wrote “La Corde” in

1863? Was Baudelaire exaggerating the cold commercialism of his age with his patent irony or was there any historical truth to the mother’s request? Richardson writes how in 1831 – for the first time in England – the Parliament passed the Anatomy Act that “recommended that instead of giving hanged murderers, the government should confiscate the bodies of paupers

127 dying in workhouses and hospitals, too poor to pay for their own funerals. What had for generations been a feared and hated punishment for murder became one for poverty”

(Richardson 1989, xv). Pauper burials in London and Paris had always been rather unceremonious but by the beginning of the nineteenth century, Richardson notes how they lacked even basic religious courtesies like the tolling of church bells (Richardson 1989, 26).

Pauper corpses were piled in common graves and knacker’s yards and most often fell prey to body snatchers. The Anatomy Act legitimized this nocturnal industry by deeming the pauper body fit for vivisection and relic gathering. There was no longer any religious guilt associated with dragging corpses out of their resting places, diving into them with scalpels and knifes, and removing parts of their bodies to sell as relics. Poverty itself became an inherently punishable crime in the nineteenth century, and Baudelaire’s “La Corde” may be said to have emerged out of this dark urban history. The prose poem not only set the tone for a ruthless industrial modernity but also implicated the poet and his reader within its ethical purview.

Baudelaire showed how the mother’s desire to sell the rope was nothing but a cruder version of his own literary ambitions in the market. The peculiar matter-of-factness with which he narrated this tale of abject commodification attests that even the corpse of an innocent boy could become a viable subject for modern aesthetics.

In her essay “The Tie That Binds: Violent Commerce in Baudelaire’s “La Corde,”

Debarati Sanyal writes:

The poem does not only scrutinize the act of painting but meditates more

generally on the underlying price of transfiguring living bodies and things

through “cette faculté qui rend à nos yeux la vie plus vivante et plus

significative qui pour les autres hommes” [that faculty that makes life

more alive and more meaningful for us than others]. What animates life

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into signification, it would seem, is the ability to extract from the fait reel

the intensity and coherence of illusion. Poetry is also implicated in this

meditation on representational violence, as the painter’s allusion to a

“nous” contaminating the silent interlocutor and author of the poem

suggests. (Sanyal 2006, 137)

Sanyal correctly perceives how Baudelaire implicated himself within this new culture of violent commodification. So long as the demand for a commodity existed, a poet or artist was forced to satisfy it, no matter how seemingly immoral or perverse it was. Baudelaire acerbically showed how the narrator’s shock at being requested for the rope was hypocritical because he too – as an artist – had commodified the boy’s body by making him pose for his paintings. Like the connoisseurs of death, Baudelaire positioned the reader of his prose poem as a “silent interlocutor” who dictated the terms of this new aesthetic contract. Baudelaire acknowledged poetry to be a trade like prostitution and thus, his sympathy lay unwaveringly with the mother of the dead boy. If something as solid as maternal love could be rendered illusory and insubstantial by industrial modernity, may not the themes of art and literature be similarly refashioned? What was the line between a work of art and a commodity, reality and fiction, poverty and beauty, spleen et idéal? Baudelaire deliberately juxtaposed the apprentice’s act of hanging himself with the artist’s act of hanging his paintings on the studio walls. Sanyal draws attention to this juxtaposition in her essay to reveal the complicity of modern poetry and aesthetics in commodity fetishism:

The dangling corpse bears mute testimony to the underlying violence of a

social and artistic process that puts real, living bodies into circulation for

profit. The nature of the relationship between model and painter is

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eloquently conveyed in the pun, “Le dépendre n’était pas une besogne

aussi facil que vous pouvez le croire” [to take him down was not as easy as

you might think]. Dépendre is but a letter away from dépeindre, which is

precisely what the painter does in his clinical account of the cadaver’s

“unhanging,” suggesting thus the link between painting and hanging,

representation and execution. (Sanyal 2006, 135)

Did Baudelaire draw this line using his symbol of la corde? The rope was the actual implement used by Manet’s apprentice to commit suicide in 1859. But that rope was also poetically appropriated by Baudelaire to pay off his debts. Verlaine famously wrote in “Mon

Testament” “Je ne donne rien aux pauvres parce que je suis un pauvre moimême”9 (cited in

Rilke 1985, 64). In a culture where poverty could be escaped by practicing a trade or ending up on an anatomist’s table, Baudelaire argued that he need not have any ethical qualms as poet in choosing something as abject as la corde to be the subject of his poetry.

One of the most influential contemporary theorists in this regard is Julia Kristeva who, in her book Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection (1980), provides an important framework to study aesthetic representations of death coming out of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Abjection, as a psychoanalytic concept, is Kristeva’s response to

Freudian and Lacanian constructions of the subject.11 One cannot definitively say what the

‘abject’ is, since it is neither a ‘subject’ nor an ‘object.’ It can only be defined as an endlessly self-renewing threat to the subject’s organization within law, language, culture – what Lacan identifies as the ‘Symbolic Order.’ Lacan defines the Symbolic Order to be the linguistic and cultural process through which a human subject becomes recognizably ‘human’ and separates itself from an archaic ‘animal’ origin. According to Kristeva, this split is never complete and

9 I can give nothing to the poor because I am a pauper myself. (My translation)

130 the abject is an upsurge of those archaic animal and maternal instincts, desires, and realities that have been banished from the subject. The abject causes a “violent, dark revolt of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable” (Kristeva 1982, 1). Kristeva incorporates within this category, anything that constitutes as a negative affect or causes the subject to turn away from a particular object, desire, or experience. From seemingly minor reactions, like the gagging sensation produced by the skin on warm milk to more severe ones such as tears, body horror, gooseflesh, vomiting, and loss of consciousness, abjection exemplifies the apotropaic or phobic response. Noëlle McAfee provides a good summary of Kristeva’s concept:

What is abjected is radically excluded but never banished altogether. It

hovers at the periphery of one’s existence, constantly challenging one’s

own tenuous borders of selfhood. What makes something abject and not

simply repressed is that it does not entirely disappear from consciousness.

It remains as both an unconscious and a conscious threat to one’s own

clean and proper self. The abject is what does not respect boundaries. It

beseeches and pulverizes the subject. (McAfee 2004, 46).

The abject is the site where all that disturbs normative culture or behaviour is jettisoned. The word originates in the Latin root jacere meaning ‘to throw’ or ‘to cast out.’ If the word subject means ‘to throw under’ then the prefix ‘ab’ in abject means ‘to throw beyond.’

Abjection is the psycho-physiological response to something that a specific subject identifies as a threat. In order to delineate what these objects or experiences that produce abjection are, Kristeva turns to Douglas’s anthropological theory of dirt. This is demonstrated

131 in her example of the human corpse as being a primary source of abjection in culture. Why,

Kristeva asks, is the human corpse so universally disturbing or contaminating, causing it to be expelled or extinguished from civilization? Kristeva observes how the human corpse arouses psycho-physiological responses like tears, nausea, and loss of consciousness. For instance, when the narrator in Baudelaire’s “La Corde” returns to his studio to find the corpse of his apprentice hanging by the rope, he immediately feels the urge to cut the poor boy down. He also experiences an inexplicable horror or revulsion that prevents him from letting the body fall to the floor. Perhaps it reminds him how, in death, the lofty human subject

“irremediably comes a cropper” (Kristeva 1982, 3). The narrator declares:

Et comme involontairement mes yeux se tournaient vers la funèbre

armoire, je m’aperçus, avec un dégoût mêlé d’horreur et de colère, que le

clou était resté fiché dans la paroi, avec un long bout de corde qui traînait

encore. Je m’élançai vivement pour arracher ces derniers vestiges du

malheur, et comme j’allais les lancer au dehors par la fenêtre ouverte, la

pauvre femme saisit mon bras et me dit d’une voix irrésistible : « Oh !

monsieur ! laissez-moi cela ! je vous en prie ! je vous en supplie ! »10

The narrator’s immediate reaction upon seeing the rope hanging on the nail is to throw it out the window… to abject it. Kristeva concludes that the human corpse and everything attached to it is fundamentally threatening to culture because it “infects” life. In its presence, one is powerfully reminded of one’s own mortality.

What also sets Pouvoirs de l’horreur apart within the discipline of Psychoanalysis is

10 I could see, with a mixture of disgust and horror, that the nail was still in the panel, with a long piece of rope still hanging from it. I darted quickly over to tear down these last vestiges of misery, and as I was about to throw them out the open window, the poor woman gripped my arm and said in an irresistible tone: ‘Oh, Monsieur! Let me have that! I beg you! Please!’ (Baudelaire 2008, 64).

132 how Kristeva turns to art and literature as a space where abjection may actually be visually or linguistically articulated. She writes that art and literature work within the Symbolic Order to inflict the power of horror upon the subject:

On close inspection, all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse

that seems to me rooted, no matter what its socio-historical conditions

might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) where identities

(subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so-double, fuzzy,

heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject. (Kristeva 1982,

208)

Pondering specifically upon the works of Dostoyevsky, Lautréamont, Proust, Artaud, Joyce and Céline, Kristeva writes “with such a literature there takes place a crossing over of the dichotomous categories of Pure and Impure, Prohibition and Sin, Morality and Immorality”

(Kristeva 1982, 16). However, she is careful to note that the affect produced by such literature varies depending on the socio-historic context of the writer. For example, Kristeva highlights that Dostoyevsky generates abjection by showing a world where the “paternal laws” have collapsed and the “maternal void” is filled with murder and suicide. This is different from Proust’s depiction of abjection as the “fashionable” or the “foul lining of society” (Kristeva 1982, 20) in his 1927 novel À la recherche du temps perdu. In representing the human corpse therefore, an artist or a writer must consciously avoid assuming any distance from it – what Jennifer and Lorrain Webb call the “two-handed” gaze. Instead, the writer must take account of or try to replicate “a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire” (Kristeva 1982, 3). Kristeva’s

133 work on abjection is motivated by the question of how death, violence, and horror may be represented in a manner so as to suspend the immediate, instinctive, and physiological responses of fear, disgust and nauseaand produce instead, an aesthetic response of pleasure and fascination.

To that extent, Dickens’s short journalistic pieces on the Paris Morgue resemble the other works in Kristeva’s compendium of abject literature. He frequently visited Paris as a journalist and was inexplicably drawn to the morgue that stood on the bank of the Seine between 1830 and 1864. Unlike the police morgue at London, the Paris morgue was located near the mainstream community center. The crowd could see victims of drowning displayed behind a glass panel in order to expedite the process of identification. The morgue, like the cemetery in Ariès’s history of death, became a part of the entertainment and commercial district of Paris. Dickens was taken aback by how its hanging corpses were spectacles like the

“dancing dogs” and “circus players.” The Paris morgue was also listed in nineteenth-century guidebooks as a tourist attraction. Bianca Tredennick in her essay “Some Collections of

Mortality: Dickens, the Paris Morgue, and the Material Corpse” draws attention to the centrality of death in the modern city to provide a new critical perspective on three of

Dickens’s morgue articles – “Railway Dreaming” (1856), “Travelling Abroad” (1860) and

“Some Collections of Mortality” (1863). Kristeva’s theory of abjection also has place in

Tredennick’s essay in that she finds Dickens’s authority as a journalist to be castrated or abjected by the material presence of the corpse. In “Travelling Abroad,” Dickens wrote that in order to recover from the sight of the corpses hanging so blatantly in the Paris morgue, he went for a swim in the Seine. Instead of refreshing him, being submerged in its water reminded Dickens of the cold, damp corpses hanging in the glass panels. He even imagined one of the corpses floating towards him and described how he felt as if he had ‘swallowed’ death. He spat out the water of the Seine as if he were abjecting the memory of those drowned

134 victims. This is an iconic experience of abjection – the desire to expel the archaic animal self or mortal self from one’s psychic structure.

Tredennick observes how Dickens the Victorian was quite perplexed at the Paris morgue’s central location in the city. In “Travelling Abroad,” Dickens described a mother pointing out the rotting corpses to her daughter while eating sweetmeats purchased at the nearby market. Tredennick, via Ariès’s research on the history of the corpse in France, writes that the French had long been habituated to the presence of death and decomposition at the heart of Paris. Ever since the shifting of the cemetery to the churchyard, the French had taken the abject horror of death in their stride and made it a part of their daily lives. When Dickens felt revolted at the sight of the corpses displayed in the morgue – like “meat in a butcher shop” – the girl’s mother approached him politely to ask if there was “anything the matter”

(cited in Tredennick 2010, 80). Dickens’s shock at her comfort with these corpses is reminiscent of the narrator’s shock in Baudelaire’s “La Corde” at the mother’s request for the rope. It allowed the young journalist in Dickens to see for the first time how detached and cannibalistic the commercial gaze of the modern pedestrian could be. It could derive pleasure or fascination from gruesome realities like the rotting, decomposing human corpse “without

God and outside of science” (Kristeva 1982, 4).

This is not to say that the Victorians did not have their own version of cold commercialism; it was not as if the notorious Burke and Hare had come from France! What

Dickens found morally repulsive was the aloofness and casual amusement with which the

French could gaze upon victims of drowning and murder at the Paris Morgue. To him, it symbolized “the market economy run amok” (Tredennick 2010, 77). But these brief journalistic vignettes also reveal his gradual acceptance that the “morgue makes sense only when seen as part of the market, in which the dead, like the dancing dogs, are spectacles, and in which the corpse is commodified” (Tredennick 2010, 77). Tredennick’s essay analyzes a

135 peculiar simile that Dickens used in “Railway Dreaming” through which he attempted to comprehend this aspect of French modernity. He compared the morgue with its corpses hanging in the glass windows “as though Holbein should represent Death, in his grim dance, keeping a shop and displaying his goods like a Regent Street or Boulevard linen draper”

(cited in Tredennick 2010, 74). It is obvious from this tentative series of similes that Dickens struggled as a writer to find an appropriate linguistic equivalent for the abjection of the morgue. Tredennick examines this complex chain of signifiers in her essay:

Death as the signified is then represented by Holbein as signifier, and

Holbein seamlessly becomes the signified as Dickens employs

contemporary marketplaces as signifiers for the explication of the Holbein

reference. Put another way, the process is this: You want to know what

Death looks like? It looks like the morgue. What does the morgue look

like? It looks like a Holbein depicting Death keeping a shop. What kind of

shop might Death keep? Exactly the same kind of shop that you see and

frequent every day. (Tredennick 2010, 78)

Dickens could not represent the Paris Morgue using a “two-handed” gaze because death was scattered all throughout the ordinary life of nineteenth-century Paris. He was unable to

“retain some ice in his heart” (Webb and Webb 2004, 219) as a journalist, in his attempt to represent it with fidelity. Although he had become a well-established writer by this time,

Dickens admitted in his morgue articles that he lacked the rhetorical wherewithal to aestheticize its abjection. His desperate attempt to portray death and commodity fetishism is obvious from the complicatedly layered Holbein simile. All that it accomplishes is to mystify the reader as to what exactly is the main signifier of death. Is it the personification of death as

136 a shopkeeper, or death represented in a work of art by Holbein, or is it the Paris morgue itself? Clearly, Dickens’s language is forced to “collapse under the weight of the material corpse” (Tredennick 2010, 73).

Ariès’s study of Western attitudes to death provides a valuable foil to Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory of abjection as the former proposes a concept that can only be appreciated by reading the latter. Ariès writes that the “tame death” of the Middle Ages gradually evolved into the “beautiful death” or la belle mort at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This is because the human corpse that had once been so dirty and taboo was imbued with the aura of the church and the commercial gaze of the market. The decision to shift the location of the cemeteries from the outskirts to the churchyard had demystified death. Ariès observes how the bread that was baked in the communal ovens of Lanrivoiré was sometimes shaped into tombstones (Ariès 2008, Loc. 201). Charnel houses became museums of the macabre where one could see, touch and gather bones and skulls. Think of the famous gravedigger scene in Hamlet in which the hero soliloquies on death with Yorick’s skull in his hand. It was through this seemingly trivial clerical decision in the sixteenth century that modern aesthetics became irrevocably wrapped up with otherwise ‘un-aesthetic’ themes like the rotting human corpse. It produced the morbid sensibility of French

Romanticism and Decadence. Take for instance, the centrality accorded to deathbed confessions and floral tributes in this aesthetic and literary tradition. Ariès avers that the deathbed, surrounded with flowers and mourners, allowed nineteenth-century art and literature to represent death not as something ominous or abject but with peaceful and spiritual stoicism:

However bitter the grief of the survivor, death is neither ugly nor fearful.

On the contrary, death is beautiful, as the dead body is beautiful. Presence

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at the deathbed in the nineteenth century is more than a customary

participation in a social ritual; it is an opportunity to witness a spectacle

that is both comforting and exalting. A visit to the house in which

someone has died is a little like a visit to a museum. How beautiful he is!

In the bedrooms of the most ordinary middle-class Western homes, death

has come to coincide with beauty. This is the final stage in an evolution

that began very quietly with the beautiful recumbent figures of the

Renaissance and continued in the aestheticism of the baroque. But this

apotheosis should not blind us to the contradiction it contains, for this

death is no longer death, it is an illusion of art. (Ariès 2008, Loc. 1311)

For the greater part of his study, Ariès focuses on la belle mort and how it elevated the abject horror and biological reality of the corpse using emollient symbols like flowers and heteronormative love.

Ariès shows how la belle mort developed simultaneously within nineteenth-century

English and French culture by comparing the journals of the La Ferronays published in 1866 as Récit d’une soeur with Emily Brönte’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights. Ariès discovers striking similarities between the depiction of death and mourning in these two texts. The main theme is the death of a loved one but this death leaves behind an unnaturally morbid and self-destructive lover. The lover exhibits an unwillingness to let go of the beloved since s/he is “infected” by death as well. The journal of the La Ferronays is a neo-baroque text that combines nostalgia for the medieval “tame death” with the more modern “narcotic sweetness” of death (Ariès 2008, Loc. 1115). The narrator Alexandrine describes her husband

Albert La Ferronays’s final death agony as a quest for spiritual discovery “Oh! Death is always mingled with poetry and love, because it leads to the realisation of both” (cited in

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Ariès 2008, Loc. 1132). She welcomes the abstract concept of her husband’s demise through a complex gesture of love and stoic acceptance. The dying man Albert as well, revels in the gradual disintegration of his body and suffers his consumption with a peculiar joie de vivre.

His elaborately performed melancholia is punctured with sudden bursts of happiness that death will release him for the misery of his condition “One day, Albert suddenly threw his arms around me and exclaimed, ‘I am dying, and we have been happy’” (cited in Ariès 2008,

Loc. 1139). Albert dies in a crowded room covered with flowers and is buried not in the cemetery but in the family crypt. Ariès notes that this archaic practice of burying the body within the home was revived among the French upper class in the nineteenth century, since the public cemetery had transformed into such a vulgar commercial site.

Later that night, Alexandrine secretly goes into the crypt where Albert’s coffin lay so that she could touch and kiss his physical body one last time. It must be noted that in order to gain access to Albert’s corpse, she has to climb into the parallel crypt that has been designed for her corpse. Alexandrine’s narration of Albert’s death and funeral service is punctuated with this abject or Gothic episode that Ariès calls “an extraordinary scene that would be incomprehensible if we did not recall all the stories, incidents from Gothic novels, and tales of apparent death and love in burial chambers. Here is the macabre eroticism of the eighteenth century, but real, sublime, purified, an eroticism from which the sexuality is either absent or repressed” (Ariès 2008, Loc. 1149). By way of comparison, Ariès considers

Wuthering Heights to be a transitional novel resting somewhere between the French

“demonic Gothic novel” and the “Victorian Romantic” (Ariès 2008, Loc. 1230). This makes it a particularly representative text if one wishes to trace the change of attitudes towards death from Dickens to Baudelaire. Wuthering Heights mainly revolves around the corpse of its heroine Catherine Earnshaw. In no other literary representation of death from the period can one see the heroine perform her demise repeatedly through the memory of the bereaved lover

139 or have her corpse exhumed twice. The first exhumation occurs on the same day as

Catherine’s funeral. Heathcliff breaks open her coffin with wild, uncontrollable grief and madness, convincing himself that she is not dead but only asleep. The instinctive ease with which the bereaved lover in Victorian literature could exhume the corpse of his beloved is a testament to how common the act of corpse gazing and bodysnatching had become.

Like Brontë’s Heathcliff, the Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet D.G. Rossetti also exhumed his wife Elizabeth Siddal’s body seven years after her death. As the legend goes,

Lizzie’s corpse was untarnished by decomposition and apparently looked just as young, innocent, virginal and beautiful as the day she had been buried. Ariès argues that it is precisely through such literary and cultural mythology that the moral and patriarchal semantics of la belle mort developed in the nineteenth century. The American writer Edgar

Allen Poe, who deeply influenced Baudelaire, stated in his 1846 essay “The Philosophy of

Composition” that “when it closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world” (cited in Bronfen 1992, 59).

Elisabeth Bronfen asks some pertinent questions regarding Poe’s statement, in her extensively researched book Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic:

What does it mean to maintain that the death of a beautiful woman is

unquestionably the most poetic topic in the world? Why a dead woman,

why a beautiful dead woman? Does the choice of the feminine gender as

object of celebration imply erotic desire? What is the reciprocity between

femininity and aestheticization, between beauty and death? And above all,

why the unconditional ‘unquestionably,’ why the superlative ‘most

poetical’? (Bronfen 1992, 60)

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On the strength of these questions, one might raise an important feminist reservation against the nineteenth-century aesthetics of abjection. Was it made possible mainly on the ground that the object of representation was almost always a dead woman? Is this because the female corpse allowed the artist and spectator to retain their ‘masculine’ gaze? Death could not strip agency away from a subject that was always already abject. Bronfen’s primary thesis is that the aestheticization of female corpses in Western literary and artistic representations was founded upon a sense of sublime or voyeuristic safety. We have already seen how the abject effect experienced upon encountering the corpse arises from its reminder of the subject’s own mortality. This effect is arrested by the presence of the female corpse because it casts the reader or spectator in the role of the ‘masculine survivor’ or mourner.

Heroes like Heathcliff could freely desecrate the graves of their lovers because nothing could sully the innate passivity and virginity of these dead women. In

Chateaubriand’s novel Atala (1801), we can see an early manifestation of the aesthetic tradition that Poe refers to in his rather cavalier statement about the female corpse.

Chateaubriand also constructs death as a kind of peaceful consummation and erases the real leakiness and biological decomposition of the female corpse. He shrouds the body of his dead heroine with flower, vines, and tranquil or virginal images of nature:

Atala était couchée sur un gazon de sensitives des montagnes ; ses pieds, sa

tête, ses épaules et une partie de son sein étaient découverts. On voyait dans

ses cheveux une fleur de magnolia fanée ... celle−là même que j'avais

déposée sur le lit de la vierge pour la rendre féconde. Ses lèvres, comme un

bouton de rose cueilli depuis deux matins, semblaient languir et sourire.

Dans ses joues, d'une blancheur éclatante, on distinguait quelques veines

bleues. Ses beaux yeux étaient fermés, ses pieds modestes étaient joints, et

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ses mains d'albâtre pressaient sur son coeur un crucifix d'ébène ; le

scapulaire de ses voeux était passé à son cou. Elle paraissait enchantée par

l’Ange de la mélancolie et par le double sommeil de l'innocence et de la

tombe : je n'ai rien vu de plus céleste. Quiconque eût ignoré que cette jeune

fille avait joui de la lumière aurait pu la prendre pour la statue de la

Virginité endormie.11

Bronfen writes “This image of a feminine corpse presents a concept of beauty which places the work of death into the service of the aesthetic process, for this form of beauty is contingent on the translation of an inanimate body into a reanimated one” (Bronfen 1992, 5).

The Pre-Raphaelite painter John Millais similarly posed Lizzie Siddal as Ophelia in his 1852 painting (Fig. 5).

11 Sourced from https://www.ebooksgratuits.com/ebooksfrance/chateaubriand_atala.pdf Atala lay on a bed of mountain mimosas, with her feet, her head, her shoulders, and part of her breasts uncovered. In her hair one saw a fading magnolia flower- the exact one I had placed on the virgin’s bed as a fertility symbol. Her lips, like a rose button picked only two mornings ago, seemed to carry on, with a smile. A striking pallor of her cheeks was varied only by a few blue veins. Her beautiful eyes were closed, her modest feet joined together, and her alabaster white hands were folded on her heart, holding an ebony crucifix; the beads of her vows were around her neck. She seemed to be enchanted by the angel of melancholy and by the double sleep of innocence and the grave. I have never seen anything more heavenly. Whoever might have been unaware of this girl’s having achieved the holy light would have taken her to be a statue of sleeping virginity. (April 2004, 71)

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Figure 5. John Everett Millais, 1852, Ophelia The image is freely available in the public domain

Just as flowers symbolically restored purity to the otherwise infecting, contaminating and taboo corpse in Chateaubriand’s Atala, Millais surrounded his Ophelia with a stream of flowers, weeds and willows. Millais goes as far as even arresting the normal process of rigor mortis in his portrait of Lizzie Siddal. Her body faces upward and floats calmly along the river. The skin shows no sign of the wrinkling or bloating, which nauseated Dickens upon seeing the drowned victims hanging in the Paris morgue. Ophelia’s hair is arranged as though she were lying on a deathbed instead of in a muddy ditch. Her golden veil avoids slipping off her shoulders and breasts, and her dress remains above the surface without ballooning or rising above her waist. The flowers have not yet floated away from her lifeless fingers.

The pace of Millais’s image of death is slow and ponderous as opposed to the abject realism, swiftness and chaos with which it descends upon Sickert’s prostitutes. The sentiment conveyed in this painting – that Ophelia fully blooms only through her death – is far more misogynistic and discomfiting than Sickert’s grimy nudes. Ironically, in order to achieve this highly artificial and contrived effect Millais had urged his model Lizzie to pose submerged in a tub of water until she almost died of contracting pneumonia. Ophelia’s lack of deathly

143 pallor and virginal bloom in Millais’s painting was harnessed through a very real enactment of Lizzie’s death as a kind of sacrificial martyring. The English Romantics and Pre-

Raphaelite artists revived an important medieval idea that death was a kind of long sleep or permanent repose. As he is about to pull out her corpse in Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff hears Catherine ‘sigh’ in his ear and becomes convinced that her spirit still roams the earth.

Brönte showed, however, that there was no repose possible for Catherine’s soul. She dies in childbirth, because the bourgeois and religious restrictions of heteronormative marriage do not allow her to be romantically conjoined with Heathcliff. Death provides no reprieve or peaceful consummation to Catherine’s soul either. According to Ariès, death in nineteenth- century art and literature could be used as a means to restore ideal femininity to the body of a threatening woman. But Brontë’s heroine could not be so easily contained or silenced. Her spirit possesses the same seductive, transgressive, child-like petulance of her material

‘unfeminine’ body. It is not a spectral or illusory wisp emanating from a stoic, beautiful and feminine corpse that has been perfectly preserved with flowers but called a “sprite” or an

“imp.”

Wuthering Heights commences with the narrator’s encounter with Catherine’s defiant and noisy spirit:

‘I must stop it, nevertheless!’ I muttered, knocking my knuckles through the

glass, and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch; instead of

which, my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand! The

intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but

the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, ‘Let me in - let

me in!’ ‘Who are you?’ I asked, struggling, meanwhile, to disengage myself.

‘Catherine Linton,’ it replied, shiveringly (why did I think of Linton? I had

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read Earnshaw twenty times for Linton) – ‘I'm come home: I'd lost my way

on the moor!’ As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child's face looking

through the window. Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to

attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and

rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes: still it

wailed, ‘Let me in!’ and maintained its tenacious gripe, almost maddening

me with fear.12

Catherine’s ghostly hand ‘bleeds’ when Lockwood violently tries to chase her spirit away.

But he cannot expel her “tenacious gripe” upon him and it is only by listening to the narrative of her life that the abjection of her death may be ritualistically purged. Since Heathcliff performs the role of the masculine survivor, Brönte is free to cast the narrator Lockwood in more the neutral position of the witness. Brönte’s depiction of Catherine’s death is a tenuous compromise between the idealization of the feminine corpse in la belle mort and the moral condemnation of the murdered prostitute in the case of the Whitechapel murders. This is a good vantage point to re-enter our initial discussion of Jack the Ripper’s crime-scene photographs. Reputed to be the Ripper’s first victim, Mary Ann Nichols sported the signature incision to the throat and mutilated abdomen. Her mortuary sketch, however, erased all these forensic wounds and details and strictly focused on the serenity of her demeanour. On 8

September 1888, The Illustrated Police News Weekly depicted Nichols’s corpse much like

Millais’s Ophelia. Although the title of the sketch read “Revolting and Mysterious Murder of a Woman, Buck’s Row Whitechapel,” there is no corresponding abjection generated by the sketch. The forensic specificity of her wounds is thoroughly cleansed in this almost Pre-

Raphaelitic image of a peacefully sleeping Mary Ann Nichols (Fig. 6).

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Figure 6. Mortuary Sketch of Mary Ann Nichols published in the 8th September 1888 issue of The Illustrated Police News British Newspaper Archive, British Library, 1888 LON 121A

As with Catherine Earnshaw, death restored idealized femininity to the sexually errant bodies of these prostitutes. The moral semantics of la belle mort dogged even these corpses, with the

Victorian press repeatedly referring to Mary Kelly’s body as “fair as a lily” (cited in Roland

2010, 76). However, the corpses of the murdered prostitutes at Whitechapel – like Brontë’s

Catherine, Baudelaire’s martyre, and Sickert’s nudes – defy these misogynistic attempts to contain their “powers of horror.”

