Women, Crime and Language

Women, Crime and Language Frances Gray Women, Crime and Language Also by Frances Gray JOHN ARDEN NOEL COWARD WOMEN A...

Author: Frances Gray

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Women, Crime and Language Frances Gray

Women, Crime and Language

Also by Frances Gray JOHN ARDEN NOEL COWARD WOMEN AND LAUGHTER

Women, Crime and Language Frances Gray Senior Lecturer in English Literature University of Sheffield, UK

Consultant Editor: Jo Campling

© Frances Gray 2003 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–1683–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Gray, Frances (Frances B.) Women, crime and language / Frances Gray; consultant editor, Jo Campling. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–1683–7 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Women in literature. 3. English literature—20th century—History and criticism. 4. American literature—History and criticism. 5. Women and literature— Great Britain. 6. Women and literature—United States. 7. Female offenders in literature. 8. English language—Style. 9. Criminals in literature. 10. Sex role in literature. 11. Crime in literature. I. Title. PR468.W6G73 2003 820.9⬘352042––dc21 2003045604 10 12

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Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction in Four Scenes

1

1

Condemned Woman

20

2

Guilty Victims

41

3

Speaking Victims

61

4

Survivor Stories

83

5

Picture of Infamy

104

6

Nanny State

126

7

Cruel Mother

147

8

Writing the Dead

169

Afterword

189

Notes

201

Bibliography

203

Index

209

vii

Acknowledgements This book would not have been written without the students of the Women, Crime and Justice seminar of the English Literature Department at Sheffield University. Their lively interest and willingness to explore the themes developed here have made them an incomparable sounding board. My colleagues have provided a constant stream of crime novels; some of these directly influenced these pages, some just kept me entertained, and I am deeply grateful for both. Sarah Daniels took considerable trouble to provide me with the manuscript of Blow Your House Down. I benefited from the insights at several conferences where I first tested out material in some of these chapters; special thanks to Nickianne Moody as the powerhouse behind the Association for Research into Popular Fictions, and to the organizers of the Women Writing Between the Wars Conference at St John’s College, Oxford. It is rare to have an opportunity to work as playwright as well as scholar on the same text and I would like to thank all those concerned with Spoken in Darkness at the Liverpool Playhouse: Anne Imbrie and Joel Stillman of Spanky Pictures for their generosity in allowing us the rights, Mike Bonsall for his energy and enterprise in getting the project off the ground, and Dominic Druce and the cast and crew for bringing it to life. This has at times been a very difficult book to write and my son has tolerated a house full of distressing material with his usual patience and charm.

viii

Introduction in Four Scenes

Scene one: the legitimate stage and the tragic hero In December 1907 the tranquil spectacle of a West End production was disrupted by a piece of Rough Theatre: the entrance of Mrs Beerbohm Tree proclaiming, ‘I have just come from the Court, the Court where young Robert Wood stood in peril of his life. I am glad to be able to tell you that the jury found him not guilty. . . I was one of those who burst into tears, others burst into cheers which were taken up, echoed and re-echoed by thousands on the streets’ (Hogarth 1954: 211). It was only logical that the climax of the Camden Town Murder Case should be framed by a proscenium arch and articulated with such carefully crafted rhetoric, because it had throughout embodied all the excitements of the Edwardian theatre. Basil Hogarth praises the final speech for the defence by Sir Edward Marshall Hall, acknowledged star of the Old Bailey, in the tones of a first-night critic: In architectonic structure Marshall Hall himself never improved on it. There was not a question that had not its appropriate answer, not a doubt but had its resolution on a perfect cadence. (1954: 211) The theatrical luminaries packing the public galleries of the Central Criminal Court – Henry Irving, Oscar Asche, AEW Mason, Seymour Hicks and Arthur Wing Pinero – would have given their eye teeth for such a review. The potent attraction of the trial lay precisely in the way it contained all the ingredients deployed in that staple treat for the turnof-the-century bourgeoisie, the Well Made Play. There was a dashing young hero with Bohemian, artistic leanings – Robert Wood was a designer at a glass works and a protegé of William Morris. There were 1

2


sexual secrets and a compromising letter (a postcard, anyway) which Wood had written to the victim, Emily Dimmock, shortly before she was found with her throat cut. There was even a tantalizing whiff of the continent and the social-issue plays of Ibsen and Brieux which in censored England could only be performed in private; for Emily Dimmock, like Shaw’s Mrs Warren, had preferred prostitution to domestic service or slaving in a factory. This hint of subversion, however, was never allowed to predominate. The prevailing discourse in which the case was constructed endorsed the sexual doublethink of plays such as Pinero’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray, which permitted men to walk away from their sexual histories but demanded the death or humiliation of the woman with a ‘past’. Wood’s original attempt to deny that he had ever known Dimmock was constructed as a ‘natural’ attempt to cover up a young man’s peccadillo rather than a signifier of dishonesty. Forty years later Hogarth was able to step outside the ‘well-made’ construct to offer a cooler judgement on the ‘lies’ told by Wood, pointing out that, although probably correct, the verdict had been ideologically determined by ‘the surrounding elements of prejudice which the atmosphere and temper of the epoch necessarily breed’ (1954: 214). From his account it is possible to imagine a different kind of narrative, one about the silencing of women. Wood had persuaded his former lover, an artist’s model called Ruby Young, to give him an alibi. (With more verisimilitude than sensitivity he located it in the Phit-Eesi shoe shop where they used to meet.) When Young reluctantly testified to his untruth, her motives were assumed to be mercenary – the News of the World had offered a substantial reward for information – and once it became clear that she was sexually active it was not difficult for the defence to demolish her character. To avoid being attacked by the angry pro-Wood crowd Young had to erase her very identity and leave the Old Bailey disguised as a charwoman. This inscription of the values of the well made play on her body anticipate the treatment of Dimmock herself in one of the first works of imagination to spring out of the case, the so-called Camden Town Murder Series painted by Walter Sickert. Dimmock lies naked on a bed, a man (client?) beside her slumping as if ashamed. Her face is turned away, and seems almost featureless. We cannot see what she is like, what she thinks, even whether she is alive or dead. She bears silent witness not to the injustice of her fate but to the criminal status of her profession. Ninety years on Toni Morrison writes: The symbolic language that emanates from unforeseen events supplies media with the raw material from which a narrative emerges – already

Introduction in Four Scenes 3

scripted, fully spectacularized and riveting in its gazeability. . . . Underneath the commodified story (of violence, sex, race, etc.) is a cultural one. . . . The spectacle is the narrative, the narrative is spectacularized and both monopolise appearance and social reality. Interested only in developing itself, the spectacle is immune to correction. (1997: xvii) Morrison is discussing the trial of footballer and film star OJ Simpson for the murder of his wife, which received saturation coverage in the media (every moment could be seen on live television) and drew thousands of tourists to Los Angeles. Most could not hope to be accommodated in the public gallery, but still desired the walk-on roles of the ‘thousands on the streets’ responding to the verdict as part of the spectacle themselves. As the criminal trial with the verdict ‘not guilty’ gave way to a civil suit that found Simpson liable, the media liked to describe their continuing obsession with the case as a ‘search for the truth’. However, this ‘truth’ involved the construction of characters geared to a highly specific narrative. Tim King has correlated the crimes committed over a fortnight in 26 different police districts in the UK with patterns of reportage. While some received only brief attention in the media, others came to prominence because police specifically asked for publicity, while those linked to topics already identified by the newspapers as boosting sales received the most extensive coverage (Guardian 15 April 1995). As King points out, over the last fifty years the representation of crime in both America and the UK has undergone a shift of focus. While in the first half of the twentieth century the prime topic of discussion was the nature of the murderer, at its close, the personality of the victim determined the amount and style of media attention. In particular, the topos of ‘the destruction of dreams’ – the deaths of the young, the rich, or the beautiful – draws saturation coverage. The inevitable lack-lustre TV miniseries narrating Simpson’s rise and fall bears this out. The events were easily mapped onto the grid of an American soap opera: man in glamorous industry encounters beautiful but insecure woman from the other side of the tracks; together they enact scenes of domestic violence against a backdrop of conspicuous consumption demonstrating that money cannot buy happiness. The shape of their story showed OJ and Nicole as ‘doomed’. It was easy to graft onto it a series of assumptions about race and sexual violence. As Patricia Williams shows, newspaper photographs of Simpson at the time of the trial were darkened, while cheesecake pictures of his wife Nicole, taken months before the killing, were doctored to show bruises Simpson had allegedly given her (Morrison 1997).

4


We sometimes speak of the process of spectacularization as both uniquely contemporary and beyond our control. Joel Black, for instance, suggests that once an event has been ‘mediated’ by saturation press and television coverage, it ‘enters into the same quasi-fictional, hyperreal domain of all artistic representation and mis-representation’ (1991: 10). The implication, especially coupled with Black’s assertion that ‘our experience of murder and other forms of violence is primarily aesthetic, rather than moral, physical, natural, or whatever term we choose as a synonym for the word real’ (1991: 3), seems to be that we should relax and enjoy the post-modern inevitable. The trial of Robert Wood, however, suggests that the process by which a crime is selected and spectacularized is neither new nor simple. The ‘quasi-fictional’ narrative framework, of male innocence vindicated catches the imagination of Mrs Beerbohm Tree; she sees herself as a passive consumer of the spectacle, ‘one of those who burst into tears’. But her entrance, with a line Pinero might have used for a second-act curtain, develops the spectacle. It adds a new strand of judgement on Young and Dimmock, a fresh silencing by a voice of female authority reinforcing the all-male judicial process. It is a strand perhaps derived from her own interaction with fiction: Mrs Tree was a noted Portia in a period that valued Shakespeare’s heroine as champion of aristocratic Gentile orthodoxy rather than as dissident woman disrupting the justice system. The applause in that theatre in 1907 was a response to a complex situation in which ideology and aesthetic enjoyment, spectacle and narrative, audience and directors, cannot easily be disentangled, even with the hindsight of ninety years. The last decades of the twentieth century, however, offer more evident opportunities to interrogate the process of spectacularization; for it is only when a powerful sense exists that the process has already overstepped the mark that the moral questions posed by Toni Morrison tend to be raised in the public domain. The behaviour of the British press in 1994, for example, in the weeks following the arrest of the multiple murderer Frederick West and his wife Rosemary, caused widely expressed revulsion. When West committed suicide the News of the World organized a clandestine relocation of the coffin in an attempt to preserve their monopoly of the funeral photographs. Reporters gave children eggs to throw at the van conveying Rosemary West from Dursley Magistrate’s Court while the process of her committal was still unfinished. Major witnesses were paid for their stories by the Sun, Mirror, and Star before they testified, as Brian Masters has shown (1996: 202). The language in which a trial could be conducted was irretrievably corrupted by media clichés placed into the mouths of witnesses, and the real defendant


replaced by a fictional figure demanding a simplified response. For, given the acts of which Rosemary West clearly was guilty, her acquittal on a murder charge would have been anti-climactic in terms of the tabloid narrative even if the outcome was still a life sentence. At the same time, however, there is an increasing awareness of this process, and an attempt to ‘correct the spectacle’ is almost built into the spectacle itself. Morrison maintains that the agenda for the spectacularized event has already been set, and that it is only possible to expose or criticize the process rather than meeting it on new terms. I would argue, however, that while the academically oriented deconstruction Morrison performs in Birth of a Nation ’hood and the populist approach of Brian Masters in She Must Have Known may have had limited direct impact upon the cases they analyze, they also operate in a more complex way. Both have planted markers on a boundary between crime fiction and narratives about real crime; it is an increasingly fragile, sometimes invisible boundary, and one of which we are fully aware only when it is forcibly and inappropriately violated. We are all, consciously or not, aware of the shape of the criminal trial as entertainment. Its mixture of formal rules for the encounter between protagonists and antagonists and free-flowing suspense as to the outcome parallels television’s other staple, the football match, and in 1991 the Courtroom Television Network in the United States began broadcasting round the clock. Any criminal case featured prominently in the news will produce a best-selling book. With additional biographical information to supplement the economical dramaturgy of the trial, it develops ‘characters’ we have come to know, turning the experience of learning about the crime into that of reading a novel. It may be unashamedly band-waggoning (I have just come across a volume called Coroner to the Stars) or present itself as art in the tradition begun by Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. (Gordon Burn’s book on the Wests, Happy Like Murderers, comes with a cover by Damien Hirst as if to stress its legitimacy as cultural artefact.) Nor is it uncommon for a writer to construct a fiction which eerily seems to anticipate events. Val McDermid’s novel The Mermaids Singing, for example, contains a troubled preface: It’s always disturbing when life seems to imitate art. I started planning this book in the spring of 1992, long before the killings that shook the gay community in London. I sincerely hope that there is nothing in these pages that will cause grief or offence to anyone. (1995: v)

6


In 2000, a television adaptation of Ruth Rendell’s novel Harm Done was broadcast a year after its publication. It painfully mirrored news footage of violent action by tenants on a council estate in Paulsgrove, Portsmouth, over the residency of a convicted paedophile in close proximity to family homes. The timing of these publications makes it plain that these texts are not the kind of causal model advocates of censorship have often hypothesized, but are, rather, responses to a zeitgeist with their own position on the boundary. Given Rendell’s status as Labour peer and McDermid’s preoccupation with gay and socialist-feminist issues in all her novels, they could be seen as attempts to ‘correct’ a spectacle almost prior to its own visibility. The complex nature of the boundary is perhaps a major reason for our interest in narratives of crime. For Foucault, the nineteenth century broadsheets of murder, simultaneously individualized and stylized, offered a strategy whereby people without power could interrogate their own location in the web of power operations: Murder is where history and crime intersect . . . murder prowls the confines of the law, on one side or the other, above or below it; it frequents power, sometimes against and sometimes with it. The narrative of murder settles into this dangerous area; it provides the communication between interdict and subjection, anonymity and heroism. (1978: 205) Foucault, however, ignores the discomfort we feel in owning to our interest – what Wendy Lesser, one of the few writers to get to grips with that discomfort, calls the sleaze factor, the guilt you experience in buying a book with the name of the latest serial killer on the cover: Part of the problem, I have come to feel, is that one can never get at the thing itself. That is the fascination of murder as a subject, and why it lends itself to all kinds of renderings, from the true-life to the highly artful. It is also what makes murder so difficult to write about . . . murder is an inherently frustrating subject because it keeps moving away from us, evading us. We want to ask big questions. Yet all we can get at, finally, are the details. That’s why the enjoyment of murder (if enjoyment doesn’t seem too heartless a word here) always consists of wallowing in the gory details. The details are all we can grasp. (1993: 15)


For crime is not only a political, but also an existential and personal issue. Details make us into voyeurs, the possessors of an invasive intimate knowledge. Details also prevent us from losing sight of the individuality of the victim, forbidding kneejerk generalizations about people who do not share our race or class or gender. Details feed the imagination, and through it we cease to be merely passive consumers of a spectacle and construct our own narratives. These may be as clichéridden, inaccurate, and prejudiced as those offered by the media, or they may bring to light bitter evidence of the power of spectacularization. Details simultaneously, in short, obfuscate and correct the spectacle, sell it and prevent its commodification. While both Foucault and Lesser afford murder a special status, I would argue that within the last thirty years or so the spectacularized narrative of crime has tended to include issues of gender as well or instead of the act of murder. Domestic violence, rape, and child abuse are woven into the texture of those ‘big questions’ which have enlarged themselves to interrogate not just the taking of life but assault upon its value and dignity. These questions would not, I think, have been afforded such prominence without the rise of the women’s movement, although the process of spectacularization seems all too often a reaction against everything the movement stood for. However, it does seem to me that an exploration of the border between true crime and fictionalized crime is most necessary, and potentially fruitful, if it is a gendered enquiry, and throughout this book I will be looking at the relationships between the various discourses of crime and women: how women are represented as victims and as criminals in fiction and in true-crime narratives and reportage, and how they have represented themselves. First, I wish to examine their relationship to the discourses of power surrounding not simply the act of murder but questions of the value of life and the fact of death: and I will begin by shifting the scene to Staithes at the close of the 1970s.

Scene two: the women of Staithes and the right to discourse David Clarke’s Between Pulpit and Pew (1982) is an examination of a community in flux, on the point of abandoning a rich vein of tradition. Once women in the Yorkshire village of Staithes were responsible for structuring the processes which accompanied the close of any life. They took charge of the clothing of a corpse and its viewing by the family in farewell. One was chosen to act as ‘bidder’ to summon the members of each household to the funeral so that the life of the departed in the community might be acknowledged. Others acted as coffin bearers;

8


some organized a ceremonial meal which was eaten in several different houses. After the funeral the same women marked the end of the first stage of mourning, uncovering windows and mirrors to emphasize the emergence of the bereaved into the community with a changed status. By the 1970s the practice had largely died out. As one of the women told Clarke, ‘Now the Co-op has it all – tea, flowers, box – he’ll put it in the paper and everything’ (1982: 128). Professionalization made the management of mourning into a male preserve. It closed up one of the last avenues which had never forbidden women’s entry into the fields of discourse surrounding the dead. The Church denied them the priesthood that conducted the soul to heaven. Medicine not only excluded them but usurped the skills they brought to midwifery and the care of the dying, replacing the deathbed, on which the dying could sum up and interpret their lives, with a hospital bed under medical supervision. Women could neither make nor practice Law. They were, of course, subject to it; but the pioneers of criminology constructed them in such a way as to preclude the possibility of a female criminal discourse of the political and moral complexity delineated above by Foucault. Whether the criminal’s relationship with the law is constructed as heroic dissidence or selfish violence, he is assumed to have an adult responsibility for it, while for Lombroso in his groundbreaking study of female criminality: what terrific criminals children would be if they had strong passions, muscular strength and sufficient intelligence . . . and women are big children. (Lombroso and Ferrero 1895: 150) If, in Staithes, the rise of 1970s feminism which paralleled the disappearance of local female tradition gave some cause to assume that there might be compensations, figures produced by Sandra Walklate twenty years later qualify that assumption. While the Church finally agreed to ordain women as congregations fell to an all time low, and the erosion of the National Health Service made it increasingly difficult for men or women to care for the dying, advances in the more profitable field of law were small. In 1989, only 10.6 per cent of the total police force in England and Wales were women; by 1994 only three women had reached the rank of Deputy Chief Constable; there were none of higher rank than this. In 1993, 80 per cent of barristers were men; in 1991 there were two women High Court Judges out of a total of 83 – figures that must, as Walklate points out, inevitably structure the experience of law for all those who entered its sphere, whether as upholders, victims or offenders (1995: 11). The Co-op indeed had it all.