Contra Catharsis: Limitations of Detective Fiction

What of the status of the corpse in detective fiction; one of the most important sub- genres of literary realism that was practically born in the nineteenth century? In an age that saw the invention of forensic profiling, fingerprint analysis, anthropometry, and lie-detector machines, detective fiction emerged as a literary equivalent of the criminological and

146 medico-legal discourse. Detective fiction – as opposed to the murder ballads and sensation fiction – became a well-respected genre that represented crime. The rational prowess of the detective provided a kind of relief from the daily shocks and horrors of the city “If, in the dreamlike space of the urban phantasmagoria, the denizens of the city were nonetheless confronted with a series of shocks and an attendant sense of unease, the detective story with its reliance on ratiocination, provided an apparent solution, one that allows the intellect to break through this emotion-laden atmosphere” (Benjamin 2006, 15). The plot of a detective story usually began in media res or after the fact. It did not deal with either side of the equation – the criminal or the victim – but introduced a third impartial character who could potentially bridge this moral gap. By emphasizing the legal and criminological process of discovery rather than the moment when the criminal strikes or the spectacle of his trial, nineteenth-century detective fiction possessed a moral apparatus that could break through its

“emotion-laden atmosphere.” One of the earliest stories in the genre is Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1840), often recognized as the very first instance of detective fiction. It introduced C. Auguste Dupin who occasionally assisted the police in criminal investigations.

Through the figure of Dupin, Poe privileged the Enlightenment ‘masculine’ ego and its ideals of reason, autonomy, and intellect. These qualities were not only evident in the murderer-as- artist tradition of English and French Romanticism, but also extended to the amateur detective to set him up as a worthy opponent to the serial killer.

The nineteenth-century detective was a mirror image of the criminal as they were both constructed using ‘masculine’ signifiers of genius and exceptionality. Consider the case of

Eugène François Vidocq, who was absorbed into Napoleon Bonaparte’s newly forged Sûreté

Nationale in 1813 having ironically begun his career as a criminal. His liminal position between the criminal classes and the police bureau gave him the competitive advantage.

Vidocq laid the groundwork for modern ballistics in one of his cases where he urged the

147 coroner to remove a bullet from the head of a victim and match it to a pistol. He was also the first to make plaster cast impressions of footprints. Such innovations in criminology are first mentioned in Emile Gaboriau’s 1868 novel Monsieur Lecoq where the name of the hero is a clear reference to Vidocq. Lecoq is a new recruit at the Paris Prefecture and makes plaster casts of footprints at the crime scene using his amateur knowledge of chemistry. Gaboriau’s crime scene is a lowly working-class district in Paris where vagabonds and escaped criminals would usually congregate at night. A police unit penetrates this district to address a tavern brawl. Gaboriau provides the reader with extremely realistic details such as the name of the tavern and the exact date and time of the incident. The police discover two victims and one witness whom they arrest on suspicion for murder. Lecoq stays behind to search for more clues. Instead of feeling horror or abjection at the sight of the two bleeding corpses, Gaboriau describes how Lecoq is thrilled that his amateur deductive abilities are finally put to the test.

He even expresses a sense of ownership over the corpses like a conqueror surveying his dominion. The detective is above all, an agent of ‘masculine’ exceptionality much like the serial killer.

It was the detective’s pride and perceptible lack of empathy that connected him to the same sociopaths and psychopaths he would hunt. For instance Poe’s short story “The

Murders in the Rue Morgue” begins with Dupin casually reading a newspaper report of a gruesome double murder. Dupin does not shy away from giving the reader all the forensic details of these corpses as if it were a crime-scene photograph. Thereafter, he assumes the

‘masculine’ role of the mourner or survivor:

Of Madame L’Espanaye no traces were here seen; but an unusual quantity

of soot being observed in the fire-place, a search was made in the chimney,

and (horrible to relate!) the corpse of the daughter, head downward, was

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dragged therefrom; it having been thus forced up the narrow aperture for a

considerable distance. The body was quite warm. Upon examining it, many

excoriations were perceived, no doubt occasioned by the violence with

which it had been thrust up and disengaged. Upon the face were many

severe scratches, and, upon the throat, dark bruises, and deep indentations of

fingernails, as if the deceased had been throttled to death. After a thorough

investigation of every portion of the house, without farther discovery, the

party made its way into a small paved yard in the rear of the building, where

lay the corpse of the old lady, with her throat so entirely cut that, upon an

attempt to raise her, the head fell off. The body, as well as the head, was

fearfully mutilated --the former so much so as scarcely to retain any

semblance of humanity.13

Here, we have another female murder victim with a severed head and horribly mutilated body – all the distinctive signs of lustmörd. Just as Jack the Ripper had attacked his victims for its own sake or “without a particular aim in mind” (Roland 2010, 191), the daughter in

Poe’s short story is strangled to death by the killer’s bare hands and then gratuitously stuffed up a chimney. Madame L’Espanaye’s corpse is splayed in the back alley of the building with her throat ripped. Dupin solves the murder by maintaining a peculiar scientific distance from these bodies. He speculates that this was a case of manslaughter and not murder precisely because no rational human could have committed such an acte gratuit:

Ordinary assassins employ no such modes of murder as this. Least of all,

do they thus dispose of the murdered. In the manner of thrusting the corpse

up the chimney, you will that there was something excessively outre--

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something altogether irreconcilable with our common notions of human

action, even when we suppose the actors the most depraved of men.14

In the conclusion it is revealed that an escaped circus orangutan had accidentally entered the apartment and killed the two women. Their mutilation and decapitation was conducted in a manner so altogether “outre” that Dupin realized it could not have been the work of a ‘man.’

It was literary preconceptions about the humane and ‘normal’ versus the bestial and

‘abnormal’ that produced the contradictory profile of the nineteenth-century serial killer as both beast and genius.

While the Victorian police investigated crimes in order to maintain law and order, the amateur detective was interested in murder exclusively as a game or puzzle. In his book

Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (1999) Ronald Thomas states that the human corpse was not the subject of but merely an occasion for this kind of literature.

Detective fiction was a scientific complement to the moral and ‘masculine’ semantics of la belle mort as it used the corpse as a prop. The corpse had intrinsic value as a plot device that set the narrative in motion. Thomas notes how the corpse became a “text” that could be

“read” and interpreted by the detective like the esoteric volumes collected in Dupin’s library.

It was not a material (feminine) body with its own concrete history of violent and abject erasure. Thomas states that “invariably, the mangled corpse the literary detective scrutinizes reveals a code that his trained eye is uniquely capable of reading; or alternatively, the body of the suspect betrays its own guilt in some visible signs that are legible only to the eyes of the detective” (Thomas 1999, 3). He gives the example of another famous short story by Poe called “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), in which the corpse of the murder victim becomes a

“bizarre mechanical reincarnation” (Thomas 1999, 23) of the lie-detector. When the perpetrator imagines his victim’s heart to be beating loudly, it is not simply a manifestation

150 of his guilt but functions as a meta-fictional symbol of how detective fiction reveals the

‘truth’ no matter how deeply repressed it is. Thomas observes that the detective was well loved by the middle-class reader because he possessed “the power to transform a body – whether that of the client, victim, or suspect – into a text that seems to speak the truth for itself (Thomas 1999, 23).

Despite maintaining this empirical or ‘masculine’ distance from the corpse, Thomas argues that detective fiction became a radical medium of social critique. He claims that it was capable of both “reinforcing” as well as “resisting” the “disciplinary regime it represents, preserving the capacity to criticize the system in which it also functions as an integral part”

(Thomas 1999, 14). Even if one concedes this, it is difficult to accept Thomas’s conclusion that the detective is a third-party sponsor to the corpse “Into their silence, the detective must speak” (Thomas 1999, 45). The detective was nothing but a doppelganger of other

‘masculine’ figures of nineteenth-century art and literature like the bereaved lover, the voyeur, and the serial killer. Dupin’s discovery in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” – that an escaped orangutan had committed the murders – was not intended to provide justice to the victims. There is no doubt that Dupin felt sympathy for the victims but his motive for solving the murder was purely logical or rational. The same may be said of Arthur Conan Doyle’s hero Sherlock Holmes who was an apotheosis of the amateur detective (like Jack the Ripper would become an apotheosis of the born criminal). In the short story titled “A Case of

Identity” (1891), Holmes tells his partner Watson:

If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city,

gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on,

the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful

chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré

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results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen

conclusions most stale and unprofitable. (Doyle 1892, 56)

In this interesting passage, Doyle revealed Holmes’s desire to bring the entire cognitive universe under his empirical and microscopic vision. Unlike Dickens, whose feet remained firmly on the ground as a journalist writing about the Paris Morgue, Holmes wants the bird’s eye view. Being a scientist and solipsist, Holmes repeatedly justifies his lack of empathy as a necessary measure for the success of his criminal investigations. Empathy is to his vision as grit is to a microscopic lens.

A Study in Scarlet (1887) was the first installation of Conan Doyle’s detective series.

Holmes and Watson are confronted with the corpse of a man who has been murdered under mysterious circumstances. While Watson anticipates the reader’s feeling of abjection “This malignant and terrible contortion, combined with the low forehead, blunt nose, and prognathous jaw gave the dead man a singularly simious and ape-like appearance, which was increased by his writhing, unnatural posture. I have seen death in many forms, but never has it appeared to me in a more fearsome aspect” (Doyle 2011, 37), Holmes is more focused on the corpse as a repertoire of signs and clues. This strikes even a medical expert like Watson as unusual:

[…] his nimble fingers were flying here, there, and everywhere, feeling,

pressing, unbuttoning, examining, while his eyes wore the same far-away

expression which I have already remarked upon. So swiftly was the

examination made, that one would hardly have guessed the minuteness with

which it was conducted. Finally, he sniffed the dead man’s lips, and then

glanced at the soles of his patent leather boots” (Doyle 2011, 38).

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Holmes’s gaze is described as both being “far-away” and minutely engaged as it scans the corpse. This is a perfect example of what Jennifer and Lorraine Webb identify as the “two- handed” gaze. When Holmes is presented with death he is not concerned with the sovereign human life that was lost but solely how the corpse can speak a language of clues. Holmes can come as close as sniffing a decomposing corpse without it arousing any abject response in him. It is clear that his primary role in the novel is to be a master interpreter of signs regardless of the violence that underlies the presence of these clues. The manner with which detective fiction subsumes the corpse to the empirical gaze of the detective is in many ways a culmination of the gross commodity fetishism that Dickens and Baudelaire would condemn.

Carlo Ginzburg in his critically acclaimed essay “Clues: Roots of a Scientific

Paradigm” (1980) calls Holmes’s empirical method of deduction “Morellianism” – referring to the nineteenth-century art critic Giovanni Morelli. Morelli recommended that art forgery could be detected by looking for minute details of a painting. This obsession for the trace, detail, or minutiae became the “key cultural modality” of the nineteenth century. Ginzburg’s connection of Holmes to Morelli is striking because it also connects the primary object of criminal investigation – the corpse – to the primary object of art criticism – a work of art. The common assumption of both these methods of interpretation was that by subjecting the corpus to the analytic gaze of the specialist its truth-value might be determined. The innocence or guilt of a criminal became inextricably linked to notions of authenticity and forgery. Ginzburg notices this merging of crime and aesthetics in how “any art gallery studied by Morelli begins to resemble a criminal’s gallery” (Ginzburg 1980, 8). He even mentions Alphonse Bertillon who made anthropometric measurements of the bodies of criminals, as Lombroso had done in L’uomo delinquente. Bertillon would construct a “word-

153 portrait” or verbal description of the criminals to accompany the mug shots and measurements:

First, Bertillon required that both front and profile views of the subject be

shot by a specially calibrated camera so that the shape of identifying

features like the ear and nose could be properly gauged against standard

diagrams. He also standardized the camera’s lenses and focal length to

ensure that the sized of faces and their traits could be methodically

compared. He insisted upon even and consistent lighting conditions in

order to reveal maximum detail and to reflect subtle variations in colouring

or complexion. To ensure the consistency of these guidelines, he even

designed a rigid, stationary chair in which the suspect was forced to sit

during the session. The chair was attached to the camera and fitted with

devices that held the head stead, monitored the angle of the face,

positioned the eye in the frame, and normalized the format of the final

photographic product as much as possible. In addition, Bertillon required

that the resulting portrait be supplemented with text summarizing critical

data from his meticulous system of physiological identification called

anthropometry (or signaletics or finally, bertillonage). (Thomas 1999, 121)

The detective also provide such a “word portrait” of criminality in crime fiction. Conan

Doyle in fact, made an overt reference to Bertillon in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and compared him to Holmes. It must be noted that “Morellianism” be it applied to art or crime was successful mainly because it was grounded in the moral subsumption of the corpus to a cathartic model of interpretation.

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Ginzburg identifies this catharsis model in his discussion of the “medical semiotics or symptomatology” (Ginzburg 1980, 12) that pervaded nineteenth-century culture. It prompts him to make a third connection to Morelli, that is, the early psychoanalytic theories of

Sigmund Freud. Ginzburg argues that Freud also operated like an art critic or Holmesian detective in his incipient studies of hysteria and repression. He treated the symptoms of trauma and sexual perversion as “clues” of certain deeper convictions, drives, and memories buried within the psyche of the subject. It was the trace detail or “inadvertent gesture” of his patients that “revealed the whole” (Ginzburg 1980, 8). By interpreting these clues concealed in the patient’s narrative and behaviour, the analyst could potentially excavate repressed events and discover the ‘truth’ of the subject. As with Holmes and Morelli, Ginzburg correctly notes that Freud tried to “appropriate the raw stuff of human experience, break it down to component parts, and return it in the guise of art” (Ginzburg 1980, 8). His essay is invaluable as it indicates the paradoxical centrality of the corpse in an empirically dominated culture that sought to repress or reduce it to a trace. By distancing herself from the cathartic model of early Freudian psychoanalysis, Kristeva also critiques the cathartic model of art and literature in her study on abjection. In a stimulating assessment of Freud, Plato and Aristotle,

Kristeva claims that the whole discourse of catharsis or purgation wrongfully presumes that an experience of horror needs to cleansed in order to be known. It assumes that the subject is a passive victim or receptacle of trauma and may recover only if the analyst intervenes with his interpretive and empirical skills. Kristeva strongly asserts that abjection cannot be purged at all “getting rid of it is out of question” (Kristeva 1980, 28).

W. H. Auden, while making some stimulating observations on detective fiction in his

1948 essay “The Guilty Vicarage,” called murder a unique crime because there was no possible justice for the victim. Murder “abolishes the party it injures” and thus “society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand restitution or grant forgiveness; it is the

155 one crime in which society has a direct interest.”15 The detective was for Auden a modern version of the deus ex machina. This was a theatrical device in classical drama whereby a god-like figure or external authority would descend upon the stage at the dénouement to absolve all sin and error. Similarly, it was the detective’s duty to dispel death, fear, horror, mystery, and guilt from the plot; all that Kristeva identifies as abject. The detective was the adjudicating figure who analyzed the murder through a retrospective, empirical examination of clues. Auden grants that while the literary detective’s aim may not necessarily be to bring the perpetrator to justice, his explanation of how the event occurred provides the reader with the cathartic relief that Aristotle valued in his theory of tragedy. In detective fiction, murder is not a source of abjection but an occasion to restore a diseased society to an erstwhile state of moral grace or health. Murder was like the ooze from a festering social wound that the detective had to cleanse. Auden’s essay traces the origins of modern detective fiction to the quasi-medical model of Aristotelian tragedy. The only difference between classical tragedy and detective fiction that Auden detects is that the reader of the latter is kept in the dark and urged to solve the mystery along with the detective. As a result, Auden argues that the reader of detective fiction becomes addicted to the ritual of crime solving without ever actually witnessing the crime or its punishment.

Detective fiction also generates cathartic relief by not looking at the entire expanse of the corpse but focusing on the minute, infinitesimal, and microscopic aspects of an ornately motivated or premeditated crime. Instead of examining murder from a moral, philosophical, anthropological, or emotional perspective, detective fiction reduces it to the specific purging of a single offense against the law. This offense is contained by a lengthy processual study of the criminal’s motive. There are few instances of serial killers and repeat offenders in nineteenth-century detective fiction and most of the crimes that Holmes investigates are committed with rather bourgeois pedestrian motives. Conan Doyle consistently steered clear

156 of representing crimes that outrage an entire community like lustmörd, genocide, and state- sanctioned violence. This is probably because in such cases the motive is either unknown and irretrievable, or obvious but incommensurable. Auden, however, elects Holmes to be the rare

‘completely satisfactory’ version of the detective. His motive for solving crime, as Auden so astutely observes, was a pure post-Enlightenment commitment to truth, rational order, and empiricism “If he chooses human beings rather than inanimate matter as his material, it is because investigating the inanimate is unheroically easy since it cannot tell lies, which human beings can and do, so that in dealing with them, observation must be twice as sharp and logic twice as rigorous.”16 It is no wonder that he continued to be such an iconic hero of Anglo-

Saxon modernity. This implies that detective fiction requires evil to exist even as it turns its face away from it. The apotropaic gesture is disguised as a “sign of harmony between the aesthetic and the ethical in which body and mind, individual will and general laws, are not in conflict.”

Auden concludes that “the interest in the detective story is the dialectic of innocence and guilt” and how a balance between the two may be consistently maintained. Strangely enough, Holmes has no interest in the relationship of the guilty to the innocent despite being the custodian of a literature dedicated to the “dialectic of innocence and guilt.” Conan Doyle imbued him with a perpetual state of grace because of his ‘masculine’ genius. Auden admits that witnessing the murders represented in detective fiction produced a sense of guilt in him as a reader but this guilt is purged by a vicarious or voyeuristic pleasure. In a provocative metaphor, Auden compares his urge to read detective fiction to the cravings experienced by a drug addict. Reflecting upon this paradoxical affect as a reader he confesses “I can, to some degree, resist yielding to these or similar desires which tempt me, but I cannot prevent myself from having them to resist; and it is that fact that I have them which makes me feel guilty, so that instead of dreaming about indulging my desires, I dream about the removal of the guilt

157 which I feel at their existence.”17 In this dream of having his guilt removed, Auden clearly invokes the Aristotelian model of catharsis or purgation. As a theoretical concept, catharsis was Aristotle’s palliative solution to the guilt and abjection experienced by the spectator of tragedy. Detective fiction is addictive because its cathartic and retributive model enacts the

“illusion of being dissociated from the murderer” but Auden concedes that it cannot purge the reader’s guilt entirely. Auden defines the reader of detective fiction as someone who essentially “suffers from a sense of sin”:

I suspect that the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person

who suffers from a sense of sin. From the point of view of ethics, desires

and acts are good or bad, and I must choose the good and reject the bad,

but the I which makes this choice is ethically neutral; it only becomes

good or bad in its choice. To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at

there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however “good” I

may become, remains unchanged. As St. Paul says: “Except I had known

the law, I had not known sin.”18

It is no wonder that Kristeva excludes detective fiction from her compendium of abject literature. According to her, the ability of the detective to circumvent abjection using ‘God’ or ‘science’ is nothing a bourgeois ‘masculine’ fantasy emerging out of the nineteenth- century medico-legal discourse. The corpse is reduced to the status of a clue that the analyst must interpret and this cycle repeats itself endlessly in an identical and ritualistic manner.

Detective stories like Conan Doyle’s are nothing but a chain of corpses, victims, and bereaved subjects being treated like clients who must have their abjection purged even as

Holmes himself remains above it all. While Kristeva’s critique of Freud in her theory of

158 abjection is extremely influential, it can be useful to read her fiction as well particularly her parody of the detective genre in her postmodern novel Possessions. Here, Kristeva powerfully cuts across the cathartic bias of the medico-legal discourse and unleashes the powers of horror upon her reader from the very beginning “Gloria was lying in a pool of blood with her head cut off” (Kristeva 1996, 3). Her narrative begins not with the ‘masculine’ detective lounging in his study making witty and insouciant remarks on crime and modern life. It commences imstead with a woman’s decapitated body as its frontispiece, much like

Baudelaire’s “Une Martyre.” There is no detective on the crimescene capable of looking at this corpse while “retaining some ice in his heart” as Jennifer and Lorrain Webb recommend.

Instead, Kristeva’s narrator is Stephanie Delacour – a young, sensitive, and impressionable journalist, who has been asked to assist in a murder investigation in Santa Barbara. Her narrative voice lacks the pride, confidence, and masculine detachment of the Victorian detective and poignantly resembles that of Dickens’s tentative and vulnerable tone at the

Paris morgue.

Possessions actively rejects the teleological and processual plot of Victorian detective fiction that progresses from concealment to revelation. It focuses instead on how language is doomed to fail in the face of abject horror, in which case, it is impossible to pursue the truth without emotionally compromising one’s own subject position. Kristeva is no direct descendant of Agatha Christie, Patricia Highsmith, or Patricia Cornwell. These women writers deviate from the masculine progenitors of the genre but the crimes they depict are counched within a hysterical, manic-depressive, or suicidal moral economy. In a later work

Visions Capitales (1998), Kristeva writes:

Supposedly incapable of humor, women prove to be masters of that

grating kind of absolute humor that is the desire for knowledge: not the

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knowledge of where children come from (because, according to Freud, all

curiosity begins there, a curiosity now oversatisfied by cloning and the

various techniques of artificial procreation), but the knowledge of where

the human desire to kill one’s neighbor comes from. The novelistic

exploration of this fundamental mystery, and especially of decapitation,

which unleashes fantasies and knowledge, appears to be a reversal of the

experience of suffering; a kind of cathartic elaboration, not through erotic

displacement, but through detailed observation of the logic and economy

of the violence itself. It is significant that, though the image can capture

horror more immediately, this feminine confrontation with trauma and

killing prefers to find expression in prefers in a vision built of words, that

is, a fantastic visibility completely woven from the uncertainties and

imaginary polyvalences of language. (Kristeva 2012, 291)

Remarkably, Kristeva does not take catharsis completely out of the equation in her detective novel but tries to modify it with her theory of abjection. Instead of only emphasizing the investigative process, her novel provides a moving history of the murdered woman’s life. It is not some deranged murderer who kills her in a fit of rage or jealousy but her daily encounters with patriacry and the suppression of her maternal image that leads to the horrific manner of her death. Gloria’s severed head becomes a larger symbol of the masculine repression or purification of the abject maternal feminine. The detective story is narrated as a tragic and empathetic history of the corpse, rather than a valorization of Anglo-Saxon law and its tenets.

When she is first confronted by Gloria’s corpse at the crime scene, the first thing that the narrator Stephanie confirms is that this is Gloria even as it is not Gloria, because “without eyes or mouth, head or hair, a corpse is no more than a hunk of butcher’s meat. Its once erotic

160 contours, pinned down implacably by gravity and lacking the only means that could have given acephalic distress a voice, are reduced to mere pragmatic pointlessness” (Kristeva

1996, 4). Kristeva concludes that “deprived of a death mask’s baleful exuberance” the body of the decapitated woman in her novel is not a beautiful or “most poetical subject” (as Poe averred) but it is “dead twice over.” Her novel persistently refuses to function as a conventional detective story because the vital clue – the severed head of the murdered woman – is missing. It is the utmost abject or unrepresentable object of the text, signifying the excess with which the murderer obliterates the victim. The decapitated head makes it impossible for any motive to ever justify or explain the ‘truth’ of the crime. Stephanie cannot look at Gloria’s body with the “two-handed” gaze of a Holmesian detective but she cannot look away either. The only way she can process the gratuitous violence that has been enacted upon this corpse is by recalling a mental gallery of severed heads in art, mythology, and history – from John the Baptist and Holofernes, to Caravaggio, Degas, and Picasso’s paintings, to the guillotined corpses of the French Revolution “Right. Despite the similarities between the Santa Varvara carnage in its luxurious setting and the famous images jostling in my mind to try to shelter me from the horror before my eyes, I’m doing my best to keep a cool head” (Kristeva 1996, 8).

Stephanie’s moody contemplation on the decapitated corpses in Western art and mythology constitutes as her desperate attempt to retain rational self-control and composure

“I need art to help me see my way, to retain my common sense, and, if you’ll forgive the expression, to keep my head” (Kristeva 1996, 9). As the narrator, she raises an extremely important question pertaining to the aestheticization of the female corpse in the nineteenth century “my pictorial reminiscences might strike some readers as literary and irrelevant, perhaps to the point of obscenity. But what use is art if it can’t help us look death in the face?” (Kristeva 1998, 9). Like Stephanie’s mental images of modern art on the crime scene,

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I was distinctly reminded of Paul Cézanne’s 1872 painting La Femme étranglée when I read the first sentence of Kristeva’s novel. At the mouth of what appears to be a small dark cave,

Cézanne depicted a man pressing his powerful hands upon the throat of a young woman (Fig.

7).

Figure 7. Paul Cézanne, 1872, La Femme étranglée, André Dombrowski, “Cover illustration,” Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life (US: University of California Press 2013)

On the surface, there is nothing particularly unusual about this painting, given how nineteenth-century France was so accustomed to spontaneous acts of violence and murder in the city and its outskirts. But like Kristeva’s description of the decapitated corpse, I found the manner with which the strangled woman is rendered in Cézanne’s painting extremely

162 disturbing. Her hands are desperately raised heavenwards in the gesture of une martyre, rather than attempting to hold back the murderer. The muscles of his forearms clench and the swiftness of his attack is made evident from a flutter in his shirt. However, it is the visual contrast between the woman’s snake-like red coils of hair, the blank resignation of her expression, and the white virginal purity of her flowing dress that pierced my imagination with a sense of dread, distortion, and horror. The accomplice, a strong peasant woman whose face resembles that of a skull, watches on with wry contemplation and does nothing to help either aggressor or victim. Something at the heart of this painting is extremely abject, irremediable, and piercing.

André Dombrowski’s book Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life (2013) draws attention to Cézanne’s crude and thick brushstrokes and his application of a palette knife to mimic the dagger of the murderer; a technique known as manière couillard. Dombrowski notes how, like Baudelaire’s paradoxical symbol of the flower of evil, this visual technique unites the extreme violence of its content with that of its form. Cézanne’s early paintings, much like Sickert, Degas, and Renoir’s works, explicitly chose murder, lust, and violent urban themes to be not only appropriate topics of modern aesthetics, but in fact, as the topic.

Dombrowski uses Cézanne and Baudelaire to address this paradigmatic change and provides a foundational clarification for the nineteenth-century aesthetics of murder:

[...] an exploration of forms of sociality, or rather asociality, produced and

not always successfully quelled by the same conditions of alienation,

fragmentation, and distancing we find in Manet. But to represent murder is

not the same as to commit murder. As much as Cézanne tried to naturalize

artistic representation through the depiction of violence – to make art

equivalent to crime – he was also aware that he was constructing violent

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imagery, and not violent acts, as connected (but not interchangeable) as the

two may be. (Dombrowski 2013, 21)

“To represent murder is not the same as to commit murder” – this assertion will resurface with the censorship of the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ in the nineteenth century. Dombrowski argues that Cézanne’s “antiaesthetic and antiethical code for the painting of modern life” was exactly that – a code. Cézanne’s powerful representation of the violence committed against the body of a young woman in this painting only went as far as equating “the breaking of the law with the breaking of artistic rules” (Dombrowski 2013, 4). He was invested in murder as a topic of modern art (much like Sickert) insofar as it brought the conventions of aesthetic representation under enquiry and produced new paradigms whereby “painting murder, then is not so different from trying to capture light on water: both themes promise a continual reinvention of art and a permanent renewal of artistic creativity” (Dombrowski 2013, 60).

The aesthetics of murder – as a discourse emerging from nineteenth-century modernity – acknowledges the unlikely congruency between art and murder by showing how abjection may be transformed into pleasure in a work of art ... a flower of evil.

Dombrowski draws attention to one of Baudelaire’s iconic poems called “Une

Charogne” in his study of Cézanne. On a casual stroll in Paris with his paramour, Baudelaire described how the narrator discovers a rotting corpse on a street. He is not disturbed at the sight but approaches the corpse as an art connoisseur would admire a sculpture. The rotting corpse is simply there, as it has always been, in the very heart of French provincial life and urban modernity. The Paris crowd is inured to this every day quality of violence and walks past death even as it lies on the street with its belly bloated with gases and its legs raised

“comme une femme lubrique” (Baudelaire 2013, 58). The fact that la charogne lies on the open street thus unmourned and unclaimed implies that it is the body of a pauper or prostitute. The poet does not shy away from giving the reader forensic details like the

164 buzzing of flies or teeming maggots on the corpse. Together, they produce a

“phantasmagoric” effect, which the poet calls “une étrange musique.” What is most striking about the poem is how Baudelaire manages to capture its abjection without purging its grotesque realism:

Le soleil rayonnait sur cette pourriture,

Comme afin de la cuire à point,

Et de rendre au centuple à la grande Nature

Tout ce qu'ensemble elle avait joint.12

The sunlight that illuminates the corpse is like the halo on saint and martyrs in Renaissance paintings, but Baudelaire shows that this aura does not erase the abjection of the corpse. The sun diabolically amplifies its putrescence that is then paradoxically compared to the bloom of a flower:

Et le ciel regardait la carcasse superbe

Comme une fleur s'épanouir.

La puanteur était si forte, que sur l'herbe

Vous crûtes vous évanouir.13

12 The rays of the sun cooked that mass of decay As if roasting it till it was done, And restoring to Nature a hundredfold All things she had gathered in one. (Baudelaire 2016, 59)

13 And heaven observed the magnificent corpse The bloomed like a flower in May: And the stench was so strong that there on the grass You thought you would faint away. (Baudelaire 2016, 59)

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Baudelaire’s symbol of the flower of evil attests to the poet’s struggle to represent death without relying on conventional voyeuristic or apotropaic models of representation. He also introduced a third figure in the poem – “une chienne” – a dog that wants to ravage this rotting corpse. The surreptitious manner with which this dog lurks in a corner of the alley all the time watching the corpse from a distance is like the “silent interlocutor” (Sanyal 2006, 137) of Baudelaire’s prose poem “La Corde.” Was Baudelaire comparing the reader of his poem to a scavenging dog with a “ravenous appetite for carrion” (cited in Flanders 371)? Despite knowing that it is perverse to derive pleasure from such violent and abject representations of death – as Auden confessed in “The Guilty Vicarage” – we as readers continue to scavenge upon these corpses in art and literature.

Between 1866-69, Dombrowski notes that Cézanne struggled to render Baudelaire’s poem on canvas and his untitled sketch (Fig. 8) did not culminate in a finished work of art. It was difficult to develop a visual correlative to Baudelaire’s comparison of a rotting corpse to the bloom of a flower “comme une fleur s’épanouir.” There are three crucial figures in

Cézanne’s sketch as from Baudelaire’s poem. The poet is featured as a dandy wearing a top hat and uses his walking stick to deictically indicate the location of corpse on the street.

Beside him stands the paramour leaning away from the corpse with disgust, a kerchief pressed to her nose. There is no dog in the margins but Cézanne added a shadowy witness at the vanishing point of the painting. The figure resembles a reflection more than an actual body and mirrors the spectator’s location facing the work of art. The protagonist – la charogne – is sketched with frenzied strokes that invoke the manière couillard, causing the body to resemble Sickert’s leg-of-mutton corpses.

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Figure 8. Paul Cézanne, circa 1866-69, a section from the Illustration for Baudelaire’s “Une Charogne,” Département des Arts Graphiques, Musée du Louvre (Orsay, Paris) Ainslie Armstrong McLees, 1989, Baudelaire’s “Argot Plastique”: Poetic Caricature and Modernism (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press), 24.

Cézanne tried to visually render the putrescence of the corpse like Baudelaire. There is a distinctive haze or putrid miasma rising from the corpse in the sketch. Beyond this, however, he could not realistically represent a rotting corpse and abandoned the project. He could not navigate that line between life and art without implicating himself. In his Letters on Cézanne

(1985), Rainer Maria Rilke discusses the painter’s efforts to represent the world with the raw earthiness as Baudelaire saw it. After Baudelaire’s dramatic redefinition of modern aesthetics, Rilke states “artistic perception had to overcome itself to the point of realizing that even something horrible, something that seems no more than disgusting, is, and shares the truth of its being with everything else that exists. Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything” (Rilke 1985, 67). If the artist turned his back on death, violence, and abjection, then who would bear witness to these horrific but fundamental realities of modern life?

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Notes

1 The epigraph is from Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov” published in 1936. It examines the incommunicability of experience in modernity and the refashioning of the writer’s role in society. Benjamin discusses the changed nature of death, that it has been removed from the sanctity and communal space of the home to the cold and clinically impersonal space of the hospital and morgue. He argues that storytelling becomes all the more important as a result of this, since people look to novels to understand and even encounter the deeper meaning of death.

2 Oxford English Dictionary Online: meretricious n. and adj.

Etymons: Latin meretrīcius , -ous suffix. < classical Latin meretrīcius ( < meretrīc-, meretrīx

A. adj.

†1. Of, relating to, or befitting a prostitute; having the character of a prostitute. Obs. (arch. in later use).

1765 W. Blackstone Comm. Laws Eng. I. 436 It is a meretricious, and not a matrimonial, union.

1809 B. H. Malkin tr. A. R. Le Sage Adventures Gil Blas III. vii. vii. 103 A young stagefinch, who had evidently suffered himself to be caught in the birdlime of her professional or meretricious talents.

1814 Shelley in Crit. Rev. Dec. 572 The lying and meretricious prude.

2. Alluring by false show; showily or superficially attractive but having in reality no value or integrity.

1709–10 J. Addison Tatler No. 120.5 The Front of it was raised on Corinthian Pillars, with all the meretricious Ornaments that accompany that Order.

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1790 E. Burke Refl. Revol. in France 59 A lust of meretricious glory.

1843 W. H. Prescott Hist. Conquest Mexico I. i. vi. 157 The meretricious ornaments... with which the minstrelsy of the East is usually tainted.

1846 T. Wright Ess. Middle Ages I. v. 185 The style he aims at is gaudy and meretricious.

1879 L. G. Seguin Black Forest vi. 85 The meretricious excitement of the gambling-room.

1931 V. Woolf Waves 34 All here is false; all is meretricious.

B. n. With the. That which is meretricious about a person, creative work, etc.

1838 E. Bulwer-Lytton Alice I. ii. i. 125 No critic ever more readily detected the meretricious and the false.

3 Accessed from http://www.casebook.org/victims/mary_jane_kelly.html

4 Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist; or The Parish Boy’s Progress. Online Literature. http://www.online-literature.com/dickens/olivertwist/49/

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 Cited in the 1994 documentary by Jake Auerbach & Hannah Rothschild titled “Sickert’s

London: The Father of Modern British Painting.” https://trentu.kanopystreaming.com/video/sickerts-london

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8 Walter Richard Sickert, ‘The Study of Drawing’ The New Age (16 June 1910), 156 - 7. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/camden-town-group/walter-richard-sickert- the-study-of-drawing-r1104303

9 Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head: Capital Visions, Trans. Jody Gladding (New York:

Columbia University Press 2012), 84.

10 The statement appears in Woolf’s 1924 essay “Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown,” where she argues that the transition from Realism, as a literary mode in Europe, to Impressionism and

Post-Impressionism has altered the collective perception of human nature. This hyperbolic and prophetic claim is of course made deliberately to alert her English audience to the multiple aesthetic movements led by Manet, Picasso, Cézanne, Gaugin, van Gogh and

Matisse among many others that had re-energised aesthetic debates on the continent. The entire essay may be found in Suman Gupta and David Johnson’s book A Twentieth-Century

Literature Reader: Texts and Debates (London: Routledge 2005), 112-18.

11 Kristeva’s concept of the abject is a modification of Lacan’s concept of the object of desire or objet petit a. While Lacan leaves scope for the subject to coordinate his or her desires through the objet petit a, Kristeva defines desire as something inherently unattainable; belonging to an archaic place before the subject entered the symbolic order or the desire for something that has been radically and violently excluded from it. Thus, there are certain objects, like the corpse, sweat, excreta, milk, blood, that border the Symbolic order and remind us of that archaic self where the distinction between human and animal or the maternal body and the self had not yet been codified. The abject is a phase of the subject’s development that precedes Lacan’s mirror stage or is a “precondition of narcissism”. It marks

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the violent separation from the maternal body and primal self, but returns constantly through certain signifiers to remind the subject how incomplete and tenuous that separation was. It is an ever-present and constantly threatening eruption of Lacan’s concept of the Real that is never fully erased by the Symbolic.

12 Emily Brönte, Wuthering Heights. Online Literature. Web. 1st Nov 2016. http://www.online-literature.com/bronte/wuthering/3/

13 Cited from https://www.poemuseum.org/works-morgue.php

14 Ibid.

15 W. H. Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict,”

Harper’s Magazine (May 1948). https://harpers.org/archive/1948/05/the-guilty-vicarage/

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

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Chapter Three

Witness under Arrest

What art can do is bear witness not to the sublime, but to this aporia of art and to

its pain. It does not say the unsayable, but says that it cannot say it.

Jean-François Lyotard1

Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, composed two years after the

Whitechapel murders of 1888, is a rare Victorian novel in which a murder leaves behind no body. The act itself is described in gruesome detail but no corpse remains as evidence of the crime. Even as Jack the Ripper left the corpses of murdered prostitutes openly strewn about the streets of Whitechapel – a cultural memory not easily forgotten – the victim’s body in

Wilde’s novel simply disappears. Towards the middle of the novel, the protagonist Dorian

Gray murders the artist who had painted his portrait in a fit of blind rage. He stabs Basil

Hallward with a knife in his attic and Wilde describes the crime down to the grotesquely onomatopoeic “drip, drip” of Basil’s blood. It is the last thing that Basil’s body speaks before it is silenced forever. The following morning, Dorian is confronted with every murderer’s dilemma; how should he proceed to hide the evidence of his crime and dispose off the body still “sitting” in his attic? Dorian calls upon an acquaintance Alan Campbell who was an expert in Natural Science and Chemistry. He blackmails him to use his chemical prowess to get rid of the corpse. Five hours later, Dorian is relieved to see that Basil’s corpse – previously a “thing” sitting at the table is “gone” (Wilde 2011, 240) – has become nothing.

The legal outcome of this chemical obliteration is radically simple. Because there is no body, there is no murder, and there is nothing for a policeman or detective to investigate. Nor it would seem is there a witness who may formally represent the body at court. The artist Basil

Hallward is assumed to have gone missing and Dorian Gray is never apprehended for the

172 murder. Nonetheless, what should concern us, as readers of the novel, are the ethical consequences of this fantastic erasure.

Wilde does not reveal the exact science that Alan Campbell employs to obliterate

Basil’s corpse but this does not mean we must accept it at face value. The novel draws attention to the fact that unlike any other crime, murder requires a third-party witness to report its occurrence since the victim cannot and the perpetrator will not. Murder violently seizes the victim’s sovereign right to life and reduces the body to a trifle or residue that may be cast aside and abjected. Encountering the corpse of a murder victim arouses painful feelings of nausea and horror. Yet the corpse provides the very foundation of Anglo-Saxon culture. By segregating it from human contact, the borders of civilization are drawn. Upon seeing the corpse in his attic the following day, Dorian is shocked not so much by the fact that he had committed murder but by the nauseating presence of a corpse “How horrible that was! Such hideous things were for the darkness, not for the day!” (Wilde 2011, 228). In

Pouvoirs de l’horreur, Kristeva argues that a human corpse “infects” life by reminding human beings of the ultimate transience, mutability, and leakiness of their bodies. After being brutally hacked to death Basil Hallward becomes a source of abjection – “comes a cropper”

(Kristeva 1982, 3) – becomes a “thing” that leaks and drips. This minor detail in Wilde’s novel forces the reader to feel the wound of the victim as acutely as if by proxy. To conceal his crime Dorian neither buries nor burns Basil’s body, which were the two predominant modes for the disposal of the dead in the nineteenth century. He finds a way instead to make the corpse disappear entirely! Unlike Kristeva’s term ‘abject,’ there is no comparable concept that can fully encapsulate what happens to Basil Hallward in The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The chemical obliteration of Basil’s corpse in Wilde’s novel forces the reader to conceive of death as more than the mere physical breakdown of the body into a primal, animal and abject form; it is death as a total annihilation of being. Nothing is as traumatic for

173 the reader, not even Dorian’s coldness and lack of remorse as a killer. This fantastic erasure of the body challenged the very legal and ethical foundations of a culture that – from medieval law to detective fiction – was deeply anxious to protect the body. Basil does not die like a sovereign subject of Anglo-Saxon law. His body is not allowed to ‘speak’ the forensic language of clues. His fate is far worse than that of the desecrated bodies of Jack the Ripper’s victims at Whitechapel. This becomes clear if one compares the ferment of discourse surrounding the Whitechapel murders, with the repressed silence that dominates Basil’s disappearance in the Victorian canon. Although it is located at the very heart of Wilde’s novel, it is rarely spoken of or questioned by critics. There is an odd manner with which the murder evades the reader’s attention even as it wounds the psyche. Perhaps the disappearance of Basil’s body has produced a kind of ‘literary trauma’ that haunts the novel’s reception even today. If the line dividing law and literature was so blurred by the turn of the century that fictional murderers like Dorian Gray were put on trial alongside real ones like Jack the

Ripper, how might one account for this repressed silence on the subject of Basil’s corpse?

Before this question is addressed, a more important one needs to be posed. Why is the corpse or the trace of the corpse so essential to the legal process in Western culture? One of the foundational principles of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence is habeas corpus, a judicial writ first recorded in 1305 during the reign of Edward I. In Latin it literally means to ‘have’ a body and it guarantees a person’s right to produce oneself at court, be it to challenge criminal detention or surmount a defence. Almost every aspect of the modern legal process – from witness testimonials to the insanity plea – develops from this judicial writ. It is disputed to have originated in the Magna Carta in 1215 that decreed in Article 39 that no citizen could be arbitrarily arrested or detained without a court order, pending which the citizen was obliged to present himself at court.2 In the case of murder particularly, habeas corpus becomes an underlying principle that directs the process of criminal investigation. The law requires the

174 material presence of a victim or body at court in order to trace the chain of clues that would lead up to the murderer’s body. A suspect’s legal right of habeas corpus originates with the victim’s right to legal justice. With these considerations in mind, one may infer that Basil’s death in The Picture of Dorian Gray is a kind of legal aporia that lies beyond the scope of abjection.

Jacques Derrida theoretically examines why the human corpse is so central to Anglo-

Saxon law and religion. Derrida’s book The Beast and the Sovereign (2003) argues that much may be deduced about the writ of habeas corpus from Anglo-Saxon’s culture’s choice of interment over cremation. The preference for interring the body reveals the importance that this culture accords to the sovereignty of the human subject even in death. Interment largely contains the abject horror of death. First, it situates the corpse at a knowable, stable and specific site; that is a grave with a labelled tombstone. Second, it extends the ‘life’ of the corpse by allowing it to decompose gradually and shed only its fleshly garb. The practice of formal burial upholds what Derrida calls the “fantasy of dying alive” (Derrida 2011, 143).

This fantasy reached its cultural zenith in the tradition of la belle mort that Ariès studies in

L’Homme devant la mort (1977). From the macabre eroticism of Baudelaire’s corpses to the beautifully preserved and enflowered female bodies in Romantic literature and Pre-

Raphaelite painting, the nineteenth century was deeply invested in this fantasy. La belle mort was not a fantasy in the sense of an illusion or denial. It was rather, an endorsement of the writ of habeas corpus that allowed one to look directly at the human corpse without experiencing abjection. This hearkening for a clean, slow, meaningful and beautiful death – the paradoxical insertion of life in death – may be traced back to the Greeks. Jean-François

Lyotard briefly comments on Athenian funerary practices in Le Différend (1983), which in many ways provides a conceptual precedent to Derrida’s deconstruction of the “fantasy of dying alive”:

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One escapes death by the only means known – the perpetuation of the

proper name. This proper name must be proper not only to the interested

party, but also to the collectivity (through patronym, eponym, or

nationality), since the collective name is what assures the perenniality

within itself of individual proper names. Such is the Athenian “beautiful

death,” the exchange of the finite for the infinite, of the eschaton for the

telos: the ‘Die in order not to die.’ (Lyotard 1988, 100)

Lyotard and Derrida make it theoretically impossible for a human corpse to disappear without a trace within Western conventions of death and justice.

Derrida notes that the practice of interment is grounded in the Anglo-Saxon writ of habeas corpus as opposed to cremation, which is a practice more popular in Eastern cultures.

Cremation reduces the body to a pure state of nothingness and allows the mourner to interiorize the finality of death. But ashes also reveal a metaphysics of presence by leaving behind a trace – what Derrida refers to as “cinders” in a previous work.3 Though lacking the solid centeredness of an interred corpse, ashes retain their aura as the dead body’s ‘remains’ and are often preserved in ornate urns or vessels. Basil’s body in The Picture of Dorian Gray, however, is neither interred nor cremated. The chemical obliteration of his corpse leaves behind no ashes or residue. He dies unmourned and without the honour of last rites. Total annihilation of the human being was unthinkable for a culture that practically invented detective fiction. For the Victorians, a corpse could never disappear without leaving a single trace or clue. To achieve this erasure as Wilde depicted in The Picture of Dorian Gray was to portray an incommensurable or irremediable act of violence within the purview of Anglo-

Saxon law. Derrida asserts “One does not have the right to make a corpse disappear, and

176 there is no right to disappearance. The one whom one sometimes calls, in a touching euphemism, the departed [le disparu ou la disparue], must on no account disappear without leaving a trace” (Derrida 2011, 145). Note the immediate transition in Wilde’s novel from the name “Hallward” to the word “thing” to refer to the body of the murdered artist “The thing was still seated in the chair, straining over the table with bowed head, and humped back, and long fantastic arms” (Wilde 2011, 224). Wilde delivers this appellative shift with a logical yet shocking swiftness.

Derrida then makes an observation that could potentially resolve the aporia of Basil’s disappearance in Wilde’s novel. The human corpse has (in and of itself) no legal rights or sovereignty because it is no longer considered ‘human.’ There is no such thing as “habeas corpse” (Derrida 2011, 143) because the corpse is precisely that body which cannot produce itself at court. By that logic, the corpse must relinquish all its legal rights to a third-party sponsor or witness. If there is no such thing as “habeas corpse” then doesn’t a murder investigation rest almost entirely on the ontological and existential presence of another body that can discover the body and bear witness to its demise? The witness-function fulfills

Anglo-Saxon culture’s “fantasy of dying alive.” The common Victorian practice of making wills and testaments, for instance, gave a person the right to control how the survivors will treat his/her body after death. The witness is the legal and ethical solution to the problem of

“habeas corpse.” This begs the question; is there a witness who survives Basil Hallward’s death in The Picture of Dorian Gray and can testify to his murder prior to the chemical annihilation of his body? Dorian Gray being the perpetrator cannot be the third-party sponsor to Basil’s corpse. Alan Campbell, the scientist whom Dorian blackmails into erasing Basil’s corpse, is sworn to silence and goes on to commit suicide at the end of the novel. He renounces his witness-function and becomes complicit in the crime. There is no scope in the novel for a detective to scour the crime scene for clues as there is no material corpse present.

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This must not prevent us as readers, however, from asking how Basil Hallward may receive some semblance of justice at the conclusion of Wilde’s novel?

In Le Différend, Lyotard defines an “event” as a violent and incommensurable conflict that lies beyond rational comprehension, legal resolution, and linguistic representation. To be sure, the Whitechapel murders of 1888 qualify as an “event” for the Victorian age because any investigation into the matter has achieved nothing but a further mystification of the facts and an endless silencing of the truth. The murdered prostitutes exemplify Lyotard’s definition of the “victim”; the subject who experiences the violence of the “event” and hence, cannot narrate it. This is not simply because the victim has been robbed of his/her legal sovereignty

(as in a murder victim’s right to life) but because there is no existing law or paradigm that can adequately resolve the “event.” The “event” is exceptional for its epistemological impossibility; there is no one truth, ethical judgment, or guiding meta-narrative that can address it. All that remains of an “event” like the Whitechapel murders is a kind of collective trauma or cultural victimhood. There are no appropriate words or images that can encapsulate the horror of the Whitechapel murders, only a shared feeling of loss, sympathy, and silence. It is precisely through this painful identification with the Ripper’s victims that contemporary writers like Patricia Cornwell and Jean Overton Fuller lash out at Walter Sickert. However, all that is revealed from the ‘evidence’ they produce against Sickert is the impossibility of ever truly knowing who Jack the Ripper was. Between the “event” and the “victim” therefore, Lyotard sees an unbridgeable gap called le différend:

The differend is the unstable state and instant of language wherein

something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be. This

state includes silence, which is a negative phrase, but it also calls upon

phrases which are in principle possible. This state is signaled by what one

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ordinarily calls a feeling: “One cannot find the words,” etc. A lot of

searching must be done to find new rules for forming and linking phrases

that are able to express the differend disclosed by the feeling, unless one

wants this differend to be smothered right away in a litigation and for the

alarm sounded by the feeling to have been useless. What is at stake in a

literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear witness to

differends by finding idioms for them. (Lyotard 1988, 13)

By creating Dorian Gray’s criminal profile in the novel as a Ripper suspect and by locating the erasure of Basil’s corpse at the very centre of the plot, Wilde allows the Victorian age to bear witness and come to terms with the trauma of the Whitechapel murders.

Lyotard raises an extremely significant question; how may a writer or artist “bear witness to differends by finding idioms” for this otherwise unrepresentable and incommensurable violence? As a preliminary response to this question, I propose that Wilde designed the picture of Dorian Gray to be a witness to his crimes. The picture narrates what the novel cannot and accomplishes this in a manner that does not erase or appropriate the silence of Dorian’s victims. If one conducts a cross-section analysis of the scene of Basil’s murder, it becomes evident that that there is a third character present as an eavesdropper or concealed witness who is in a legal position to testify against Dorian:

Dorian half opened the door. As he did so, he saw the face of the portrait

grinning in the sunlight. On the floor in front of it the torn curtain was

lying. He remembered that, the night before, for the first time in his life, he

had forgotten to hide it, when he crept out of the room. But what was that

loathsome red dew that gleamed, wet and glistening, on one of the hands,

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as though the canvas had sweated blood? How horrible it was! – more

horrible, it seemed to him for the moment, than the silent thing that he

knew was stretched across the table, the thing whose grotesque misshapen

shadow on the spotted carpet showed him that it had not stirred, but was

still there, as he had left it. (Wilde 2011, 239)

The witness to all of Dorian’s crimes is present on the crime scene. It is the titular ‘character’ of Wilde’s novel; the picture of Dorian Gray. Just as he is about to usher Alan Campbell onto the crime scene, Dorian notices a peculiar change in the picture. One of the painted hands of his portrait has “sweated” blood; its canvas oozes a “loathsome red dew that gleamed, wet and glistening.” This dew represents Basil’s blood, which had dripped onto Dorian’s carpet the previous night. Even as Basil’s corpse is made to disappear, it is quite clear that the trace of his leaking wounded body remains in the picture. The picture’s ‘eyes’ witness the murder and its painted hands bear the mark of Cain. Not all the proverbial perfumes of Arabia can sweeten its hands.4 In the following sections, I will analyze how the picture – in bearing witness to all of Dorian’s crimes – functions as the moral anchor of Wilde’s novel. It provides the legal and ethical testimony against Dorian by presenting an archive of his sins and crimes through its scarred and wounded canvas. By extension, I argue that Wilde situated the implied reader of his novel in the same legal and ethical position as the picture. The reader becomes infected or traumatized by the novel’s central “event” and develops a strong ethical obligation to bring the perpetrator to justice. Thus, in spite of the chemical obliteration of his corpse, Basil Hallward manages to break through the “silence” of the “victim” and narrates the macabre tale of his murder through his work of art … the picture of Dorian Gray.

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Picture/Portrait? Intentions versus Interpretations

The most unusual aspect of The Picture of Dorian Gray is the manner with which

Wilde represents the picture’s gradual corruption into a rotting, wounded canvas. The picture studies and records all of Dorian’s crimes from the moment of its inception. Through its corrupted canvas, it compiles a catalogue of Dorian’s crimes with the diagnostic precision of a detective. Its testimony against Dorian is not presented, however, via the conventional criminological method but through its own traumatic disintegration as a witness such as when its canvas appears to have “sweated blood.” The picture succeeds precisely where a detective would have failed in such exceptional circumstances. It renounces its status as an elevated work of art and becomes the literal embodiment of a Lyotardian “event.” Its rotting, bleeding, and wounded canvas attests to the fact that Dorian’s erstwhile innocent and beautiful body has devolved into a criminal body. The picture re-presents Dorian’s crimes to him, just as reading Gautier’s poem “Etude de mains” compels him to compare his own murdering hands to the preserved hand of Lacenaire with its “doigts de faune” (Wilde 2011, 230). When the picture ‘sweats’ blood, it becomes a proxy for Basil’s corpse and functions as his plaintiff, witness, or third-party sponsor. It is the only ‘character’ in Wilde’s novel that is privy to all of Dorian’s secret crimes. Dorian cannot conceal anything from it, causing the picture to become saturated with the wounds of his victims. Hence, the picture of Dorian Gray may be read as something other than or beyond what critics have traditionally ascribed to it.

If the picture is indeed a ‘character’ and not a material object, then how does it come into ‘being’ in Wilde’s novel? The opening scene of The Picture of Dorian Gray depicts

Basil Hallward engrossed in painting a life-size portrait of Dorian. As he marvels upon the beauty and accuracy of Basil’s rendition of his form, Dorian becomes melancholic. He cannot tolerate how the picture’s aura sharply contrasts his own impending mortality. The work of art possessed a permanence that for Dorian, ironically becomes a memento mori:

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I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the

portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose?

Every moment that passes takes something from me, and gives something to

it. Oh, if it was only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could

be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day,

mock me horribly!” (Wilde 2011, 103)

Subsequently, in one of the most famous scenes of Victorian literature, Dorian kisses the lips of his painted image and wishes he could exchange his ‘body’ with its eternal beauty.

This misguided wish comes true (once more, Wilde does not provide an explanation for this gothic exchange) and the picture begins to age and corrupt in lieu of Dorian, who appears forever young, innocent, and beautiful. Wilde adapts the Faustian motif here, one that he had previously explored in a short story “The Fisherman and his Soul” (1889).5 Dorian’s eternal youth like Faust’s immortality gives him the perfect alibi for a life of iniquity, crime, and decadence. He is implicated in the deaths of four characters and the moral corruption of several young men. It is only when Basil confronts him that it becomes clear just how far

Dorian has progressed down the path of crime and violence:

You have a wonderful influence. Let it be for good, not for evil. They say

that you corrupt everyone whom you become intimate with, and that it is

quite sufficient for you to enter a house, for shame of some kind to follow

after you. I don’t know whether it is so or not. How should I know? But it

is said of you. (Wilde 2011, 216)

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To protect his secret, and to some extent punish the artist for painting this fatal portrait,

Dorian savagely murders Basil in his attic. He then goes about ensuring that all evidence of the crime is removed.

Though Dorian initially believes the picture’s transformation to be a literal representation or mimetic reflection of the corruption of his soul, Wilde gives ample evidence that it is possesses an actual, organic body. What else does an organic being possess if not an ageing, vulnerable and, mortal body? The picture shows visible signs of what Kristeva identifies as abjection:

[...] a flayed skin; neither inside nor outside, the wounding exterior turning

into an abominable interior, war bordering on putrescence, while social

and family rigidity, that beautiful mask, crumbles within the beloved

abomination of innocent vice. A universe of borders, seesaws, fragile and

mingled identities, wanderings of the subject and its objects, fears and

struggles, abjections and lyricisms. At the turning point between social and

asocial, familial and delinquent, feminine and masculine, fondness and

murder. (Kristeva 1982, 135)

Wilde’s conceptualization of the picture’s ontology is thus quite solid and not supernatural or gothic; it is a body lying at the border between organic and inorganic, life and death,

“beast” and “sovereign,” reality and representation. Even as it shows how Dorian’s innocent face is nothing but a “beautiful mask,” the picture itself “crumbles within the beloved abomination of innocent vice.” By oozing the victim’s blood, the picture provides an actual forensic clue of the murder. Note how Wilde deliberately uses the word ‘picture’ in the novel’s title as opposed to the aesthetic word ‘portrait.’ Wilde takes great pains to show that

183 its transformation is not a hallucination or product of Dorian’s guilt-ridden mind. In what he had previously imagined to be a memento mori – due to the wrinkling and sagging of his handsome face in the picture – Dorian now finds admissible evidence of his crimes. He locks it in his attic and by means of further paranoiac precaution, drapes a veil over its rotting canvas:

His eye fell on a large purple satin coverlid heavily embroidered with gold,

a splendid piece of late seventeenth-century Venetian work that his uncle

had found in a convent near Bologna. Yes, that would serve to wrap the

dreadful thing in. It had perhaps served often as a pall for the dead. Now it

was to hide something that had a corruption of its own, worse than the

corruption of death itself, something that would breed horrors and yet

would never die. What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to

the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat away

its grace. They would defile it, and make it shameful. And yet the thing

would still live on. It would be always alive. (Wilde 2011, 177)

Wilde insists here that the picture was paradoxically “alive” in death; he compares its degeneration to the rotting of a corpse. The veil that covers does not give it the aura of a work of art but the horror of a funeral shroud and it is soaked with the Anglo-Saxon “fantasy of dying alive.”

The picture’s first testimony against Dorian’s gratuitous acts of violence is presented after his fiancée Sybil Vane’s suicide “The expression looked different. One would have said there was a touch of cruelty about the mouth. It was certainly curious” (Wilde 2011, 133).

From this point onwards, its changes resemble mortal death and disease “the leprosies of sin

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… the rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful” (Wilde 2011, 222). The picture provides the evidence of Dorian’s crimes by itself becoming a palimpsest of sin. This is particularly emphasized in the concluding chapter, which enacts the final tryst between

Dorian and the picture. Dorian experiences a change of heart when he falls in love with a lowly, country maiden but decides not to sully her reputation. He rushes to unveil the picture to see if it shows any sign of his redemption. To his despair, however, he discovers that “in the eyes there was a look of cunning, and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite.

The thing was still loathsome – more loathsome, if possible, than before – and the scarlet dew that spotted the hand seemed brighter, and more like blood newly spilt” (Wilde 2011, 249).

Wilde makes Dorian’s selfishness and hypocrisy clear for the reader to see through the hypocrite’s smile in the picture. Its final verdict as the moral arbiter of the novel is that

Dorian’s last victim – if he is to truly redeem himself – must be Dorian himself. This enrages

Dorian and he slashes the canvas with the same knife he had used to murder Basil. Wilde invokes the image of Jack the Ripper in Dorian’s final act of ripping the canvas and makes him appear all the more villainous at the end. When the blade pierces its canvas, portrait and protagonist return to their original state. The servants rush to the attic upon hearing a terrible cry and discover the beautiful portrait of their master smiling down at Dorian’s corpse

“withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage” (Wilde 2011, 252).