However, the fragility of the boundary between true crime and crime fiction has made it a rewarding place for those who have been denied access to the other discourses of power. Helene Cixous has pointed out that the figure of woman has been culturally and socially constructed as confined to marriage-bed, child-bed, and death-bed ‘as if she were destined . . . to be the nonsocial, nonpolitical, nonhuman half of the living structure’ (Cixous and Clement 1986: 66). But while this construction has been an inevitable counterpoint to women’s struggle for access to the discourses which control the body through mechanisms of law, medicine, justice and theology, they could acquire less formal languages of authority which tacitly politicize these very places. Crime fiction has been one of them. The reading of detective fiction has been compared to both the primal scene (Krag 1949) and the process of mourning (Munt 1988), ideas to which I shall return in more detail. Here I would suggest that, because the whodunnit has an informal, contingent kind of relationship to the fields of discourse surrounding death – like that of the women of Staithes – rather than the kind of status that might have made it a male privilege, it has offered the woman writer a site on which to combine and experiment with those fields in the person of the detective. He or she is the bidder who gathers the community in the library to reveal the murderer: the provider of a substitute deathbed, in that the decoding of the signs on the body amounts to a sort of posthumous dying speech: the orchestrator of the end of mourning who ensures that new roles are assigned to survivors, legacies reach the rightful heirs, suspicions cleared to allow new marriages to take place: and the conductor of the body from its liminal position in the forensic fridge to the stability and silence of the tomb. (Agatha Christie’s final Hercule Poirot novel, Curtain (1975) allows him take this role of psychopomp to an entertaining extreme: he not only invokes natural justice to kill the murderer, but kills himself and leaves a detailed testament which orchestrates all the above functions from beyond the grave. Curtain is also, of course, Christie’s own playful version of a deathbed speech, written in the war years and kept back for publication after her death in 1974.)

Scene three: poisoner in petticoats A further attraction of the detective story for the disempowered was the lively opportunity it afforded for readers and writers to explore gender positions not traditionally their own – indeed, the structure demanded it. On the one hand, Sherlock Holmes might give a performance of deductive logic that left Watson gasping. On the other, these were sensation

10 Women, Crime and Language

stories, in, as D.A. Miller shows, the literal sense, provoking breathlessness and making the pulses race. ‘The excitement here is as direct as the “fight-or flight” physiology that renders our reading bodies, neither fighting nor flying, theatres of neurasthenia’ (1989: 187). The double experience allowed male readers to be passive to the physio-emotional traumas they associated with young women in tight stays and afforded female ones the epistemological opportunities to make legal and moral judgements denied to them under the law. It also permitted an (often unwitting) exploration of gender inequalities within the spheres of law and justice. A work of fiction could sharply defamiliarize a real crime and the issues which it seemed to raise by re-gendering the subject. In 1857, for instance, a fourteen-year-old Henry James overheard his parents discussing what he was later to describe as ‘the perfect case, with nothing to be taken from it or added’ (Altick 1972: 189). The ‘perfection’ of the trial of Madeleine Smith for the murder of her lover Pierre Emile L’Angelier lay in the verdict, only possible in Scotland, of Not Proven. It afforded the public a rare opportunity to enjoy the pleasures of gossip with legal sanction. There would, after all, be no relish in a story which proved that a sexually active woman will do anything and thus removed the delight of speculation. On the other hand, there would be too great a risk of having to rethink values in a story which proved that moral standards do not disappear along with virginity. As W.R. Greg had written in the Westminster Review seven years previously, if women were to experience desire ‘as ready, strong and spontaneous, in a degree even approaching the form they assume in the coarser sex, there can be little doubt that sexual irregularities would reach a height of which, at present, we have happily no conception’ (Poovey 1988: 225). Smith had begun the affair in defiance of her father, and it had gradually become clear to L’Angelier that he would cut his daughter off without a shilling rather than allow them to marry. He set about fostering sexual guilt in the hope that Smith would apply pressure to her parents. ‘Think of the consequences if I were never to marry you. . . . I was not angry at your loving me . . . but I am sad it happened. It was very bad indeed’ (Jesse 1941: 22). Smith had decided that their position was hopeless, however, and when a wealthy suitor appeared she tried to break with L’Angelier and asked him to return her unusually explicit letters. When he refused, she wrote in more affectionate terms asking for a meeting. During this period, L’Angelier had three violent attacks of sickness and when he died arsenic was found in his body and the letters in his room.


Standing in the dock in her smart bonnet, Smith offered a dazzling image straight out of a sensation novel. Although she could not be called in her own defence, she was illuminated by the erotic glow of her own words tantalizingly veiled in euphemism by the Lord Justice Clerk. ‘It is the letter of a girl rejoicing in what had passed and alluding to it, in one passage in particular, in terms which I will not read, for perhaps they were never previously committed to paper. . . what passed must have passed out of doors, not in the house, and she talks of the act as hers as much as his’ (Jesse 1941: 24). Well aware of her status as spectacle and commodity – a contemporary illustration shows a forest of top-hatted men clustered outside the court while a raddled newsboy hawks the seventh edition of a paper with banner headlines – Smith noted acidly that she had received several hundred letters from ‘gentlemen, some offering . . . consolation, and some their hearths and homes’ (Jesse 1941: 49). She remains a spectacle still: in, for example, the purple-covered collection which features among its titles UFO Mysteries and Fantastic Freaks she appears alongside Lucrezia Borgia as one of The World’s Wickedest Women in the chapter ‘They Left a Question Mark’ (Nicholas 1994: 180–8). So inseparable is Smith from the so-called Scotch Verdict that it is impossible to read Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady, published eighteen years after the case, without superimposing her image on that of the character whose life is blighted by it – and finding oneself thus engaged in a vigorous deconstruction of legal and social double standards. Collins offers not only a prototype woman sleuth through whose eyes we clearly perceive the verdict to be a source of pain rather than the ‘complacency’ posited by Henry James (Altick 1972: 189) but also a piquant gender reversal forcing the reader to reassess the role and function of female sexuality in the story. His heroine Valeria begins, like L’Angelier, by falling in love against the wishes of her prospective in-laws. A few days after the runaway wedding her husband Eustace abandons her; she discovers that he has been on trial for the murder of his wife and received the Not Proven verdict, a fact he belatedly decides must preclude the possibility of intimate relationships. Like many fictional heroines after her, Valeria sets out to prove his innocence. The sunny tone of Valeria’s narrative suggests the prospect of a guilty husband to be unthinkable – so the excess lavished by Collins on his construction of the wronged Eustace is interesting. He is not simply feminized by circumstantial likeness to Smith (like her he is seen buying arsenic, the ‘woman’s weapon’ as a later generation of ‘cosies’ might put it). He is also given all the attributes of the conventionally good


Victorian heroine: weakness, duplicity, a feeble constitution and languorous sexual passivity. Throughout the story he maintains a silent conviction that A Gentleman Does Not Move. His first wife traps him into marriage. Valeria behaves like a predatory male from the previous century, stealing one of his curls like the naughty beau in Pope’s Rape of the Lock. And when he is closest to collapse, ‘too weak, poor fellow, even to raise his head from the pillow’, Valeria has to organize his sexual (re)awakening by announcing that she is pregnant – with encouraging results. ‘Our new honeymoon dates, in my remembrance, from that day’ (1994: 1131). While these attributes turn Eustace into the same image of sexless respectability which Smith was tacitly required to project in the dock, they are here constructed as problematic, in need of rescue. Smith’s unabashed sexual energy finds a proper home in Valeria. The novel crackles with her sensual pleasure in Eustace. The three days ‘of delicious solitude, of exquisite happiness, never to be forgotten’ (890) comprising their first honeymoon are important because it is her legalized eroticism that allows her to save Eustace. Firstly, of course, it qualifies her for detective status. The role would be hazardous for a woman with no sexual knowledge, while a free agent with too much might prove a loose cannon. Secondly, it permits her bodily freedoms. She experiments with make-up to charm evidence from one man, drinks Burgundy with another. Like Bluebeard’s wife, she is preoccupied with keys, but satisfies her curiosity without loss of life or dignity. Only at the end does Collins duck the implications of the story. Valeria has to rush off to forgive the fainting Eustace while her male friends literally get their hands dirty grubbing through rubbish heaps for the vital clue. ‘I have been learning,’ she writes. ‘The Law and the Lady have begun by understanding one another’ (954). If beginnings were all that Collins could offer, he nonetheless implied a new strategy for interpreting the juxtaposition of crime with female desire. One of the few facts recorded about Smith’s subsequent career is that she became an active radical. Her opinion of The Law and the Lady would have made interesting reading had any journal had the imagination to ask her for a review.

Scene four: a new archetype? Collins’s gender-bending of a notable true-crime story pioneered the possibilities of retrospective interpretation. A slightly later heroine gave to a complex position on the boundary between fact and fiction, reinterpretation and foresight, a kind of unofficial imprimatur. Irene Adler,


the woman, is a part of what might be termed the Sherlock Holmes Kit – the characters so inextricable from that of Conan Doyle’s fictional detective that they share in his vigorous intertextual life in countless works from Ronald Knox’s parodies of biblical scholarship to Star Trek. What Lawrence Rothfield has resonantly labelled ‘the moment of Holmes’ (1992: 132) exists at a juncture when discourses collide: the logic of the detective story arriving in the wake of the establishment of a more organized police force, the bodily thrills of the sensation novels and the discourses of medicine and psychoanalysis ready to interrogate what he terms the ‘erotics’ of dreams, fantasies, and the stories themselves. Like commedia dell’arte figures on whom social, political or comic agendas can be endlessly plotted, the Holmes Kit offers a device for probing our own relationship with the Victorian past to uncover both gaps and similarities: Watson explores male bonding, Moriarty the alternate self and the blurred gap between detective and criminal, and Irene Adler, with no fixed role or right to the discourses of law or justice, offers an endless destabilization and disruption of what seems fixed. Ruth Rendell’s novel The Keys to the Street (1996) offers homage to Adler’s status in the detective story canon. Mary Jago is enmeshed in a plot involving several Conan Doyle topoi – inheritance, disguise, drugs and suitors who may not be what they seem. She is saved from murderous fortune hunters by an independence which both leads to and is fostered by her job at a museum dedicated to Irene Adler – a museum whose lack of any genuine relics gives it the freedom to construct its subject any way it pleases, and makes Adler into a free-spirited reader of The Yellow Book. This incarnation as patron saint to a shy liberalfeminist can be seen as a tribute to the polymorphous quality of Adler’s intervention into the ‘moment’ of Holmes. While Holmes himself owes much to Poe’s Dupin, whose appearance in 1841 arguably marked the birth of the detective story, the figure of Irene Adler pays ironical, gender-shifting homage to The Purloined Letter (1844), in which Dupin, working to help a queen, identifies with the powerful intellect of his opponent to recover a compromising document. Here Holmes, trying to recover a photograph for the King of Bohemia, tries a similar strategy but fails. This is because, possessing what the King calls ‘the mind of the most resolute of men’ (1979: 6) Adler is a uniquely unpredictable freak of the kind Lombroso called ‘a Napoleon in petticoats’ (1895: 189) removing logic from the battle of wits altogether. But the fact that Doyle instantly makes her one-off status clear by introducing her as ‘the late Irene Adler’ suggests that he was aware that she had real subversive potential and should be deployed economically if the balance of the


stories were to be preserved. The struggle which Holmes and Adler engage in is not about a photograph, but about the right to discourse. Doyle sets A Scandal in Bohemia in 1888, a year of political, social and criminal upheaval. It was coincidentally the year in which a father’s illness initiated a ten-year sequence of events culminating in Freud’s failure to bring a satisfactory conclusion to the case of his patient Dora. Freud discusses Dora’s dream of a fire: My father was standing beside my bed and woke me up. I dressed quickly. Mother wanted to stop and save her jewel-case; but Father said, ‘I refuse to let myself and my two children be burnt for the sake of your jewel-case.’ (1977: 99) Irene Adler’s reaction to the fire organized by Holmes leads him to the site of the missing photograph. As he tells Watson, when a house is on fire ‘a married woman grabs at her baby – an unmarried one reaches for her jewel-box’ (12). He is confident of the single meaning of Adler’s response, just as Freud is clear that ‘Schmuck-kastchen [jewel-case] is a favourite expression for the female genitals.’ Dora’s acid reply, ‘I knew you would say that,’ (1977: 105) he interprets as a sign that she is rejecting a piece of knowledge as it emerges from the unconscious, but it could also be seen – like Adler’s realization of Holmes’s trick and her escape in male disguise – as a counterblow in a struggle over meaning. Freud presents his reading of Dora’s symptoms and dreams as moves in a battle, as ‘facts’ about her suppressed desires which he does ‘not hesitate to use against her’ (94). Like Holmes, he imaginatively identifies with his adversary to uncover a ‘truth’, but, like Holmes, finds that his adversary insists upon the validity of her own ‘truth’. Dora may or may not have acknowledged the subconscious desires detected by Freud, but she was certainly aware that her budding sexuality had been exploited by those closest to her. As she immersed herself in a programme of study rather disparaged by Freud, she may have been seeking for an alternative language, perhaps a political one, in order to articulate the fact. As Steven Marcus puts it, ‘she refused to be a character in the story that Freud was composing for her, and wanted to finish it herself’ (1985: 88). For Irene Adler too, what is at stake is her right to her story. Holmes, like Freud, sees their dispute as a sexual struggle which he will win; as he tells Watson, ‘she will not be able to refuse’ because she will act from the womanly instinct he has outlined (1979: 11). But when he enters her apartment it is as a helpless clergyman she treats with maternal tenderness, leaving Watson troubled as to who has the moral high ground.


In this story it is Holmes who is subject to ‘drug-created dreams’ (1) and Adler who imposes meaning on the ‘jewel-case’. She is neither a virgin nor, at the start, a married woman; while Holmes is sharp enough to detect the signs of marriage on Watson’s body to the nearest half-pound of added weight, he is tricked into witnessing an event he has never imagined, Adler’s wedding. The photograph is neither child nor jewel, but a complex mixture: a sentimental memory, a tool of Irene’s trade as blackmailer, and an insurance policy against the assassins of Bohemia. For Adler’s story is political as well as personal, and she offers a chance not only to rethink a simplistic reading of female desire but also to reconfigure history. Doyle sets the story a year before the autopsy on the Crown Prince Rudolf, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose body had been discovered at Mayerling. The King of Bohemia bears a marked physical resemblance to the Prince, and his impending marriage to a puritanical princess reflects that of Rudolf to Princess Stephanie of the Belgians, who wrote of her wedding night, ‘What torments! What horror!’ (Listowel 1978: 73). Rudolf’s marriage was jeopardized by his love affairs (like Dora’s father, he suffered from a venereal infection) notably with a young baroness, Marie Vecsera. Her body was found with his at Mayerling. Whether the deaths were murder or a suicide pact has been widely disputed, but what was always clear was that Vecsera’s body was an embarrassment. It was smuggled out of Mayerling fully clothed and propped up in a coach, certified as suicide but rushed to Christian burial. Her presence alongside Rudolf was only admitted when denial was impossible and, like Ruby Young, she had her identity erased. The records state only that ‘In the extra-territorial building of Mayerling a female corpse was also found.’ Adler’s glamorous and unspecifically criminal past give her the potential of the figure, increasingly visible in both English and Russian popular literature of the period, of the female anarchist or revolutionary, her sexual freedom and her opposition to the social order a double danger. As Alex Houen puts it, ‘Every time a nigiltska fired a pistol it was not just the autocracy but the rights to heroic subjectivity that were being challenged’ (1999: 46). Given this shocking possibility it is courageous of Conan Doyle to allow his fictional heroine to challenge successfully what the Austrian socialist leader Victor Adler called the Habsburg monarchy’s tendency to ‘despotism softened by casualness’ (Palmer 1997: 262). Her presence in the disputed photograph is her own way of inscribing her identity into a situation which does not hesitate to erase inconvenient women, her success in retaining it is a way of ensuring that there will be no corpse in her story, and, perhaps,


a warning to the powerful world of Bohemia that such corpses cannot be hidden with impunity. Moriarty is the polar opposite of Holmes; he exists to destroy or be destroyed. Adler, rather, mocks Holmes, eluding him with his own favourite device of disguise which she takes to a parodic extreme, not only in her gender-bending clothes but in teasingly bidding him goodnight. Her staying power in the Holmes Kit arises, I would argue, out of two issues which she draws together. First, she is an early example of the parodic tradition which several feminist historians of the detective story see as intrinsic to women writers’ appropriation of the genre; Sally Munt, for example, finds in some of the early male-authored tales of women detectives an ‘early generic predisposition to an ironic mode which was consolidated by female-authored texts, which made successive feminist manoeuvres in the genre tenable’ (1994: 5). Munt rightly argues that women’s contribution to detective fiction has often been undervalued because the parodic strain is seen as permitting imitation but not innovation. The media predilection for epithets like ‘Queen of Crime’ bears this out. There are no kings, it implies, because great male writers are so richly diverse as to make comparisons odious. Queens, as bees and Victoria demonstrate, produce large numbers of identical offspring while presiding over the status quo. I would suggest, however, that the parodic strain should be linked not to literary dependency but to a second issue raised by the figure of Irene Adler. In her contiguity to real political and psychoanalytic situations, she reminds us that every narrative of crime must, implicitly or explicitly, embody the issue of gender as long as one gender has more power than another. Women writers seized on the detective story as a rare chance to engage with the discourses of law, morality and justice, simultaneously aware of their own inequality within those discourses and their playful delight in the opportunity. Hence the volatile, fluid way in which Agatha Christie in Murder on the Orient Express (1934) manipulates a series of high-camp characters in a puzzle with a solution so outrageous that Raymond Chandler complained it could only be divined by a half-wit, but also addresses a real crime. The kidnap and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s child had horrified both sides of the Atlantic. Christie uses a similar situation to explore the extent of its impact on a family and household. Dorothy Sayers allowed a corpse to be greeted at the beginning of her first novel, Whose Body? with ‘Indeed my lord? That’s very gratifying’ (1975: 9). Only for a professional policeman a hundred pages later to reproach her elegant amateur sleuth for his story-book attitude:


You want to hunt down a murderer for the sport of the thing and then shake hands with him and say, ‘Well played – hard luck – you shall have your revenge tomorrow!’ Well, you can’t do it like that: (115) This is addressed as much to the reader as to Lord Peter Wimsey. It paves the way for the debates in Sayers’s later fiction which constantly elide questions about the moral responsibilities of the amateur detective with questions about those of the crime novelist. It is a tone which stands in marked contrast to Chandler’s eulogy of Dashiell Hammett as the writer who ‘gave murder back to the kind of people who commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse’ (Allen and Chacko 1974: 3). This is often quoted in histories of the genre to demonstrate male innovation over female limitation. But what is also interesting is the monolithic tone it assumes, as if a single discourse of fiction were both possible and available to be selected as an alternative to, say, those of politics, law, journalism or criminology. The attractions of this tone are perhaps greater for those who have such a choice. For those who do not, fluidity and paradox afford greater opportunities. The flag of parody is planted on the discourse of crime and law in full awareness, as Ngaio Marsh once put it, of ‘giving myself some sort of treat’ (1995: 3). But precisely because it has had to be struggled for, an awareness of the power of that discourse remains; even the most playful puzzle can lead us to rethink and revise our readings of crime in the real world, and these new fictional contrasts will in turn affect the way that future crimes are understood. ‘Anybody can have the harmony’ remarked Sayers’s Peter Wimsey in Gaudy Night, ‘if they will leave us the counterpoint’ (1992: 438). This introduction has tended to celebrate this contrapuntal power rather than explore its more painful aspects. I have stressed the interplay between real and fictional crimes of an earlier century, the fortuitous but speaking links, like those between Dora, Irene and Marie Vecsera, from the relatively distant past. With some clear and brief exceptions I have concentrated upon narratives which readers will have imbibed from history books rather than newspapers, retrospective studies rather than living memories, fictions from which they have derived entertainment and awareness but which have not greatly impinged upon their own lives. The reason for this focus is a desire to advance some of my argument before I intrude upon the emotional privacy of the reader. In the body of my text I will be looking at more recent criminal cases, and it is impossible not to know how painful our awareness


of these can be: pity for the victims, rage at the conditions that brought forth the crime, anger at the spectacularization of the narrative, simple concern for our own safety, play a part in our attempts to make sense of what we read. So does crime fiction, to which I shall constantly be returning. I am not primarily concerned with the historical development of the genre and feminist interventions within it, nor will I be offering chapters on the many sub-genres which flourish under the general heading of crime fiction, from lesbian-comic to tartan noir; rewarding explorations of these topics already exist. Rather, I have organized chapters according to particular kinds of crime in which gender is a vital issue, and explored the ways in which fiction and reality interact; each chapter will look at reportage and fiction, some from the mainstream, some from minority presses, chosen for the issues they have in common. The first part of the study will concentrate on aspects of female sexuality. I begin with the figure of the adulterous wife and the forces that construct her as necessarily murderous, concentrating on a figure who haunted British perceptions of female criminality in both fiction and the courts, that of Edith Thompson. I move on to the ways writers have treated sex crime and feminist responses and initiatives from the Whitechapel murders of 1888 to the most recent discourses surrounding the figure of Peter Sutcliffe. I go on to examine the languages in which women have begun to speak very directly of their experience of rape and sexual violence and the freedom that some feminist writers have taken from this new openness to explore more controversial and dangerous stances. The second part of the book is concerned with children and the way in which the maternal role is constructed in the discourses of crime, both in terms of the individual and the state. Again, I open with a named figure, Myra Hindley, on whom these emotive issues first began to find a focus and through whose image we can track society’s changing understanding of its responsibility to childhood and its attitude to those who threaten it. I will examine real and fictionalized accounts of institutional abuse – the failure of the state – and explore constructions of the maternal relationship to the child who kills, with particular reference to the murder of James Bulger. Finally, I shall be addressing what seems to be a new kind of writing, one which the women of Staithes might recognize, which allows the dead to articulate for themselves the issues surrounding their deaths. My conclusion will be grounded in the extraordinary essay written by Marian Partington, sister of Lucy Partington, who was murdered by Frederick West, and its significant literary legacy.