Critics continue to be baffled about the true meaning of the novel’s conclusion and

Dorian’s ‘suicide.’ Writing as recently as 2005 in the introduction to his variorum edition The

Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, Joseph Bristow ponders:

Hidden away in the protagonist’s home, the increasingly misshapen canvas

bears supernatural witness to this attractive youth’s secret life of sin. What is

the precise nature of his crimes? Why has he committed them? And what is

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the lesson of this fantastic plot? ... Does the narrative relish the decay that it

depicts? Or does it seek to establish an ethical position that exposes the error

of its hero’s ways? Why, in other words, is the work both hard to classify and

taxing to interpret? (Bristow 2005, xi)

By calling the picture’s testimony “supernatural,” Bristow discounts its ontic and ethical presence in the novel. He equates the picture’s numinous connection to Dorian’s activities with the nature of its testimony. There is, however, nothing supernatural about the picture’s

“increasingly misshapen canvas” or its traumatic disintegration as a witness. In fact, in moments such as the “touch of cruelty,” the “sweated blood,” the “blood newly spilt” and the

“hypocrite’s sneer,” the picture provides concrete legal and criminological evidence of

Dorian’s crimes. If it were indeed a figment of Dorian’s imagination, then the picture could not have been the agent of retribution at the end. To call this testimony “supernatural” is to negate the ethical value of its role as a witness for Dorian’s victims. The trauma its canvas bears as a consequence of witnessing Dorian’s crimes also represents, by extension, the trauma of the reader. The main question that The Picture of Dorian Gray raises therefore is not whether Wilde was committed to an “ethical position” as a writer as Bristow wonders, but how a reader may assume an “ethical position” vis-à-vis its traumatic and incommensurable content. The novel may appear on the surface as if it “relish(es) the decay it depicts,” simply because Wilde is not interested in upholding a recognizable model of ethics. He could not conceive of any party in his novel so free of guilt that they could cast the proverbial stone on the perpetrator. Dorian’s suicide is brought about not by recourse to an external moral authority or deus ex machina like the detective. It is worked out purely within the moral economy of the text into which the reader is ethically inscribed as a witness.

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Without necessarily invalidating the extant critical interpretations of The Picture of

Dorian Gray, I propose that the picture is a legal and ethical witness to the aporia of Basil’s disappearance. It does not represent this aporia in the traditional mimetic sense of a work of art but actually embodies the artist’s struggle of representation through its wounded canvas. It does not appropriate the voice of the “victim” by attempting to speak for Basil but experiences by proxy, the violence committed upon his body. The reader of the novel also becomes imbricated in the picture’s ethical obligation. Even as the reader derives aesthetic pleasure from reading Wilde’s novel, there is also an ambivalent or paradoxical feeling of guilt, horror and moral outrage. It is worth mentioning here that there are two different versions of Wilde’s novel published between the summer of 1890 and the fall of 1891. It may appear as if there is nothing exceptional about this fact – most Victorian writers produced several versions, manuscripts or drafts of their novels. But Wilde did not undertake this extensive revision of his own accord. The initial reaction of his readers was so censorious and extreme that Wilde risked facing an obscenity trial like Baudelaire and Flaubert in France. He had to salve the gaping wound or trauma that Basil’s murder and Dorian’s decadent crimes had left in the Victorian reader’s mind, and was forced to make the novel’s conclusion more recognizably ‘moral.’ Wilde added five new chapters and a new character named James Vane, who would more literally assume the witness-function that he had previously attributed to

Dorian’s picture. It must also be noted that the disappearance of Basil’s corpse is no longer the central traumatic event of the revised novel. Instead, Wilde gave centrestage to Sybil

Vane’s suicide and her brother James’s desire for justice.

A sailor freshly returned from the colonies to avenge the death of his sister, James Vane assumes the legal and ethical role of the witness in the 1891 version of The Picture of Dorian

Gray. The phrase ‘with a witness’6 was in fact, commonly used in the nineteenth century to signify vengeance in the archaic biblical sense of ‘an eye for an eye.’ James Vane establishes

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Dorian’s culpability mainly to bring moral closure to his sister’s suicide. Instead of using a detective like Sherlock Holmes whose primary role was to provide such closure, it is interesting to see how Wilde revived a character from Renaissance and Jacobean tragedy to play the role of the witness; the avenger. When James apprehends Dorian he immediately dons the legal, moral and theological authority to exercise his imperative as witness “You had better confess your sin, for as sure as I am James Vane, you are going to die” (Wilde 2006,

161). This appointment does not come from an a priori state of grace like the Holmesian detective but from the trauma of his sister’s death. Consequently, Wilde constructs the picture of Dorian Gray in his revised novel with more layers of his patent irony, subterfuge, and symbolism. Even as James watches Dorian’s every move looking for an opportune moment to strike, the reader forgets that the picture had already borne witness to Sibyl’s death with the appearance of a “touch of cruelty” around its mouth. This oversight might explain why the novel’s critics continue to interpret the picture of Dorian Gray not as a picture but a portrait with a distinctively disintegrating aura.

In Wilde’s revised version, it is James’s threatening presence and not the picture’s terrifying testimony that forces Dorian to repent for Basil’s murder “Oh! in what a wild hour of madness he had killed his friend! How ghastly the mere memory of the scene! He saw it all again. Each hideous detail came back to him with added horror. Out of the black cave of

Time, terrible and swathed in scarlet, rose the image of his sin. When Lord Henry came in at six o’clock, he found him crying as one whose heart will break” (Wilde 2006, 339). Such bursts of expiatory excess are absent from the original 1890 text, where Dorian’s character belongs to the French Decadent tradition of perverse and amoral dandies. Take for instance, another confessional and overtly ‘moralistic’ passage that Wilde appended to his revised version:

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There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for

what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the

body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses.

Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They

move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them,

and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give

rebellion its fascination, and disobedience its charm. For all sins, as

theologians weary not of reminding us, are sins of disobedience. When

that high spirit, that morning-star of evil, fell from heaven, it was as a rebel

that he fell. Callous, concentrated on evil, with stained mind and soul

hungry for rebellion, Dorian Gray hastened on, quickening his step as he

went, but as he darted aside into a dim archway, that had served him often

as a short cut to the ill-famed place where he was going. (Wilde 2006,

330)

These ‘moralistic’ revisions transformed Wilde’s originally banned text into the popular canonical version that is still read today. By studying the complex publication history of The

Picture of Dorian Gray and its censorship, it becomes possible to see how modern literature struggles to represent a violent and incommensurable “event.” Between the two versions of

Wilde’s novel – the first so traumatic that it had to be repressed but the latter, achieving the critical acclaim that Wilde deserved – one may see an instance of what Lyotard calls the

“conflict” of representation. It becomes evident that the reader of such literature is not a passive recipient of graphic representations of violence. The reader is like a murder witness who accidentally discovers the corpse on the crime scene and becomes traumatized. Yet there is a strong ethical obligation to bring justice to the victim and apprehend the perpetrator. The

189 reader is thus appointed in an active ethical role and partakes of this “conflict” of representation. Wilde’s novel is not some self-contained transcendental object of beauty or literary value but rather draws attention to itself as a product of an ongoing and self-renewing negotiation between the artist and spectator, perpetrator and witness, trauma and testimony.

A key interpretation of The Picture of Dorian Gray is that the picure is Dorian’s psychic double or doppelgänger. Emerging out of Otto Rank’s influential 1971 book The

Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, this trend reads the picture’s degeneration to be some sort of gothic fantasy born from Dorian’s narcissism. Dorian cannot form successful erotic relationships with women because of his narcissistic obsession with the picture. His paranoia compels him to lash out against Basil when he threatens to expose him. Rank was influenced by Havelock Ellis’s essay on sexual inversion titled “The Conception of Narcissism” (1897) and Sigmund Freud’s early theories of homosexuality developed in “Three Essays on the

Theory of Sexuality” (1905) and “On Narcissism” (1914). The psychoanalytic tradition of literary criticism, which identifies Dorian as a pathological narcissist and his picture as a psychic mirror or “double,” develops mainly from Wilde’s sodomy trials. When Wilde appeared on the dock in 1895 to defend himself against a libellous charge of posing as a

“somdomite” (sic), he also used the trial as an opportunity to defend the ‘Art for Art’s Sake.’

When the prosecuting lawyer Edward Carson asked him if he had ever “adored a young man madly,” Wilde replied “I have never given adoration to anyone except myself” (Cited in

Bruhm 2000, 54). This, among many other Wildean assertions during the 1895 trial, created a mass panic around English male homosexuality in the nineteenth-century. It is no doubt with

Wilde’s own narcissism in mind that psychoanalytic critics like Rank connect male homosexuality with pathological narcissism. Narcissism became, in fact, the main symptom or diagnostic feature of male homosexuality and Rank postulated that the homosexual’s

“defective capacity to love” arose from a “narcissistic fixation on his own ego” (Rank 1971,

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71).

The critical trend of reading Dorian’s picture as a symbolic mirror or double – from

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s influential book Epistemology of the Closet (1990) to Gregory

Bredbeck’s “Narcissus in the Wilde: Textual Cathexis and the Historical Origins of Queer

Camp” (1994) – is effectively summarized by Steven Bruhm. In his book Reflecting

Narcissus: A Queer Aesthetic (2000) Bruhm delves extensively into Freudian and Rankian theory to propose, in his turn, another interpretation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. He avers that Wilde’s novel offers up not one version of narcissism but two:

The Picture of Dorian Gray, which has already attracted more than one

discussion of narcissism, offers us a look at the multiple uses of the myth,

both in its ethical and its aesthetic considerations. Through the character of

Dorian, himself called a Narcissus early in the novel, Wilde creates a

narrative of ethical dissolution proceeding from narcissism; and in marked

contrast, he explores through the artist Basil Hallward, the artistic, creative

aspects of narcissistic desire. (Bruhm 2000, 65)

Bruhm’s division of narcissism into two types; pathological and creative, is much closer to

Wilde’s original conception of homosexuality in the novel. Bruhm makes an important clarification that theorizingnarcissism through Wilde’s iconic trial results in an

“overdetermined” and pathological kind of narcissism “being at the same time clearly readable and impossible to specify” (Bruhm 2000, 55). He shifts attention away from

Dorian’s ambiguous interaction with the picture to Basil’s original act of creating it. As Basil is engrossed in painting the picture, he confesses to Lord Henry Wotton that Dorian Gray is not only a muse for his work of art but a catalyst for his own sexual awakening. Bruhm

191 highlights Basil’s hesitation to display the picture in a public gallery because he admits

“There is too much of myself in the thing, Harry, too much of myself” (Wilde 2011, 85). This reticence to display his art in order to protect his closeted homosexual desire for Dorian is, for

Bruhm at least, completely opposed to the Rankian definition of narcissism. Bruhm uses

Basil’s confession to conclude that the picture is not only a reflection of Dorian’s self- destructive criminal narcissism but also a signifier of Basil’s creative, aesthetic cult of the homoerotic. Since homoerotic desire cannot manifest in an actual, physical relationship with

Dorian, Basil channels it through his work of art.

Reading the picture as a symbol of the homosexual closet in the nineteenth century has now become fairly commonplace. It considers Dorian’s act of killing the artist symbolic of his own repressed sexuality. Dorian does after all pierce Basil’s body in a quasi-sexual gesture of phallic penetration. The murder is interpreted not in its legal or ethical literality but as a signifier of a psychically impossible homosexual consummation. The same goes for Dorian’s final act of stabbing his own image in the picture. These acts of violent thrusting signal

Dorian’s futile desire to unite with his ideal image and transgress the border that divides his

‘body’ from his ‘soul.’ Bruhm maintains that Wilde’s novel ends on a decidedly mythological note; when Dorian stabs his portrait, it is a re-enactment of Narcissus drowning in his image in the pool. The death of desire is the only paradoxical way the narcissist can express desire.

Bruhm paraphrases Rank’s argument “For Otto Rank, this moment of self-recognition is also the moment at which the narcissist recognizes that he cannot obtain the object he desires, that his passion is destined not to be fulfilled, that what is at the center of his desire is death, not love” (Bruhm 2000, 69). Bruhm thus resolves the ambiguity surrounding Dorian’s suicide via a well-established psychoanalytic method of literary criticism. It is a compelling hypothesis, even for strict narrative theorists like Elana Gomel, who analyze the portrait in relationship to its subject and its creator. Gomel, however, remains within the boundaries of the text and

192 leaves aside queer interpretations that equate Wilde’s alleged status as a ‘homosexual’ with

Dorian’s own narcissism.

Gomel defines the picture of Dorian Gray to be above all a work of art or a ‘portrait.’

Dorian Gray is the subject and Basil the artist and both are ontologically distinct from the author we culturally identify as Oscar Wilde. She proposes that the text of The Picture of

Dorian Gray is also an autonomous material object and must be analyzed independent of this author. She bypasses the history of Wilde’s sodomy trial, which has somewhat overshadowed the literary criticism of the novel. She writes “Art both is and is not life; writer both is and is not (in) the text. Any interpretation of Wilde-as-Dorian or Dorian-as-Wilde has to contend with the unbridgeable gap between the two” (Gomel 2004, 87). Gomel’s essay “Oscar Wilde,

The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the (Un)death of the Author” maintains that Dorian’s picture is not necessarily a psychic reflection or double of his identity. It is a portrait and not a picture and becomes metonymic for the novel itself as a work of art. Gomel argues that there is a more fundamental connection between Basil Hallward the artist and Wilde the writer versus between the ‘homosexual’ protagonist Dorian Gray and the author-function Oscar

Wilde. This enables her to acknowledge the traumatic moment of the disappearance of Basil’s corpse “without a trace” (Gomel 2004, 84). She writes that the disappearance of the artist is a prerequisite for the aesthetic autonomy of a work of art. Basil dies when he discovers that the portrait has taken on a ‘life’ of its own, which Gomel sees as an early example of what postmodern narrative theory would later identify as the ‘death of the author.’7 Invoking one of

Wilde’s own aphorisms “To reveal art and to conceal the artist is art’s aim” Gomel deduces that “The violence that separates art from the artist indicates a strain and hostility in their relationship. “Art’s aim” suddenly sounds like an implicit personification that credits “art” with scheming against the artist, perhaps to the point of murder” (Gomel 2004 76).

Gomel delves into the psychoanalytic discourse as well to support her theoretical

193 claims. She believes that Dorian’s relationship with his portrait is not pathological but an illustration of what Lacan calls the “mirror stage”:

According to the Lacanian notion of the mirror stage, a growing infant

identifies with its reflection in the mirror and thus acquires a unified self,

based on the visual matrix of an image. Similarly, Dorian identifies with his

own “ideal self,” (the whole problem is that he cannot identify: it has

become something Other than him, and therefore causes a fracture within

his own self) presented to him by the painting. (Gomel 2004, 80)

For Gomel (as originally for Lacan), there is nothing abnormal or pathological about Dorian’s split interaction between ‘body’ and ‘soul.’ His anxiety regarding the reflected image in his portrait makes him an everyman of what Lacan terms méconnaissance or misrecognition. Just as a child feels a gap, distance, or split between his fractured experience of the world and the image of a unified face and body in the mirror, Dorian’s obsession with his portrait stems from such a Lacanian ‘misrecognition.’ By his own admission, he becomes “jealous” of the beauty, aura, and unity of his image in Basil’s portrait because it sharply contrasts his mortal and mutable experience of life. According to Gomel, Dorian’s desire to exchange bodies with his portrait is an instance not of pathological narcissism but a more general psychological need for unity, wholeness, to become one with the image one sees in a mirror. The tussle between image and reality surfaces early in the novel in Dorian’s dismissal of his fiancée

Sybil Vane. As long as Sybil upholds Dorian’s ideal image of himself as “Prince Charming”

Dorian is satisfied and able to live up to the role. But when she confesses that she has fallen in love with the ‘real’ Dorian Gray, he immediately dissociates himself from her. Gomel concludes that Dorian’s anxiety is not pathological but simply a condition of being a social,

194 linguistic being – with the “image passing itself as the man, the signifier pretending to be the signified” (Gomel 2004, 83).

Gomel invests in the psychoanalytic concept of méconnaissance insofar as it holds language and representation to be responsible for constructing this essential gap between the signifier and the signified. The child in Lacan’s hypothesis may appear to be narcissistic or autoerotically obsessed with his own image in the mirror but this is simply because it experiences the incongruity between his own body and the reflected image. This anxiety is evidenced both in Dorian’s murder of Basil – the artist whose authorial presence challenges the exclusivity of his connection to the portrait – as well as in Dorian’s final act of stabbing the portrait – an act that leads to his own destruction. Dorian’s tussle with his portrait stems from his inability to grapple with three socially-constructed or “Symbolic” gaps which Gomel enlists in her essay, namely, the ‘aesthetic’ or the gap between the artist’s intention and the actual work of art, the ‘ontological’ or the gap between body and soul, and the ‘psychological’ or the gap between the self and the Other:

Read as an allegory of artistic creativity, the novel minimizes the difference

between a painting and a literary text by focusing on the dynamics of

subjectivity and the clash between the corporeal and the ideal selves of the

artist, the character, and the audience. This clash is dramatically represented

in the last scene of the book, in which Dorian stabs the picture and regains

his body, now somewhat the worse for wear but individual and unique,

indelibly marked by a misspent life. But the picture is not destroyed:

flawless once again, it smiles down at Dorian’s corpse. (Gomel 2004, 80)

Another useful aspect of Gomel’s interpretation of Dorian’s portrait is how she extends the

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Lacanian concept of misrecognition not only to Dorian’s interaction with his image but also to

Basil’s failure to recognize his own work of art when Dorian unfurls the veiled portrait before him:

An exclamation of horror broke from Hallward’s lips as he saw in the dim

light the hideous thing on the canvas leering at him. There was something in

its expression that filled him with disgust and loathing. Good heavens! it

was Dorian Gray’s own face that he was looking at! The horror, whatever it

was, had not yet entirely marred that marvellous beauty. There was still

some gold in the thinning hair and some scarlet on the sensual lips. The

sodden eyes had kept something of the loveliness of their blue, the noble

curves had not yet passed entirely away from chiselled nostrils and from

plastic throat. Yes, it was Dorian himself. But who had done it? He seemed

to recognise his own brushwork, and the frame was his own design. The

idea was monstrous, yet he felt afraid. He seized the lighted candle, and held

it to the picture. In the left-hand corner was his own name, traced in long

letters of bright vermilion. It was some foul parody, some infamous, ignoble

satire. He had never done that. Still, it was his own picture. (Wilde 2011,

221)

Where once he had told Lord Henry Wotton that he would never display the portrait in a gallery because he had put too much of ‘himself’ into it, Basil fails to recognize his portrait here because it has assumed another life, another signature … it has become an ‘Other.’

There is, however, a noteworthy textual detail about The Picture of Dorian Gray that

Gomel’s essay would have done well to consider. In 1891, Wilde also added a preface to his

196 revised edition of the novel (Fig. 1). It was structured as a catalogue or manifesto of important aphorisms defending ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ and the autonomy of the work of art. At the bottom of the preface, as if to reinforce his author-function, Wilde adds a signature in block letters

“OSCAR WILDE.” It is no coincidence that the writer of a novel where the corpse of an artist disappears without a trace quips in the very preface “To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.” Is Wilde revealing himself or concealing himself behind this signature? What bearing does this signature have on the issues of identity, subterfuge, and disappearance that dominate the novel? How does this emphatic declaration of authorial ‘presence’ enable Wilde to bear witness as a writer to an incommensurable “event”? What is the precise nature of this kind of literary or aesthetic witnessing?

Figure 1. Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ward, Lock and Company, 1891 Brett Beasley, “The Triptych of Dorian Gray (1890-91): Reading Wilde’s Novel as Three Print Objects,” Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 84 (Aug 2016)

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The doubling of Wilde’s name mimics an older van Eyckian model of aesthetics whereby a work of art is not merely a fictive entity but can function as a ‘real’ legal and testamental deposit of an “event.” Jan van Eyck’s famous 1434 painting (Fig. 2) of the Arnolfini bridal pair not only depicts a marriage ceremony but is also invested in legitimizing this ceremony.

Van Eyck certifies himself as both artist and adjudicator of this legal ceremony. His ornately painted name at the heart of the painting performs the legal role of notarizing the wedding that is both represented on the canvas and re-presented in the mirror at the vanishing point. The mirror also reflects a third figure standing between the bridal couple that is frequently interpreted as a representation of van Eyck himself.

Figure 2. Close up of the mirror in Jan van Eyck, 1434, Arnolfini Wedding The image is freely available in the public domain.

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The manner with which this Renaissance painting employs the convex mirror and the artist’s signature deeply influenced Rossetti, Millais and Holman-Hunt of the Pre-Raphaelite

Brotherhood. It was acquired by the National Gallery of London in 1842, as is demonstrated in an article printed that same year in The Illustrated London News,8 where it is quite probable that Rossetti and Holman-Hunt saw it. The juxtaposition of the legal with the aesthetic and reality with representation – specifically in the doubling of the artist’s ‘presence’ in the mirror – may have predisposed Rossetti and Holman-Hunt’s depictions of distortion, doubling, and dissimulation in paintings like The Awakening Conscience (1853) or Lady

Lilith (1868). Wilde being a disciple of the Pre-Raphaelites was no doubt aware of van Eyck’s painting. The signature at the end of Wilde’s preface performs a similar double role. It implies that Dorian’s picture is not merely a work of art but also a juridico-legal testament of his crimes. Erwin Panofsky’s celebrated analysis of van Eyck’s painting claims that the doubling of the artist’s name and presence allows the work of art to function as both a painting and a marriage certificate. Although Arnolfini and his wife were actually married in 1447, more than a decade after van Eyck’s painting was completed, Panofsky’s suggestion that a work of art can perform a legal role is nonetheless valuable. It paves the way for one to think about writers and artists as being concrete legal witnesses and cultural adjudicators rather than merely inventors of fiction. Panofsky’s comment about the painting functioning as both a work of art and marriage certificate may in fact, be fruitfully connected to Wilde’s vindicatory statements about authorship in his preface.

Jonathan Bordo elaborates a parallel theory of aesthetic witnessing to Panofsky’s in his essay “The Witness in the Errings of Contemporary Art” (1996). He invests the contemporary artist with a legal and ethical obligation complementary to his aesthetic obligations “The artist bears witness to a condition through the work, which initiates an episode, demanding an ethical response from the viewer, who is asked to complete the work by taking in its lesson

199 accordingly. Viewing is thus a corroborating act of witnessing” (Bordo 1996, 180). This sort of “viewing” as “witnessing” is at work in The Picture of Dorian Gray where the picture bears witness to an unrepresentable condition; the erasure of Basil’s corpse. In a later essay

“Picture and Witness at the Site of the Wilderness” (2000), Bordo expands his theory of aesthetic witnessing with respect to van Eyck’s painting:

With modernity, the witness function becomes inseparable from the

reflexivities of the subject, and the subject as witness comes to organize the

space, frame, and contents of visual art in the very way that the word came

to organize sight. The very well travelled example of Jan van Eyck’s

commemorative portrait of the Arnolfini bridal pair of 1434 is illustrative of

this pictorial testamentality with its saturation of authorizing inscriptions.

The picture posits two specular witnesses, reflected in the mirror, as bearing

witness to the marriage, making the picture an agent in the event of the

marriage … the picture, thus, is a proof of marriage. (Bordo 2000, 233)

It is the same “saturation of authorizing inscriptions” that one sees in Wilde’s construction of

The Picture of Dorian Gray as a text. The “specular witness” in van Eyck’s painting becomes a “strategic site for revealing this reflexivity” between the artist, the work of art and the spectator (Bordo 2000, 228). Bordo’s choice of the legal word “proof” to define the role that van Eyck’s painting performs fits quite well with Wilde’s conceptualization of Dorian’s picture as an “agent in the event.” His theory of the “specular witness” becomes especially relevant when it is applied to unrepresentable and sublime elements of reality, like

“wilderness.” Bordo writes “Being in principle unrepresentable, the wilderness leaves a picture as a testamental deposit for that which the picture was unable to picture” (Bordo 2000,

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229). Where Bordo writes on wilderness as an aporitic and unrepresentable site, Wilde uses

Dorian’s picture to represent his unsayable and un-nameable crimes.

Bordo’s theory of the “specular witness” allows one to comprehend the deontological presence that Wilde ascribes to Dorian’s picture. It becomes the corroborating authority or arbiter uniquely appointed to testify against Dorian’s crimes. Wilde explicitly refers to its function of “viewing” as “witnessing” in his preface by calling the reader of his novel a

“spectator.” Through this ekphrastic move, Wilde declares from the very beginning of his revised novel that the ethical obligation to find a moral for this story lies with the “spectator” and not the artist. Wilde’s choice of the word “peril” is also interesting “All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.” As an extension of the picture’s witness-function, Wilde appoints the implied reader to take on the ethical burden to bear witness to Dorian’s gratuitous acts.

There can be no hypocritical longing for a detective to provide justice as there is no corpse on the crime scene. Wilde’s word ‘peril’ brings an entirely new dimension to the traumatic response of the reader. The Picture of Dorian Gray raises some fundamental questions about the role of the modern writer in an inherently violent world. Wilde enables us to wonder whether the trauma of witnessing murder in real life is somehow congruent to the trauma of witnessing it in art and literature. Is it possible to derive aesthetic pleasure from graphic representations of violence without ethically implicating oneself? The gradual disintegration of Dorian’s picture as a “specular witness” thus becomes a premonition of the reader’s own traumatic disintegration and desperate need to censor and repress Wilde’s original novel.

Witnessing the Unrepresentable: Digression on De Quincey

When Wilde first published The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1890 amidst the furore of the Whitechapel murders, Dorian Gray’s actes gratuits subtly mirrored Jack the Ripper’s

201 mysterious crimes. Wilde does not clarify what exactly Dorian’s secret activities in the East

End’s brothels, opium dens, and music halls were. It is no wonder that the Victorian reader made such an aggressive demand for this ‘immoral’ novel to be removed from the stands. For the greater part of the text, Dorian’s devolution from an aristocratic dandy and arbiter elegantarium to a petty and hypocritical murderer is allowed to run its natural course. Dorian does not commit these crimes to break any particular commandment or with the intention to injure any party. His violent acts are spontaneous, gratuitous, unmotivated, and committed for pleasure “There was an exquisite poison in the air. I had a passion for sensations” (Wilde

2011, 115). Wilde’s depiction of Dorian’s criminal career deviated significantly from the standard teleological structure of the high Victorian novel; be it Dickens’s mode of moral realism or Conan Doyle’s detective fiction. Wilde delivers instead a perverted or inverted bildungsroman. Writing in the wake of the Whitechapel murders, Wilde had already seen the depraved limits to which a man with no prior history of crime could go without being apprehended. London had changed irrevocably after 1888 into a “grey” and “monstrous” city of “splendid sinners, and its sordid sins” (Wilde 2011, 115). Like Baudelaire and Stevenson,

Wilde could not see Victorian modernity without the mark of Cain on its brow and he was inclined to “let my brother go to the devil in his own way” (Stevenson 2002, 5). This is not to say that Wilde’s novel is ‘immoral’ as it was widely believed to be. Through his election of

Dorian’s picture as witness, Wilde morally reined in his diabolical protagonist’s criminal career.

Although Wilde comes eerily close to letting Dorian disappear into the night like the

Ripper, Dorian’s death at the dénouement effectively ties the various threads of the plot together. The Picture of Dorian Gray ends with the unmasking of the perpetrator and affirms surprisingly ethical concerns like justice and authenticity. Wilde firmly believed that the obligation to find the moral of the story lay with his reader. The preface to his revised 1891

202 edition echoes Baudelaire’s prefatory address to the reader in Les Fleurs du mal “Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère!” (Baudelaire 2016, 6). As one of the chief apostles of the

‘Art for Art’s Sake’ in England, Wilde argued that it was hypocritical of the reader to abdicate his ethical obligation as a consumer of violence and expect the writer or artist to pander to existing morals. It was the modern writer’s responsibility to push existing limits and the reader’s, to maintain public morality. A similar obligation is at play in The Strange Case of

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The dramatic opening scene of Stevenson’s novel is in the format of an official witness statement:

‘I was coming home from some place at the end of the world, about three

o’clock of a black winter morning, and my way lay through a part of town

where there was literally nothing to be seen but lamps. Street after street,

and all the folks asleep – street after street, all lighted up as if for a

procession and all as empty as a church – till at last I got into that state of

mind when a man listens and listens and begins to long for the sight of a

policeman. All at once, I saw two figures: one a little man who was

stumping along eastward at a good walk, and the other a girl of maybe eight

or ten who was running as hard as she was able down a cross street. Well,

sir, the two ran into one another naturally enough at the corner; and then

came the horrible part of the thing; for the man trampled calmly over the

child’s body and left her screaming on the ground. It sounds nothing to hear,

but it was hellish to see.’ (Stevenson 2002, 7)

This oral testimony is presented to the lawyer Utterson who assumes the main juridico-legal function in Stevenson’s novel, in lieu of an amateur detective or police. As the protagonist, he

203 investigates the “strange case” surrounding the mental illness and disappearance of his friend

Henry Jekyll.

The opening scene of Stevenson’s novel is another literary example of what Lyotard calls an “event” or an irresolvable conflict between two parties. There is absolutely no way for Hyde to legally compensate the poor street urchin he tramples. His act is so unprecedentedly evil and misogynistic that it is beyond the scope of legal compensation.

Ironically, the gaslights that had been installed in the streets of London to prevent the occurrence of exactly such “events” all but heightened the horror of the witness. Note how the witness in the opening scene admits to a feeling of rising dread under the solemn, processional glow of the gaslights. They appear to be illuminating a path precisely towards a crime scene. Wilde also inhabited such a “grey” and “monstrous” London post-Jack the

Ripper; each street corner looked like a potential crime scene and the dark alleys became sites of spontaneous violent encounters. Gaslights had recently been installed in London to allow pedestrians to safely walk the streets at night. But as we see from Stevenson’s novel, the gaslights lit up London like a chessboard, with poorer sections of the East End remaining largely unlit. It was on such dark squares on London’s topography that ‘black knights’ like

Mr. Hyde, Jack the Ripper and Dorian Gray secretly attacked their victims. Darkness was required for decadence. Nor were the insides of the Victorian home any safer; recall how the

Ripper’s final victim Mary Kelly was found ripped to pieces in her bedroom. Witnessing this gratuitous evisceration of her body rendered the landlord John McCarthy speechless and traumatized:

“The sight I saw I cannot drive away from my mind. It looked more like

the work of a devil than a man. [...] I had heard a great deal about the

Whitechapel murders, but I declare to God I had never expected to see

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such a sight as this. The body, was of course, covered with blood, and so

was the bed. The whole scene is more than I can describe. I hope I may

never see such a sight again.” (cited in Roland 2010, 82)

Windows where an important portal from where one could bear witness to London’s inscrutable crimescape. They collapsed the safe or sublime distance between the perpetrator and the spectator. Note how McCarthy was so affected by the sight of Mary Kelly’s corpse that he became infected with the victim’s irremediable “silence.”

There is something rather singular about McCarthy’s reaction as a murder witness, however, which requires theoretical explication. Instead of repressing the horror of what he had seen, he felt a heightened ethical obligation to report Mary Kelly’s murder. He did not give in to the immediate feeling of abjection and flee from the crime scene. Despite his debilitating horror and nausea, he did not turn his back on the victim who was nothing but a

‘low’ and ‘immoral’ streetwalker. Was this a product of a rare and courageous exceptionalism? Was it an ethical obligation that sprung directly from the expectional violence of the “event”? For now, let’s make a note of McCarthy’s complex and internally contradictory psychological reaction to the crime scene – his inability to speak versus his imperative to speak – and move on to exploring exactly what the witness-function in a murder investigation is. Although they operate completely unaware of each other’s presence, the murderer and the witness become bonded by the violent excess of the “event.” Even as the former disappeared into London’s darkness post-actum, the latter was left behind on the crime scene with the corpse like a residue. This psychological tussle between the murderer and the witness is brilliantly described in chapter four of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and

Mr Hyde, where a maid looking out at the streets of London at night accidentally sees a gruesome murder:

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A maidservant living alone in a house not far from the river, had gone

upstairs to bed about eleven. Although a fog rolled over the city in the

small hours, the early part of the night was cloudless, and the lane, which

the maid’s window overlooked, was brilliantly lit by the full moon. It

seems she was romantically given, for she sat down upon her box, which

stood immediately under the window, and fell into a dream of musing.

(Stevenson 2002, 21)

Stevenson drew upon the fog, the full moon, the gas lamps, and the dark waters of the

Thames almost as if to construct a criminological profile of the city itself. From the maid’s peaceful and romantic contemplations prior to the murder, it is clear that London was yet to gain its “hellish” countenance following the Whitechapel murders. The murder that she witnesses Hyde commit moments later shatters the maid’s psyche like a broken windowpane. She is not safe inside her home any more than the Victorian reader was safe with Stevenson’s abject literature in hand.

The murder is not described from the point of view of Hyde the perpetrator, or that of the victim Sir Danvers Carew. It is reported from the perspective of the maid. Even though she was so far removed from the crime scene, the maid becomes so affected by the gratuitous violence she witnesses that it causes her to lose consciousness. Stevenson uses four parenthetical notes to remind the reader that the maid was giving her witness statement retrospectively to the police:

Never (she used to say, with streaming tears, when she narrated that

experience) never had she felt more at peace with all men or thought more

206 kindly of the world. And as she so sat she became aware of an aged and beautiful gentleman with white hair, drawing near along the lane; and advancing to meet him, another and very small gentleman, to whom at first she paid less attention. When they had come within speech (which was just under the maid’s eyes) the older man bowed and accosted the other with a very pretty manner of politeness. It did not seem as if the subject of his address were of great importance; indeed, from his pointing, it sometimes appeared as if he were only inquiring his way; but the moon shone on his face as he spoke, and the girl was pleased to watch it, it seemed to breathe such an innocent and old-world kindness of disposition, yet with something high too, as of a wellfounded self-content.

Presently her eye wandered to the other, and she was surprised to recognize in him a certain Mr Hyde, who had once visited her master and for whom she had conceived a dislike. He had in his hand a heavy cane, with which he was trifling; but he answered never a word, and seemed to listen with an ill-contained impatience. And then all of a sudden he broke out in a great flame of anger, stamping with his foot, brandishing the cane, and carrying on (as the maid described it) like a madman. The old gentleman took a step back, with the air of one very much surprised and a trifle hurt; and at that Mr Hyde broke out of all bounds and clubbed him to the earth. And next moment, with ape-like fury, he was trampling his victim under foot, and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered and the body jumped upon the roadway. At the horror of these sights and sounds, the maid fainted. (Stevenson 2002,

21-22)

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The maid as narrator could not adopt the distanced, ‘masculine,’ medico-legal gaze of a lawyer, detective or criminologist. There was nothing fascinating about the violence she9 witnesses … only horror and abjection. The maid did not feel a sense of sublimity or awe at witnessing the murder although she was physicially safe. Instead, a wave of abjection rendered her unconscious. The paradoxical nature of the murder witness’s reaction – the interplay between abject silence and the ethical obligation to speak – emerges from the gap or différend between the victim and the “event.” In his literary and psychoanalytic critique of

Lyotard titled Lyotard, Literature, and the Trauma of the differend (2014), Dylan Sawyer observes “the problem of literature appears to be that it can exist as both testimony and act, able to become the representation of an event as well as an event of representation” (Sawyer

2014, 4). This implies that describing an “event” becomes somewhat possible in literature, where it had been impossible to articulate historically. Compare for instance, McCarthy’s stunted testimony with the detailed retrospective narrative that maid in Stevenson’s novel produces. Nineteenth-century novels like The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde successfully articulated what Sawyer calls the “trauma of the differend.”

At this critical juncture, it is worth reflecting upon a long tradition of literary witnesses from Shakespeare to Thomas De Quincey who narrowly escape death but fulfil their ethical obligation to speak about the “event.” In a series of satiric essays published between 1823-

1854, Thomas De Quincey represented the historical murders of two working-class families in

1811. Born to a prosperous linen merchant in 1785, De Quincey was probably drawn to

Timothy Marr’s murder as Marr was nothing but a humbler version of his own father. In her book Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (2016) Frances Wilson stresses the impact that the murder of Marr’s family had on De Quincey’s writings. She begins his biography in

208 fact, with Marr’s murder and the maid’s nocturnal quest for oysters. The episode marks the beginning of De Quincey’s aestheticization of murder. It also attests to the civilian fear at inhabiting a violent urban space like London’s East End. Wilson rejects the standard chronological approach in biography and elects a more postlapsarian method, almost as if to suggest that it is impossible to imagine De Quincey’s life prior to the 1811 event. As Lyotard would show in Le Différend, an “event” can wound and traumatize culture in such a vital manner that it becomes impossible to retrieve any experience that is untouched or unscathed by it. Wilson calls De Quincey “an obsessive” (Wilson 2016, 9) who used the 1811 murders to adapt the provincial Romanticism of a Wordsworth or Coleridge for a more violent urban setting. Even as a child, De Quincey liked to eavesdrop and peep behind locked doors. It should come as no surprise therefore that he could so successfully reconstruct what went on behind the locked door of Marr’s house on the night of 7 December 1811.

De Quincey’s 1823 essay “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” which predates the more famous “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” successfully blurs the line between reality and fiction, deposition and drama, testimony and literature. Instead of talking directly about the 1811 “event,” De Quincey began by analyzing Shakespeare’s use of a knock in the scene of Duncan’s murder in Macbeth that “reflected back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity” (De Quincey 2006, 3). This unfolds in Act II

Scene II where, immediately after Lady Macbeth smears blood on Duncan’s guards, she is roused by the sound of a porter knocking at the gate. A comic interlude follows where the inebriated porter (completely unaware of the terrible deed he has interrupted) has a humorous conversation with Macduff. De Quincey drew attention to this seemingly trivial stage direction to ask an all-important aesthetic question; why did the knock produce such an effect of “solemnity” on the audience? What was so impactful about the knock when behind the door a king was being murdered? To elucidate, De Quincey connected the knock in Macbeth

209 to the very real knock that had alerted the maid to the murder of the Marrs in 1811. In a lengthy “Postscript” to “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” appended in 1854,

De Quincey made a Shakespearean tragedy of Marr’s (otherwise proletarian) murder:

At Marr’s there was both a knocker and a bell. Mary rang, and at the same

time very gently knocked. She had no fear of disturbing her master or

mistress; them she made sure of finding still up. Her anxiety was for the

baby, who being disturbed might again rob her mistress of a night’s rest.

And she well knew that, with three people all anxiously awaiting her

return, and by this time, perhaps, seriously uneasy at her delay, the least

audible whisper from herself would in a moment bring one of them to the

door. Yet how is this? To her astonishment, but with the astonishment

came creeping over her an icy horror, no stir nor murmur was heard

ascending from the kitchen. (De Quincey 2006, 109-110)

In this obscure but riveting piece of literature, De Quincey attempted to narrate how the murder of the Marrs may have transpired. The fact that the maid Margaret Jewell was outside the door that night at the precise moment the murderer had finished his dark deeds was for De

Quincey the decisive factor that made the crime an “event.” Margaret Jewell’s accidental knock marked the transition from the sublime violence of ordinary unsuspecting reality to the elevated tragic scale of drama.

It was at this door – the border separating the murderer from the witness – that the minimum conditions for an aesthetic experience of murder could be determined. De Quincey argued that the knocking on the gate in Macbeth was not accidental but providential. The

“depth of solemnity” it generated was an affect of that precise moment when the spectator

210 watching Macbeth realized he was a spectator (what Bordo refers to as a “specular witness”).

Witnessing a gruesome murder on stage was pleasurable because of this self-reflexive or metafictional awareness of its contrived nature. It produced a concrete moral distance from the murder based on the shared expectation that what was being witnessed was not ‘real.’

When the same spectator, however, encountered the violence that is spomtaneously diffused and scattered in real life (as with the murder of the Marrs and Williamsons in 1811), he experienced what Kant and Burke called the “sublime.” Wilde was aware of this Romantic distinction between the “sublime” and the “aesthetic.” In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord

Henry remarks upon the difference between an “aesthetic” representation of a murder versus a real manifestation of its “sublime” and “crude violence”:

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic

manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute

incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They

affect us, just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer

brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that

has artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of

beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic

effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the

spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the

mere wonder of the spectacle enthrals us. (Wilde 2011, 131)

In this passage, Wilde revealed that his reader was not unaware of the distinction between life and art and in fact, experienced a heightened sense of pleasure when the novel drew self- reflexive attention to its constructedness. This crucial gap between reality and representation

211 collapses when Dorian exchanges his mortal body with the aura of the work of art. As the picture suffers the moral consequences of his crimes, Dorian Gray becomes the hero of his own elevated tragedy like Macbeth. Even as Kant had segregated the cultic from the ontic in his Critique of Judgement, De Quincey’s retelling of Marr’s murder enabled the cultic to seep into the ontic. He accomplished this by highlighting an unlikely “aesthetic” element that converted the 1811 “event” into a work of art; Margaret Jewell’s accidental knock on the door.

In order to achieve this aestheticization of murder, De Quincey left the murderer free to “work his pleasure” and attached his narratorial perspective to the maid. Affectionately calling her “Mary,” De Quincey allied his ethical sympathy with this lowly working-class woman. Mary’s route through Ratcliffe Highway was veiled with “shadowy misgivings” in anticipation of the horror that was about to follow. As this was a London yet to gain street lighting, it appeared as if the stars had indeed “hidden their fires” as in Macbeth. De Quincey imagined the 1811 “event” as a Shakespearean drama of secrecy and solitude. It began with the murderer’s secret act of violence, the victims’s unheard cries of help, and concluded with the witness’s un-witnessed horror at discovering the bodies. By so doing, De Quincey distilled the basic requirements for an aesthetics of murder from an ordinary “event.” He saw the 1811 murder as a rare schism where the truth was axiomatically stranger than fiction. The murderer had already written the script of the “event” as this was no crime passionnel; like Duncan’s murder in Macbeth Marr’s death was a premeditated hunt. Only at the opportune moment between the maid leaving the kitchen door ajar and the watchman completing his patrol could the murderer have entered Marr’s house. It was also essential for him to kill the victims in a certain order beginning with Marr’s apprentice who would have been sleeping in the lower domestic quarter of the house. The next victims would have been Marr and his wife asleep upstairs. All had gone as planned except the maid’s premature return sans oysters. The

212 murderer had just claimed his last victim – the sleeping baby – when she knocked on the door.

Margaret Jewell stated in her formal testimony at court that she had actually heard the baby’s dying wail and the murderer descend the staircase in response to her knock. De Quincey speculated that she may have even heard his agitated breathing on the other side of the door

“How hard the fellow breathes!” (De Quincey 2006, 110).

Had the maid arrived a minute before or after the murder of the Marrs would have passed into historical oblivion. De Quincey noted that the exceptionality of this “event” depended entirely on the fact that the murderer, the corpses, and the witness were all present at crime scene at the same time. To De Quincey, it resembled the solemn structure of a well- crafted tragedy where there could be no coincidences. Mary became the liaison between the incommensurability of the “event” and De Quincey’s aestheticization of murder. Her knock on the door ruptured le différend or the gap between the event and its victims and initiated the process of reparation and representation. The knock had roused the murderer from the clockwork precision of his script. Above all, it was an irruption and pierced the “sequestered” physical, temporal and moral space required to commit the fatal deed, otherwise known as a crime scene:

In order that a new world may step in, this world must for a time

disappear. The murderers, and the murder, must be insulated – cut off by

an immeasurable gulph (sic) from the ordinary tide and succession of

human affairs – locked up and sequestered in some deep recess: we must

be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested – laid

asleep – tranced – racked into a dread armistice. (De Quincey 2006, 6)

De Quincey’s incisive observations on the optimum conditions for a murder grounded his

213 aesthetic as well as his ethical position as a writer. He highlighted le différend as the

“immeasurable gulph” that mometarily cuts off both murderer and victim from human society and its laws. He described murder as a cinematic pause or arrest in the ordinary progression of time. The knock was extremely important as it announced the entry of the witness and showed how “the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish”… the ethical upon the sublime. The entry of the witness Mary was the moment when the clock struck again and legal time could begin once more. This conjunction of the ethical with the sublime – where the distance or gap that Lyotard calls le différend is collapsed by the interruption of the murder witness – is precisely how literature also makes its “refluc upon the fiendish.” The witness represents the violent incommensurability of the “event” without appropriating or erasing the irremediable “silence” of the victim.

A witness as per Anglo-Saxon law is a person who sees the unfolding of an event and can rationally speak, interpret and testify to its occurrence. The concept belongs to the evidentiary model of truth in the West. The word originates from the Old English combination of “wit” meaning wisdom or knowledge with the conditional verb “ness.” There are also etymological traces of the Old High German giwiȥnessi and the Middle Dutch wetenisse. At its most fundamental legal level, witnessing is a three-step process. The witness, because she happens to be present at an event, is able to observe the event. Even if the event is seen through a window or door, the most important criterion for witnessing is to be ‘present’ in some capacity. This presence connects the witness to what she sees. The word ‘witness’ is double-edged; it derives from the Latin root teste, which means evidence, token, or the mark of a fact, and the French témoignage that specifically deals with empirical vision. The next step in the legal process is to be capable, liable, and willing to report what one has seen. This willingness to testify through speech is crucial in the legal aspect of the term “to alert” or

“bring something under examination.”10 In this metaphysics of presence, the murder witness

214 is valuable mainly for two things; seeing and speaking. The witness in Anglo-Saxon law is someone who meets these basic existential and ontological conditions that correspond with each other. She bridges the gap or le différend between a secret or private occurrence and its legal or ethical recognition as an “event.” By initiating the discourse of law and ethics, the witness transforms an otherwise inaccessible or incommensurable violence into a knowable, iterable, historical reality.

The murder witness is the legal representative not just of the victim but also of a wronged, wounded, and traumatized community. She must scour the crime scene and immediately alert the nearest authority to the presence of a body. Before the coroner or the police arrive, it is the witness’s responsibility to pronounce the death. It is an existential legal role borne from a series of deictic assertions – I am here, the body is here, ergo the murderer was here. Another important thing to remember about the witness-function in Anglo-Saxon law is that arriving at the crime scene at the opportune moment is extremely crucial. By the turn of the nineteenth century, it is quite clear that London and Paris had become very violent urban spaces. The cities were strewn with corpses and by that logic, with witnesses.

Nevertheless, one did not qualify as a murder witness if one happened upon the body too late into the action. Baudelaire’s 1857 poem “Une Charogne”11 may be compared to De Quincey’s

1854 “Postscript” on Marr’s murder. Composed roughly at the same time, they both centre on a character’s psychological reaction to witnessing murder but there is a significant difference in their viewing conditions. “Une Charogne” opens with the poet accidentally discovering a rotting corpse on the streets of Paris. He points it out to his lover and teases her that she too will come to this fate. According to Anglo-Saxon law, the poet fulfils the two main ontological conditions of being a witness that is, seeing and speaking. But he does not rush to call the authorities to report the body or attempt to remove the corpse from its location. It is clear that the body has been there a long time since it first became a corpse. La charogne has

215 progressed so far along the process of decomposition that the legal and ethical urgency of the matter is gone, the precise moment when the murderer struck his blow is lost, and the body requires no dramatic revelation by a witness. It is no longer an incommensurable “event” in the Lyotardian sense, but a mere social fact on the streets of Paris.

By contrast, De Quincey brought his witness Mary to the very epicentre of the crime scene so much so that she narrowly missed the murderer’s blade herself. Baudelaire’s ironic and aloof detachment as a poet is impossible in Mary’s case as she is not allowed to distance herself from the crime scene in any way. Her gaze cannot be that of an apathetic pedestrian.

Baudelaire sees la charogne not as the victim of a specific act of violence but as an abstract embodiment of death and poverty in Paris. However, when Margaret Jewell arrived on the crime scene on the night of 7 December 1811, the murderer had not yet escaped … blood had just been split. This is the crucial difference between De Quincey’s concept of the sublime and that of Kant and Burke. For Kant and Burke, the “sublime” was a new way of thinking about the pleasure generated by excess and violence. Burke wrote in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757):

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is

to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible

objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the

sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is

capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the

ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part

of pleasure. (Burke 1999, 36)

Burke’s theory of the sublime dealt with the power of evocation and the paradoxical pleasure

216 or awe that could be produced from pain and horror. This pleasure emerged from the fact that the spectator was merely witnessing the sublime “event” from a great physical distance or safety. It was only if there was no possible chance at all of the spectator becoming a victim of the sublime event himself, that this awe or pleasure could be generated. The spectator felt pain by proxy or a pleasurable, cathartic relief that he had escaped danger. Burke separated pain and pleasure by showing that they were different only in terms of degree, and were not oppositional affects. Deeply influenced by Aristotle’s theory of tragedy and catharsis in The

Poetics, Burke dedicated the final section of his book to studying the evocative power of words. For him, literature provided the ultimate safe distance from a sublime event and words had the power to evoke pain without causing it. The sublime in art was pleasurable, but the sublime in reality was paralyzing.

In direct contradistinction to Burke’s theory of the sublime – premised as it was, on the guarantee of safety and physical distance – De Quincey showed how the effect of “solemnity” or paralysis of the audience watching Macbeth in theatre was the same affect experienced by

Margaret Jewell as she happened upon the crime scene. Where Burke argued that the sublime led to a total suspension of the rational faculties of the spectator, De Quincey allowed Mary to remain alert, sharp, and incredibly diagnostic on the crime scene. Her paralysis was not due to fear but from a ‘perverse’ curiosity or fascination to know more about this dark “event.”

Unlike the passive or palliated spectator of Burke’s sublime, De Quincey’s witness wants to know all that is transpiring at the heart of the violence. The will for self-preservation from the sublime event or a kind of distanced ‘masculinist’ voyeurism is replaced in De Quincey’s murder witness by the will to knowledge. She is the murderer’s main adversary and has the power to bring him to justice. There is a profound ethical obligation inscribed within her experience of the sublime. De Quincey’s witness is permitted to keep her ‘wits about her’ so to speak, but Burke insists that the sublime leaves the spectator stunned, silent, traumatized,

217 and divested of all rational faculties. In his introduction to Burke, Adam Phillips writes:

Beauty and Sublimity turn out to be the outlaws of rational enquiry. Both

are coercive, irresistible, and a species of seduction. The sublime is a

rape, Beauty is a lure. Though Burke lucidly asserts their difference in a

series of neat oppositions – the Sublime involving pain, admiration, and

greatness, the Beautiful entailing positive pleasure, love, and often

smallness – a certain similarity becomes impossible to ignore. Both the

Sublime and the Beautiful induce a state of submission that is often

combined with the possibility of getting lost. They disorientate and

undermine purpose. (Burke 1999, xiii)

De Quincey’s witness might be disoriented for a moment but does not lose her purpose to bring justice to her dead master and mistress. She remains rooted outside the door at great personal risk so that she may discern as much information about the crime as possible without compromising hersel. Later at court, she invokes this information as part of her formal testimony. Although the recollection of the event traumatizes her once more, without this crucial proximity to the “event” Margaret Jewell would have been completely inconsequential to the trial.

Given that the witness happened to be at the right place at the right time, a further point of enquiry would be how Mary knew, having just knocked on the door, that it was not her master but some “dreadful being” breathing on the other side? What were the little clues she discerned as an eavesdropper? How was this lowly ‘feminine’ witness imbued with the diagnostic genius of a Sherlock Holmes without even looking at the crime scene? The testimony of the murder witness requires some level of insight over and above literal sight; a

218 more involved and engaged experience that goes beyond the basic “témoin oculaire.” In

Mary’s case, seeing essentially required an act of analysis or reading. Her diagnostic ability is not, like Holmesian genius, a product of the ‘masculine’ medico-legal gaze but emanates from her condition as a “specular witness.” As he identifies the “specular witness” in his analysis of van Eyck’s painting, Bordo also invokes a crucial distinction between two different aspects of witnessing as laid out by Émile Benveniste. In the 1969 edition of Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, Benveniste adds to his lexical definition of the ‘witness’ the legal distinction between arbiter and testis. A witness as testis has to be physically present at the scene whereas a witness as arbiter can adjudicate even from a distanced position above or beyond the event. Benveniste confirms that the arbiter cannot perform “une fonction testimonial” or cannot be called upon in matters of criminal law “On n’invoque jamais en justice le témoignage d’un arbiter pour remplir une fonction testimonial; car c’est toujours l’idée de voir sans être vu que ce terme implique” (cited in Bordo 2000, 236). Roughly translated, Benveniste states that the testimony of an arbiter is not used in legal cases because it implies the act of seeing without being seen, which is the opposite of the testis function.

The arbiter may perform his act of witnessing off-site, in retrospect, in abstentia, as a signature or notary. There is also some degree of skill and training involved in this kind of adjudication. Conversely, in the case of a murder, the witness has a deontological appointment from which she cannot relieve herself. Her mere presence on the crime scene is enough because it can either facilitate the legal process or thwart the felicitous completion of the event. The act of adjudication or arbitration in the case of murder is both precocious and providential. The empiricist vision of the detective is the epitome of juridico-legal power but it belongs to Benveniste’s category of the arbiter. The detective needs must enter the plot retrospectively and it is even possible for him to investigate the murder in abstentia. He is impartial and has no emotional attachment to the victims or obligation to ensure them justice.

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This, the detective firmly believes to be his sole advantage in the matter of detection. But in the case of the murder witness, her testimony relies completely on her presence on the crime scene. Where the detective remains emotionally distanced, the witness feels a sense of guilt at having survived the event. But it is important to note that this guilt does not, in any way, hamper her diagnostic ability. Recollect how Stevenson’s maid registers a minute detail in her testimony that would have been impossible for her to gauge through sensory perception or empirical deduction alone. When she sees Hyde attack Danvers Carew, she claims that the victim’s bones were “audibly” (Stevenson 2002, 22) shattered. Even if she had heard his cries for help from her position at the window of the top-floor bedroom, she couldn’t possibly have heard the bones shatter from that physical distance. She experienced a heightening of her senses and emotions, which allowed her to see the event in all its incommensurability.

Theorizing the Arrest in Law and Literature

De Quincey developed an entirely new genre that may be called aesthetic witnessing between the years separating his 1827 essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” and the 1854 “Postscript.” While fully preserving the unrepresentable aspects of the 1811 murders, he managed to represent it through Margaret Jewell’s knock on the door. He made the conscious and rather overdetermined decision to narrate the “event” through the eyes of the murder witness. By comparing Mary’s momentary paralysis outside the door to the affect experienced by an audience watching Macbeth, he connected the apparently disparate registers of the legal with the aesthetic. He did not, however, elaborate why Mary remained transfixed on the other side of the door that night. Why didn’t she run to call for help the moment she sensed there was a “dreadful being” beyond? If the knocking on the gate in

Macbeth was meant to puncture “the world of ordinary life (that) is suddenly arrested – laid asleep – tranced – racked into a dread armistice” (De Quincey 2006, 6), then what was the

220 nature of Mary’s own arrest? The same sort of paralysis dominated the London mob’s reaction to John Williams’s execution in 1812. In The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe

Highway Murders 1811, P.D. James and T.A. Critchley observe how the vengeful mob remained strangely calm or spellbound when Williams’s corpse was carted on the streets:

The Home Secretary’s fear that the enraged mob might seize and wreak

vengeance on the corpse proved unfounded. All contemporary records

mention the strange and unexpected calm. The frail body was guarded as if

it might suddenly leap to life and fall upon its persecutors. But the drawn

cutlasses, the phalanx of watchmen, were not required. No one sought to

lay violent hands on Williams. There were no howls of execration, no

screams of abuse. Why, one wonders, this unnatural restraint? It can

hardly have been pity for the dead man. Few, if any, present had any doubt

that here was the murderer of the Marrs and Williamsons. Few, if any,

would have been repelled at this public display of his corpse, or indignant

at the dishonour in store for it. Was it perhaps awe that kept them silent?

(James and Critchley 1971, 157)

The mob began to abuse and attack Williams’s corpse moments later as it was wont to do, but

James and Critchley are baffled by this initial paralysis or state of “profound reverie” (Fig. 3).

They conjecture “Was the silence one of speechless amazement that this frail body could have achieved so much horror? Or was the mob stunned into silence by wonder that the monster who had added self-murder to his heinous crimes, could wear such a human face?”

(James and Critchley 1971, 158).

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Figure 3. Sketch of John Williams’s punishment from P. D. James and T. A. Critchley, The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders 1811 (London: Constable and Co. 1971), 118

De Quincey found it striking how, in spite of its moral outrage and horror, London was obsessed with the 1811 event with an ‘aesthetic’ sort of fascination. During the criminal investigation, Marr’s home was opened for public viewing like Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors. The drained and preserved corpses of the victims and murder weapon were displayed. De Quincey quipped that the murder had made of the London mob a “Society of

Connoisseurs in Murder who profess to be curious in homicide; amateurs and dilettanti in the various modes of bloodshed; and, in short, Murder-Fanciers. Every fresh atrocity of that class, which the police annals of Europe bring up, they meet and criticise as they would a picture, statue, or other work of art” (De Quincey 2006, 8). Unsurprisingly, De Quincey’s comparison of the mob to ‘connoisseurs’ of murder in his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the

Fine Arts” has been misunderstood to mean that he was calling the murder aesthetic. But one

222 may clearly see how this connoisseurship or fascination for the murder did not at all discount the East End’s collective trauma, their painful sympathy for the victims, and ethical obligation to give them justice. Like Burke’s concept of the “sublime,” both pleasure and pain fused in the crowd’s response to the murders and Williams’s execution. But this sublimity was different from the kind Burke discusses because the paralysis it caused in the spectators became the grounds for their ethical engagement and obligation to punish the culprit.

It is important to note that this combination of the sublime with the ethical also caused

Margaret to faint when she appeared before the parish court at Shadwell. Because the source of the sublime in her case was not far but so near, she could not narrate the precise moment when she and the murderer had been on either side of the door:

What was it? On the stairs, not the stairs that led downwards to the

kitchen, but the stairs that led upwards to the single storey of bedchambers

above, was heard a creaking sound. Next was heard most distinctly a

footfall: one, two, three, four, five stairs were slowly and distinctly

descended. Then the dreadful footsteps were heard advancing along the

little narrow passage to the door. The steps – oh heavens! whose steps? –

have paused at the door. The very breathing can be heard of that dreadful

being, who has silenced all breathing except his own in the house. There is

but a door between him and Mary. What is he doing on the other side of

the door? A cautious step, a stealthy step it was that came down the stairs,

then paced along the little narrow passage – narrow as a coffin – till at last

the step pauses at the door. How hard the fellow breathes! He, the solitary

murderer, is on one side the door; Mary is on the other side. (De Quincey

2006, 110)

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When she fainted in court, the jury saw it as hard evidence of her trauma and could relate to the paradoxical imperative to speak versus her inability to speak. Where words had failed her,

De Quincey came to Margaret’s rescue in his remarkable aestheticization of the murder.

These were the conditions that prompted De Quincey to contemplate on the pain/pleasure or attraction/repulsion affect that an incommensurable event could generate in the witness. He attested to this incommensurability by uniting ethics with aesthetics and law with literature, without necessarily subsuming one to the other. The London mob’s fascination with looking at the bodies connected with this event was not a fetishistic or voyeuristic kind of spectatorship, as from Baudelaire’s prose poem “La Corde.” What is idiosyncratic about the

1811 affair is not the knock itself but how Mary’s arrest at the door brought about the legal arrest of the perpetrator. Mary experienced an erotic or pleasurable gravitation towards the source of peril over and above her fear and pain. The same may be said for the London mob.

If they started latching doors at night (as Coleridge had remarked to De Quincey), it may not have been entirely out of the fear or trauma caused by the 1811 murders. They felt perhaps an

‘aesthetic’ need to prolong this Shakespearean scale of drama that had suddenly invaded their otherwise ordinary or ‘real’ lives.