The variety of texts in each section attests to our continuing interest in crime and the power of the spectacle; but it also, I hope, suggests the possibilities open to an imagination re-working that spectacle. The details, which, as Lesser rightly says, are all we can grasp, do not have to become aids to spectacularization. They can also be read and re-imagined to allow our interaction with writing about crime to become a dynamic for change.

1 Condemned Woman

Edith writing I went to the “Waldorf” to tea – & while waiting in the vestibule by myself a gentleman came up to me – raised his hat and said “Good afternoon, are you Romance?” I thought he was mad & turned away & sat on a couch – he followed & continuing the conversation said “Im sorry if youre not, but I have an appointment here with a lady with whom Ive corresponded thro a “Personal Column”, she calls herself “Romance” & she was to wear a black frock & a black lace hat. I was wearing the blk frock with the roses on it & the lace hat you like. Then he moved away & later I saw him at a table with a girl in a blk frock with steel beads & a black lace hat, so I supposed he was speaking the truth, altho at the time I doubted it. (Letter to Bywaters, 15 August 1922) The author of this lively vignette, Edith Thompson, was hanged at Holloway Prison on 9 January 1923 for the murder of her husband, her lover, Frederick Bywaters, being executed at Pentonville on the same day. Ever since the passing of the sentence the public had scanned the papers for news of a reprieve among the ads for the January sales. For it had been clear from the outset that only Bywaters had been involved in the actual stabbing of Percy Thompson as he returned with his wife from an outing to the theatre. Edith’s complicity had never been satisfactorily proven; the guilty verdict hinged on an image of her as a suburban Messalina, seducing her younger lover into a conspiracy of poison and murder. Moreover, no woman had been hanged in Britain since 1907 and petitions on behalf of the lovers were received on an unprecedented scale. The Court of Criminal Appeal, however, stated 20

Condemned Woman 21

that the case exhibit[ed] from beginning to end no redeeming features (Filson Young 1923: 254), and letters to the Home Secretary and the King achieved nothing. Edith’s death caused terrible distress to those involved – the governor of Holloway launched a campaign against capital punishment, the hangman resigned and eventually committed suicide – and she is still one of the more persistent and troubling ghosts who haunt the criminal justice system, the biographies and novels about her both reinforcing and re-interpreting her presence there. Despite its lighthearted tone, the little anecdote about the Waldorf could be seen as a metaphor for the whole process, in that it shows Edith simultaneously as a text, chosen by someone else to express his own ‘romance’, and as a narrator, projecting onto a commonplace incident, her chosen image as a flirtatious, glamorous and independent woman to whom lively things happen, an image she shared in letters with friends and lovers just as she shared her passion for narrative itself: . . . arent books a consolation and a solace? We ourselves die & live in the books we read while we are reading them & then when we have finished, the books die and we live – or exist – just drag on thro years and years until when? who knows? (Young 1923: 246) As Peter Brooks has remarked, ‘We live immersed in narrative,’ (1992: 3) and for Edith everything she actually did, and wrote about, was surrounded by a sea of stories with alternative outcomes, situations she could discuss and comment upon and fantasize about. Her letters are full of the books she has read and her comments on the characters; she is much preoccupied with adulterous lovers, but she does not straightforwardly identify with figures in her own situation; she cautions Bywaters, for instance, not to say that he admires a character with a younger lover simply to please her: ‘Oh I hated her – she was a beast a vampire – Oh I cannot bear her – darlint I should have been much more pleased if you had said you hated her’ (Young 240). However, her attempts to be her own narrator were cruelly sabotaged. Only part of her complex correspondence with Bywaters was given in evidence, and its chronology was totally disrupted. As René Weis has shown in his biography of Edith, Criminal Justice, the precise dating of her last letter, in particular, was vital to its interpretation, a fact never raised in court (1988: 171). Since the trial, Edith’s letters, and the photograph of her found on Bywaters at his arrest, have disappeared. Weis remarks that, ‘Every document which is in Edith Thompson’s own hand has, it seems, been


erased from the records with a disquieting single-mindedness’ (317). Part of the Home Office file has been sealed and will not be opened until 2022. This process of silencing is in marked contrast to the interaction that takes place between Edith’s own self-articulations – in the dock and on paper – and the work of writers sympathetic to her. I will go on to examine several works in which a relationship exists between Thompson and narrative, concentrating, inevitably, on the most complex and far-reaching, those of F. Tennyson Jesse. First, however, I wish to explore the silencing process at its most fully realized, the spectacularization of Edith as condemned woman. Rumours about her death began to circulate within hours of the execution. It was said that she disintegrated emotionally, that she had to be carried to the gallows in a state of drugged terror, that ‘her insides fell out,’ (Kennedy 1992: 256) that she had a miscarriage as she died. The Home Office insisted in its standard formula that the hanging had been carried out ‘expeditiously and without a hitch’ (Koestler 1970: 274). Both the force of the rumours and the energy expended in attempting to prevent a public analysis of their factual basis (Weis 1988: 309) suggest that her death was powerfully visible in the public imagination, that perhaps, even without the shocking details, it already partook of the nature of spectacle because of Edith’s gender. As Richard Evans points out in Rituals of Retribution (1996) the ‘death penalty’ comprising only a private execution unaccompanied by torture reflects the conceptual shift charted by Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. The horrific public ceremonies of violent death prior to the eighteenth century dramatized the power of the state to degrade and dishonour, to destroy the body of the criminal completely and reduce it to ashes. The later economy of punishment stressed its certainty, the fact that we are all policed and observed in an ineluctable carceral network which, geared to reform rather than retribution, may hygienically obliterate but not abase the body of a convicted killer. But to read of Edith’s death is to feel with visceral force that Foucault has glossed over the question of gender, that the body of a condemned woman is a text on which patriarchal power continues to be mapped in a spectacle that is not literally public but which the public cannot fail to construct in the mind’s eye. One might compare the rumours about Edith with an article for the Illustrated London News written by GK Chesterton in the month of her death: The police and the public are still under the shadow of a tragedy which ended on the scaffold. The shadow comes to most of us through the

Condemned Woman 23

transparency of newspapers, which makes the tragedy too much like a shadow pantomime . . . if we have really come to the dreadful decision that a man must die, he has at least already achieved the independence of death . . . he is no longer a mystery, he is a man. He has a right to what is left of his private life . . . we have no business whatever to be told about his breakfast, to spy on his private moments or to eavesdrop on his private words. (20 January 1923) This imaginatively outlines the desirable limits of panopticism, transforming the individual, whose name is withheld to protect his individual subjectivity, into an archetype with the poetic dignity such status implies. While death by hanging was a disgrace in the twenties, Chesterton’s word ‘mystery’ taps in to older images of the Hanged Man as a symbol of wisdom, to the sacrificial splendour of Christ on the gallows and Odin on the World Ash. However, the power of his rhetoric depends upon female absence: for this particular archetype, a woman will not serve, whether named or not. Chesterton is aware that though both deaths are in part spectacularized, that of the woman raises different and more troubling issues that make the process harder to resist. As Camille Naish points out, the hanging of a woman is invariably sexualized, the image of the swinging body mimicking the sexual act to suggest that the condemned is a wanton even in death (1991: 82). The misogyny of Diogenes in the olive grove where maidens hanged themselves prompted him to growl ‘If only all trees bore such fruit!’ – a sentiment acted out in the Odyssey with the hanging of the maids who have slept with Penelope’s suitors. We are, in short, dealing with something other than the simple retributive exaction of a life for a life, and the Lord Justice Shearman’s charge to the jury (one woman, eleven men) suggests an awareness of this: Just at the end of a letter. . . comes this: ‘He has the right by law to all that you have the right to by nature and love’. Gentlemen, (sic) if that nonsense means anything it means that the love of a husband for his wife is something improper because marriage is acknowledged by the law, and that the love of a woman for her lover, illicit and clandestine, is something great and noble. I am certain that you, like any other right-minded person, will be filled with disgust at such a notion. (Young 1923: 135) While it is difficult to grasp the logic of this blatantly prejudiced speech, the expected response to Edith herself is clear. The word ‘disgust’ is


painstakingly foregrounded in Shearman’s notes towards his summing up (Weis 1988: 246). Guilty or innocent, Edith partakes of what Kristeva has called the abject, the unclean that we reject in order to achieve stable identity but which continues to draw us and threatens to disrupt that stability. To experience disgust is to try to expel the unclean, the Other. The corpse is a spectacle that revolts us and yet draws us to investigate it: The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death . . . in that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue’s full sunlight, in that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders. (1982: 3) and for Shearman it seems that to view Edith was automatically to view an adulterous figure and one therefore already in the sphere of condemnation, in effect a corpse. For the anti-capital punishment lobby Edith’s death was a spectacle to incite compassion; for the aggressive Right the prospect demanded the repudiation of ‘flaccid sentimentality’, as TS Eliot expressed it in a letter to the Daily Mail (8 January 1923). But for both, it reduced her to a silenced object to be looked at. Thomas Hardy’s poem on her, in his aptly titled volume Human Shows, actually seems to cast her back into the era when hanging was a public event. He had attended the execution of a woman, and found it both disturbing and erotic. ‘What a fine figure she showed against the sky,’ he recorded (Weis 291). Hardy’s language is curiously ambivalent: Posing there in your gown of grace, Plain, yet becoming; Could subtlest breast Ever have guessed What was behind that innocent face, Drumming, drumming! Would that your Causer, ere knolled your knell For this riot of passion, might deign to tell Why, since it made you Sound in the germ It sent a worm To madden its handiwork, when it might well Not have assayed you.

Condemned Woman 25

Not have implanted, to your deep rue, The Clytemnestra spirit in you, And with purblind vision Sowed a tare On a field so fair, And a thing of symmetry, seemly to view, Brought to derision! ‘Gown of grace’ might denote one of the fashionable outfits in which Edith delighted, but could also refer to a penitential or prison garment; ‘posing’ suggests a chosen activity, but artists dictate the poses of their models – is ‘there’ the scaffold? Romantic novelists speak of pulses and passions ‘drumming’, but drums also ritualize the march to the gallows. The language seems to adumbrate the fate of the victim, ‘seemly to view’ (rather than simply see), exposed to the gaze of ‘derision’ in the final stanza. Her moral responsibility is spelt out no more clearly than her physical location. The ‘Clytemnestra spirit’ (we shall return to Clytemnestra in a later chapter) suggests a tragic protagonist making a choice, but it is ‘implanted’; as surely as Blake’s rose, the condemned woman is destroyed by a ‘worm’ from without. Hardy’s Edith is an essentialist spectacle, her sexuality both the cause of her situation and a component of it. The poem comes disturbingly close to the conviction, present in those rumours from the execution shed, that the abjected cadaver is the ‘real’ woman, shorn of her female duplicities. (Much as the photographs of Marilyn Monroe after autopsy – in themselves neither undignified nor remarkable – were peddled as expressing the ‘reality’ beneath the glamour.)

Reading Edith Roland Barthes points out in his essay Dominici, or the triumph of literature that ‘[The] official visit of Justice to the world of the accused is made possible thanks to an intermediate myth which is always used abundantly by all official institutions . . . the transparency and universality of a language’ (1957: 2). Dominici, a rural farmer, was trapped at the Assizes in linguistic codes wholly alien through both class and region. Edith Thompson’s trial took place at a point when new languages about sexuality, desire and the subjectivity of women were contesting pre-war certainties. While she arguably received no more justice than Dominici, this linguistic fluidity and her own command of narrative ensured that the silencing process was not complete.


Filson Young’s account of the trial draws attention to the fact that Edith Thompson eluded representation, that the various pictures and photographs depicting her in 1922 vary so much that they could be of different women. His conclusion was that ‘quite above her station in life, quite beyond the opportunities of her narrow existence, she had power. . . . the secret of looking like a hundred different women’ (1923: xvi). Like the man at the Waldorf, he perceives Edith as ‘Romance’ in that she personifies multiple narrative possibilities. Todorov called the detective story ‘The narrative of narratives’. Its function is to uncover the fabula, the ‘true’ order of events of which the sjuzet, the plot, is the artful arrangement – much as a trial offers an arrangement of evidence to uncover the actions of the defendant. But of course the detective fabula is actually produced by the fictive needs of the sjuzet. Lord Justice Shearman failed to extract the fabula from the multiplicity of narratives in the case and only succeeded in rounding up the usual sjuzets which assumed that a woman capable of acting out her sexual desires would necessarily act out any transgressive desire, including the desire to kill. The fabula of a conspiracy to murder ‘uncovered’ by the letters is in fact a sjuzet every bit as carefully manufactured as the novels Edith loved to discuss. For a conspiracy, indeed, it takes up remarkably little narrative room. The letters range across racing tips, a sharp word about a racist remark made by Bywaters, recipes and clothes. There are vivid scenes of provincial life. Edith acts as MC for an impromptu ‘Lancers’ with a local cricket team: she yells herself hoarse, and flirts with the man who buys her a brandy as a reward, while Percy sulks. She tries out all the attractions at a fair and ‘shocks a lot of people,’ going home in her ‘jade ribbon and velvet and white fur’ with a bag of fish and chips which ‘smelt the bus out’ (Young 234). There is a clear relish for the act of narrative itself. When a major event occurs, she struggles for a vocabulary with which to rise to the occasion – in the last letter, for instance, she tries to pin down not just an erotic milestone in her relationship with Bywaters but its place in her whole life. ‘Darlingest lover, what happened last night? I don’t know myself I only know how I felt – no not really how I felt but how I could feel’ (Young 213). Her contemporary Marie Stopes generated floods of euphemism in a similar search for an acceptable language of sexuality, only to find her book Married Love described as ‘obscene’ by the very judge awarding her damages when she sued a critic who had accused her of ‘encouraging immorality’ – a piece of doublethink that indicates just how perilous the linguistic situation in court was for Edith.

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It would be reasonable to see her frequent recourse to novels and newspaper cuttings as an attempt to put life into those periods when there was less to narrate. The headlines she selects – BEAUTIFUL DANCER DRUGGED: VISIT TO A CHINESE RESTAURANT: POISON CHOCOLATES FOR UNIVERSITY CHIEF – seem chosen as an invitation to the recipient to indulge his own imagination. Her more detailed analyses of fiction, in which characters are treated almost like personal acquaintances, invite him to investigate parallels or analogies to his own situation. For the prosecution and the judge, however, they could only be understood as poisoner’s recipe-books. ‘They write chiefly about so-called heroes and heroines, probably wicked people, which no doubt accounts for a great many of these tragedies,’ remarked the judge, (Young 150) assuming that causal relationship between art and life still being peddled by the prosecution at the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1963, when anxiety was expressed for the moral welfare of wives and servants getting hold of this tale of adultery. Signally failing to make the jury read the book central to the prosecution’s case, Robert Hichens’s Bella Donna, he permitted the prosecution’s interpretation of ‘the plot . . . which is really the plot of the story, to poison her husband’ (Young 199) to remain virtually unchallenged. Edith’s response, that ‘It is a matter of opinion whether that is absolutely the plot’ (Young 100) is no mere evasion. As the letter to Bywaters already quoted demonstrates, the appeal of the novel did not lie in crude identification with its villainess. It lay rather in the Egyptian setting (Edith’s generation revelled in fashions inspired by the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb) and the erotic dreams liberated by its orientalist fantasy. Edith Thompson lived out her last months in the year that saw the emergence of new fragmented narratives of modernism spearheaded by Ulysses and The Waste Land; it was also a year in which the young Agatha Christie began to hit her stride as the premier exponent of the detective puzzle. Had these narrative modes emerged a little earlier they might have helped to articulate an Edith Thompson to whom the law could have responded with greater understanding. Readers of the same TS Eliot who deplored ‘sentimental’ attempts to secure Edith’s reprieve might have reflected that, like the narrator of his Waste Land, she was using snippets from a variety of literary sources as ‘fragments shored against her ruin’ – in short, that she was expressing her situation through language, and that for her, if not Bywaters, authorship was an end in itself rather than a rehearsal for criminal activity. Had the so-called Golden Age of the detective story not been in its infancy, the discourses of Agatha Christie and others might have already popularized the notion on which their work


was grounded: that the middle classes may be thoroughly riddled with dirty secrets – about drugs, about money, about sex – but that while these constitute motives for murder and justifiable reason for suspicion, they are not in themselves evidence of it. Christie showed independent women motivated by sexual passion, sometimes as murderers, sometimes as heroines; the point was that the reader would not know which until the final page. While it would be interesting to imagine what life was going to be like for the inhabitants of Styles or Roger Ackroyd’s village with all their dirty linen on public view, the ending of a Christie whodunnit always made clear the distinction between sexual and financial crimes and the taking of life. This might account for the choice of the whodunnit as a site on which some of the anxieties generated by the treatment of Edith Thompson could be explored by later generations of women, and played out with a variety of alternative outcomes. Dorothy L. Sayers, whose first detective novel Whose Body? appeared in the year Edith died, began the process of humanizing her Bertie Woosterish hero Peter Wimsey in her 1930 novel Strong Poison, placing him in an unusually passive situation: he is in the public gallery, living out an experience parallel to that of a spectator at the Thompson–Bywaters trial: a woman accused of murder, facing a hostile judge, listening to aspersions on her sexual character couched in language almost interchangeable with that of Justice Shearman: You [the jury] will not be led away by the false glamour which certain writers contrive to throw about ‘free love’ into thinking that this was anything but an ordinary, vulgar act of misbehaviour. (1998: 5) Harriet Vane is an independent woman and a professional writer; her sexual life is unconventional. She embodies the issues raised by Edith’s situation in what appears to be a less ambivalent fashion. Sexually active but not adulterous, she has a moral code which she clearly spells out to the court: she lived with the man she is accused of poisoning because he told her he did not believe in marriage, and left him when he offered to marry her as what she succinctly describes as ‘a bad-conduct prize’ (40). As a writer of novels rather than letters, Harriet is better equipped than Edith for a discussion of the borderline between fact and fiction and her claim to have bought arsenic solely for the purpose of research is straightforward. However, her situation, as opposed to the verdict, is not so clear cut. Her sexuality provides the energy of subsequent books: Peter

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courts her taking her sexual history for granted as he expects her to accept his own. Her chosen lifestyle informs her writing, and thus her independence and the integrity of her work. (The value of crime fiction is a continuing topic throughout Sayers’s work.) Yet it is also a source of trouble as the world will not let her reputation rest. When in the next novel, Have His Carcase, Harriet plays detective, she is well aware that her earlier trial makes her a prime suspect. While in her the passion and imagination of Edith Thompson find a happier fate, there is also a suggestion that her marriage to Peter Wimsey redeems her past. It is as if Sayers is reconfiguring the story of Edith’s trial less as a serious injustice than as a necessary right of passage for the sexually dissident. Twenty-five years later, the profoundly troubling aspects of Edith’s execution were recalled during a Parliamentary debate on hanging which was eventually to result in its partial abolition. It is interesting that another text which drew on the case had only recently emerged – Scales of Justice, winner of the Crime Writers’ Association Red Herring Award of 1955 for Ngaio Marsh, whose opposition to capital punishment is articulated again and again by her more attractive characters. Once again a version of the story is played out in a whodunnit form with the reference this time made explicit: ‘Look here, are you trying to make out that she egged me on or or – I egged her on or any perishing rot of that sort! Thompson’, Commander Syce shouted angrily, ‘and Bywaters, by God!’ ‘What put them in your head, I wonder? The coincidence that he was a seafaring man and she, poor woman, an unfaithful wife?’ (1964: 219) Scales of Justice is a lively example of what has been called the Mayhem Parva genre, set in an idyllic village where the inhabitants spend hours of leisure in country pursuits – golf, shooting and fishing – and filled with clues requiring recondite knowledge (the vital information here concerns the scale patterns of trout). Commander Syce’s reference could be seen as a variety of red herring, for Kitty Cartarette, the unfaithful wife, is no Edith, but unambiguously guilty of murder with those weapons of happiness, the shooting stick and the golf club. There is, however, a darker aspect to the narrative, linking Edith and Kitty more directly. Marsh describes the landscape in the opening chapter as ‘pretty as a picture’ (9), and her Olde English place names – the Vale of Traunce, Swevenings (dream) Chyning (yawn) – underline its unreality. The inhabitants, while sharing the charm of their setting, are also viciously snobbish and both


politically and sexually treacherous. If Kitty is an adulterous social climber who smashes her husband’s head in, she is also treated appallingly by the smugly established families. The contradictions of the story suggest a class system alive and well, decades after it victimized Edith Thompson for the sexual behaviour it might have tolerated in one of higher status, and while Marsh does not shirk the details of the brutal act committed by Kitty Cartarette, she presents her eventual fate in such a way as to disturb both her detective and her readers: Alleyn said harshly: ‘The case will rest on expert evidence of a sort never introduced before. If her counsel is clever and lucky she’ll get an acquittal. If he’s not so clever and a bit unlucky she’ll get a lifer.’ Oliphant said, ‘Has something upset the chief, Mr Fox?’ ‘Don’t you worry,’ Fox said. ‘It’s the kind of case he doesn’t fancy. Capital charge and a woman.’ (254)

Writing Edith The whodunnit, most addictive of all literary forms, achieves narrative closure in the full knowledge that other versions of the same narrative will be played out again and again. As Alison Light has suggested, its popularity in the Golden Age lay precisely in the way it simultaneously invoked and soothed anxieties about the social upheavals that followed the First World War (1991: 64). While these rehearsals of Edith’s story articulate concerns about the shifting role of women, they also suggest a more localized anxiety. If the detective novel does indeed reflect the process of mourning, as Munt suggests (and certainly the anxieties outlined by Light involved the mourning of a whole generation of war dead), the injustice of Edith Thompson’s fate meant that England found it difficult to mourn her appropriately. Shorn of fictional simplifications, her story did not contain the bittersweet and temporary closure of a puzzle novel which mimics the final transition of the mourning psyche from grief to acceptance. Rather, it left England in the state Freud called melancholia, in which feelings of excessive and unresolved grief mask an aggression which turns inward to become a kind of self-hate. The figure who did most to provide, if not a ‘talking cure’, at least a thorough exploration of the meanings inscribed on Edith’s abjected body, was F. Tennyson Jesse, whose complex literary relationship with the case was played out in both fictional and non-fictional genres and across two decades.

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Jesse, like Sayers and Christie, became a writer from economic necessity; her career began a little earlier than theirs, in 1910, with articles for the Times; she was war correspondent for the Daily Mail, she wrote poetry, short stories and a picaresque novel. In short, she was an established professional before the modernist detective story took shape as the most useful template for a young writer in need of reliable income. Her relationship with the form was complex. In 1930 she edited The Baffle Book, a volume of detective puzzles hinging on elaborate clues like the nocturnal habits of insects or the drying time of silk. She insisted, however, that she had no aptitude for a novel of this kind. ‘It is a pity, because I should play the game so honourably. I should begin with a country-house, and the body of the murdered host discovered in the library. . . . I have never been able to imagine what on earth happens next’ (1931: xx). In fact some of Jesse’s stories between 1918 and 1919 featured a woman detective. At first glance Solange, the French legal anthropologist, offers a more promising feminist icon than Miss Marple. More scathing about English racism than Poirot, she is aware of the contradictions in a society about to be pulled apart, ‘the divinely stupid, honest, un-self-conscious-because -quite-sure-of-itself England’ (1931: 2). But her skill is intuitive rather than deductive, a sense of ‘evil’ pointing her towards the solution; despite their humour, The Solange Stories hark back to the moral certainties of Conan Doyle rather than the brisk puzzles of Christie. One of the more melodramatic stories, The Canary, sets its central figure in Edith Thompson’s situation: a wife is accused of poisoning her husband. Young, innocent and dim enough to marry a miserable old man for security without anticipating sexual unhappiness, she represents the class to which Jesse would consign Edith, ‘the class of life which likes its romances legalised’ (1931: 121). Solange fakes a séance to expose her prime suspect, the dead man’s sister; but the medium is possessed by the victim, who confesses that he has poisoned himself to hang the wife he suspects of infidelity with a younger man. The medium’s canary is found dead, attesting to the ‘real presence’ of evil and, presumably, the genuineness of supernatural help. The Canary is one of Jesse’s most anthologised stories, perhaps in part, because of the contradictions it embodies. On the one hand it explores the jury’s kneejerk equation of adultery with murder, on the other it implies no political solution to the situation but suggests its inevitability: only a miracle can save the silly young woman – or Edith Thompson. The tension between these positions can be seen in a slightly different form in Murder and its Motives, a volume of popular criminology Jesse was


preparing throughout the period of Edith’s trial. Here crime is assumed to be not simple ‘evil’ but capable of analysis, and in her exposition of nineteenth century killers such as Constance Kent Jesse contrasts Victorian ignorance with 1920s awareness of psychology. She also, however, employs a kind of essentialist language not unlike that of Lombroso: . . . woman, being less civilised, has fewer inhibitions than man . . . less far advanced on the path of evolution than man, woman wants what she wants more undisturbed by ethical promptings. (1953: 108) She is less willing than Lombroso to equate woman’s place on the evolutionary ladder with inferiority, pointing out that a lack of ethical inhibition can be deployed unselfishly. But she also contradicts her own position by suggesting that the relative paucity of women criminals is less attributable to innate virtue (or to the weakness and religiosity which Lombroso considers essentially feminine) than to lack of opportunity: Now that women are entering more and more into the wage-earning life of the world, crime among them will increase and there will, of course, be found people to declare that “it only shows” how women are deteriorating, whereas it will simply mean that a woman who under the old order had to be content with cheating her husband can now be a fraudulent company director. (1953: 22) Jesse seems to have one foot in a past in which morally infantile women can commit only the crimes to which nature predisposes them, and the other in a world where women have full political autonomy, a confusion appropriate to a society that had recently granted the vote to women over thirty. Edith Thompson was to die before the age of the ‘flapper vote’; old enough to be seen as an ageing vampire corrupting a young man, she still legally lacked the ‘maturity’ to elect the government that had power to hang her. These contradictions inform Jesse’s novel, A Pin to See the Peepshow, about Edith Thompson. The vivid figure of its heroine, Julia Almond, offers England something like the awareness needed by Freud’s mourner stuck in melancholia, who knows whom he has lost, but not yet what he has lost. The misogyny and sexual self-contempt of a system that could neither proclaim Edith Thompson’s innocence or vindicate her after death is implicitly exposed and challenged, sometimes by Jesse, sometimes almost in spite of her.

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Peepshow seems to address the England Orwell was to satirize in his essay The Decline of the English Murder: feet up after a roast beef lunch, eager to find out what terrible deeds are committed in the interests of preserving a respectable facade. Appearing at the height of the whodunnit’s popularity as the favoured reading of the suburban commuter, Peepshow constructs a kind of anti-detective story, removing from the reader that certainty of the survival of individual innocence on which the genre depends. Jesse swipes this from beneath the reader’s feet by withholding the fact that this is a story of murder until we have done the detective work. Initially, it seems to be a female Bildungsroman rich in the domestic detail of a ‘thirties’ woman’s novel’. We follow Julia through school, work, and marriage before, without warning, we are confronted by a tableau no reader of the period could fail to recognize: the shocked wife cradling the body of her husband in the street as her young lover runs away. As Julia fuses with Edith it becomes clear that we have been unwitting detectives. Our task is not to prove her innocent but to re-define her as such, to name what we have lost. The process works by decoding signs left on the body of Julia/Edith as a detective decodes the body in the library. From the outset Julia is presented as subject to the gaze; her recurring gesture is the removal of her glasses. ‘It was tiresome being a woman if there was anything wrong with your sight. You had to choose between seeing and being seen. Julia chose to be seen’ (1982: 9). While this overtly proclaims her fatal flaw, it also alerts us to her presence as a sign we have to view and re-view against others. Julia is endlessly defined against the other women she is not, but the differences between Julia and the Others is never great; rather, we discover what we have lost through measuring her possible alternative selves. Her looks are presented in a way that at first suggests only a gentle satirical distance between author and subject: Yes, said Julia’s heart at the glance of those narrow grey-blue eyes in the mirror, it’s true, I’m pretty. . . . Julia was wrong. She wasn’t pretty. She was very short sighted, and she saw the pallor of her skin, the narrow brightness of her eyes and the gleam of her hair through a haze . . . on a plain day, Julia could look incredibly like a pudding. (1982: 7) However, the elimination of the beautiful opens up a gap between Julia and the heroines of the romances she loves to read, one she can only close in fantasy. If she is not-beautiful she is also not-intellectual, a


point Jesse stresses with the invention of a major character, Julia’s friend Anne. Anne is more definitively saved from the fate of a romantic beauty by downright ugliness. Julia dresses up in her teacher’s gown, the closest she will get to academic achievement; Anne qualifies as a doctor and is able to care for Julia after a botched abortion. The gap between the bright girl and the committed intellectual is here shown to be both narrow and impassable. This is explicitly touched upon when Anne’s father holds forth in terms which suggest he has studied Ibsen’s comments on A Doll’s House: Have you ever observed the habits of the common tick? . . . they do their mating upon the host, as well as sucking its blood, and when they’re swollen with food and young they drop off and lay their eggs . . . that’s very like women in the Victorian era and a lot of women now. . . Anne laughed, but Julia thought she understood how some people were shocked by Dr Ackroyd. Both Mrs Starling and Mrs Almond were feeling outraged. (1982: 63) Julia enjoys the joke too much to be an unquestioning Victorian, but she lacks the courage to commit herself as a New Woman. Politically, she can define herself only through negatives. Sexuality is the only remaining sphere of existential possibility, and Jesse re-invents Edith Thompson’s life to make Julia’s body a site of multiple cultural inscription on which the sexual possibilities of the era struggle to produce no clear outcome. Like Edith, Julia works in a shop, but while Edith’s employers were straitlaced to the point of asphyxiation, the fictional shopkeeper Gipsy is linked to both the aristocracy and Bohemia, a world Julia covers with a single term, the Darlings. Among the Darlings, Gipsy can sleep with a man, get a divorce, and run her own finances. But her world is one Julia can enter only in borrowed clothes and a borrowed style. While she can maintain the outward signs of a Darling, her sexuality resists the process of definition in a struggle to construct itself independently. The New Woman in her resents a casual grope by a customer, but she cannot articulate her resistance in the hypocritical bourgeois language (‘I’m not that sort of girl’) which is all she knows. The Victorian resists the man she really desires, while the emergent Darling decides to sleep with him only to be thwarted by the Big Push: Second Lieutenant Safford was sent off to France at a moment’s notice before he could make an honest woman of Julia. The night she was to have spent with him in a hotel in Oxford street, he lay. . . amid a

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tangle of barbed wire. He lay for many days disintegrating, while Julia, all unknowing . . . walked backwards and forwards across the Park, and her own flesh cried out in frustration. (1982: 110) While ‘honest’ is clearly not used in the sense Julia’s suburban milieu would understand, she has not yet renegotiated its meaning to encompass the woman Alfie might have helped her to become, the woman who understands her own desires. Later she will meet a man in Paris who will teach her the multiple meanings of aimer. But she is not French, not a Darling, not a sexual radical, and she will never control the language of sexuality but will passively accrue the signifiers that cluster round the spectacle in the dock – adulteress, murderess, self-deceiver. Jesse’s detective story ends where others begin, with the corpse. Rather than help us to read the figure who is on trial – like the judge who sees it as an object of disgust – Jesse disrupts the spectacle by moving into a blurred and dreamy stream-of-consciousness mode. She denies us the spectacle of Julia’s own death. While this is partly a matter of taste (and in the stage version of the book a matter of censorship) it is also a refusal to equate the hanged corpse with the ‘real’ Julia. Rather, in the chapter ironically titled Night Piece to Julia, recalling Herrick’s tender lyric to fleeting love, Jesse dwells on Julia’s relationship to her own body and on that of the other characters to the physicality of what is to take place – Dr Ackroyd, the warders, the young man awaiting his own death. Julia is never an object but a speaking subject. Not, however, an articulate subject. Jesse’s early judgement of Edith in Murder and its Motives was that she was an ‘instinctive liar’ (1953: 17). Long acquaintance with the case softened this judgement. ‘Fryn immersed herself so deeply in their lives she almost suffocated’ (1984: 190) wrote her biographer and secretary Joanna Colenbrander. Nonetheless Peepshow fails to do justice to Edith Thompson’s command of language. Her articulation of her position, even her fictionalization of it, could be seen as active choice, a rejection of Bywaters’s direct and violent answer to the situation. By contrast Julia is permitted only two choices: love or respectability; and she lacks the courage for the first. The lust for life she shares with other fictional heroines of the period – Scarlett O’Hara, for example, or Jesse’s own Lacquer Lady – is at war with her own cowardice. We are, it seems, asked to infer that she is free to become a doctor, or leave her husband, and her failure to do so is a judgement on her character. Jesse’s feminism remains rooted in the individual, applauding those who challenge the demands made on them by their world, but offering little analysis of the forces which shape it.


Neither Jesse nor Edith Thompson speak directly of political solutions, but a politically based compassion for the lovers is clearly part of what England, Freud’s mourner, needed to know it had lost. Peepshow, however, might have helped in the partial dawn of that understanding. It had been published for barely a year when Jesse was at work on a volume of the Notable British Trials series, an account of the Rattenbury and Stoner trial of 1934. Alma Rattenbury was thirtyeight years old and her lover George Stoner just eighteen. He had been working for her as a chauffeur-handyman and when they became lovers she took him to the Royal Palace Hotel in London and lavished presents on him. When they returned she arranged for him to drive her and her sixty-seven-year-old husband to Bridport. Stoner became violently jealous and later that night hit Francis Rattenbury three times with a mallet. Alma called the doctor, but when he arrived she had already become drunk. When the police arrived she was drunker still and claiming that she struck the blows; the doctor gave her morphia but she did not sleep for long and, drugged and drunk, continued to assert her own guilt. After three days the Holloway doctor considered that she was still deeply confused; a few days later Stoner confessed. Throughout the trial, as Jesse notes, the lovers continued to defend each other. Slowly, it emerged that Alma had no part in the killing, and the judge directed the jury that their attitude to her sexual conduct must be considered irrelevant. They took only forty-seven minutes to find her not guilty, and to recommend mercy for Stoner. The ghost of Edith Thompson was not far away, and in one sense the trial offered an opportunity for British justice to make amends. It did not, however, provide a different language in which to do so. Though Jesse’s account often rises brilliantly to the situation it is shot through with the same contradictions which public perception of the case inscribed on Alma’s body. On the one hand, Jesse can be scathing about the lack of sophistication with which her story was narrated, pointing out the naiveté of the judge’s assumption that she intended to marry Stoner and that Francis Rattenbury was an obstacle rather than an object of both convenience and affection. She points out the damage done by the language used of Alma: The worst of all Anglo-Saxon attitudes, a contemptuous condemnation of the man and the woman, but more particularly the woman unfortunate enough to be found out in sexual delinquency, never had finer scope. (1955: 188)

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On the other hand, Jesse also falls back on currently fashionable medical jargon: Mrs Rattenbury was a highly sexed woman, and six years of being deprived of sexual satisfaction had combined with the tuberculosis from which she suffered to bring her to the verge of nymphomania. Now, nymphomania is not admirable, but neither is it blameworthy. It is a disease. (1955: 190) The standard sexual slur of the thirties also finds its way in: She was extremely talented musically. The cheap strain in her came out in the words of her lyrics, but she was a really fine pianist. (189) Strange how potent the word ‘cheap’ is, as Noel Coward might have remarked. Intellectuals of the thirties applied it to popular culture (‘Here is a fur coat you can afford’ sneered Day-Lewis of the cinema). Novelettes allowed their heroines to reflect on the perils of ‘making oneself cheap’. (Men were, presumably, priceless.) The notion of a sexual rate of exchange for women hovers uneasily here, although the implications of the term are never held up for scrutiny. Such linguistic contradiction serves to emphasize the lack of a vocabulary in which Alma and Edith could be spoken of as women with rights over their bodies, women who found the standards of their time to be double, women who, despite sexual bad faith, had the right to be respected. Jesse could not develop one, but she did make clear that the current legalese had to be rejected. The arch humour of Murder and its Motives rises to a sharp and focussed satire: The learned judge referred to the ‘orgy in London’. It is difficult to imagine an orgy at the Royal Palace Hotel in Kensington, and indeed, I have never been able to discover of what an ‘orgy’ consists. It is associated, more or less vaguely, in the popular mind, with the ‘historical’ productions of Mr C de Mille: glasses of wine, dancing girls, tiger skins . . . even shopping at Harrods does not quite come under this heading. (202) Exposing the court to her comic scrutiny, Jesse shatters the language of patronizing disgust which bespattered both Edith and Alma in the dock. She also briefly situates Alma Rattenbury in the dignified discourse of the tragic, invoking both Julius Caesar and Wuthering Heights in her peroration:


When an ancient Roman killed himself, he inserted the tip of the sword between two ribs, and fell upon it . . . he knew that the shrinking of the flesh was such that it was impossible to drive a knife steadily into the breast. Mrs Rattenbury drove it in six times . . . her life had been given back to her, but the whole world was too small a place, too bare of any sheltering rock, for her to find refuge. (1955: 223) This is a direct challenge to the literary terminology selected by Edith and Alma’s detractors – seen, for instance, in this early review of Filson Young’s passionate defence of Edith in his Notable British Trials volume: the romantic, or ‘novelette’ elements in this dismal story of misguided passion have obscured for the editor the significance of the evidence. (Illustrated London News 15 December 1923) It is also, however, a language Jesse reserves for a climactic moment. She also speaks of Alma transcending her ‘cheap strain’, while Julia/Edith’s last moments are filtered through the consciousness of those who loved her. Both factual and fictional narratives are presented within a framework of classic realism that assumes a clear trajectory of cause and effect. Edith/Julia and Alma suffer the consequences of sexual infidelity within their own communities – consequences which are not ‘fair’, but which are also not wholly unexpected within the carefully linked sequence of events of Jesse’s pre-modernist sensibility.