In De Quincey’s aesthetic retelling of the 1811 event, the arrest of the murder witness mirrors the spectator’s contemplative and self-reflexive pause during a performance of

Macbeth. Despite knowing that it is wrong to derive pleasure from the death of the other, De

Quincey showed how the audience remained transfixed. He also proved that the pleasure the audience felt upon witnessing Duncan’s murder was not perverse or pathological but in fact crucial in the development of their ethical need for closure. If Margaret Jewell’s body had expressed the shock or pain of narrowly missing the murderer’s blade through a loss of consciousness, De Quincey aestheticized that abjection by highlighting the thin barrier

224 separating Mary from the murderer. Although her knock was nothing but an ordinary quotidian act, it shielded Mary from becoming a victim herself. The door protected her from the murderer and yet allowed her to occupy an intimate weave of space and time with the murderer “both their lips upon the door, listening, breathing hard” (De Quincey 2006, 111).

Her life rests entirely on the mercy of the murderer, but she lingers out of some strange, inexplicable curiosity. This is not the case only with De Quincey’s fictional witness. As per

John McCarthy’s witness statement for Mary Kelly’s murder, one glance through her window was surely traumatic enough for him to flee the crime scene. Nevertheless, he was rooted on the spot long enough to register exactly how Mary Kelly’s corpse was dismembered and scattered and which specific organs were spilled over. He may not have been able articulate this into a comprehensive oral testimony but one may be sure that McCarthy’s first reaction to this traumatic event was not repression. He was arrested by this spectacle of violence, feeling perhaps the same “effect of solemnity” and fascination that De Quincey discovered in an audience watching Duncan’s murder.

At this point, it is worth revisiting Kristeva’s theory of abjection to nuance the murder witness’s arrest. Kristeva employs the word ‘abject’ both as a noun and a verb in her book

Pouvoirs de l’Horreur. Used as a noun, the abject is a thing like the corpse or the skin on warm milk. Used as a verb, the abject describes affective responses like nausea and horror that causes the witnessing subject to become abject. As an instance of the latter, Kristeva defines abjection as “one of those violent, dark revolts of being directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable” (Kristeva 1982, 1). It is the gap or void where all that disturbs normative culture is jettisoned, but Kristeva contantly reminds us that this gap “lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated.” The abject is “a frontier” or a “border”

(Kristeva 1982, 9) that connotes ambiguity as well as danger. What better example of this

225 than Margaret Jewell’s knock on the door on the night of 7 December 1811? At the precise moment that the murderer was pressed against the other side of the door, Mary experienced a threat that “emanates from an exorbitant outside.” But her accidental knock reminded the murderer of the gruesome acts he had just committed and became the voice of his conscience or a threat from an exorbitant “inside.” For De Quincey, all the ‘aesthetic’ value of the 1811 event rested on this door because it was a thin, porous, ethical boundary that separated two

“exorbitant” forces on either side of the law. Kristeva writes that even as abjection produces horror, disgust, nausea, and fear, it also invokes in the witness a simultaneous desire and curiosity because it is defined by ambiguity and not knowing – it “fascinates desire” (Kristeva

1982, 1).

Poised at this “frontier” thus, the murder witness cannot but help feel a sense of being swallowed or engulfed by the event. If the effect of witnessing such a horrific event was merely repression or silence, then it would prevent the next definitive legal step of the action from taking place – the raising of the alarm and the criminal arrest of the perpetrator. The word arrest here describes the complex and inherently contradictory affect of pain/pleasure/moral outrage that is experienced by the murder witness. It etymologically originates in the standard French interpellation arrêt, which performs the legal command or speech act to cease and desist. But this arrest is a legal imperative or ethical command that emerges from the aesthetic pleasure, awe, or fascination that the murder witness experiences.

Not only does it counter the guilt of surviving the murder but it also recognizes the “effect of solemnity” derived from witnessing the death of the Other. The inexplicable desire to remain rooted at the spectacle of violence and bear witness to the incommensurability of the event is like a cardiac arrest – that paralyzes with pain and horror – as well as a narcotic or erotic arrest – that paralyzes with heightened pleasure. Kristeva’s introduction of desire and pleasure into her notion of abjection is hence, fundamental for this new paradigm of aesthetic

226 witnessing in the nineteenth century “One thus understands why so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims, if nor its submissive and willing ones” (Kristeva 1982, 9). For

Kristeva, the conjunction of aesthetics with abjection is not a paradox or contradiction that needs to be resolved, but one that becomes constitutive of the late-nineteenth and early- twentieth century culture. She also rejects Kant and Burke’s notion of the sublime by bringing the source of abjection extremely close to the subject and disavowing the older ‘masculinist’ models of pleasure, fetishism, and voyeurism vis-à-vis the corpse.

Moving from the conceptual to the lexical, the word ‘witness’ has some added etymological connotations that are useful for this discussion on trauma, murder, abjection and aesthetic reception. It was used in the metallurgical industry in the nineteenth century to denote the residue from the extraction process. J. Nicholson’s 1825 text Operative Mechanic12 explains that the substance left behind when silver was deducted from the assay was called

‘witness.’ De Quincey presented Mary as a residue of the 1811 event, but certainly not one that could be cast aside as easily as metallurgical waste. Her loss of consciousness during the trial became a signature of that event and could not be excluded from the legal record at court.

As a murder witness, Mary possessed different qualifications from an ordinary witness because her presence on the scene put her own body in danger of becoming a victim. Mary did not go into the battle prepared or retrospectively like a detective or policeman. It was not a game, puzzle, or adventure whose pleasure lay in the nitty-gritty of the process itself. The murder witness’s testimony lies somewhere between the limit of knowing and not knowing but this sanctions her experience as both traumatic and testimonial – silence as well as speech.

Because the witness is the survivor, her status as residue discursively produces the legal and ethical dimensions of the event. Around the turn of the century, the word ‘witness’ was also appropriated by the publishing industry. J. W. Zaehnsdorf’s glossary to his 1880 text Art of

Bookbinding lists the word to mean the rough edges of a book that was not properly cut down

227 during the process of printing.13 From meaning just a residue or excess that could be discarded, the word witness here assumed an altogether different implication. In metallurgy, the witness was cast aside as there was no further use for it post-extraction. But in the bookbinding process, the uncut leaves of the book signified an inconvenient remainder.

The witness was therefore that which nearly escaped the blade that should have cut down the book’s edge uniformly in the first attempt. In this case, the witness is not a kind of pathetic, dispensable residue but something accidental and unintentional that above all, obliges one to start the process all over; it is a kink in the process. This was certainly the intention with which De Quincey cast Mary as the witness in his retelling of the 1811 event.

He entered the mind of the murderer very briefly to show what he must have thought at the other side of the door:

The meaning was this: separately, as an individual, Mary was worth nothing

at all to him. But, considered as a member of a household, she had this

value, viz., that she, if caught and murdered, perfected and rounded the

desolation of the house … whilst Mary stood on the outside, was – a hope

that, if he quietly opened the door, whisperingly counterfeiting Marr’s

voice, and saying, What made you stay so long? possibly she might have

been inveigled. (De Quincey 2006, 111)

De Quincey demonstrated that it was actually Margaret who “inveigled” the murderer with her knock. With her accidental knock, she forced his hand and brought down his entire operation. By situating Mary outside the door and dramatizing her narrow escape, De Quincey forced the murderer to pause, reconsider his actions, spiral into an interminable wave of indecision, and finally, start over. By narrowly escaping the murderer’s blade, she became a

228 kink, an overflow, an interruption … a flaw in his original plan. De Quincey spent little time with the murderer’s motive in his “Postscript” to “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine

Arts.” For him, there was no ethical value in doing so, despite what countless critics believe.

He is not, as Wyndham Lewis observed, a “distinguished diabolist” in the legacy of “Lord

Byron, Huysmans, Baudelaire, Wilde, De Lautréamont, and the rest of them” (Lewis 1987,

174) because his narrative empathy clearly lay with the witness. De Quincey brought attention to the fact that despite her loss of consciousness, Margaret Jewell was not some pathetic residue or victim of the 1811 event. Even at her most vulnerable, she was able to alert the patrolling watchman and exercised her legal authority as a witness.

Let me reiterate here that Mary’s arrest is not a symptom of trauma or repression but a necessary prerequisite for the criminal investigation. Although it is difficult (and somewhat counter-productive) to reduce this arrest in linear, chronological and definitional terms, it may be said to unfold thus – it begins with narrowly escaping being victimized by an event, which produces an aesthetic kind of suspension or curiosity for the event. This is exemplified by the physical rootedness of the witness at the crime scene, as though she were a critic pausing to analyze a work of art at a gallery. This enables the witness conducts a diagnostic examination of the evidence as a “specular witness.” Finally, the witness experiences all the psychological affects associated with a traumatic event – fear, shock, horror, and nausea, which is required for her to turn away from the crime scene and move towards the law. The arrest of the murder witness thus emerges both from her legal function as testis and aesthetic function as a ‘connoisseur.’ Unlike the experience of the sublime, the arrest does not cut the witness off physically and morally from the event. She comes to embody the gap between the legal and the aesthetic because of her uncontrollable urge to revel in the grandeur or beautiful enormity of the event. De Quincey may not have gone into the psychology behind Mary’s arrest but it is my contention that her willing submission to the incommensurability of the

229 event – the few minutes during which Mary and the murderer had their lips pressed against the door and could hear each other breathing – is the crux of modern aesthetics.

Before I proceed to further break down the complexity of Mary’s arrest, I want to examine how Sawyer combines Freud and Lyotard’s theories in his concept of the “traumatic sublime.” In the concluding chapter of his book Lyotard, Literature, and the Trauma of the

Differend, Sawyer provides a comprehensive history of the psychoanalytic term “trauma” from Sigmund Freud to Cathy Caruth. Taking off from Charcot and Breuer’s concepts of traumatic hysteria at the turn of the nineteenth century, Freud discovered a temporal lag or gap between a horrifying or painful experience and the subject’s recollection of it. The word

‘trauma,’ as Sawyer astutely notes, comes from the Greek word for wound. It is a psychic wound that gets progressively buried deeper and deeper into the layers of the unconscious, which prevents the subject from knowing the full extent of the emotional damage it has caused. The main problem with trauma is that the subject cannot consciously bear witness to the event and so, becomes a victim to it. All that the traumatized subject is left with is a sense of guilt, unease and anxiety that corrodes the psyche over time and produces a compulsion to repeat the event through involuntary gestures. It is a kind of rupture that is not visible or locatable but has been exiled into the inscrutable terrain of the unconscious. Sawyer invokes

Caruth’s introduction to her volume of essays titled Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1991) to elaborate on his own definition of the “traumatic sublime.” Caruth states that “the traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess” (Caruth 1991, 5).

Because it cannot rationally or consciously possess this event or “impossible history,” the traumatized subject is forced into a position of guilt or silence without being fully aware what it feels guilty for.

While paraphrasing Freud from multiple important sources, Caruth develops this

230 definition of trauma further in her book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and

History (1996). Here, she identifies trauma as “the wound of the mind – the breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world – is not like the wound of the body, a simple, healable event” (Caruth 1996, 2). In response to Freud, Caruth formulates her own theory of the “wound” and the “voice.” She argues that despite the inscrutability of the wound, trauma sometimes manifests in a manner that is almost aesthetic or performative. With reference to

Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, wherein the hero Tancred hears the voice of his dead lover

Clorinda speak out from within a tree, Caruth writes that trauma exceeds or circumvents repression by ‘crying’ out “(in) a voice that is paradoxically released through the wound”

(Caruth 1996, 2). Caruth’s use of the word “wound” with reference to trauma is fairly conventional within the psychoanalytic tradition, but in tandem with the word “voice,” it makes for a valuable contribution to Freudian theory. Because the source of trauma in unknown to the subject, so much so that he cannot consciously speak about it, the psychic wound leaks or oozes through flashbacks, dreams, and repetition compulsion. By “crying out” thus, the wound begins to heal over time and the subject is gradually made to come to terms with it. This complex psychoanalytic process never fully returns the traumatized subject to his original stability or sovereignty. The subject has no control over either the repression or recovery of the source of trauma. The event can only be remembered in fragments, symbolic images, and inassimilable or unrepresentable forms. This prompts Sawyer to compare Freud theory of trauma to Lyotard’s notions of incommensurability “I believe the two (trauma and the différend) are inextricably linked to one another through their relationship with Silence, being both the impact and the affect of cataclysmic injury, present in the very absences they intuit (the wounds from which they speak) and ultimately incommensurable with articulation”

(Sawyer 2014, 161).

To bridge the theoretical gap between the two, Sawyer proposes his concept of the

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“traumatic sublime,” which brings together a Freudian (or rather, Caruthian) notion of the wound and the voice with Lyotard’s idea of the “impossible testimony.” Sawyer’s main critique of Lyotard’s theory of le différend is that he is unable to bridge the “disjunction” or silence between the event and the victim because he sees the event as being, above all, incommensurable. Lyotard maintains that the silence of the victim cannot be addressed through any means without being somehow appropriated or nullified. It is Sawyer’s primary ambition to work his way out of this ethical and representational bind by turning to a certain kind of literature that is capable of providing this “impossible testimony.” Through his concept of the “traumatic sublime,” Sawyer rejects the “balanced pleasure/pain synthesis of the traditional sublime” (Sawyer 2014, 171) as well as Lyotard’s proposition of the

“postmodern sublime.” Following more in Freud’s footsteps, Sawyer argues that despite the alleged impossibility of knowing the traumatic event, the victim is defined by a continued struggle to know or comprehend the event. And it is a similar struggle that literature undergoes in its attempts to represent an event. Unlike traditional modes of representation,

Sawyer avers that there is a certain kind of art or literature that may force the reader not to repress but take note of “the unrepresented in the unrepresentable – that which is overlooked even in ‘absent presentation,’ perpetually incomplete. The traumatic sublime is therefore to be understood not simply as a response to the event but more as the recurring event of such a response, attesting to inability itself …” (Sawyer 2014, 173). Sawyer thus attempts to resolve the categorical “impossibility” of representing the event by moving away from law, ethics, and psychoanalysis towards literature.

To substantiate his concept of the “traumatic sublime,” Sawyer examines the contemporary novelist Jonathan Safran Foer’s novels Everything is Illuminated (2002) and

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). He shows how Foer’s portrayal of the trauma associated with the Second World War or 9/11 can “resonate both the resilience of those

232 suffering trauma as well as their overwhelming despair” (Sawyer 2014, 174). Contrasting

Lyotard’s rather tentative and hesitant proposal of a “postmodern sublime,” Sawyer’s notion of the “traumatic sublime” advocates for a “double-negative presentation” (Sawyer 2014,

191), which can actually gesture towards or acknowledge the event. A literature of the

“traumatic sublime” seeks to not provide reparation or restitution for an incommensurable event but to bind the reader and the text together in a collective recognition of an “impossible testimony.” The main thing that Sawyer’s concept of the “traumatic sublime” accomplishes then is to prevent the forgetting of the event – to take an unmourned and forgotten “wrong”

(recall the trauma of Basil’s disappearance in Wilde’s novel) and elevate it to the status of an event with a concrete history. What is restrictive about this logic, however, is that it remains trapped within Lyotard’s insistence on the incommensurable and unrepresentable aspects of the event. Sawyer sees the ethical potential of literary witnessing strictly within “the inability of the differend to deliver any final judgment on the establishment of an ‘ethical standard’ is precisely why it is so ethical” (Sawyer 2014, 68). While Sawyer’s clarification is indeed valuable – that literature is that rare mode of representation that exclusively engages with the incommensurable by disavowing any meta-narratives and produces itself through an “act of communion between artist and audience operating in a space that prohibits legislature and complete control” (Sawyer 2014, 80) – unfortunately, his concept of the “traumatic sublime” remains tied to the silence of the victim.

Sawyer does not take into account the fact that there is a kind of aesthetic witnessing that literature is capable of representing through which the silence of the victim may be pierced, without being appropriated or over-simplified. De Quincey established how Mary’s knock was an irruption that pierced le différend, thus making her presence an actual kink or obstacle for the murderer. Similarly Wilde, by representing how the portrait’s testimony brought about Dorian’s suicide, showed how aesthetic witnessing in literature could be ethical

233 even as it was aesthetic. By remaining within the limits of trauma and the sublime, however,

Sawyer overlooks the fact that the manner with which literature bears witness to an event is a concrete and actively engaged ethical imperative towards reparation. This is because, instead of focusing on the trauma or silence of the victims, literature incorporates pleasure, curiosity, and a sensual gravitation towards the incommensurable – what I have been theorizing as the witness’s arrest. As De Quincey elaborated, it was precisely Mary’s arrest at the door that allowed her to choose between the murderer and the victims beyond the door. Instead of a traumatic debilitation or repression, the arrest imbued her with the ethical obligation to report the crime. To that extent, Sawyer’s concept of the “traumatic sublime” would have done better to focus more on Lyotard’s later work Heidegger et “le juifs” (1988). Sawyer appreciates how literature may bear witness to an incommensurable event only insofar as it can go “beyond the temporal singularity of the event so as to echo the distance between the it, the traumatic event and the attempts at testimony” (Sawyer 2014, 197). But Lyotard’s essay on Heidegger takes the witness-function of literature in a more positive legal and ethical direction.

In a chapter called “Housed Exile,” Sawyer successfully condenses the main premise of

Lyotard’s argument from Heidegger et “le juifs.” But I think that instead of progressing towards Freud and Caruth for his conceptualization of the “traumatic sublime,” it would have done Sawyer’s analysis some good to dwell on Lyotard’s keywords “anesthesia” and

“amnesia”:

Lyotard ultimately views writing as a compound act of resistance and

restrain against a forgetting. While he believes that the Forgotten should

not be used as a weapon, literature as a discourse must bear arms against

the event and the silent concatenation inherent in its ensuing trauma. Most

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importantly however, literature must struggle against itself so as to be able

to convey their magnitude through the failures of its own representation.

Lyotard describes such an action as akin to using ‘anaesthesia to fight

against amnesia’ (HJ, 48). It is an interesting analogy, not least because it

implies a degree of absence from pain. Yet when examined more closely,

neither anaesthesia or amnesia actually annul the presence of pain; rather

they annul its registered effect and in doing so arguably amplify its power

– anaesthesia through a predicated and localised forgetting, amnesia

through an unconscious and repressed forgetting that attempts to conceal

its own absence. (Sawyer 2014, 87-88)

Lyotard clearly delineates here that the “forgetting” of an event is a consequence not of psychic trauma but a conscious, culturally protected and reinforced amnesia. The psychoanalytic tradition reads trauma as a kind of personal or subjective conflict between the event and its recollection. Caruth does, to a certain degree, extend this private drama of repression and memory to collective trauma,14 but even so, her theory of trauma finds it impossible to rupture the silence of the victim. Sawyer also fails to categorically distinguish between Freudian interpolations of trauma and Lyotard’s later concept of “amnesia.” This would explain why he could not break through the impossibility of testimony in his analysis of the literary différend. However, Lyotard’s proposal of an “anesthesia to fight against amnesia” (Lyotard 1990, 48) invests art and literature with the ability to take concrete action against a political or ideologically motivated repression of the facts relating to an event. Even as Sawyer asserts that Lyotard cannot overcome the constitutive unrepresentability of the event in Le Différend, which forces his own argument to fall into the same trap, the philosopher quite emphatically states in Heidegger et “le juifs” that:

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One must concede to art and writing that they cannot escape this

requirement of being new, of “bringing on” something new, because it is

under the cover of this misprision that art and writing - by redirecting the

meaning of “new,” by turning the new, as the always repeated future-

present of the culture market, toward the impossible newness of the more

ancient, always new because always forgotten -can still have an audience

for ears deafened by bustling (ibid., 47-48, 246-47). Art and writing can

make this silence heard, in the noise and by means of it; they can make

this noise, the multiplication and neutralization of words, because it is

already a silence, attest to the other silence, the inaudible one. (Lyotard

1990, 48)

I find Lyotard’s use of the legal term “misprision” and auditory term “noise” significant for my own understanding of the “specular witness” and her arrest in nineteenth-century art and literature.

Lyotard allows the silence of the victim to be shattered by the witness-function of art and literature, while retaining the gravity of its struggle to invent “new” paradigms of representation. Lyotard writes that certain kinds of art and literature have the ability to shatter an ideologically enforced ‘amnesia’ or ‘misprision’ surrounding a traumatic event. The term

‘amnesia’ harks back to Lyotard’s original distinction between a “wrong” and “le différend” – the former gets completely forgotten or silenced since the event abolishes the victim and the witness entirely:

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For the displacement of the tasks of secondary repression onto the

sociocultural apparatuses, this reification, this abjection, reveal in the

emptiness of the soul the sickness that Freud prophesied would increase

with “civilization.” A more “archaic” anxiety, and one that is precisely

resistant to the formation of representations. It is this, and only this,

extreme resistance that can nourish the resistance of contemporary art and

writing to the “everything is possible.” Anesthesia to fight against amnesia

(Lyotard 1990, 48)

Lyotard finds in a certain kind of literature not only the potential to make “noise” or rupture the silence of the victim but also the ability to soothe or temporarily suspend the pain of its narration. Testimony in this case, is certainly not “impossible” but emerges out of that strange confluence of pain and pleasure, aesthetics and abjection; an “anesthesia to counter amnesia.” It is a craving like the craving a drug addict is unwilling to admit but cannot ignore. Lyotard’s concept of the “anesthetic” – particularly in the manner with which it is implicated within the aesthetic – becomes a prism through which art and literature may represent an otherwise violent and incommensurable “event.” Not for nothing was this literature of “anesthesia” born in the dark, narcotic dens of nineteenth-century writers like Coleridge, De Quincey, Baudelaire, and

Wilde ...

Literary Trauma and the Ethics of Censorship

By inventing the figure of the reader as murder witness, De Quincey elevated a traumatic and incommensurable event into a work of art. Because she submits – because she is arrested by the presence of the murderer on the other side of the door – Mary becomes a witness as reader. Her pleasurable and erotic suspension, following from narrowly avoiding the

237 murderer’s blade, becomes a question not of aesthetics – in a traditional Kantian sense of beauty and transcendental aura – but rather, a theory of anaesthetics. As opposed to the hypocritical voyeurism of the reader of detective fiction who relied on an external authority to arrest the criminal, De Quincey brought about the legal arrest of the criminal through the aesthetic arrest of the reader. Like the murder witness, the reader was given the involuntary but inescapable responsibility to become a third-party sponsor for the corpse. The overwhelming leakiness and abjection of the corpse, which is forensically swept clean in detective fiction, is precisely what interpellates the reader to testify against the criminal. This witnessing is accomplished through the very act of viewing or reading “as readers, we are witnesses precisely to these questions we do not own and do not yet understand, but which summon and beseech us from within literary texts” (Felman and Laub 1992, xiii). Shoshana Felman’s critical intervention in law, literature, and psychoanalysis is valuable in this respect. In her book

Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992), co-authored with Dori Laub, Felman reads modern literature in conjunction with incommensurable events to compare the trauma of survivors to the trauma of the reader.

Felman’s main premise for studying works by Camus, Celan, and Dostoevsky among others is to prove that the reader of such literature is appointed like a survivor or murder witness to partake of the trauma of the victim. Felman converts the reader’s trauma or vulnerability at witnessing crime and murder in literature into a sense of moral accountability or ethical obligation. This literary testimony counters the guilt of deriving pleasure from witnessing the death of the Other, as well as puts the reader in a position to negotiate with the writer, how an event may be represented without appropriating the silence of the victim.

Although she constructs the psychology of the reader using the same Freudian model of trauma that Caruth and Sawyer employ, Felman’s experiments with the impact of reading literature deviate from the confines of silence or “impossible testimony.” She commences her theory of

238 literary trauma with a fundamental question “Is the act of reading literary texts itself inherently related to the act of facing horror?” (Felman and Laub 1992, 2). These two categories of witnessing are usually separated by the Kantian distinction between the cultic and the ontic.

Felman, however, makes the important clarification that this epistemological distinction does not imply that literature cannot reproduce the same traumatic effects of facing actual horror.

Like the murder witness, the reader is also traumatized by literature and this trauma manifests first as a shock or arrested state, where the reader is unable to speak about what he has witnessed in the text:

Massive trauma precludes its registration; the observing and recording

mechanisms of the human mind are temporarily knocked out, malfunction.

The victim’s narrative – the very process of bearing witness to a massive

trauma – does indeed begin with someone who testifies to an absence, to

an event that has not yet come into existence, in spite of the overwhelming

and compelling nature of the reality of its occurrence. While historical

evidence to the event which constitutes the trauma may be abundant and

documents in vast supply, the trauma – as a known event and not simply

as an overwhelming shock – has not been truly witnessed yet, not been

taken cognizance of. The emergence of the narrative which is being

listened to – and heard – is, therefore, the process and the place wherein

the cognizance, the “knowing” of the event is given birth to. (Felman and

Laub 1992, 57)

Felman and Laub define trauma as a shock that is unknowable, untranslatable, lost to the rational and interpretive processes of the conscious mind. It is an event that lacks

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“cognizance” and therefore, cannot be narrated.

The main symptom of trauma in the Freudian tradition of psychoanalysis is thus the inability to narrate or speak what has been witnessed. The experience of the event leads to the emotional and psychic disintegration of the murder witness, which in its turn, leads to a disintegration of language. We have already seen examples of this in Margaret Jewell and

John McCarthy and their inability to testify orally at court. Margaret’s traumatic disintegration was so intense in fact, that not only could she not speak at the trial but she actually lost consciousness.15 Felman argues that this disintegration stems from the witness’s

“re-traumatization” or re-experience of the original source of trauma during the process of testimony. But she clarifies (and this is extremely crucial) that the trauma is inscribed within testimony and cannot silence the witness forever. There is another internal force at work – an ethical responsibility, accountability, and imperative to testify against the event – which can break the effects of trauma. Recall how the word ‘witness’ etymologically meant a narrow escape, a near-death experience or almost becoming a corpse. This experience may momentarily paralyze or petrify the witness but it simultaneously intensifies the imperative to speak and seek vengeance and reparation. Felman shows how the reader of certain kinds of modern literature emerges from the “textual encounter somewhat changed” (Felman and

Laub 1992, 39) – feeling anesthetic emotions of suspension and ‘solemnity’ – which resembles the murder witness’s arrest on the crime scene. Therefore, Felman and Laub successfully conflate real trauma with aesthetic trauma. Their comparison of the witness’s

‘inability to tell’ with the reader’s ‘imperative to tell’ acknowledges the struggle of literary representation without offering a simplistic, contrived, or overtly positive solution to trauma.

Instead of inverting the difference between the cultic and the ontic – by calling the reader’s experience traumatic or the murder witness’s experience aesthetic – Felman opts for the more complex legal and theological term ‘testimony.’ It harks back to the dual

240 connotation of the French root témoin – seeing and speaking, which means that there is little theoretical scope for silence or “impossible testimony” here. Felman’s defines testimony the language of trauma or the “literary and discursive mode par excellence of silence”:

The specific task of the literary testimony is, in other words, to open up in

that belated witness, which the reader now historically becomes, in the

imaginative capability of perceiving history – what is happening to others

– on one’s own body, with the power of sight (insight) usually afforded

only by one’s immediate physical involvement. (Felman and Laub 1992,

108)

Admittedly, literary testimony cannot bring back the dead or stand in for what Derrida had identified as “habeas corpse.” But Felman and Laub insist that the reader’s testimony does not repress or memorialize death and violence with an empty nostalgia. Felman defines the witness as the ‘bearer of silence’ as well as a breaker of silence. When a reader encounters trauma in literature, he/she is initially silenced or stunned by it but this silence gradually transforms into an uncontrollable desire, fascination, and obsessive ‘imperative to tell.’ In

Felman’s first essay “Education and Crisis: Or, the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” she describes her pedagogic experience of teaching a course “Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History” at

Yale University in 1984 “I organised my choice of texts around literary, psychoanalytic, and historical accounts, which dramatize in different ways, through different genres and different topics, the accounts of – or testimonies to – a crisis” (Felman and Laub 1992, 7). The students of this course, whom Felman exposed to the traumatic themes and content represented in select literary works, became obsessed with these texts as if the proverbial albatross was hung on their neck.

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Felman observes how the trauma of her students manifested in an uncontrollable desire to speak or talk about the texts even though they didn’t quite know what to say. They became obsessed with determining the exact meaning of these literary texts and why it affected them.

By studying this paradoxical “imperative to tell” and the “inability to tell,” Felman concludes that readers of certain kinds of traumatic literature do not find peace in silence, especially if they decided against sharing or speaking about the event. The event became distorted and more horrific in the witness’s memory if it was repressed “the not-telling of the story serves as a perpetuation of its tyranny” (Felman and Laub 1992, 78). It is interesting to see from

Felman’s research that literature can make the same ethical demand upon the reader as the victim makes upon the murder witness. By appointing the reader as a witness, literature attempts to “decanonize the silence, to desacralize the witness, and in so doing, enact the liberation of testimony from the bondage of the secret” (Felman and Laub 1992, xviii). To return to the case of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, one must ask how a reader may bear witness to the central traumatic event of the text. It is surprising to see how, despite the canonical status of Wilde’s novel, the event has been brushed past in literary criticism almost as if the disappearance of Basil’s corpse resulted in a repressed silence or trauma in the academy. If one follows Felman in her hypothesis, that testimony allows the body to be discovered by the law and for trauma to speak or reveal itself, then it is quite clear that

Basil’s death lacks a valid testimony.