Edith rewritten The fractured narrative techniques of modernism have, however, been recently pressed into service on Edith’s behalf. Jill Dawson’s novel of 2000, Fred and Edie directly challenges Eliot’s judgemental stance by turning her into the Hyacinth Girl of The Waste Land. The extract Dawson uses as epigraph to the novel Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence . . . evokes a figure who is an enigmatic gateway to both desire and loss, sexuality and death – and, who, presumably, has access to the aristocratic

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world sketched at the beginning of Eliot’s poem, and to the privileged education which allows the reader to place her in the tradition of high culture to which The Waste Land alludes and aspires. Edith is by birth closer to the less literate typists, clerks, merchants and drinkers whose lives Eliot goes on to depict as joylessly promiscuous. But when as a child she plants a riot of multicoloured bulbs – ‘L’Innocence, Lady Derby, Distinction, Gertrude, Chestnut Flower’ (2000: 268) – rather than her mother’s preferred blocks of colour, when as an adult she contemplates planting hyacinths on Percy’s grave or – one of her final experiences – plants bulbs with a sympathetic warder – she is shown to embody a different kind of relationship to her own story, one with the dignity of the literary tradition Eliot’s lower-class figures devalue or ignore. Jesse’s project was to stress the detail and individuality of a figure known to her contemporaries only in terms of a notorious court case, and to show this case as the outcome of a lack of self-knowledge on the part of the protagonist. Dawson, almost sixty years later, moves backwards and forwards from this starting point precisely to allow Edie the space to evaluate and articulate herself. Part of this self-articulation involves the search for words, ‘looking in them for cracks, for little slips where meaning nestles’ (42). She searches out the etymology of the words used of her by the prison doctor – and probably by numerous others – ‘vain’ and ‘silly’, discovers that they imply a lack of value and of intellect, and eventually relates these specifically to the relationship between class politics and literary taste: Vain to consider that our love might be a real love, on a par with other great loves. That just because you are from Norwood and work as a ship’s laundryman and I grew up in Stamford Hill and read a certain kind of novel, we are not capable of true emotions, of having feelings and experiences which matter. (222) In Jesse’s novel, choosing to be seen rather than to see is an aspect of Julia’s ‘vanity’; Dawson’s Edie understands that one is impossible without the other. With Bywaters she experiences an epiphany of her own sexual nature; it arises from the fact that he, unlike Percy, looks at her, renders her a subject not an object. While she acknowledges that her betrayal of Percy is wrong, and slowly comes to see Bywaters the killer rather than just Bywaters the lover, she also claims her desire as part of her own worth. And she realises that the value society will place on her selfhood will depend upon its presentation, upon ‘being seen’ as a figure from the great tradition to which the Hyacinth Girl belongs.


Sexuality, she insists, is a part of that selfhood with a right to ‘be seen’ in its complexity. ‘Is the private world of the bedroom really so irrelevant, when it is also the theatre where the most significant dramas of a woman’s life are spent?’ (263) Dawson closes by fusing death with selfabandon, hanging with Edith’s dream of dancing, and being lifted, the moment of supreme abjection and objectification, with the delight in performing a vivid and accomplished subjectivity. Mapping an injustice, she also re-defines her subject; England is enable to recognize and mourn not simply the victim of a prejudiced court, but an articulate, flawed and dissident voice.

2 Guilty Victims

The game’s afoot To Colin Wilson, Dan Farson, Tom Cullen, Robin Odell and ‘Ripperologists,’ – not forgetting JACK who brought us together. . . my final acknowledgement is once again to my wife who has patiently deciphered my mangled and mutilated manuscripts. (Rumbelow 1975: ii) We are all familiar with the politics of acknowledgement. The discreet intimations of authorities consulted, of papers swapped with distinguished names, indicate more than a book’s intellectual origins. They are a clue to the desired audience and of course the desired review: will it praise rigour or imagination, ideological insight or objectivity, accessibility or high-level engagement? Nowadays, feminism and the word processor render unacceptable the once-routine patronizing thanks to the typist-drudge-wife. If a partner is mentioned, it is in terms of her/his skills as ‘severest critic’. The dedication page of the 1975 edition of Donald Rumbelow’s Complete Jack the Ripper is one which pervades most male-authored studies of the murders by the figure known as ‘Jack the Ripper’, and it has had a troubling impact on both fiction and criminology. Consider the only woman in the party. Rumbelow is aware that the question of equal opportunities is at least on the agenda, awarding his wife the status of editor rather than hewer of wood and drawer of coffee. Subsequent books have been even more eager to disavow explicit misogyny. That flip allusion to mutilation, however, allies Mrs Rumbelow not just to the female victims, but to their dead passivity. 41


‘JACK’, on the other hand, is pretty active here, but his status appears problematic. No one could expect serious consideration of a history of the Second World War dedicated to Adolf, who began it all. However, Rumbelow’s nod to the Ripper conforms to a pattern rarely found in historical or criminological studies but commonplace in fiction. A dedication to Sherlock Holmes, or Captain Kirk, would raise few eyebrows, for certain fictional characters have moved beyond the boundaries of their originating texts. They are appropriated by the public for communal fantasy, in magazines, clubs and social events and for exploitation by new texts, in which they may intersect with historical or geographical reality. (Both Holmes and Kirk have ‘met’ Jack the Ripper.) Since the Romantic movement, it is fiction which is considered to generate the authorial agony for which those ‘mutilated and mangled manuscripts’ are a metonym. Rumbelow’s dedication, despite prefacing a work which purports to offer evidence, implies what the old Everyman editions used to call ‘the precious life blood of a master spirit’, the product of a creative struggle that has caused the very paper to bleed. This stance is not peculiar to Rumbelow but an ineluctable part of what might be called the Ripper Detective Project. The investigation of any unsolved crime involves the construction of hypothetical events. Modern sensibilities will be layered over the original context, motives ascribed, feelings assumed, gaps filled with meanings inaccessible to the protagonists. Where there is no longer reason to envisage danger from the perpetrator or justice for the victims, the desire to investigate is itself the desire to engage in fictionalizing. As with Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes, the process may become marketed as experience. You can try competing ‘Ripper walks’ through Whitechapel, or see exhibits at the London Dungeon or Madame Tussaud’s; you can buy silver coins discovered in an East End house – ‘who knows, one of his victims may even have handled one of these historic original crowns’1 – you can buy a figurine by the well-known porcelain manufacturer, Wade, of the Ripper ‘in characteristic pose’. In short, there is ample material to aid in the Dupin-like task of identifying with the criminal in order to catch him. The stakes are, however, high, as the third group of Rumbelow’s dedicatees suggests. Colin Wilson claims that the Whitechapel murders ushered in ‘The Age of Sex Crime.’ Jane Caputi has appropriated this title for a seminal feminist text which could not differ more widely in style or approach from the work of the ‘Ripperologists’ (a term also coined by Wilson). She suggests that just as the Nuclear Age was born at the moment of the Trinity explosion in 1945:

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the Age of Sex Crime was blasted into being in London, 1888, with the unprecedented crimes of Jack the Ripper. That still anonymous killer essentially invented modern sex crime. We might think of him as its ‘father.’ (1988: 4) Some might reject the emotive nature of the word father, but it underlines a point on which Wilson and Caputi agree: to investigate the Whitechapel murders is to investigate origins. To be the author of the ‘definitive’ solution is to obtain a key to this ‘age’. It is more than imaginative identification or fictionalizing, it is the construction of a master narrative, subject to the Oedipal ‘anxiety of influence’ said to pervade Western literature – an ordeal that might well trail clouds of Romantic agony. If you are a man, that is. This may account for the flip tone in which many Ripperologists couch their hypotheses. It springs less from hostility to the victims than a tendency to ignore them in favour of a spirited challenge to competitors like this one from Robert Bloch: One of the most popular suspects is Montague J. Druitt, a barrister who failed at law, became a tutor at a private school, in Blackheath and voiced fears that he was going insane. . . . But nomination isn’t election, and the trouble with Druitt’s candidacy – aside from the fact that there’s no evidence linking him to the crimes – is his ability as a cricketer. On the mornings following two of the Whitechapel murders, Druitt was playing his heart out on cricket fields many miles from London. That he could kill and mutilate two women in the city slums shortly before dawn, then board a train and go directly to join his team in contest matches in the country is hardly plausible. To do so just isn’t cricket. (Casper and Dozois 1988: 11) The figure currently selected as the ‘real’ Ripper takes on a powerful charge with origins in the popular fiction of his own day. Foucault has suggested that the replacement of punishment as spectacle with the certainty of surveillance generated an alternative spectacle, the duel between policeman and master criminal, which the emerging detective story took as its central trope. The Ripper, endlessly eluding the vigilance of the state, thus has a potentially attractive outlaw status; his relationship to law is like that of Punch to Victorian domesticity; he refuses his conformity, he cannot be tamed. To participate in the duel as Ripperologist is to identify with his outlaw status while not only remaining within the sphere of law, but asserting a superior status within that sphere.


Jon Stratton postulates a complex relationship between the capitalist state, the male individual and the female body. The state can be experienced as the Law of the Lacanian Father, the bearer of the symbolic phallus against which man, the bearer only of the penis, feels helpless, lack and desire for what he cannot have. In this scenario, woman becomes fetishized as the phallus she too does not possess. Inevitably, as she cannot be the phallus for another without the obliteration of her own identity, she becomes an object, a commodity (Stratton 1988). At best, she is Judy to his Punch, at worst, the Foucauldian narrative of the defiant criminal is violently and literally inscribed upon her body. The obliteration of the Whitechapel victims is a double one: destroyed by the murderer to the extent that in some cases they were barely recognizable as women, they also become for the would-be detectives of Ripperology little more than raison-d’etre for a duel. But this is a true story about women. It is their killer who has always partaken of the nature of fiction. His name and persona derive from two letters sent to the Central News Agency signed ‘Jack the Ripper’ and a third to the Chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee accompanied by half a human kidney; it was a persona with graveyard humour and specific intent – ‘I am down on whores and I shan’t quit ripping them till I do get buckled’ – and one which others liked to assume. Scotland Yard has 350 letters on file, all claiming to be the killer; and practical jokers pounced on victims declaring themselves ‘Jack’. His victims have names, and real dates of death. All lived within a quarter of a mile of one another, all earned part – not all – their living from prostitution, all died within a ten week period: Polly Nicholls on 31 August, Annie Chapman on 8 September, Liz Stride and Catherine Eddowes on 30 September, Mary Jane/Marie Kelly on 9 November. To undo their absence, to place a female voice in the story, it is necessary to reconfigure it, dislodging the question of criminal identity from the centre. Judith Walkowitz’s masterly study of Victorian London, City of Dreadful Delight, offers a strategy for beginning this process by focussing not upon the identity of the killer but on the nexus of discourses surrounding contemporary responses to the murders. There are discourses of social geography: Whitechapel was a locus of disease, crime and violence traversed alike by thrill-seekers and philanthropists. There were discourses of class: a famous Punch cartoon shows a spectral figure with prognathous jaw raising a knife, entitled THE NEMESIS OF NEGLECT: but stories also circulated about ‘toffs’, shadowy suspects with astrakhan collars and doctor’s bags (Walkowitz 1994). These tap in to another

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discourse, that of medicine. Elaine Showalter cites a widespread distrust of doctors at this period, especially surgeons, who responded by controlling the flow of information, casting details of the corpses in medical terminology and offering pathological diagnoses of the murderer as syphilitic, or as ‘invert’ (Showalter 1990). There was a discourse of racism: a bungling attempt to erase a graffito which could have been seen as implicating ‘the Juwes’ (sic) did nothing to allay rumblings of anti-Semitism. And there were discourses of sexuality. As Walkowitz has noted, however, these failed to be integrated with other discourses, reflecting ‘a Victorian tendency to conceptualize social problems and identities as stark dichotomies, rather than as multiple and intersecting determinants’ (1994: 225). This failure occurred at a crucial level, between the discourses of male psychopathology that produced images of the Ripper and those of female sexuality inhabited by his victims. On the one hand, the killer was characterized as a ‘lust murderer’ delineated in the pioneering study of Krafft-Ebbing, Psychopathia Sexualis, published in 1886; and in populist mode, as the ‘monster’ of Stevenson’s fiction The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. While Stevenson’s hero inhabited a world of crusty bachelors, the colourful West End adaptation hinted at crimes of heterosexual violence and female characters, chaste and otherwise, rushed into the sexual gap in the novel. Jekyll acquired – as he still tends to in films – a virtuous fiancée and some less reputable liaisons. In short, both medical and popular psychopathology constructed a figure driven by forces beyond his control and a threat to all women regardless of class or sexual history. The victims, on the other hand, were constructed even by the radical press as deserving their fate, as ‘women of evil life’ and ‘dehumanised creatures’ (Star 9 October 1888). There was little published dissent from the attitude of Sir Robert Anderson, head of CID; in his memoirs he credits himself with bringing the murders to an end by warning prostitutes they would not receive police protection, thus clearing the streets. Their title, The Lighter Side of My Official Life, suggests the importance he placed upon the lives of the victims. The women’s personalities disappeared under the weight of moralizing stories, such as the prophetic encounter between Liz Stride and Dr Barnardo (Sugden 1994: 197) or Marie Kelly’s alleged warning to a young girl about the evils of prostitution on the night of her last encounter. This process of de-individualization continues, as the exhibit set-up in 1980 by Madame Tussaud’s, the ‘Ripper Street’, graphically bears out. In line with their vaunted policy that Tussaud’s will not ‘invent a face’ (Chapman 1984: 96), the killer is


represented by a shadow. However, Marie Kelly also appears, at the door of the room in which she is to be murdered. There is no recorded likeness of Kelly, whose face was so mutilated that her lover could barely recognize her. The only way her portrait could be constructed is from images in the popular press, images which had no pretension to likeness but merely supported the sensational text. Tussaud’s Kelly is a generic prostitute, her individuality given less respect than that of the faceless shadow. This is a visual correlative of a tendency in an example of ‘Ripperature’ I cite here not because it has received any special credence but because the ramifications of the mindset it exemplifies will be plain in Chapter 3. Jack the Ripper: The Mystery Solved, by Robert Hale – still a policeman when he wrote it in 1991 – refuses to link the social conditions of prostitute women with their sexual behaviour. Hale dismisses the victims as ‘women . . . of the lowest possible class, perhaps once they had been fair maidens, but now they had been ravaged by time and ill-health and, were little more than old hags who had been used and abused’ (1991: 20). ‘Hags’ is a term connoting witchcraft, malice and an extreme old age at which sexual activity is inappropriate and illicit – in short, deliberate criminality and self-destruction. It denies the real lives of women who were in their early forties (Marie Kelly, the exception, was in her twenties) and who treated the streets as a last resort when other work failed: Annie Chapman did fancy needlework, Catherine Eddowes was still tanned from hop-picking when she died and none of her acquaintance was willing to describe her as a prostitute. Hale’s ‘solution’ to the mystery is to suggest that Marie Kelly’s lover, Joseph Barnett, discovered how she earned her living and after killing some of her friends as a warning vented his fury by making her repulsive in death. While this is offered as a ‘commonsense’ alternative to more complex scenarios, it is grounded less on evidence than on the assumption that hatred of prostitutes and murderous jealousy are ‘normal’, that ‘this man was not unusual, he was no weird and wonderful creation, he existed like you and me’ (28). It brutalizes both Barnett and Kelly (who according to their neighbours were on affectionate terms), by denying the possibility of a complex relationship between them, one which acknowledged that her occasional prostitute activity was necessitated by poverty and made tolerable by drink, in favour of an ‘inevitable’ clash between generic figures. The more the woman’s personality is subsumed into the generalized ‘prostitute’, the more ‘natural’ a victim she becomes. Meanwhile, the figure of the killer takes on a dual nature: at once Everyman, his behaviour over-determined by women, and wholly Other, so freakishly

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individual that there is no need to assume that the will to misogynist violence needs to be understood as part of the social fabric. This would be less troubling if the figures constructed here were confined to Victorian boundaries; but ‘Ripperature’ is as much to do with ideology as with detection. Hale compares his characterization of Joseph Barnett to Peter Sutcliffe on the grounds that ‘both men hunted down prostitutes’ (174). As the Chapter 3 will show, this kind of reading of the Ripper case is a template dangerously inappropriate to the later situation. The danger is masked by the text’s self-proclaimed status not as imaginative reconstruction but as the ‘truth’ about an individual. This ‘truth’, the product of mapping assumptions onto evidence, competes only with other ‘truths’ similarly derived rather than interrogating the society which produces the conditions in which the murder could take place. The writer of fiction is not subject to this pressure to produce a single ‘truth’; fictions, rather than the work of competing Ripperologists, are better equipped to investigate that damaging gap between discourses and offer ways of bridging it. The number of available fictions is daunting and it is important to be aware of the size and the range – including novels, stories, films, plays, comics, jokes, computer games and parodies – of what Jane Caputi calls ‘The Ripper Repository,’ (1988: 14) in order to understand the force of the Ripper myth. However, her pioneering work and that of others in this field allow me to assume this awareness in my readers and to work in closer focus. I have selected texts ranging from the experimental to the popular and from the explicitly feminist to those which, like TS Eliot’s Sweeney, take for granted that ‘Any man might do a girl in’. They fall into three categories I have encountered again and again: those grounded in a ‘solution’, drawing on the work of the Ripperologists but assuming the freedom to make imaginative leaps, those which cut the figure of the killer free from contextual moorings to construct an archetype of evil, and those which alter features of the situation to allow the author to focus upon different aspects of the Victorian context. This latter category has been extensively used by women and the texts, while widely different, make interesting use of the idea of the domestic.

Unmasking the criminal One of the numerous works which appeared in the centenary year of the murders not only crosses media boundaries but at first appears to confront some of the problems inherent in Ripperology: Mark Daniel’s novel Jack the Ripper, developed for Thames Television and Euston Films


by David Wickes and Derek Marlowe. Both texts foreground the possibility of multiple solutions rather than the status of the Ripper as master criminal. The novel presents a framing text in which the narrator’s father is given an account of events by George Godley, a young sergeant on the team of Inspector Abberline in 1888, shortly before Godley’s death in 1941. Godley, sworn to secrecy, breaks silence while preserving his oath by offering a narrative with four alternate outcomes from which the narratee is invited to draw his own conclusions. The film’s publicity made much of the fact that several endings had been shot and that the cast were unaware of which one would be shown. Having chosen the liberties of fiction, however, both novel and film are confined within the structure of a ‘police procedural’ which requires closure. The four outcomes discussed in the novel are politically sensitive enough to make Godley’s silence credible: they point respectively at George Lusk of the Vigilance Committee, Sir William Gull the Queen’s Physician, Inspector Spratling of the Police, and Prince Albert Victor, eldest son of the Prince of Wales. This would seem to afford a lively opportunity to interrogate all the discourses of power. However, the novel undercuts this by resolving its ambiguities with a coded suggestion. As the narrator reflects on Godley’s story, he discusses the weaknesses of each ‘solution’ in turn – except the last. This leaves us in the position of the magician’s stooge, not genuinely free to choose any card in the pack; we are stuck with the most apparently controversial suspect – but at an era when the queen’s reclusive habits rendered the monarchy almost invisible, the one with least immediate social impact. The revealed corruption of law, medicine and social reform might lead to a far sharper reassessment of the world from which they sprang. The film, on the other hand, proclaims an alibi for the Prince, almost omits Spratling and turns Lusk into a fool before revealing Gull as homicidal maniac. It would be difficult to envisage an ending that did not one way or another embody the cliché of identifying the killer with the Least Likely Individual. This seems to arise out of the casting. Inspector Abberline, most intelligent of the officers associated with the case, is played by Michael Caine. While Caine’s laid-back, proletarian and witty persona is an excellent choice, his star status ensures that Abberline is unambiguously the hero. It is necessary to produce a single antagonist he can successfully identify and disarm, even if the story does not end in a trial and conviction. Despite its refusal to vaunt a final ‘solution’, both versions of the text focus upon the relationship between detective and criminal and the hint of a new dialectic between discourses vanishes. Female sexuality is

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still a ‘problem’ rather than an element in this dialectic. While Daniel details the legislation that had recently made prostitution more hazardous by forcing women out of bawdy houses and on to the streets, he also suggests that it was an occupation chosen in pursuit of thrills; in an echo of the Thatcherite rhetoric of the 1980s – notably Edwina Currie’s advice to the old and impoverished to knit themselves warm clothes – he blames the poor for their situation: ‘No one starved in 1880s London. Food and gin were cheap. If deficiency diseases were widespread, it was only because the poor preferred to live on stale bread and broken biscuits rather than pease-pudding and faggots and thus save another ha’pence for beer or spirits’ (1988: 41). This may be Godley rather than Daniel talking, but there is little to suggest that any of the nested narratives differ in political outlook as well as in period. A further paragraph confirms that the ‘choice’ to go on the streets is not made by a self-defining individual but by a type conforming to expectations. Godley contemplates the corpse of Annie Chapman: To me, had I seen her on the streets, she would have been just another ugly face, another still-sow on the game. Now, thanks to a nameless butcher with a long knife, I was to come to know her better – or know more about her, at least – than any man alive. (84) This is not the ‘knowledge’ a detective has of a murderer; through the process of identifying with him he comes to discover the Romantic uniqueness that the criminal opposes to the Law. The criminal’s capture depends upon the detective’s knowledge, but is not a function of his individuality: the end of the story is not a foregone conclusion, as A Scandal in Bohemia shows. For Annie, however, recognition of her selfhood is necessarily bought at the price of her erasure; she is worth decoding as a corpse only because the signs of individuality inscribed on it are clues to her killer. In the film, even this posthumous recognition is denied. Abberline is given a sidekick, played by Lewis Collins; knowledge is not the result of reflection but produced by a relationship, at a speed which reflects the excitement of the chase. The effect is to crowd the victims out of the narrative space to make room for the buddy dynamic. The prostitutes may ally themselves with specific attitudes, cheering on the somewhat manic Lusk or booing the nobs, but never articulate their own situation at any length. Room is made, however, for a love interest – Jane Seymour as a freespirited artist, a character not in the novel. Her prominence underlines


the distance between Abberline and the victims by implicitly postulating her relationship with him as the embodiment of ‘normal’ sexuality. Her high-gloss fictionality is both evident and jarring. Seymour’s success in the art market is almost as remarkable as her clothing, which combines nineteenth century complexity with an ease of removal (no Victorian inhibitions for Caine and Seymour) more common in Polyester. The unintentional comedy has its pleasures, but the effect is to colonize the narrative margins to which the victims are already relegated by their gender with a wholly fake representative of it. They are not only constucted as negligible, but expendable. One of them is induced by Abberline to act as bait to catch Gull, a job clearly out of Seymour’s brief; her feminism may reject the old virgin/whore dichotomy, but it hardly embraces the notion of female solidarity. A Ripperologist text of 1976, Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, offered some potential for the exploration of such a notion. Knight postulated not a single murderer but a conspiracy. His account is predicated on a marriage between Prince Albert Victor (‘Eddy’) and Annie Crook, a shop assistant at a tobacconist’s in the notorious Cleveland Street. The union produced a daughter, Alice Margaret, and was a potential source of embarrassment to a future king, not only on the grounds of class but because Annie was a Catholic. A cabal led by Lord Salisbury took action. With the connivance of Sir William Gull, Annie was kidnapped and lobotomized, and attempts made on the life of Alice Margaret. At this point the five victims enter Knight’s story. Marie Kelly and Annie Crook both knew the Prince’s companion, the painter Walter Sickert. On Annie’s capture Marie fled with the child who was cared for by relatives of Sickert, and eventually became his mistress. Marie returned to her life as an East End prostitute and told her story to some women friends. They made a clumsy blackmail attempt, and Gull, exceeding Salisbury’s orders, eliminated them in spectacular fashion grounded in Masonic ritual, co-opting a coachman, John Netley, to assist, and ensuring Sickert’s silence with threats and bribery. Doubts have been raised about Knight’s ‘solution’, but it had its attractions for the mid-1970s. The Watergate break-in in 1972, the introduction of internment without trial in Northern Ireland in 1971, offered images of the present against which stories of long-ago government conspiracy could be measured. Foucauldians could see in the story an image of the power of the state, inscribing its violence on those who challenge its power while simultaneously denying that it does so. Nowhere, however, did Knight interrogate the received image of the

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victims. While his argument was predicated on their mutual acquaintance, it was constructed as that of ‘a gaggle of gin-sodden harlots . . . [whose] fatal greed brought about their own destruction’ (1976: 28). However, later fictions have taken Knight’s theory as a starting point while shifting the focus from state conspiracy to female resistance and male complicity. Paul West’s novel The Women of Whitechapel, published fifteen years after Knight, expoundes his thesis grounded in the geographical proximity of the would-be blackmailers and concentrates upon the interaction between them. The women are characterized in relation to their whole existence rather than simply to their deaths. This goes some way to restoring the dignity which the repeated exposure in Ripperologist texts of their photographed remains has tended to deny. Their sexuality is a part of this holistic characterization, not simply a function of their prostitute activity and thus the cause of their deaths. Rather than the degraded and passive creatures of the Victorian press, they are shown with clearly defined desires, on which they can sometimes afford to act: Liz and Marie engage in three-handed love play with Sickert ‘free or for the price of the gin,’ (1991: 282) which involves walking and singing as well as sex. With Marie Kelly, West goes further; her sexual individuality is the source of a language in which she articulates her complex sense of political identity. She fantasizes acting as dominatrix to Gladstone and the Prince of Wales and transcending the usual outcome of commodified sex – the restoration of the old power relations – by dismissing them herself and letting her voice continue to ring in their ears. She also has fantasies of extreme masochism, but these too are an attempt to keep control of her sexuality, ‘entering into the unthinkable . . . the metaphysical extreme of the things she had to do daily because she was poor’ (161). Her sexual imagination allows her to resist alienation from a body forced to be both means of production and product. The power this gives her welds the other women into a team who seek control over the system which commodifies them by demanding money for Alice Margaret. Marie is arguably the heroine of the novel. The hazard of that status is demonstrated not just by the brutal slaying at the end, but from the outset: a long lyrical introduction from the point of view of Annie Crook suggests that the central role might be hers, but it is, quite literally, cut: brain surgery leaves her with only instinct, removing the decision-making capacity of a protagonist. If Marie is the heroine, Sickert is the anti-hero. Unlike the women he can choose how to situate himself in relation to the structures of power, and what he chooses is complicity rather than resistance. While Gull wishes he could publish an account of his work, Sickert is frozen in


hypocrisy. Unable and afraid to articulate a confession or an accusation about the unspeakable acts in which he has joined, all he can do is to scrawl the ‘Juwes’ graffito to no effect. West mercilessly deconstructs his attraction to the world of Whitechapel. It may resemble the lust for life and social radicalism of the Romantic artist, but it is also inextricably entwined with the commodification of women, a desire not just for the free sexuality of Marie and the rest but for ‘the way these women saw themselves as expendable’ (208). Sickert’s complicity, however, has another dimension. Not only does he take bribes and cower under threats, he is also aware that his experience has benefited him as an artist. Energized by his confrontation with violence, he ponders De Quincey’s essay On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts and speculates on the distinction between imaginative engagement with killing and the performance of it. ‘Painting was a way of altering the visible world, and so was murder, but were these changes in any way alike?’ (227). The novel does not offer an answer, but a series of potent images from which we are implicitly invited to draw our own conclusions. Sickert ponders the elaborate cleansing of the coach used by Gull to entice his victims, imagining traces of blood and flesh too small to be seen. While they suggest forensic clues decodable in another century, they here develop the parallel between the murderers and the artist who experiments with female secretions as paint. Sickert dreams of painting like Fuseli, horrific images which would force the viewer to recoil physically while stretching the mind beyond its limits. But he cannot envisage a mind stretching to encompass the idea of justice, any more than he has a clear understanding of his responsibilities as artist. Gull, Pygmalion-like, reconstructs living beings, both artist and destroyer, and has full confidence in his dual role. Marie Kelly, aware of her limitations, sings simply for her own pleasure, and her song remains in Sickert’s head as she once imagined her voice echoing in the ears of authority. Sickert can neither forgive himself for his complicity nor enjoy the Faustian bargain that elevates his painting to the level of Degas or Hogarth. Inevitably, the reader is forced by the extensive parallels to interrogate not only Sickert but the nature of representation itself. Salisbury, Gull and Netley, aristocrat, bourgeois and proletarian, could be seen as an allegory of patriarchal capitalism which needs violence against women to continue – and Art, which might choose to side with its subjects, is compromised. So complex and full of false starts is Sickert’s corruption that the reader, shifting between his viewpoint and those of Marie and the dimly flickering consciousness of Annie Crook, is aware of the constant possibility of coming to find it ‘natural’ rather than monstrous.

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Feminist critics2 have debated West’s right to his subject matter and the possibility that the fact of representation is in itself a form of complicity. It is worth pointing out that the author’s text is not the only site for such a debate. The publisher’s blurb for the British edition of The Women of Whitechapel offers snippets of reviews which laud its ‘juicy Falstaffian fantasies of toping and tupping’, as if granting permission to read West’s complex interactions between art and power, survival and desire, from the point of view of a consumer without responsibility.3

Murder and metaphor The links explored by West’s Sickert between art and murder could be seen as exemplifying an early stage in the Ripper’s transition from historically specific individual to cultural metaphor. As Jane Caputi has pointed out, this inevitable process was to give rise to a variety of fictions which depict him as ‘eternal evil’. Best known is Robert Bloch’s frequently anthologized story, Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper, in which he immortalizes himself through blood sacrifice, ‘an ageless pathological monster, crouching to kill, on evenings when the stars blaze down in the blazing patterns of death’ (Casper and Dozois 1988: 101). But while there is nothing intrinsically gendered about a desire to live for ever at others’ expense, and while the original year of publication, 1943, offered Bloch countless images of ‘evil’ grounded in racism and the abuse of power, the story assumes that violence is inextricably bound up with sexuality. The victims, inevitably, lose their identities. ‘No one saw or heard him. But watchmen making their grey rounds in the dawn would stumble across the hacked and horrid thing that was the Ripper’s handiwork’ (102). But here the obliteration of the feminine is carried to a bizarre extreme. The Ripper, who usurps the usual detective role as narrator and the detective-like profession of psychiatrist, is living under the name of John Carmody in 1940s Chicago when he confronts the only person capable of unmasking him, an English diplomat called Sir Guy, who explains his motive for hunting him down: ‘In London’, he whispered, ‘in 1888 – one of those nameless drabs the Ripper slew – was my mother.’ ‘What?’ ‘Later I was recognised by my father, and legitimised . . . ’ (119) The fetishization and destruction of female identity is not only the distinctive aspect of the Ripper’s criminality, but the necessary precondition


of the duel between his master-criminal persona and the incarnate force of the patriarchal law, Sir Guy, that is, ‘Mister Man’. Guy has been ‘legitimised’ into his role as avenger by the substitution of the maternal name with that of his father. This is a game only men can play, and the escape of Carmody to fight another day suggests that it can be played across eternity. The fact that the ‘drabs’ of 1888 did have names and identities has to be ignored in order not to raise questions about the cost of the game. If Sir Guy’s mother bore the name of one of the victims, his failure to destroy the Ripper would be a failure of justice, not simply the conclusion of a single bout of a fight between unchanging masculine archetypes over the bodies of ‘nameless drabs’ treated, like Marie Kelly in the waxworks, as mere mis-en-scene. Bloch’s story, one of the best known of the multitude of Ripper fictions, was inevitably anthologized in the collection brought out by Futura in 1988. (‘After one hundred years, the horror lives on.’) This also contains a story which could be seen as a counterblow, Sarah Clemens’s A Good Night’s Work. Here the Ripper is merely ‘Jack’ while the victims have precise identities: Liz Stride – who demands that he use her name, not the appellation ‘whore’ – is the narrator, naming the women and adding biographical details such as the ‘jolly bonnet’ with which Polly Nichols hoped to attract a client on her last night alive. Equally radical is Clemens’s treatment of time and space. It is based neither in an ‘eternity’ through which unchanging evil continues an unquestioned course, nor in a carefully evoked Victorian Whitechapel, but in the grave. This is a place not unlike Kristeva’s pre-semiotic chora, where the women rest in warmth, companionship and reminiscent laughter. Laughter at Liz as the ‘odd one out’ – the one victim whose body was not mutilated – projects her back into the world to challenge ‘Jack’. Her joyful embracing of her ‘difference’, the signifier of the Ripper’s failure to complete his project, puts her in charge of the signifying process: the Ripper thus loses control of the Law of the Father which decrees the unequal polarization of the sexes as part of language. Faced with the anarchic jouissance of the women, who deconstruct all binaries, even ‘dead’ and ‘alive’, he cannot cope: In some way that I don’t really understand, I and the girls followed him down to the Thames, where he fell in. If you ask me, he fell, but he threw himself, both, because he couldn’t get the best of us. (Casper and Dozois 1988: 245) Liz’s cheerful vagueness about the details of capture and revenge radically subverts the criminal/detective dynamic; she omits most of the

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information which usually occupies the narrative centre at the expense of the victims’ individualities. The true closure of her story is the establishment of safe space for women on both sides of the grave: It’s me and the girls together again, and the earth lies over us all like a kind, warm blanket. There is rest here. I think if they dug us up now, we would all have smiles on our faces, smiles for our tired, dead bodies, smiles for old Jack, who never rested, and never will. (245) The choice of Liz as narrator is occasioned not only by the unmutilated state of her corpse, but by her linguistic difference from the others stemming from her Swedish birth, for the events of the story cannot unfold in physical space but only in words. Sarah Clemens is also Sarah Caudwell, the author of a series of comic novels about a group of detective-lawyers, narrated by a figure called Hilary whose gender is never revealed. In this story, the wit and the play with gender has a political overtone: it makes a foray into the territory of commodification and fetishization and reclaims it on behalf of the forgotten.