Wilde took great pains to show that the portrait’s traumatic disintegration was not a product of Dorian’s fear-addled or guilty mind. In this respect, Felman and Laub’s phrase

“bondage of the secret” is useful when applied to the portrait’s peculiar testimony. The portrait’s traumatic disintegration is caused by its arrest as a witness – its morbid fascination, curiosity, and addiction to watching Dorian’s covert activities – but this is precisely what allows Wilde to ensure Dorian’s punishment, or legal arrest at the conclusion. With the final

242 unveiling and stabbing of the portrait, the witness is “desacralized” or released from “the bondage of the secret” and brings about Dorian’s death. The burial of a body be it corpse or corpus requires a shroud or veil. Dorian chooses an ornate Bolognese veil, once used as a

“pall for the dead,” to cover the rotting, mortal canvas of his portrait so that none may see its testimony. But Dorian realizes that this is wishful thinking on his part. The veil cannot erase the portrait’s testimony “it would be always alive” (Wilde 2011, 177). There is an obvious

(but rather underrated) link between the moment when Dorian veils his portrait, to protect it from prying eyes of the public and the police, and Wilde’s own veiling of his original 1890 novel with a new cautionary preface. This act of veiling comes with the obvious caveat that the veil is only a cover and may be easily removed or unfurled by a reader willing to delve deeper into the secret ... to go beneath the “surface at his peril.” With the addition of a new preface, Wilde’s revised 1891 version thus draws attention to itself as a site of trauma or repression. Just as trauma pushes the event deeper into the unconscious – from a surface secret to an irretrievable yet constantly oozing and festering wound – one may postulate that

Wilde’s original text was also traumatically buried in the Victorian canon.

The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in July 1890 in the Philadelphia-based journal The Lippincott’s Magazine under the editorship of J.M. Stoddart. The weeks immediately following this saw one the greatest literary scandals of the century. Though

Wilde was pretty explicit about the novel’s moral conclusion, the reaction he received from the Victorian reading public ranged from a traumatic silence to downright moral outrage.

This version of The Picture of Dorian Gray became one of the most heavily critiqued, censored, publicly lambasted and controversial texts of the nineteenth century. Wilde was put on literary trial and accused of promoting sexual perversion, decadence, crime, and degeneration through his portrayal of Dorian Gray. The St. James’s Gazette wrote in its review that the same tale would have been acceptable had it not been Wilde’s handiwork

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“Théophile Gautier could have made it more romantic, entrancing and beautiful. Mr

Stevenson could have made it convincing, humorous, pathetic. Mr Anstey could have made it screamingly funny. It has been reserved for Mr Oscar Wilde to make it dull and nasty” (cited in Wilde 1988, 333). On 5 July 1890, a few days after The Lippincott’s Magazine was circulated in London, The Scots Observer commented that Wilde’s novel “deals with matters fitted only for the Criminal Investigation Department. Mr Wilde has brains, and art, and style, but if he can write for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys, the sooner he takes to tailoring (or some other decent trade) the better for his own reputation and the public morals” (cited in Wilde 1988, 346). The censorious tone of these critics was pre- emptively Nordauvian. Under the guise of aesthetic pedantry and an affronted literary sensibility, these preliminary reviews resemble Felman’s model of the traumatized reader.

But writers like Wilde maintained the categorical distinction between an artist and his work through statements such as “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well-written or badly written, that is all.”

Regardless of whether the first draft of The Picture of Dorian Gray was a ‘moral’ or

‘immoral’ text, it is worth analyzing what the terms ethics and morality meant in the

Victorian age. In the critical reception of Wilde’s novel, the term ‘public morality’ featured repeatedly in lieu of the more familiar philosophical term ‘ethics.’ It was a term idiosyncratic to the nineteenth century and was used mostly in the sense of a positive good or virtue being violated. While ethics dealt with abstract ideal human behaviour specific to a certain context or practice, ‘public morality’ referred to social institutions and power structures that ensured these ideals were maintained. The former is prescriptive, the latter, proscriptive. Rarely therefore, was the question of ethics raised with regard to Victorian literature unless ‘public morality’ had been threatened or breached in some specific manner. For instance, in its critical denunciation of Wilde’s novel, The Scots Observer went on to add “It is false art - for

244 its interest is medico-legal; it is false to human nature - for its hero is a devil; it is false to morality - for it is not made sufficiently clear that the writer does not prefer a course of unnatural iniquity to a life of cleanliness, health and sanity” (Wilde 1988, 346).’ It would not be erroneous to assume then that the word ‘false’ must have had a moral overtone in the

Victorian age. Today, it simply means that which is prosthetic or factually not true. However,

The Scots Observer’s use of the word castigates the novel from a Platonic perspective. Plato had argued in The Republic that all poets and artists must be banished because their works aroused an affective response in the spectator as opposed to rational response. By that logic all art is ‘false’ but The Picture of Dorian Gray was doubly ‘false’ because it dealt with themes that The Scots Observer deemed inappropriate for aesthetic representation. Parallel to this, the word false also encompassed an anxiety about the fluid boundary between reality and representation depicted in Wilde’s novel. Dorian’s immersion into the world of representation via the ontological exchange with his portrait infuses his physical body with an aura that makes him immune to the law. A further etymological connection of falsehood to immorality in the nineteenth century may be seen in the medico-legal persecution of the homosexual. The review’s reference to “outlawed noblemen” and “perverted telegraph boys” clearly shows how the homosexual body was viewed as a product of gender inversion, deception, and dissimulation. Male homosexuality was ‘false’ because it went against the

‘natural’ heteronormative body and required prosthesis, surfaces, artifice, and appearances.

Such cultural anxieties brought an entirely new dimension to the debate on literature, the unrepresentable, and public morality, that is, the medico-legal. We saw how, with the invention of criminology, sexology, and psychology, crime became a moral disease. It was no longer seen as a radical inversion of the theological category of good but an infection or degeneration that could potentially infect the good. The Scots Observer argued that literature’s responsibility was to promote public morality by upholding a rather striking set of

245 goals “cleanliness, health and sanity.” These are not words one would traditionally associate with literature and so censorship became an extension of the medico-legal impulse. No one was more aware of this dialogue between literature, disease, and public morality than Wilde himself. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, before he is a dandy, a ‘homosexual,’ or a murderer,

Dorian Gray is a reader. He spends a large portion of the plot reading French Decadent literature that deal exclusively with themes of crime and transgression. Wilde satirized the pervasive Nordauvian fear that certain kinds of literature were responsible for spreading degeneration and moral corruption. Where The Scots Observer had quipped that The Picture of Dorian Gray was born from the “muck-heap” of French Decadent literature, The Daily

Chronicle maintained that “dulness” (sic) and “dirt” (cited in Wilde 1988, 343) were its main elements. It is evident from the repetition of this moral terminology of civic health and sanitation that murder was demoted from the grandeur of evil to something dirty and infectious that needed to be cleansed from civilization. Censorship became the scourge of these matters by putting on trial writers like Wilde and Baudelaire, whose works were deemed unsavoury, unseemly, and therefore unaesthetic.

The Scots Observer was not alone in accusing Wilde’s novel of being false or immoral.

One of the most scathing critiques of The Picture of Dorian Gray came from the editor of

The Daily Chronicle on 30 June 1890:

It is a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French Decadents – a

poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic

odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction – a gloating study of the mental

and physical corruption of a fresh, fair and golden youth, which might be

fascinating but for its effeminate frivolity, its studied insincerity, its

theatrical cynicism, its tawdry mysticism, its flippant philosophisings, and

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the contaminating trail of garish vulgarity … (cited in Wilde 1988, 343)

Note the critic’s use of the word “leprous” and the multiple synonyms of disease and epidemic such as “spawned,” “poisonous,” “putrefaction,” “mephitic” and “contaminating.”

Here, the word “leprous” brings to mind Michel Foucault’s images of madness in his celebrated 1961 text Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique. Foucault shows that before the nineteenth century, madmen were treated like lepers and relegated to the borders of society and civilisation. They were marooned on islands, confined in a leprosarium, or ultimately cast out to sea. A presiding image from Foucault’s history is the ship of fools or stultifera navis from Heironymus Bosch’s 1499 painting. For Foucault, the ship of fools was an institutional means to remove the contagion of leprosy from its site within civilisation. Foucault writes that lepers themselves disappeared towards the end of the

Middle Ages but leprosy remained a defining symbol of something kept at a “sacred distance” or fixed in an “inverse exaltation” (Foucault 2009, 4). It is probably with the same intention to cast out or abject Wilde’s novel from the Victorian canon that The Daily Chronicle employs the word “leprous.” It claimed that the literature of the French Decadents was “leprous” because of the immoral influence it had on the reader. The review anxiously sought to protect and safeguard the Victorian reader from such a baleful and degenerative influence. In such harsh reviews one may find conclusive evidence of what Victorian reader understood immoral literature to be. If the source of cultural infection lay in France, then what The Daily

Chronicle found most threatening about Wilde’s novel was that it was a carrier or vector of that infection. Wilde had finally transported French Decadence onto the respectable shores of

Victorian England.

From the first typescript of the novel that he received, Stoddart removed all explicit references to French Decadence, particularly to J.K. Huysmans’s novella À Rebours (1884).

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Like its protagonist Des Esseintes, Dorian engages in a life of unbridled pleasure and criminal excess, but with one important difference. Des Esseintes spends a significant length of

Huysmans’s text recovering from the impact of his unnatural acts. He is perpetually sick, cloistered in his boudoir, and suffers the medico-legal consequences of pursuing a decadent life. He fears polished surfaces that show him the degeneration of his body. But Dorian does not fear mirrors and instead, surrounds himself with them. Since his portrait bears the ethical burden of his crimes, Dorian feels exempt from the stigmata of crime. Ironically, the portrait brings about his suicide and retribution not by reflecting his degeneration back to him, but by testifying against his specific crimes. In that case, The Picture of Dorian Gray is not “false art because its interest is medico-legal,” as The Scots Observer claimed. It is “false art” precisely because it disavows the “medico-legal.” Wilde believed that literature was distinctive in its ability to elect the reader as an agent involved in the event that it struggles to represent, rather than being a passive or palliated recipient. A novel could possess and thereby, dispossess the reader. Lord Henry ruefully observes “there is no such thing as good influence, Mr Gray. All influence is immoral, immoral from the scientific point of view” (Wilde 2011, 94).

Like “leprous,” the word influence also has an etymological connection to disease. It shares the same root as the word influenza and it is no wonder that metaphors of infection, insemination, and invasion dominate not only the moral reviews of Wilde’s novel, but abound in the text itself. It was widely held that a reader of the novel, particularly a young impressionable man like Dorian Gray, could be vulnerable to the same kind of “moral and spiritual putrefaction” if exposed to it. Copies of The Picture of Dorian Gray were taken down from the stands in a desperate attempt to prevent the moral infection or degeneracy from spreading. Since Dorian had “been poisoned by a book” (Wilde 2011, 210), the act of reading literature was not a passive, leisurely act but a dangerous or ‘perilous’ encounter.

Confronted with the equally unviable options of discarding his novel or confining its

248 circulation to a coterie of readers, Wilde settled for revising the Lippincott’s version in the fall of 1890. The next year, Wilde submitted a revised draft to the Ward, Lock and Company with significant changes (Fig. 4):

Following the debate over art and morality in the press, Wilde then set to

work revising his novel with the intention of publishing a longer version as

a separate volume. Although he removed further vestige of the homoerotic

innuendo found in the manuscripts, he also did what he could to suppress

the “too obvious” morals he called it. He did so in part by adding six new

chapters, further developing the social criticism, introducing the revenge

motif of James Vane, and placing a greater emphasis upon Dorian’s

increasingly gothic consciousness. The formula worked so well that the

revised version did not produce anything like the sensation of the serial text,

although it did receive greater critical acclaim. (Wilde 1988, viii)

From being a text that faced the threat of extinction and repression, Wilde’s novel refashioned itself into the canonical version that is still read. The original manuscript, however, has passed into oblivion. It is currently being held at the Morgan Library and Museum at New York, certainly beyond the reach of the common reader. Donald Lawler made the first attempt to place the 1890 and 1891 versions of the novel in the context of their censorship in his Norton variorum edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray; Authoritative Texts; Backgrounds, Reviews and Reactions, Criticism (1988). Lawler’s contribution is extremely important as he draws attention to the minute differences between the two texts. But it was only as recently as 2011 that the censored and repressed corpse of the original text seeped back into reading circles.

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Figure 4: Autograph Manuscript of Chapter Five that introduces James Vane The Morgan Library and Museum, New York, MA 3149, Accessed 24 July 2017

Nicholas Frankel obtained the typescript that Wilde had submitted to Lippincott’s, prior to Stoddart’s edits, and compiled it as an Annotated and Uncensored Edition. The publication of this far more “daring and scandalous version” (Wilde and Frankel 38) allows

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Frankel to bear witness to the ‘murder’ and burial of Wilde’s original novel. Like a detective hot on the trail of a lost body, Frankel resurrects a text that would have otherwise, like Basil

Hallward’s corpse, disappeared without a trace. Even the title of his version alerts an amateur reader that there was an original text that had been censored. Of the two versions that exist of

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde’s original text is the source of cultural trauma. The disappearance of Basil’s corpse is situated at the very centre of this plot thus allowing the reader to give the murder its due solemnity and seriousness. This particular version needed to be repressed in order to be recovered, and it could not possibly have been published in its original form. Its theme was far too traumatic for Victorian readers so recently ‘wounded’ by the Whitechapel murders of 1888. Much as a murder witness could be a kink or obstacle in the felicitious enactment of the crime, Wilde’s Victorian critics firmly stood between his celebrity status as a writer and his ‘false’ representation of an incommensurable event. With respect to censorship and the ethical obligation of the reader thus, Jonathan Dollimore writes

“In the most imaginative writing, the wounding reality seeps back into the forms which would formally beautify, rationalize, contain, exclude, or transcend it, and the substitution for the real becomes no more or less than its indirect representation, its defended, half-recognition”

(Dollimore 2001, 161). This is how the “wounding reality” of Basil’s murder has seeped back into the Victorian canon with Frankel’s annotated version.

In his book Sex, Literature and Censorship (2001), Dollimore avers “To take art seriously – to recognize its potential – must be to recognize that there might be reasonable grounds for wanting to control it” (Dollimore 2001, 97). By this logic, the most ‘serious’ readers of The Picture of Dorian Gray were the very critics who wanted to censor it.

Dollimore studies the category of ‘public morality’ over something as abstract as ‘ethics’ because it discursively produces that which it identifies as ‘immoral.’ In the case of The

Picture of Dorian Gray, when critics called the novel ‘leprous’ or ‘contaminating’ to warn the

251 reader – they ironically directed the reader’s attention to Wilde’s affiliation to the French

Decadents – a fact that Stoddart had initially tried to repress. Dollimore insists that studying a literary or aesthetic text through the history of its censorship can be a powerful way to examine its transgressive potential as a work of art. Dollimore in fact, asserts that the study of censorship should not be disregarded or devalued simply because it offends liberal modern sensibilities. Censorship, as the vanguard of ‘public morality,’ does not necessarily stem from conservatism. Through an experience of literary trauma or abjection, the reader of such transgressive literature bears witness to an unrepresentable or incommensurable violence within his culture. Dollimore notes that “civilization is inseparable from censorship of all kinds, and most people, civilized or otherwise, are in favor of censoring something”

(Dollimore xii). How and why a text is censored can thus, be revelatory about the norms and morals upheld by that culture. Censorship must therefore be studied not only from a historicist or materialist point of view, but also from the aesthetic point of view to determine how a writer may revise a traumatic text. Even Wilde’s career recognized his aesthetic battle with

Victorian society and its moral boundaries.

In a recent public lecture titled “Literature and Vulnerability: Writers on Trial,”16

Felman focused specifically on the censorship of The Picture of Dorian Gray and Wilde’s incarceration in 1895 for promoting degeneracy, obscenity, moral corruption, and homosexuality. Here, she developed her theory of the tramatized reader in a more concretely legal and ethical direction. Felman’s leading question in this seminar – “what is the role of art and literature as the willing or unwilling legal actors and as political performers in the struggle over ethics and the struggle over meaning” – is a more complex articulation of her preliminary enquiry in Testimony “what is the relation between literature and testimony, between the writer and the witness?” Felman has shifted her critical attention onto Wilde, as he was a rare literary figure who took the witness stand in person. In his post-prison letters

252 that were posthumously published as De Profundis (1905), Wilde confessed “What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion.

Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both.”17 His legal defence against the libellous charge of homosexuality18 culminated in an ‘aesthetic’ defence of the ‘Art for Art’s

Sake.’ In this stimulating seminar, Felman delved deep into the intricacies of Wilde’s trial and the battle between the medico-legal discourse and the aesthetic discourse that was played out between him and Edward Carson, the lead prosecutor.

What Felman found most striking about Wilde’s trial was that in the absence of any evidence of his homosexuality – bar a few incriminating letters intercepted from renters and male prostitutes – Carson sought to discursively produce this evidence by studying passages from The Picture of Dorian Gray. Much of the exchange between Wilde and Carson during the trial was based on Carson’s close reading of the novel. Wilde must have experienced a sense of déjà vu during his criminal trials, having already been subjected to such a prolonged literary trial by Victorian newspapers and critics in the summer of 1890. Felman’s interpretation of Wilde’s legal trial is useful to study the intersection between law and literature, crime and aesthetics, and trauma and testimony that emerged in the nineteenth century. Above all, the censorship of his novel bore witness to a larger cultural crisis brewing at the turn of the century whereby modernity became defined by the perverse, the violent, the abject, and the incommensurable. Censorship could quarantine the bourgeois reader from what it identifies as ‘immoral’ literature. If Wilde managed to circumvent this censorship by revising his original manuscript for Ward, Lock, and Co., it is because he was able to redress the reader’s “re-traumatization” with his own re-aestheticization. One of the most memorable statements that he made in De Profundis (1905) was “The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.”19

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Notes

1 The epigraph is from Jean François Lyotard’s Heidegger and the Jews (Minnesota:

University of Minnesota Press 1990), 47.

2 The original quote from the Magna Carta is “No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor will we send upon him except upon the lawful judgement of his peers or the law of the land.” It can be accessed at “A brief history of habeas corpus,” BBC News, 9 March 2005.

3 Jacques Derrida, Cinders, trans. Ned Lukacher (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press

2014).

4 Macbeth Act V Scene I: 20—Here’s the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh! http://www.online-literature.com/shakespeare/macbeth/

5 Wilde had initially offered the editor J. M. Stoddart his short story “The Fisherman and his

Soul,” but it was rejected because he felt it was unsuited for an adult audience. The fairy tale, which dealt with a lowly fisherman who sells his soul to the devil in order to live with a mermaid he falls in love with, was eventually published as part of the collection The Happy

Prince and Other Tales.

6 Oxford English Dictionary Online: witness n.

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with a witness: with clear evidence, without a doubt, ‘with a vengeance’, ‘and no mistake’.

Obs. or rare arch.

1816 W. Hazlitt Polit. Ess. (1819) 103 Here's a levelling rogue for you! The world turned inside out, with a witness!

1829 Scott Anne of Geierstein II. xi. 334 To every other person about her she plays countess and baroness with a witness.

1849 G. Cupples Green Hand (1856) x. 90 At midnight, it blew great guns, with a witness.

7 In a 1967 essay titled “La mort de l’auteur,” Roland Barthes argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of a text, and instead establishes that the actual writing and its creator are unrelated.

8 Refer to http://www.artlyst.com/previews/jan-van-eycks-arnolfini-portrait-pre-raphaelite- brotherhood-new-exhibition/

9 Henceforth, I will refer to the symbolic role performed by the murder witness using only the female pronoun. This is to designate a moral and ontological difference from the

‘masculine’ subjectivity generally attributed to the mourner or survivor in nineteenth-century

Western literature and culture, who experiences death by proxy as a sublime, voyeuristic or vicarious pleasure when gazing upon the generally ‘feminized’, passive, and objectified corpse.

10 Oxford English Dictionary Online: witness

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Etymology: Old English witnes, more frequently gewitnes, < (ge)wit wit n., i-wit n. + -nes - ness suffix. Compare Old High German giwiȥnessi, Middle Dutch wetenisse. The passage in sense from abstract to concrete is paralleled in French témoin (< Latin testimonium ).

I. 1. Knowledge, understanding, wisdom. Obs

1433 Rolls of Parl. V. 435/1 The connyng and witnes that resten in his persone.

2. a. Attestation of a fact, event, or statement; testimony, evidence; †evidence given in a court of justice.

1866 Duke of Argyll Reign of Law vii. 360 Nature is called as a witness, and then the witness she gives is condemned.

1870 J. R. Lowell My Study Windows 11 There is the most trustworthy witness to the imitative propensity of this bird.

1881 B. Jowett tr. Thucydides Hist. Peloponnesian War I. 7 Agamemnon...if the witness of

Homer be accepted, brought the greatest number of ships himself.

b. The action or condition of being an observer of an event. Obs.

c. Applied to the inward testimony of the conscience; after 2 Cor. i. 12.

a1616 Shakespeare Merry Wives of Windsor (1623) iv. ii. 193 May we with...the witnesse of a good conscience, pursue him with any further reuenge

†d. In some versions of the Bible: = testimony n. 4.

1530 Bible (Tyndale) Exod. xxxviii. f. lxxiv This is the summe of the habitacyon of witnesse.

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1530 Bible (Tyndale) Exod. xxxviii. f. lxxii The tabernacle of witnesse.

1535 Bible (Coverdale) 2 Kings xi. 12 He..set a crowne vpon his heade, and toke the witnes, and made him kynge.

3. Testimony by signature, oath, etc. Chiefly in phr. in (rarely †into) witness of, witness hereof, witness whereof, etc.

1658 Sir R. Hutton's Yng. Clerks Guide (ed. 8) i. 240 In witnesse whereof I have hereunto set my hand and seal.

1871 E. A. Freeman Hist. Norman Conquest IV. xvii. 27 The land was received as a fresh grant, which needed the writ and seal of King William as its witness.

4. a. One who gives evidence in relation to matters of fact under inquiry; spec. one who gives or is legally qualified to give evidence upon oath or affirmation in a court of justice or judicial inquiry. hostile witness, one who gives evidence adverse to the party by whom he is called.

‘ultroneous’ witness,

1651 T. Hobbes Leviathan ii. xxvi. 146 A Judge…ought to take notice of the Fact, from none but the Witnesses.

1885 M. E. Braddon Wyllard's Weird ‘You can show that to the Coroner,’ he said; ‘of course, you will be a witness.’ ‘About the only one necessary, I should think’, said the doctor. ‘I saw her fall.’

5. a. One who is called on, selected, or appointed to be present at a transaction, so as to be able to testify to its having taken place: spec. one who is present at the execution of a

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document and subscribes it in attestation thereof; more definitely, attesting or subscribing witness.

Often in formulæ corresponding to medieval Latin teste me ipso, teste rege, his testibus, etc.,

Anglo-Norman tesmoin…

†b. A sponsor or godparent at baptism. Obs. orig. in Puritan use.

6. a. One who is or was present and is able to testify from personal observation; one present as a spectator or auditor. (Cf. ear-witness n., eyewitness n.) Usually with of, occasionally to.

1795 W. Paley View Evidences Christianity (ed. 3) II. ii. ix. 247 It was the credit given to original witnesses, appealing for the truth of their accounts to what themselves had seen and heard.

1811 J. Austen Sense & Sensibility II. xiii. 248 Before such witnesses he dared not say half what he really felt.

1824 W. Irving Tales of Traveller II. ii. viii. 12 I will endeavour to act as if she were witness of my actions.

1854 J. S. C. Abbott Napoleon (1855) I. xxiii. 367 I have been twenty times witness to the singular effect, which the sound of a bell had upon Napoleon.

b. In asseverative formulæ, in which a deity or a human being is invoked as one who is cognizant of a fact; as God is my witness, be my witness that... Most often in phr. to call or take to (†one's) witness: to call upon or appeal to as one’s surety; to swear by.

a1616 Shakespeare Merry Wives of Windsor (1623) iv. ii. 12 Heauen be my witnesse you doe.

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1667 Milton Paradise Lost i. 635 For me, be witness all the Host of Heav'n, If counsels different, or danger shun'd By me, have lost our hopes.

1700 Dryden tr. Boccaccio Sigismonda & Guiscardo in Fables 138 That I have lov'd, I own; that still I love, I call to Witness all the Pow’rs above.

1833 H. Martineau Loom & Lugger ii. i. 3 He had so often emphatically taken his neighbours to witness that he was weaving.

1841 Dickens Old Curiosity Shop i. xxv. 232 The tall boy…called those about him to witness that he had only shouted in a whisper.

†c. Referring to, usually introducing, the designation of an authority for a statement.

7. a. fig. Something that furnishes evidence or proof of the thing or fact mentioned; an evidential mark or sign, a token. a1616 Shakespeare Henry V (1623) iv. iii. 98 Vpon the which [graves], I trust Shall witnesse liue in Brasse of this dayes worke.

1656 Earl of Monmouth tr. T. Boccalini Ragguagli di Parnasso (1674) ii. xxii. 170 [He bade them] remove away that unfortunate Witness of their ingratitude from the eyes of the World.

1815 Scott Guy Mannering III. xii. 245 Now wipe these witnesses from your eyes.

1860 N. Hawthorne Transformation II. xix. 218 Italian asseverations… however true they may chance to be, have no witness of their truth in the faces of those who utter them.

b. Introducing a name, designation, phrase, or clause denoting a person or thing that furnishes evidence of the fact or exemplifies the statement. Also as witness, and, in early use,

†witness on. (After Latin teste…, French témoin…)

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c. spec. In textual criticism, a manuscript or an early version which is regarded as evidence of authority for the text. (Usually in pl.)

d. Technical uses (see quots.; cf. French témoin).

1802 C. James New Mil. Dict. Witnesses. In fortification. (See Temoins.) [Temoins, Fr. In civil and military architecture, are pieces of earth left standing as marks or witnesses in the fosses or places, which the workmen are emptying, that they may know... how many cubical fathoms of earth have been carried.]

1825 ‘J. Nicholson’ Operative Mechanic 763 If any silver be produced it must be deducted from the assay. This is called the witness.

1880 J. W. Zaehnsdorf Art of Bookbinding Gloss. Witness, when a volume is cut so as to show that it has not been so cut down, but that some of the leaves have still rough edges.

These uncut leaves are called ‘Witness’.

8. a. One who testifies for Christ or the Christian faith, esp. by death; a martyr. Obs. exc. as literal rendering of Greek μάρτυς martyr n.

The reference in Rev. xi. 3 is much disputed; see, e.g., Vigouroux Dict. de la Bible at

Témoins. b. = Jehovah's Witness at Jehovah n. 2 orig. U.S.

9. a. in witness: as a testimony or piece of evidence.

†b. to stand in witness: to act as a witness. Sc. Obs.

10. to bear witness: (said properly of a person, a book, etc.) to give oral or written testimony or evidence; hence fig. to furnish or constitute evidence or proof; to testify, witness to

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(occasionally of). to bear (one) witness: to corroborate one’s statement or be a witness of one's action. (Cf. ON. bera vitni, Old French porter temoin.)

†11. to take witness by or of: to take example by.

†12. to bring witness, teem witness (teem v.1) to witness: to bring under examination. Obs.

†13. to take witness of: to call or take to witness (see 6b); to appeal to as an authority or source of information. Obs.

14. with a witness: with clear evidence, without a doubt, ‘with a vengeance’, ‘and no mistake’. Obs. or rare arch.

1816 W. Hazlitt Polit. Ess. (1819) 103 Here's a levelling rogue for you! The world turned inside out, with a witness!

1829 Scott Anne of Geierstein II. xi. 334 To every other person about her she plays countess and baroness with a witness.

1849 G. Cupples Green Hand (1856) x. 90 At midnight, it blew great guns, with a witness.

11 Refer to Chapter 2 “Corpses in Bloom” for a lengthier analysis of Baudelaire’s “Une

Charogne.”

12. Ibid. d. Technical uses (see quots.; cf. French témoin).

1802 C. James New Mil. Dict. Witnesses. In fortification. (See Temoins.) [Temoins, Fr. In civil and military architecture, are pieces of earth left standing as marks or witnesses in the fosses or places which the workmen are emptying, that they may know..how many cubical fathoms of earth have been carried.]

1825 ‘J. Nicholson’ Operative Mechanic 763 If any silver be produced it must be deducted from the assay. This is called the witness.

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1880 J. W. Zaehnsdorf Art of Bookbinding Gloss. Witness, when a volume is cut so as to show that it has not been so cut down, but that some of the leaves have still rough edges.

These uncut leaves are called ‘Witness’.

13 Ibid.

14 It is worth investigating how ‘trauma,’ a psychoanalytic term that implies an individual or intensely subjective reaction to a shocking or painful event, may be applied in a wider sense to mean the collective experience of a culture or community? Kai Erikson’s contribution to

Caruth’s volume Trauma: Explorations in Memory is useful in this regard. With respect to survivors of a violent or incommensurable event like the Holocaust Erikson writes

“sometimes the tissues of community can be damaged in much the same way as the tissues of mind and body”. This would mean that “traumatic wounds inflicted on individuals can combine to create a mood, an ethos – a group culture, almost – that is different from (and more than) the sum of the private wounds that make it up. Trauma, that is, has a social dimension.” (Caruth 1991, 185). In such a case, the entire community of survivors experiences symptoms similar to the deep shock, amnesia, psychic distortion and inexpressibility of individual trauma “the moment becomes a season, the event becomes a condition,” to quote Erikson. This produces a somewhat paradoxical community of survivors whose kinship is based on a shared, spiritual experience of pain, estrangement, and loneliness. Erikson argues that, unlike the immediacy of trauma’s shock and repression in an individual’s psyche, collective or historical trauma has a more gradual, everyday quality to it.