Getting murder off the streets? Both The Women of Whitechapel and A Good Night’s Work allow the victims not only to speak but to stand, to occupy a space other than the streets where they are commodified. The effect is to re-establish them as women and as subjects, to increase the distance between the reader and the Ripper by offering no mediating detective figure. However, the discourses of female sexuality can only be fully integrated with the other discourses shaping the analysis of the Ripper’s murders if they are relevant not just to the immediate victims but for all women. It is perhaps no coincidence that several works of fiction for women have grounded themselves in a situation which signals its fictional status with shifts of date or location; this permits the construction of female characters to articulate a range of responses ignored or silenced at the time and seldom voiced since, without replicating the too common patriarchal strategy of elbowing the victims out of the way. They allow the reader to consider the implications of the murders not simply from the victims’ viewpoint but as one of the privileged class protected at their expense, and to consider the killer in a wider context than simply the streets of his immediate operations. One of the earliest fictions did precisely this. Marie Belloc Lowndes’s The Lodger, twenty-five years after the murders, relocated them in the


West End and did not dwell on the profession of the victims. However, as Laura Marcus has pointed out, Lowndes had begun her own journalistic career in the year of the murders under the wing of the influential campaigner against child prostitution, WT Stead, and freely explores contemporary theories about the motivation of the killer, notably that of Lyttleton Forbes Winslow which locates it in sexual disgust and religious monomania. One might therefore assume that her fictionalizing is not based on squeamishness. Rather, she evokes the heartland of lower middle class respectability and plants the killer inside it to explore the nature of female complicity. The murderer known as ‘The Avenger’, ironically styling himself ‘Mr Sleuth’, takes rooms with Mr and Mrs Bunting, former servants whose investment in their boarding house has brought them to the edge of penury. His regular payments give them a motive to stay silent, even to each other, about their dawning suspicions. Their understanding of their class position compounds the silence. They have an ingrained detachment from their employer’s behaviour in the world – his late night wanderings, his aversion to pictures of women – judging only in terms of the master–servant relationship. Here, he gives almost complete satisfaction, his only flaw the vegetarianism that links him a little too closely with ‘those nasty Radicals’ (Lowndes 1996: 160). Their terror of the law, too, is class-based. While the upper class can afford to conduct its affairs without reference to the police, and the working class can expect to be watched for signs of disaffection and radicalism, the very presence of a policeman in the world of the Buntings is a sign of disgrace. It is this fear that makes reluctant detectives of the Buntings. Both, at times, find blood on their hands from Mr Sleuth’s clothes and bag, and both uneasily ponder the implications. For Mrs Bunting, this task is complicated by the fact of her gender. On the one hand, it is something she shares with the murdered women; furtively, she attends the inquest, recalling that before her marriage she testified as a witness on a similar occasion in the country. Now she assumes her maiden name, Ellen Green, to go to the London inquest, as if her married identity is threatened by even this remote contact with the Avenger. On the other hand, her gender prompts a maternal impulse toward Mr Sleuth, an emotion Lowndes glosses in a famous passage: In the long history of crime it has very, very seldom happened that a woman has betrayed one who has taken refuge with her. The timid and cautious woman has not infrequently hunted a human being fleeing from his pursuer from her door, but she has not revealed the

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fact that he was ever there. In fact, it may almost be said that such a betrayal has never taken place unless the betrayer has been actuated by love of gain, or by a longing for revenge. So far, perhaps, because she is a subject rather than a citizen, her duty as a component part of civilised society weighs but lightly on a woman’s shoulders. (98) As Laura Marcus points out in her introduction to the reissued novel, this passage was widely discussed by contemporary reviewers in the context of the women’s suffrage debate (Lowndes 1996: xx). Certainly the lack of ‘citizenship’ displayed by Mrs Bunting in allowing the situation to continue may be attributed in part to her infantilization under the law; her refusal to look at the newspaper that is one of her husband’s few luxuries suggests she has no concept of herself as part of a wider world. However, it is easy to overestimate Mrs Bunting’s obtuseness: clues such as Mr Sleuth’s mysterious bag, the traces of blood, were not in 1913 the clichés they are now; her bafflement over his apparent lack of motive is understandable in a world not yet familiar with the vocabulary of the Age of Sex Crime. Nor is she willing to resort to the simple explanation that Sleuth is ‘pure evil’. She considers what forces govern him, what might have made him mad and ‘what was more, and very terribly, to the point, having altered, why should be not in time go back to what he evidently had been – that is, a blameless, quiet gentleman?’ (99). If Lowndes presents Mrs Bunting as priggish, infantile and narrow, she also depicts her as a talented servant. The novel describes in sensuous detail the domestic pleasures that are, after all, her achievements – bright warm fires, comfortable chairs, hot meals served with the security that comes from awareness that there is still money to buy the next one. This domestic detail serves to remind us that she has not compromised from greed. Rather, it implies, no one should have to purchase their survival at such moral cost. Mrs Bunting, barring the killer’s passage with the tool of her profession, the tea tray, offers an image of complicity in her own danger. Although it has its comic overtones, it stresses the ground of economic necessity she shares with the murdered prostitutes – one of the few pre-feminist versions of the story to expose the narrowness of the gap between the ‘women of evil life’ on the streets and ‘protected’ women whose grasp on safety was more tenuous than they liked to think. Later writers have also explored the narrowness of that gap with a different emphasis on domesticity. In The Lodger its very precariousness renders it a potentially corrupting force. Some recent versions of the


‘family saga’ genre, traditionally one aimed at a female readership, have postulated the domestic as a source of empowerment. Sally Worboyes’s Whitechapel Mary (2001) makes implicit comparisons between the dysfunctional family which produces a female Ripper killing to defend a mad nephew and that of a heroine who turns prostitute to keep her brother and a stray orphan. The latter is rewarded with a rich patron. Mary Jane Staples’s The Ghost of Whitechapel incorporates a copycat Ripper into a mix of romantic family saga and police procedural. Its focus is suggested by the cover, on which the heroine, Bridget Cummings, is placed in the foreground in lively conversation with her sweetheart PC Billings against a background, not of slums, but the busy London docks. Bridget is introduced as a typically ‘feisty’ heroine, lashing out with a stick in a riot in support of striking workers, ‘an uproar of angry people close to the kind of starvation that meant early death’ (1997: 49). Within the romantic framework, however, characters demonstrate a relatively conservative ideology. Bridget’s resistance to authority is undercut by her failure to place a blow correctly, and she gets a nasty smack in the face from the sailor she hits by mistake. There is a strong element of idealized fantasy in the treatment of the police, who conduct their enquiries with the help of plucky women: Inspector Dobbs’s wife recognizes the killer as an old flame, while the sergeant’s intended, Nurse Cartwright, acts as decoy. Bridget’s life intersects with the killer’s in several ways: her sister bluffs her way into the latest victim’s day job in a laundry; Bridget, spraining her ankle, is approached by the killer acting out the role of doctor. But her main role is to embody domesticity as opposition to his misogynist isolation. The family is determinedly united throughout their endless quarrels in a quest for a better life. Turning every space in the home and hour in the day into cash, they move steadily further from the margins of destitution on which they might confront the stark choices of the victims. These celebrations of ‘family values’ may seem sentimental, but they do make it clear that the moral qualities of their more attractive characters depend on small material advantages within a corrupt system: Bridget’s family gets a leg up in the shape of compensation when their father dies in an accident; the eponymous Mary has exceptional beauty that ensures she will not have to start her career at the level of Annie Chapman and the others. Nonetheless, the family is also an achievement, something these heroines have made: a source of power and energy rooted in food and fires and cleanliness, a site of female resistance to the killer’s fantasies of dominance and misogyny.

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A tougher and more overt exposition of domesticity as resistance appears in the detective novels of Anne Perry. Here there is an effort to deconstruct the linking of ‘family’ and ‘Victorian’ values promoted by the Thatcher government. For this ‘family’ has constructed itself in defiance of hegemony and offers a detective team of unique power – the working-class Inspector Thomas Pitt and his aristocratic wife Charlotte, who defies her family to marry. His policing skills combine with her access to social circles from which his class excludes him. Together they redraw the map of London (each volume bears the title of a different district) to reveal pockets of poverty and crime as direct consequences of bourgeois élitism and greed. Highgate Rise deals with a case of arson in Highgate Village contemporaneous with the Whitechapel murders, and linked to the conditions that gave rise to them. The victim has spent her life campaigning for legislation to control the slum landlords of the East End. Pitt, Charlotte and her maid trace a chain of sublettings until the disgusting rookeries (described in unsparing detail) are revealed to belong to the Church and the aristocrats who most persistently deny links between poverty and crime. In making the Ripper peripheral, Perry denies him the uniqueness that underpins Ripperology and explores the possibility of female resistance. The Angel in the House is not, Charlotte finds, without power: ‘Don’t social pressures come from the same people who vote?’ Charlotte asked; then knew the moment she had said it that it was not so. Women did not vote, and, subtle though it was, a very great deal of society was governed one way and another by women. (1995: 51) Her ability to use this power for social change, however, depends – as does that of the dead reformer Clemency Shaw – upon a marriage which operates outside the codes of the Angel and provides a source of strength. The series forms a Bildungsroman about Charlotte’s progress from pampered aristocrat to wife, mother and detective. The detective role, Perry implies, is directly grounded in the domestic: in caring for a house, Charlotte does not enter a prison but acquires skills – manual, financial and interpersonal – many of which she imbibes from her maid, and which give her the confidence to question the social structures she has taken for granted. It is a small bourgeois revolution, but also one which has the possibility of growth and continuance, and one which investigates at least the possibility of a role for working class women4 other than that of victim.


It also offers an image of resistance which affords the ‘protected’ woman reader a ground on which she can stand to interrogate her own position: it recognizes both her privilege in relation to a set of particular murders and the wider context which the Ripperologists obfuscate. It acknowledges the fact that the Ripper was so terrible a figure not because he was unique, but because he was not, because his imitators and admirers and the factors that bred them cannot be reduced to elements in a game of detection. As Chapter 3 shows, there is a continuing need for narrative strategies which are also acts of resistance.

3 Speaking Victims

Telling stories Virginia Woolf sees a young sailor with his girl, his friends, a cottage with flowers, and imagines for herself a picture called ‘The Sailor’s Homecoming’. As she reflects on it other images arise spontaneously, scenes of the sailor drinking tea, opening gifts. Later she hears a woman cry in the night. ‘It had been merely a voice. No picture of any kind came to interpret it. . . . But as the dark arose at last all one saw was an obscure human form, almost without shape, raising a gigantic arm in vain against some overwhelming iniquity’ (1942: 16). The pictures function for her as opposites, the cheerful image exorcising the horror evoked by the cry in the night. In the morning, she encounters another potent ‘picture’, a gravedigger whose wife is bringing tea. As lumps of clay mingle with the teacups, she learns that the grave is that of the sailor, the cry that of his wife. Woolf recognizes that to one another we are inevitably ‘pictures’ constructed by our class (and, she might have added, gender) position. While she alleges that ‘we cannot possibly break out of the frame of the picture by speaking natural words,’ (14) the mere existence of the essay hints at the importance of finding a language in which pictures can enter into a dialogue which not only allows them to express their own perceived reality but makes them respond to and interact with the fictions constructed around them. From the outset, the case of the so-called ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ generated pictures. One image of the criminal, shaped by preconceptions about society and sexuality, dominated and damaged the police investigation into the murders of thirteen women; women responded by angrily deconstructing that image, placing at the centre of the case not the 61


criminal but themselves, the potential victims, a counter – image primarily grounded not in their vulnerability but in their rights to respect, to liberty of movement and association, to the protection of the law. As I taught the literature of crime in the 1980s and my students investigated the work of Jane Caputi, Joan Smith and Nicole Ward Jouve, the clash of pictures, the sudden replacement of one image with another, seemed as clear and dramatic as Virginia Woolf’s experience of the cry in the night. While, however, I would not dissent from the conclusions that were drawn at that time, the experience of viewing those ‘pictures’ today is different again. Every book about the never-identified Jack the Ripper proclaims itself to be the last word, the final answer; facts which might establish guilt in a court of law are assumed to be an all-embracing ‘truth’. Nothing written about Peter Sutcliffe has even tried to make that claim. Questions go on being asked about the killer, about the police, about the victims. The women who are asking the questions ask questions about themselves. The variety of forms these questions take makes it clear that it is not enough to replace the original false assumptions with the simple fact of Sutcliffe’s guilt; they probe both information and image, they draw on the techniques of fiction, of drama and of reportage. A piece of feminist analysis may produce a small, surprising, novelistic, vignette; a documentary effects the transition between one piece of evidence and another with a piece of music which suddenly offers its own comment. Anne Cranny-Francis suggests that Change in the individual and in collections of individuals often seems to result from an awareness of injustice which is experienced initially as anger, hurt, frustration or misery. In attempting to locate the causes for those feelings . . . the individual subject is forced to deconstruct his/her discursive positionings and the contradictions they generate. (1992: 10) The mistakes and consequent injustices in the search for the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ led men, women and police to re-define themselves; they continue to re-negotiate their relationship with one another and with the sexual mythologies of the century between Jack the Ripper and Peter Sutcliffe. The ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ was a product of this mythology, a lethal fiction. Sutcliffe’s sphere of operations was not confined to Yorkshire. While he outraged and mutilated the bodies of his victims he did not ‘rip’ or eviscerate. They were not all prostitutes. Nor was he, like the

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Whitechapel murderer, active for a brief and intense period; the thirteen murders and seven assaults for which he was tried and found guilty took place between 1975 and 1981, and it has been alleged by West Yorkshire Chief Constable Keith Hellawell that he was active from 1969 and killed or maimed at least forty-five women across the country (Sunday Mirror 24 November 1996). The image which dominated the police imagination and that of the media during the six-year hunt, however, was precisely that of ‘Jack’, flamboyant killer of prostitutes. He only attracted the real indignation of the police after he had made a ‘tragic mistake’ in killing a young shop assistant, Jayne MacDonald, and went on to manifest an increasing ‘madness’ by continuing to kill ‘innocent’ women. It was an image reinforced by a series of communications from a figure styling himself ‘Jack’ and accepted by the police as the killer or at least as a viable suspect. This picture of ‘Jack’ was at the heart of an extraordinary series of representations. Posters in several languages showed ‘The Ripper’s handwriting’ and urged the public to listen to a tape of ‘his’ voice on a special hotline. Breathy, mocking, with a marked Tyneside accent, which was to lead to a literally fatal concentration of police energy on suspects with the same vocal patterns, the voice became the best-known in England as millions dialled the number. Most of us who heard it could probably still produce an imitation. Relief at the tangibility of such a ‘clue’ perhaps accounts for what now seems an extraordinary lack of awareness of ‘Jack’s’ more unconvincing aspects. Listening to the tape now, you notice a wooden intonation suggestive of a talentless actor, the language resembling the original Ripper letters, even to signing off ‘ha, ha’. The launch of a ‘Ripper Roadshow’ which toured the country and erupted into social and working spaces reinforced the suggestion of a Victorian theatre staging a battle of wits between police and master criminal over the bodies of women. George Oldfield, then Assistant Chief Constable for West Yorkshire, and in charge of the investigation, confirmed the spirit of the enquiry. ‘This has become something of a feud. He obviously wants to outwit me, but I won’t pack it in until he’s caught. . . . I would like to talk to this man’ (Burn 1985: 254). However, the contradictory aspects of the roadshow were all too evident. The police repeatedly insisted that women should not walk alone at night, that they should depend on men for protection. But they simultaneously invoked that other aspect of the serial killer template contributed by Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde – the murderous life deeply hidden, even perhaps from the killer himself. As the roadshow warned, he was ‘somebody’s husband, somebody’s son.’ Women thus seemed to


be handed the task of identifying him in his domestic space, the space to which they themselves had been urged to retreat. Any ‘protector’ who seemed safely associated with the home rather than the street – the escort on a dark night, the policeman, the driver of a taxi prudently taken to avoid a solitary walk – was thus re-inscribed as a possible killer. In short, according to the police, no man could be trusted, and yet it was the presence of women on the streets that was seen as problematic, even provocative. Small wonder that the first book about the case, David Yallop’s Deliver Us From Evil, felt able to announce that Sutcliffe had put back the cause of women’s liberation a hundred years, driving them indoors after dark (1981: 348). This proved to be an oversimplification. Most women were hardly in a position to abandon their jobs, including those which involved shiftwork, and if their social lives were curtailed their professional lives were not. They remained the ‘citizens’ imagined by Marie Belloc Lowndes rather than the passive dolls evoked by Yallop. And some of them offered the roadshow vivid pieces of counter-theatre. Women picketed the Leeds cinema showing the slasher movie Dressed to Kill and sprayed graffiti over a sex shop in Chapeltown near the site of one of the murders. The organization Women Against Violence Against Women organized a conference in Leeds in 1980 and satirically treated men to low-grade sexual harassment, pinching bottoms and patting cheeks while accusing them of ‘asking for it.’ The demonstrations graphically dramatized women’s anger at the police misogyny they felt underlay both the slowness in catching the killer and the effective imposition of a curfew on potential victims rather than suspects. Chiefly at stake, however, was the identification of the killer as a product of patriarchal culture rather than as a freak of nature and the consequent need to engage with the vulnerability of women in that culture – in particular, with the relationship between women, both prostitute and non-prostitute, men, language and law.

Detective stories The debate enshrined in these initial ‘pictures’ was to assume massive and complex proportions with the arrest of Sutcliffe himself. It was revealed that he had been interviewed by the police and released because he had no Tyneside accent, and that his final arrest had been fortuitous, prompted by nothing more than a query about number plates. The police were forced to re-imagine themselves in relation to sexual crime, at least to an extent. To assess that extent, and to give a rather fuller account of the progress of the police investigation itself,

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I have chosen to examine an ITV television drama shown in 2000, This is Personal: the Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. This was a high profile series. Spread over two nights, its lavish production values stressed its ‘drama’ rather than ‘documentary’ status; they also made clear, with careful attention to the dress and music of the seventies and eighties, that it was presenting itself not simply as detective drama, but as historical drama. The usual preface about ‘bad language’ was couched in terms which stressed the temporal difference, referring to a police ‘canteen culture’ in which women might be referred to in sexist or even abusive language. In short, the viewer was encouraged to see the mistakes of the past through a present which would whole-heartedly repudiate them. So, for instance, social shifts of all kinds, not only those of gender relations, were carefully included; we saw increasing piles of paperwork threatening to collapse the ceiling as a harassed detective expressed a longing for the computer that was not yet standard police issue – a highly visible excuse for the failure to co-ordinate information such as that of DC Laptew, whose report that Sutcliffe had had a conviction for ‘going equipped to steal’ was ignored by his superiors. Within this framework the absence of any kind of feminist police perspective became a feature of the seventies mis-en-scene. Tracy Browne, a young girl who desperately tried to give evidence about the attack Sutcliffe had made on her, was seen being patronizingly dismissed with the assurance that he was not interested in ‘nice’ girls like her. Domestic episodes with George Oldfield’s student daughter were introduced in order to let her voice ideas clearly current at college, ‘It’s women, Dad, he wants to kill women’ – implying, perhaps, the minority, ‘intellectual’ status of such a viewpoint at the time. Images of ‘canteen culture’ – such as the fictional WPC peremptorily summoned to impersonate a ‘dead tart’ for a reconstruction – seemed to be inserted precisely to show that this culture should take responsibility for its failure to catch Sutcliffe earlier. We did not, however, hear remarks like the one about a victim which Joan Smith attributes to a senior detective at the time, ‘Her fanny was as sticky as a paperhanger’s bucket’ (1989: 128). Nor would we, naturally, in an episode of Inspector Morse. The story was mapped onto a grid closely resembling this police procedural series in which a subtle interplay between characters habitually competes for centrality with the narrative of the crime. The casting of established stars rather than the anonymous faces of a Crimewatch reconstruction alerted us to the details of characterization among the senior officers. Alun Armstrong, whose features radiate craggy integrity, played what seemed to be two versions of Oldfield simultaneously: the man situated within an


ideology that caused him to misread the signs, and the maverick cop at odds with his fellows. His face reflected trouble and doubt, suggesting a lack of ease with the policy of pursuing the author of the ‘Jack’ tape as prime suspect although the text was unable to credit him with a clear line of thought on the subject. He had scenes clearly modelled on cop shows: Oldfield was shown with friends, recalling the death of his own child, clearly establishing the strength of his motivation to find the killer of the young Jayne MacDonald; he was seen angrily upbraiding a colleague who rejoiced over a dead prostitute as a source of overtime pay. Against this humane ‘maverick’ were set his superior and rival: James Laurenson’s smug Chief Constable Gregory, preening in front of the TV cameras as he glossed over mistakes to lead the celebrations over Sutcliffe’s arrest (which in fact took place within the hearing of Sutcliffe’s wife, an image the dramatization ignored) and John Duttine’s Jim Hobson, Acting Assistant Chief Constable, portrayed here as the know-it-all dandy against Armstrong’s dogged good sense. Although Hobson replaced Oldfield as head of the investigation, the narrative retained Oldfield’s point of view, increasing the likeness to a copshow where the hero is ‘taken off the case,’ which he then pursues with freelance integrity. Armstrong’s Oldfield effectively became the bridge between the ‘mistakes of the past’ and the attitudes of the present. However, the hypothesis was advanced that the ‘Jack’ hoax was in fact the work of a police rival trying to discredit Oldfield. The closing credits included a note that the hoaxer has never been found. Disturbingly, this was presented as Oldfield’s tragedy. There was no attempt to deal with the wider and more terrifying implications: either a man who took pleasure in identifying with a serial killer to the extent that he would risk women’s lives by derailing an investigation was still at large and not, apparently, considered worth pursuing – or the assumed duel between police and criminal had taken on a particularly ugly twist, what Jane Caputi has called the ‘secret sharer’ motif ‘hold[ing] a particularly critical place in the ideology of sex crime’ (1988: 88). The assumption on which This is Personal seemed to be grounded – that a radical cultural shift had occurred in the way both the police and the rest of society viewed sexual crime – was undercut in this final stress on the ‘personal’ at the expense of the political.