15 To this mix, one may add another historical instance of the vulnerable witness provided by

Shoshana Felman in her book The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the

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Twentieth Century (2002). As is evident from the title, Felman moves away from her early work on nineteenth-century French literature, madness, and Freudian psychoanalysis to the relatively more contemporary instance of Holocaust trauma and vulnerability. Here, she examines those rare moments when the violence committed upon the Other is so overwhelming, inexplicable and unspeakable that it defeats the historical impulse to record, narrate, bookkeep, or represent the event in any conventional manner. She argues how in such cases, law and literature must suspend epistemological specificities to come together and reciprocally narrate the event. Since her critical focus was originally on la chose littéraire or the ‘literary thing’ Felman avows “Literature emerges from the very tension between law and trauma as a compelling, existential, correlative yet differential dimension of meaning” (Felman 2002, 8). In her essay, “A Ghost in the House of Justice: Death and the

Language of the Law” (139-168), she delves deep into a particular moment in the Eichmann trial, when a writer who went by the pen-name ‘K-Zetnik’ was brought in to testify against

Eichmann, but fainted during his testimony. He had to be taken to the hospital and remained in a paralytic stroke for a while following the trial. His experience of Auschwitz was so abject and traumatic, and when he saw Eichmann in court and was compelled by the legal process to convey in rational verbal terms his experience of the Holocaust, he could not remain a rational, sovereign and legal subject. His act of fainting indicates his ‘re- traumatization’. Felman writes, “K-Zetnik faints because he cannot be interpellated at this moment by his legal name, Dinoor: the dead still claim him as their witness, as K-Zetnik who belongs to them and is still one of them. The court reclaims him as its witness, as Dinoor. He cannot bridge the gap between the two names and the two claims. He plunges into the abyss between the different planets. On the frontier between the living and the dead, between the present and the past, he falls as though he were himself a corpse” (Felman 2002, 149).

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16 This public lecture was organised by The School of Criticism and Theory and delivered on

19th June 2017 at 4:00 pm, at the Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall, Cornell

University, Ithaca, New York.

17 Cited from Wilde’s prison letters to Lord Alfred Douglas that were later published as De

Profundis. Oscar Wilde, “Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculus,” The Complete Works of Oscar

Wilde Vol. 2 De Profundis, Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculus, ed. Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford

University Press 2005), 95.

18 For more details on Wilde’s legal trials and the transcripts, read Hyde, H. Montgomery.

The Trials of Oscar Wilde. New York: Dover, 1973. Print.

19 Wilde De Profundis, 168.

Conclusion

Notes from a Defence

This dissertation was successfully defended on 9 May 2018, in the presence of the supervisory committee comprising of Jonathan Bordo, Yves Thomas, James Penney, and

Suzanne Bailey at Trent University. The session was chaired by Veronica Hollinger, and

Elana Gomel, Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Tel-Aviv University, joined as the external examiner. Summarized below are the important highlights of the discussion and the ideas generated from it, many of which will be invaluable for the future development of this project.

E.G. – Your discussion on the ethics and aesthetics of murder with respect to The Picture of

Dorian Gray was brilliant but incomplete insofar as the question of genre. The novel differs from detective fiction because it belongs to the genre of the fantastic, the gothic, or the supernatural. What can you say about the relationship between the aesthetics of murder and fantasy as a genre?

A.P. – The question of genre is dealt with mainly in the first two chapters that analyze how murder was aestheticized in the nineteenth-century through Romanticism, French Decadence, and la belle mort, all of which displayed elements of fantasy. Baudelaire, Lautréamont, De

Quincey, Huysmans, Cézanne, and Sickert (among others) invented new genres to represent the otherwise fantastic and inscrutable aspects of violence. I consciously chose not to delimit

The Picture of Dorian Gray within a particular genre because Wilde heavily ironicized its gothic and fantastic elements. Fantasy as a genre relies almost exclusively on catharsis and older retributive models of justice. The gothic transforms transgression into monstrosity and

265 does not rest until it is abjected or purged at the end. The Picture of Dorian Gray, however, goes beyond these generic restrictions and reveals the cracks in psychology, power, heteronormative patriarchy, religion, and justice. Through his ironic deployment of fantasy and the fairy tale, Wilde critiqued their overtly moralistic structures. The novel belonged to no existing genres as such, but produced an entirely new genre in the nineteenth-century that I refer to as aesthetic witnessing. This was perhaps why its readers were so disturbed or baffled by it. Critics like Joseph Bristow call it a gothic or supernatural text, with reference to

Dorian’s interaction with his portrait, but I think that these generic definitions reduce the legal, criminological, and ethical polyvalence of how the portrait functions.

E.G. – Indeed, The Picture of Dorian Gray depicts a kind of “aesthetic witnessing” that arises out of the abjection of the body; what you call “corpses in bloom.” You use Shoshana

Felman’s work quite appropriately to talk about the trauma of the reader at encountering the body. There is trauma in Basil’s reaction to the portrait’s transformation, but absent from

Dorian who slowly becomes desensitized to the corruption of his own body. Does this kind of desensitization have any bearing on us as consumers of violence today? Has the resurgence of this Victorian “aesthetics of murder” in neo-Victorian and postmodern adaptations made

Dorian Grays of us, so much so, that we are attracted only to violence?

A.P. – When I began writing the dissertation, I thought that the crimes that were deemed exceptional, gratuitous, incommensurable, excessively violent or abject for the Victorian age no longer affected us in the same way. Take for instance, how easy it is to access and gaze upon Mary Kelly’s crime scene photograph online. Even when it makes an appearance in the final season of Ripper Street, the producers of the BBC show assume that the ordinary viewer is familiar with these crime scenes. But this does not mean that the traumas of the Victorian

266 age have healed. We are still invested in finding out who Jack the Ripper was although the question itself is now irrelevant. Felman talks about the constant “re-traumatization” of the reader that manifests is an endless curiosity, fascination, or obsession with an incommensurable event. I discovered this “re-traumatization” in Patricia Cornwell’s book on the Ripper. Her desire to catch the Ripper centuries after the murders reveals an empathy for the victims and traumatic identification with their plight. This trauma grounds her allegations against Sickert and her moral aim to censor and destroy his works. His paintings “re- traumatized” her so much that she had them removed from her house. It proves that Sickert’s aesthetics of murder in the early 1900s has not lost its shock effect today. It also shows how it is not important to determine who the Ripper was but to remember what he did to those bodies. As I progressed through Jonathan Dollimore’s theory of censorship, I also realized that every age has its own Dorian Gray. We appear desensitized to violence in comparison to the Victorian reader, but we have our own abject literature that wounds and traumatizes us.

There will never be a culture without moral censorship of some sort because the abject will always be defined by its capacity to wound, subvert, nauseate, and complicate our relationship with law, order, and ethics.

J.B. – Sitting within the domain of the picture as witness is a question that your work has compelled me to confront – what is ‘art’ and is it, by that ontological declaration, exempt from the ‘law’? The way the whole machinery of the law works is to divide the aesthetic from the legal and autonomy from obligation. You show how Wilde was trying to stay ahead of his time by using the legal to produce the aesthetic to create a new discourse that may be called the ‘legal-aesthetic.’ Could you elaborate on how you use Wilde to penetrate and resolve that unstable violent zone between law and literature? How does it enable you to produce your version of what you call “aesthetic witnessing” or literary testimony?

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A.P. – In my discussion on the reader-as-witness, I conclude that no work of art is exempt from the law. The Picture of Dorian Gray as a novel actually produces the law (in a

Foucauldian sense). The only distinction that Wilde enforced was that the parameters for judging art must be different from the parameters for judging crime. This was of course, his response to Nordau and other prominent juridico-legal detractors of the ‘Art for Art’s Sake.’

Many of the keywords that came up in the course of my writing also resisted the hierarchical binary between the legal and the aesthetic. The etymology of “Mal” for example, revealed that it was a prefix for legal terms like “malfaiteur” as well as literary movements like

Romanticism “le mal du siècle.” The legal and the aesthetic remained in a productive and reciprocal relationship. This is what prompted me to speculate that the testamental and archival role of the portrait in The Picture of Dorian Gray was perhaps a combination of the two. Once again, Felman’s commendable work on testimony is useful. When I met her at the summer session organized by the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, we had a fascinating discussion on The Picture of Dorian Gray as her research is currently moving towards Wilde and his criminal trials of 1895. Where once she had examined how the reader’s trauma forced him to take a stand or testify against a certain kind of literature, she is now turning her attention to Wilde and he how he took the stand to defend his work.

I foresee my own work on the nineteenth-century aesthetics of murder to be headed in the same direction. In his post-prison work De Profundis, Wilde invented himself as a new modern subject in whom all three tropes of this dissertation collapse – the body (the homosexual), the criminal (the pervert), and the witness (the writer on trial). Wilde was singled out by the ‘law’ because his ‘aesthetic’ philosophy did not conform to the existing

‘moral’ standards. Felman is interested in the legal details of his trials and how Wilde took the witness stand himself. I deviate from Felman’s project by focusing on how writers and artists

268 overcome the repression and bowdlerization of their work. I firmly believe that censorship is the domain where the legal and the aesthetic coalesce. Only by studying how a particular culture censors a particular text, one may determine what exactly it considers “dirty”

(Douglas), “abject” (Kristeva), or “transgressive” (Dollimore). By probing what readers find offensive or morally corrupting, the writer may undertake the process of re-aestheticization. A subversive work of art is thus a product of both “re-traumatization” and re-aestheticization.

J.B. – There are two registers at work here; one is law and testimony, and the other has to do with the text and the connoissieur. Lyotard’s theory of the différend belongs mainly to the former and has very little to do with art and literature. I was unconvinced by your use of the différend via Dylan Sawyer’s book. What is so striking about Wilde is that he is already sitting on both sides of the fence. You mention chapter nine of The Picture of Dorian Gray – one of the most unreadable chapters of the novel – where Wilde educates his protagonist in the tenets of the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ through an exegesis of Huysmans. Conversely in De

Profundis, he educates himself in the violent aspects of the law that forced his aesthetic philosophy into hiding. He comes to repudiate the very dandyism that he programmatically propogates in The Picture of Dorian Gray. There is a double here between the ‘real’ – what things are and what they can do – versus ‘representation’ – how something can stand for something else. How do you gather this antinomy together or strike a “rapprochement” between these two registers, unlike Sawyer who tries to fit Lyotard’s legal concept where it doesn’t belong.

A.P. – Wilde did not “repudiate” his dandyism and aesthetic philosophy in De Profundis. He heightened its moral and spiritual aspects so that he could legally exonerate himself. Instead of looking at law and literature as “antinomies” or opposed registers, it is worth defining the

269 word representation as both legal and aesthetic. The portrait in The Picture of Dorian Gray is, to be sure, an aesthetic representation of Dorian Gray’s body. But it also represents his body in a legal and testamental sense through its mortal canvas. Additionally, the portrait represents

Wilde’s implied reader as it “goes beneath the surface” at its own “peril.” The reader is appointed as a representative of the law and bears witness against the violence embedded in this text. Hence, representation can be both proxy and portrait. De Profundis is interesting because the notion of the writer martyring himself for his work also brings the legal and the aesthetic domains together. It involves a very ‘real’ sacrifice and negotiation between two seemingly irreconcilable forces. I agree that Sawyer’s use of Lyotard is limited since it tries to subsume the legal to the aesthetic. His book would have done infinitely better by using

Heidegger et le juifs as its central theoretical text because Lyotard himself brings together law and literature here. Lyotard writes that the violence of the Holocaust cannot be known legally because there are no survivors or witnesses. It can only be known through a certain kind of writer – Freud, Benjamin, and Kafka – who develops a language to speak about that most irremediable, traumatic, and unrepresentable “event” of our times. These writers provide the necessary “anaesthesia to counter amnesia,” or a pleasurable numbing and relief that can penetrate the state-sponsored repression of a genocide. Felman also approaches holocaust trauma through the works of Camus and Celan, and Kristeva approaches abjection through

Céline. It was my intention to do the same through Wilde and De Quincey.

Y.T. – In the nineteenth-century aesthetics of crime, the work of the French Revolution is there. It is coded in all the cultural traumas, moral assumptions, and conflicts that you navigate through. The Revolution unleashed a kind of violence in a trans-European way that had never been seen before. It had a tremendous impact on the way that poetry was conceived, novels were written, and avant-garde art was produced. What is marvellous about

270 your work is how you theoretically dwell on De Quincey and connect him to Sade and

Lacenaire on the one hand, and Kant and Burke on the other. You also create a rich dialogue between De Quincey – a post-Revolution Romantic writer – and Wilde, who is a post-

Victorian writer. Moving forward from the Revolution, how do you bridge the hundred years separating Wilde and De Quincey and their respective ideas about murder and aesthetics?

How does the synchronicity you create, happen?

A.P. – The “Postscript” to De Quincey’s essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine

Arts” was published in 1854. The first version of The Picture of Dorian Gray came out in

1890. The historical gap between the two is about fifty years. Wilde was certainly influenced by De Quincey and mentions his romanticization of the criminal in his 1885 essay “Pen,

Pencil and Poison.” Through Romantics writers like De Quincey and Baudelaire, Wilde could conceive of the Victorian writer as an outsider, dandy, addict, or abject creature that subverted social norms from the margins. By connecting Wilde to De Quincey, it was not my intention to appear as if I am evading chronology or making a historical leap. My section on De

Quincey is deliberately called a digression. In the discourse of the aesthetics of murder, it is quite difficult to historicize and separate these avant-garde movements as they often bleed into one another. The etymology of the word “influence” is relevant here. Its semantic roots in contagion and disease reveal how widespread, trans-historical, and universal these ideas were.

I don’t think I am creating this “synchronicity” as much as merely drawing attention to it.

Wilde is frequently linked to Baudelaire and Huysmans, or Nietzsche and Joyce, but rarely to

De Quincey. I wanted to highlight the influence that De Quincey’s work on murder and aesthetics had on Wilde and the ‘Art for Art’s Sake.’

With respect to the impact of the French Revolution, I agree that it was the “event” that progenited many of the cultural traumas and paranoias of the nineteenth century. Edmund

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Burke singles it out as a consummate instance of the “sublime.” I chose to follow De Quincey rather than Burke. In his aestheticization of the murder of the Marrs, De Quincey also dealt with fear, terror, and dread and the affects that Burke collated into an experience of the

“sublime.” He also mixed curiosity or fascination with terror and abjection, and like Burke, proved how they fed into one another. There is, however, a crucial distinction between Burke and De Quincey. For the former, the experience of the “sublime” was completely dependent on the safety of the spectator. It required a great physical and psychological distance from the

“event.” Without this distance, there was no scope for the pleasurable or cathartic relief. My ethical reservation against this ‘safe’ distance is that it engendered the fetishistic, masculinist, and voyeuristic gaze that ran amok in la belle mort. Even death could be made beautiful if it was not one’s own. Burke’s emphasis on distance and safety was also a cultural symptom of the English rejection of the French Revolution; its unprecedented violence was admirable only from a distance. De Quincey produced the effect of the “sublime” by collapsing this safe distance. What I found absolutely fascinating about his representation of Marr’s murder was how he separated the witness Margaret Jewell (and by extension, his reader) from the murderer only by a door. He depicted them breathing on either side of this thin barrier – each a threat to the other. This proximity to danger as opposed to distance and safety was precisely what produced an ethical obligation in the witness.

Y.T. – I’d like to bring in another actor or “witness” who is not being considered at all in this dissertation; Arthur Rimbaud. He is not a Romantic or a Decadent, but is quite important to these discussions on ethics and aesthetics. His detachment from the literary production of the

1870s in Une Saison en enfer is evident where he bids “adieu” to France, and subsequently moves to Abyssinia to become a weapons dealer. “Adieu” concludes with a mandate to writers “il faut absolutement pas moderne.” In a letter that he writes to Mallarme in 1897,

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Rimbaud addresses himself as ‘Arthur Rimbaud, the author’ in an ironic or distanced way. By comparison, isn’t Wilde the ultimate ‘anti-modern’ writer because he could not accept that it is the very notion of authorship and autonomy that should be on trial. Rimbaud sacrifices his name so that authorship may be deconstructed. But Wilde willingly went to prison to retain his title and autonomy as an author. He needed that title so much so that he was even willing to revise his novel based on its public reception. Doesn’t that make him anti-modern in the sense that Rimbaud illustrates in “Adieu”? This is not necessarily a negative charge as the battle between the Classicists and the Modernists existed in the intellectual circles of nineteenth-century England and France. Merely that Wilde is anti-modern in how he looked upon literature rather retrospectively so that he could restore the ‘aristocracy’ of the author.

A.P. – I draw attention to this very tussle for authorship when I delve into the revisions that

Wilde made to The Picture of Dorian Gray. The cover of this edition had the title of the novel and the name of the author. The first page stated “A Novel by Oscar Wilde.” Then came the preface that Wilde signed off with his name in block letters. I analyze this repetition of his authorial name using van Eyck’s painting and Panofsky’s theory of the artist as a legal witness. Admittedly, Wilde started his career as a Victorian or what you call an “anti-modern” writer. His desire to protect his authorship and autonomy came from the ‘Art for Art’s Sake,’ which had many “aristocratic” and Classicist impulses inscribed within it. But Wilde’s allegiance to the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ and its “anti-modern” notions shifted significantly after his trials and imprisonment. De Profundis was actually a long confessional letter addressed to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas that Wilde never intended to publish. Its original title –

“Epistola incarcere et vinculis” – exhibited the Latinate esotericism that Modernists like T.S.

Eliot would popularize. Here, he deconstructed and denigrated his position as an author in a manner reminiscent of Rimbaud. In another major post-prison work “The Ballad of Reading

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Gaol,” Wilde realized that it was not his exceptionality that mattered but how his plight was the same as so many others. He accepted his new social status as a ‘criminal’ and cast himself, like Rimbaud, in the role of the Other. From a writer who believed that he “stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age,” Wilde began to see the age itself as a symbol for violence, inequality, and repression. In an almost Foucauldian manner, Wilde critiqued the juridico-legal discourses and that had produced his life and came down hard on the State and

Prison. Unfortunately, Wilde died shortly after this rather modern or anti-establishmentarian turn in his aesthetics. He also bid “Adieu” to Victorian London and exiled himself to Paris.

He died there anonymously in 1900, not as the ‘great’ Oscar Wilde, but under the wonderfully ironic and suggestive alias Sebastian Melmoth.

J.P. – You bring up Foucault but I got the impression that your notion of censorship and trauma is pre-Foucauldian, in that you consider it to be a kind of negative thing that tries to repress subversive texts and discourses. Foucault’s work in the 70’s leading up to The History of Sexuality completely upturned that notion and showed how power and censorship are positive or ‘productive’ forces in society; an “incitement to discourse.” This is germane in this particular context because much of his theorization of the “repressive hypothesis” was anchored in the Victorian age. I think your argument on censorship would benefit greatly from adopting this more contemporary ‘productive’ approach to power.

A.P. – I don’t think that my take on censorship stresses only on its negative or repressive aspects. My third chapter, in fact, shows how the censorious reader actually “produced” the draft of The Picture of Dorian Gray that we read today. The novel would have been lost to time had it not faced such a scandal. I argue that the Victorian reader had just as much to do with the literary production of this text as its ‘author.’ The ethical obligation that grounds

274 censorship is not a simple manifestation of conservatism, but emerges from the reader’s trauma of encountering the body, the abject, and the transgressive in aesthetic representation.

By comparing the two versions of The Picture of Dorian Gray, I draw attention to a moment in the nineteenth century where two allegedly opposed discourses were competing, that is, the legal and the aesthetic. Foucault shows the same battle of discourses in I, Pierre Rivière between the lawyers and criminologists that indict Pierre Rivière’s versus his own ‘aesthetic’ narrative of the murder. My first chapter on Jack the Ripper also looks at the “productive” aspects of sex and power through which, despite the overwhelming lack of evidence, avant- garde artists like Sickert were accused of being criminals and degenerates. The sheer number of books that Cornwell has written on this subject reveals her “incitement to discourse.”

I also conceptually separate the term ‘ethics’ from ‘public morality.’ The former is

“productive” of culture whereas the latter operates in what you call a “pre-Foucauldian” negative, repressive or juridico-legal manner. While the power dynamic behind what constitutes as the ‘ethical’ remains abstract or invisible, ‘moral’ norms and expectations reveal the cracks within it and make this power visible. I use Dollimore’s materialist and historicist approach to censorship, which derives from both Raymond Williams and Foucault.

He explicates how a reader can partake in the process of aesthetic production through censorship. Kristeva and Douglas also argue that there is no a priori category of the

‘aesthetic’ or the ‘abject,’ but that censorship “produces” them. In all the three case studies I attempt – Sickert, Mary Kelly, and Wilde – I show that there was nothing essentially abject about their bodies (corpse or corpus) but that the threat was created entirely through moral discourses. I’d also like to mention a wonderful essay that Elana wrote earlier in her career called “The Poetics of Censorship” in which she states that “violence is not a contagion” or something that emanates from society sui generis. It is a specific subversion of the very power structures that categorically “produce” its status as a contagion.

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J.P. – Why is the reader obliged to testify against a literary text? Doesn’t the text give the reader the freedom from obligation and allow him to feel pleasure? From a psychoanalytic point of view, the parallel that comes to my mind is of the relationship that the analyst has to the analysand. Lacan insists upon the very rigid rule of a suspension of judgement, which is similar to how De Quincey shows literature to be a field where judgement is temporarily suspended or “arrested.” This suspension has a technical application so that the “transference” may be managed. With that in mind, let me invite you to think about whether the reader’s pleasure and detachment isn’t lost in this commitment to censorship?

A.P. – This somewhat archaic and Horatian insistence on pleasure and delight was admittedly the main obstacle that stood in my theorization of the reader-as-witness. I do not want to take pleasure out of the equation at all but I think it is necessary to qualify the pleasure one derives from graphic representations of violence. Taken to its extreme, pleasure culminates in the distanced, masculinist, fetishistic, voyeuristic emotions that Baudelaire critiques in “La

Corde” and “Une Charogne.” Pleasure reduces the object of representation to a mere body and the reader or spectator to a consumer. In my theory of the witness under arrest, I reveal how pleasure and pain are equally inscribed within the aesthetic experience of violence. Pleasure hypnotizes or paralyses the witness on the crime scene, pain forces her to feel death by proxy and flee to call the authorities. Her pleasurable or erotic ‘arrest’ combined with the shock or pain of a cardiac ‘arrest’ culminates in the legal ‘arrest’ of the perpetrator. This explains the seemingly paradoxical nature of the reader or spectator’s attraction to graphic representations of violence. I also invoke Kristeva’s theory of abjection to define this pleasure-pain principle.

On the surface, it may appear as if my theory of the traumatized reader – who needs to testify against a subversive text – resurrects the very moral structures I am trying to critique. I

276 am not, however, asserting that the reader needs to testify against a subversive text to satisfy some conservative or repressive urge. The reader cannot prevent himself or herself from doing so because after the pleasure, comes the pain … after the “inability to speak” comes the

“imperative to speak.” This is the ethical nature of literary trauma, which ironically emerges from pleasure. Felman exposed a sample of students in her classroom to works by Camus,

Celan, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and Holocaust testimonies – what she considered to be the subversive or traumatic texts of our age. She saw that her students reacted to these texts like trauma victims simply by reading them. They were reduced to babbling and incoherency but could not prevent themselves from speaking or obsessing about them. There was a deep level of pleasure or attraction to the violence represented in them, but also a confusing, debilitating pain, nausea, horror. I found the same reaction in Wilde’s Victorian readers and censorious critics who testified against his novel. Basically, silence, detachment, or indifference was impossible for them.

S.B. – Could you comment on the role that visual realism plays in aesthetic depictions of the corpse, particularly on how you bring together the otherwise disparate styles and politics of

Millais, Sickert, and Courbet? In the paradox of realism, there is a real grey area, aporia, or dividing line between the ‘real’ and ‘representation’ that really highlights the tension between ethics and aesthetics.

A.P. – Allow me to quote from Wilde’s preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray “The nineteenth-century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his face in a glass. The nineteenth-century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his face in a glass.” This is a compelling way to think about the paradox of realism in the nineteenth century. Realism claimed to represent monstrosity and abjection as it is, and therefore

277 appeared “dirty” or like “slum art,” misogynistic, fetishistic, pathological and immoral to its critics. Romanticism, on the other hand, fed the “fantasy of dying alive” or dying beautifully so much so that death was no longer abject and became a ‘consummation most devoutly to be wished’ for. Millais’s Ophelia does precisely that; although she has drowned, Ophelia’s corpse shows no forensic or ‘realistic’ signs of bloating or distension and even the flowers in her hand have barely floated away. In comparison, Sickert and Courbet’s vision of the murdered female nude produced the apotropaic or abject response in the viewer. I argue that it is the Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite tradition in art that ironically feeds the voyeurism and moral hypocrisy of the age. It allows you to look at the body by cleaning it, dressing it up, and objectifying it. But Sickert and Courbet’s realism forces the spectator to look away from the body and instead upon the harsh and unequal social environment that gave birth to this violence. This apotropaic gesture is necessary as it produces the ethical obligation in the spectator, which I elaborate in my third chapter on the witness.

S.B. – How do the three tropes that you delineate – the murderer, corpe, and witness – come together? Could you summarize your overarching contribution to the field?

A.P. – I am not the first to look for key tropes of the nineteenth-century aesthetics of murder.

As early as in 1938, Walter Benjamin wrote in his essay “Paris of the Second Empire in

Baudelaire” that although Baudelaire composed no detective stories, Les Fleurs du mal had three decisive elements as disjecta membra – the victim and the crime scene in “Une

Martyre,” the murderer in “Le Vin de l’assassin, and the masses in “Le Crépuscule du soir.”

In 1991, Joel Black also mapped the aesthetics of murder similarly but used the word

“witness” instead of Benjamin’s materialist term “masses.” Black was the first to draw attention to De Quincey’s “Postscript” and how it connected the reader to the murder witness.

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He also discussed the hand of Lacenaire alongside The Picture of Dorian Gray. There’s Lisa

Downing’s work on gender and serial killing, which was deeply influential for my chapter on the Ripper’s victims. A lot of extremely original and valuable research gave rise to my work.

There was the tendency in these texts, however, to focus on only one of the three tropes. In fact, the moral semantics of the acte gratuit overwhelms the field so much so that almost any book on the aesthetics of murder begins with Lacenaire and ends with Jack the Ripper. Joel

Black, Lisa Downing, Ellen O’Brien, Judith Flanders and Patricia Cornwell deal exclusively on the trope of the ‘murderer as artist.’ But I also wanted to draw attention to Philippe Ariès and Elisabeth Bronfen’s books that are centered on the corpse. Black dedicates a small section of The Aesthetics of Murder to the witness and Dylan Sawyer connects law and literature through the trauma of the reader, but both remain restricted to the traditional Burkian sublime.

I have yet to discover a critic who covers the ground from all these perspectives without subsuming one trope to the other.

In my dissertation, I wanted to show how all three tropes – ‘murder as artist,’ ‘corpses in bloom,’ and ‘witness under arrest’ – interacted in The Picture of Dorian Gray. The novel allowed me to carry forward my vindication of Walter Sickert to my feminist critique of Jack the Ripper’s crime scenes and how these bodies came to be produced as “abject” in art and culture, and finally to how the body dictates the evidentiary and ethical paradigms of Anglo-

Saxon law. Through the murderer, corpse, and witness, I conducted a minute cross-section analysis of the major cultural traumas of this age. They come together in the missing body of

Basil Hallward, but also deviate and bring up ethical questions in their own way. There is a reciprocity as well as distinctness to the tropes. This is not to say that I was trying to create my own metanarrative or smooth picture of all that was transpiring in the nineteenth century. I was mostly uncomfortable with the way that critics insisted on separating “aesthetic astonishment” from “moral outrage,” the “sublime” from the “beautiful,” and pleasure from

279 trauma. Even Felman, who so expertly fuses law and literature together, is interested in studying Wilde’s trials primarily with a legal or archival investment. I was surprised that she did not turn to The Picture of Dorian Gray in her seminar at Cornell University, in which the legal and aesthetic merge so skillfully. Wilde’s novel allowed me to not only question ethics from an aesthetic point of view but to develop my own theory of aesthetics that completely required, relied upon, and revived an ethical awareness.

Bringing together Wilde and De Quincey was essential. Through the former, I could define the status of the work of art and through the latter I could designate the witness- function. If the reader was not a voyeur, a connoisseur, a proxy, or a passive receipient of these graphic representations of violence, then what was he? What was the source of the reader’s obsession with a certain kind of art or literature that did its very best to shock, horrify, repel, and nauseate? I found the prelimary answer to these questions in De Quincey, who elaborated how an audience watching Duncan’s murder in Macbeth experienced the same “effect of solemnity” that the murder witness at Marr’s murder had felt outside the door.

I began to wonder if the reader or spectator of these extreme representations of violence experienced all the affects that a murder witness felt on the crime scene, might he not react to this violence in a similar manner? Might he not come forward and testify? How can a reader bear witness to violence like a murder witness?

This brought me to discussions on trauma and psychoanalysis, which I connected to contemporary reader-response theory. I came to dwell upon the Kantian ‘aesthetic’ and the

Lyotardian ‘anaesthetic’ and concluded that they were not oppositional or antinomian, but rather in an analogical relation to one another. Just as Kant wanted to find a language to talk about evil, pain, horror, and the unrepresentable and how these aspects of our lives may be represented in a work of art, Lyotard spoke of literature as providing the necessary emollient or anesthetic for violence Here, the term ‘anesthetic’ was being used in a seemingly

280 conventional sense; as something that renders the recipient numb, insensible and in a passive state. But in Lyotard’s phrase “anesthesia to counter amnesia,” I understood that this insensibility was only temporary so that the recipient could prepare for the shock impact of the violent, the incommensurable, the evil, and the unrepresentable he was about to confront through a subversive text. Anesthesia was both pleasurable and providential in this case. This was a striking idea and I built my theory of the arrest from here. De Quincey showed how the murder witness’s arrested state at the crime scene and her erotic attraction to its extreme violence allowed her to comprehend its enormity in diagnostic detail and present the evidence in a formal retrospective testimony that brought about the perpetrator’s legal arrest. Similarly,

I argued that the reader’s attraction to graphic representations of violence and momentary sympathy with the psyche of the criminal was not unethical, but in fact, produced the ethical obligation. The arrest comes from both pain and pleasure; the former seeks reparation and redressal while the latter produces a sort of guilt that W.H. Auden was clever enough to identify in his addiction to detective fiction. With my theory of the reader-as-witness, it becomes possible to effect a rapprochement between ethics and aesthetics.

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