Murder stories If the format of the lavishly produced police procedural was unsympathetic to a materialist–feminist reading of the case, so too was another

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dominant narrative structure through which it continues to be widely read, one that might be termed ‘the Sutcliffe story’. Its existence was probably inevitable. Most of the public’s information about Sutcliffe of course emerged initially at his trial. While a trial by its very nature focuses upon the guilt or innocence of a named individual, the facts were not in dispute. What was at issue was Sutcliffe’s responsibility. The jury were, effectively, being asked to judge his character, the sort of individual he was. They heard his accounts of hearing the voice of God instructing him to kill prostitutes, a voice he alleged had marked him out while he worked as a gravedigger in Bingley Cemetery. Confronted by a battery of psychiatrists who enlarged on the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, and the claims of the prosecution that Sutcliffe killed women for pleasure and gambled on imitating those very symptoms to secure the option of mental hospital rather than jail, they faced an impossible decision. The judge, Mr Justice Boreham, told them that the most important witness was Sutcliffe himself. They had to form their impressions of his sanity and truthfulness out of their own ‘collective good sense’, ‘I think’, he told them, ‘you will find if you keep your feet on the ground it will stop you getting your head in the clouds’ (Times 13 May 1981). Their verdict of ‘Guilty’ and the award of twenty life sentences, one for each murder or attempted murder, were to have little lasting significance; Sutcliffe was reassessed in 1984 and transferred to Broadmoor, where he remains. That original verdict might best be understood not as reflecting the accuracy of the jury’s clinical judgement, or their confidence in their ability to make such a judgement, but the nationwide desire for closure after years of uncertainty. The punishment of a single, identifiable, responsible individual was perhaps the only satisfactory symbolic outcome of such a desire. While this was a wholly understandable response to the jury’s specific brief, the inevitable media focus on Sutcliffe as the central character in the drama made it more difficult to discuss him as a cultural phenomenon. The scandals over ‘cheque-book journalism’ I shall address later in this chapter might imply that this focus was confined to the tabloids, but this was by no means the case. The Times, for instance, made sanctimonious allusions to the ‘motley rabble’ agog to see ‘this year’s Trial of the Century’ (6 May 1981) as if in contrast to its own measured sensibility; but it rapidly undercut this with a headline of breathtaking vulgarity inflicted on a major female witness, RIPPER’S LAST WOMAN LEAVES IN TEARS (8 May 1981). The Observer, meanwhile, also implied a clear chain of specific cause and effect which made the central figure what he was. Sutcliffe claimed that his first murder was prompted by


the taunts of a prostitute when he failed to get an erection, a view that the paper seemed to consider not wholly unreasonable: It is not hard to see how this cocktail of frustration, guilt and humiliation could lead to fury, and the fury to an urge not just for revenge but for the satisfaction in spirit if not in body of his sexual urge. (7 May 1981) The story which emerged piecemeal at the trial was then re-told in Gordon Burn’s Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son. The book’s cover makes plain its role as detailed investigative journalism rather than simply ‘the book of the trial’. On the back reviews are cited by Norman Mailer, Julian Symons and Patricia Highsmith, clearly indicating that it should also be judged as a work of literary significance. Highsmith explicitly likens it to a novel ‘in which we come to know all the characters’, while the presence of Mailer suggests that it straddles the territory between fiction and documentary occupied by his own lengthy study of the murderer Gary Gilmore, The Executioner’s Song. As readers we are evidently expected to find in it the virtues of responsibility and imagination, to learn to know Sutcliffe as an individual – one moreover with coherent individual motivation. Rather than the simple key incident cited in the trial, we have a more complex view of a ‘loner’, the odd one out in family and community, a man who did not share his father’s brutal masculinity and his brother’s liking for booze and casual sex. He is a man whose first encounter with the feminine, however, is fatally flawed: In lots of ways she were an exceptional person, me mother. She were right patient and a right good mum. But you couldn’t sit down and talk to her – at least you couldn’t about anything that mattered. She could feed us and clothe us and look after us materially, but she just didn’t seem to have enough discipline to cope. (Burn 1985: 85) Thus Maureen, Sutcliffe’s sister, describing part of a ‘family romance’ in which masculine brutality is countered by female incompetence rather than maternal strength, a scenario which constructs Sutcliffe as a hero with a fatal flaw, a disaster waiting to happen. In the reading Burn constructs from the trial and the medical reports, the waiting was over when Sutcliffe met a figure who became the catalyst for his subsequent actions, his wife Sonia. Sonia’s own instability, the shyness her in-laws read as snobbishness, her pride in the house she and Peter bought

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together, are presented as the catalyst to Sutcliffe’s obsessions. While the tabloids reduced her to a cartoonish (and culpable) shrew with headlines like ‘NAGGING’ MAY BE LINK IN TRAGIC CHAIN (Walkowitz 1994: 233) Burn is more subtle. That initial failed encounter with a prostitute is shown as the outcome of an incident during Sutcliffe’s engagement to Sonia when his brother maliciously informed him that he had seen her in a car with another man. Women are the crucial actors in this script. Mailer’s dust-jacket comparison with Hardy might be relevant here. For, while they are not directly awarded blame, they are seen as agents of a malign fate. There is no hint that they might have represented an alternative way of being, that, as Joan Smith suggests, the possibility exists that ‘Peter’s marriage was not the cause of his violence but an attempt to contain it’ (1989: 146). While the contention of most feminists was that it was more profitable to interpret Sutcliffe as cultural rather than psychoanalytical phenomenon, Nicole Ward Jouve offered a kind of counter-biography to that of Burn, hinting at an individualized focus in a title which echoed Sutcliffe’s own view of his function, The Streetcleaner. It was an attempt to find a role for academic feminism, to bring to bear a specific set of skills in ‘psychoanalysis, socio-economic discourse, whether Marxist or not, linguistic analysis, myths, diary, fiction’ (1986: 30) in order to make sense of the case. Aspects of her reading have attracted strong criticism. Walkowitz, for example, points out that she merely inverts the ‘narrative logic’ of Burn to produce a reading of Sutcliffe as a repressed homosexual in a brutal working class culture, one which patronizingly assumes that misogynist violence and homophobia are located solely within this class and almost endemic there. However, Jouve offers some valuable strategies which allow the reader to break free of the interpretative grid provided by Burn. First, she asserts that there are ‘no women in this case’ (37) in the sense that there is no relationship, causal or otherwise, between the individual subjectivities of the victims and their murders. They had no more significance to Sutcliffe than the victims of an explosion have to the terrorist who caused it. While this might be seen to be working against the grain of the feminist stance in denying their rights as speaking subjects, it also removes them from the false position they occupy in many texts as agents-provocateurs. It also restores the privacy to which the dead are entitled; Jouve’s refusal to dwell on the details of their deaths is a conscious attempt to ‘remove obscenity from the bodies of the victims and place it back


where it belongs, in the acts of the murderer’ (37). The reader is thereby also free to seek for her/his own reading of the case without the sleaze factor coming strongly into play. Denied spectacle, we are more alert to Jouve’s project to equip us with a language in which to find and articulate our own position. To do so involves recognition of the difficulty of engagement with the web of signification: Jouve points out her own situation as a speaker whose original language is French, as an inhabitant of a Yorkshire she sees as changed and disfigured by the killings, and as woman, and thus Other, as potential victim. She parallels this with Sutcliffe’s own discomfort with both the middle-class idiolect of Sonia and the easy brutalities of his family, struggling to be both conformist and resistant. Jouve invokes the story of Oedipus, not as narrated by Freud and Sophocles but by Cixous, who stresses the role of the Sphinx, as a kind of incarnation of the semiotic chora, against which Oedipus struggles for male identity, the only kind of identity there is ( Jouve 1986: 43). This certainly situates Sutcliffe as the ‘hero’ of a myth – but when, of course, the Greek myths were dramatized, the hero was constantly interrogated by a Chorus which stood for the society in which he functioned. Jouve’s analysis is at its best when the focus shifts from specific acts and their possible motives and homes in on language itself, just as the Chorus in a Greek tragedy will freeze the action in order to ponder its significance in a whirl of metaphor and lyric. So Sutcliffe’s epiphany in Bingley Cemetery at a grave marked ‘Zapolski’ becomes significant for Jouve not for the light it throws on his sanity or veracity, but as a meditation on masculinity: she imagines Sutcliffe abandoning his own gently sibilant name for the harsher ‘z’ consonant, she propounds a scene in which he climbs out of the feminine amorphousness of the grave he is digging into free space and an orgasmic shower of rain. She invokes masculine heroes: Christ calling Lazarus out of death; John Braine’s anti-hero Joe Lampton, who climbs to social success over the women he exploits; Dracula, for his foreignness, the Incredible Hulk for his rage, Freud’s Rat Man for his terror, Charles Atlas for his promise to transform a weakling male body into a ‘phallic tool’. And at the close of the story we have the equivalent of a messenger-speech through which we are invited to understand the climax: When one man – Sergeant Ring – projects himself imaginatively into Sutcliffe – imagines that the killer’s tools (the male organs) can be removed, deposited in a sheltered corner (in the camouflage of the mother’s skirt?) – when he conceives subconsciously that the

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masculinity he’s dealing with is artificial – that the object that is in fact being sought is ‘femininity’ – then, unlike Dupin, he sees the ‘purloined letter’. Sees the powerlessness that hides under the storage tank – the powerlessness that inflicts a curse: devour, or be devoured. (180) It is easy to mock this reading as self-indulgent, as élitist in its frames of reference, as meaninglessly clever; it is impossible to imagine any change in law, in the rearing of children, in gender relations, taking shape as a direct result of such a text. It could be seen as glorifying Sutcliffe by placing him as a kind of ultimate signifier against which all these other signs jockey for difference and meaning. But this would be to read the text for narrative, for the details to which, as Jouve points out, we have access elsewhere. Like the Greek tragedies whose outcome was known from the outset, The Streetcleaner offers itself as an act of imagination. It revitalizes the language in which we tell ourselves the story by re-vivifying dead metaphors about sexuality, misogyny and power in order to scrutinize them, to ask whether we want a language in which women can be so easily erased and the masculine exalted to a point at which it warps personality. Jouve’s questions about language are articulated from a position which is partly that of choregos, leading the collective interrogation of the central character, and yet one which is also aware that this is not a role which falls to her ‘naturally’. Rather, it must be seized, by writing herself into the story in opposition to the voice of collective patriarchal wisdom which attempts to define her. ‘At the time of the murders, as a “sexed” being, I was the prostitutes that were being murdered. As a “respectable” wife-and-mother, I was also what Sutcliffe meant to “protect”, for whom he cleansed. Whichever was I turned, I was “in” it. Up to my neck? As you all were, sisters. And brothers’ (211). As the Oresteia ends with the chorus of Furies welcomed into the polis, so Jouve stresses her claim to the ‘citizenship’ which the law denied to the complicit women of The Lodger and which the police images of both the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ and his victims had largely undermined.

Commercial stories By appearing in an academic imprint, The Streetcleaner has visibly distanced itself from the field of commercial publication. Most texts concerning Sutcliffe, however, inevitably move to an extent within that sphere. Others have explicitly made him into an object of exchange.


At the trial, a key witness, Trevor Birdsall, admitted that he had been promised money for his story. When the mother of one of the victims, Jacqueline Hill, protested, it became apparent that several of Sutcliffe’s relatives had been made substantial offers. Sonia was to fight claims by the magazine Private Eye that she was negotiating with a national newspaper, to become embroiled in legal actions over the next ten years. An alleged offer of £130,000 was withdrawn in response to growing public hostility ( Jones 1992). However, public outrage at chequebook journalism complicated, rather than altered, the fact of Sutcliffe’s saleability. In 1997, for instance, Chris Morris’s Channel 4 show Brass Eye proposed a sketch of a Peter Sutcliffe musical designed precisely to lampoon the values underlying the marketing of serial killer stories. The outrage with which the tabloid press protested led both to the banning of the sketch and an exploitation of the story’s Sutcliffe connection, which, as the Guardian pointed out, largely proved Morris’s original point (10 March 1997). While, however, public interest in the details of the story existed in a definite tension with reservations about the morality of allowing market values to control its transmission, ambiguities about the nature of prostitution, the ‘market’ that Sutcliffe professed himself to be ‘cleaning up’, remained largely unresolved. While the original misreading of the murderer as a prostitute killer whose ‘mistakes’ in killing ‘innocent’ women showed his ‘madness’ has been acknowledged, the meaning of the assumed dichotomy on which it is predicated has remained largely unexplored. It has never been wholly clear to our society what the term ‘prostitute’ might mean. Villain, says Othello, be sure you prove my love a whore. He is not, of course, assuming that his wife has sold her body for cash. Rather, he is simultaneously expressing two aspects of their relationship as he perceives it: firstly, in betraying him she deserves the worst sexual insult he can devise; secondly, no man could be more desirable than he, and that therefore the only motive for such a betrayal could be mercenary. If the word ‘whore’ expresses an emotion about a relationship rather than a specific sexual transaction, its synonyms can transform non-sexual meanings into signifiers of such transactions. Rosalie Maggio lists a collection of euphemisms for ‘prostitute’ in her search for a non-sexist language: (1987) bawd, call girl, camp follower, chippie, demi-mondaine, drab, fallen woman, fancy woman, floozy, grisette, harlot, hooker, housegirl, kept woman, lady of pleasure, lady of the evening, lady of the night, loose woman, madam, slattern, slut, streetwalker, strumpet, tart, tramp, trollop, trull . . . many of these originally

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signified non-sexual ways of behaving deprecated in women, but the Othello connotation – bad woman ⫽ whore – has irresistibly accrued. For a man to walk on the street is morally neutral. For a woman to do so signifies an excess of freedom – with which, presumably, she would do only one thing. ‘Slut’ and ‘slattern’ used to mean ‘untidy housekeeper’, but the energy thus saved on the housework could only, it seemed, be put to one use. Nor could this singlemindedness be credited with a straightforwardly pleasure-loving motive; the monetary aspect of the transaction is part of the package. This linguistic doublethink was embedded in most of the discourses surrounding the Sutcliffe murders; it was part of a code which he shared with the police even while its more complex modulations made mutual understanding impossible. The defence of insanity and his claim to divine guidance were both grounded in his bizarre reading of what he considered to be signifiers of prostitution. Jayne MacDonald, shop assistant, walked alone in the red-light district. Jacqueline Hill, student, turned round, as if to adjust a stocking. Uphadhyda Bandara, doctor, walked slowly. Marguerite Walls, civil servant, was simply ‘there’ when he had been brooding on his desire to kill prostitutes. But if this code of signification did not appear to belong to the sane world, it nonetheless had features in common with that used by the police. In an infamous speech to a press conference, Hobson spelt out the reading of the case which justly aroused women’s anger: He has made it clear that he hates prostitutes. Many people do. We, as a police force, will continue to arrest prostitutes. But the Ripper is now killing innocent girls. That indicates your mental state and the fact that you are in urgent need of medical attention. You have made your point. Give yourself up before another innocent woman dies. (Evening News 26 October 1979) This blatant assumption that prostitutes’ lives did not matter co-existed with an apparent ignorance of the meaning of the word. Joan Smith viewed a dossier circulating to police forces across the country in 1979. In it, Sutcliffe’s attacks on women were classified into those on prostitutes and non-prostitutes using some bizarre criteria. Anna Rogulskyj, who had rejected his advances, was described as ‘a very heavy drinker [who] has cohabited with a number of men’ and who had a Jamaican boyfriend. Olive Smelt was labelled ‘a woman of loose morals’, the evidence cited to support this being ‘her usual custom several nights a week to visit public houses in Halifax on her own’ (Smith 1989: 126).


Any woman, in short, whose ‘innocence’ was not denoted by specific signs – youth, a visible and loving family, middle class origins – but who courted disapproval by her independence, her sexual choices, her relationships outside her own race, was not only classified as a ‘prostitute’ but understood to have been ‘read’ correctly by Sutcliffe – although it was never apparent how he might be aware that Mrs Smelt liked a drink with female friends after her shift or that Anna Rogulskyj had a Jamaican lover. Smith wryly notes that when attending a press conference in Manchester about the case she was also ‘read’ by a senior policeman who told her ‘Sorry love, you’re too late, the pro’s conference is over’ (127). This continual circulation of the term ‘prostitute’ between the signification of specific commercial transaction and that of generalized disapproval featured as prominently in Gordon Burn’s attempt to analyze Sutcliffe as it did in the tabloids. The innocent girl/prostitute polarity is very apparent in the way that he introduces two of the victims. Jayne MacDonald is described in a tone which suggests that the standard press clichés are slipping into a more individualized free indirect speech, a semi-quotation from someone who loved Jayne: A confident, attractive, sweet-natured girl, she had quickly become popular with the staff at Grandways supermarket in Leeds, where she sold shoes, as she had always been in the streets where she lived. The Birnbergs were particularly fond of her and, because they were on the phone, she knew she could rely on them to pass the message on to her parents if she was going to spend the night at a friend’s house or get home particularly late. This only ever happened on Saturdays. (1985: 178) Here in contrast is Wilma McCann: By 1975 . . . Gerry McCann had left her and Wilma was bringing up her children, then aged from five to nine, on what she could earn on the street. Most night she turned her back on the dirty dishes and unmade beds in the council house where she lived on the edge of Chapeltown, and began her tour of the pubs and clubs. (147) Slut. Slattern. There is no friendly voice behind this account, no attempt to convey the reality of the figure who is dead. Had the washing up and the unmade bed featured in the description of Jayne MacDonald they would have had an intimate specificity, a detail to make more visible

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a sweet teenager, just like those details of her job in a particular supermarket. Here they are simply a clichéd backdrop to indicate disapproval of McCann, to hint, perhaps, at inadequate mothering. Burn, however, goes further than this. He also exploits Wilma McCann’s body in language. He does not merely describe the stab wounds, the partial nakedness; arguably, these details do illuminate the mind of the criminal, to whom, as Jouve points out, any ‘obscenity’ belongs. He dehumanizes her for a specific literary purpose: by the time she was found she was already starting to look like merely the remnant of a person, like an impersonal bundle of a crumpled mannequin; or like something out of what Michael Sutcliffe would come to think of as ‘Peter’s room.’ (149) This launches the reader into the next chapter, an account of the waxworks at Morecambe whose images of naked bodies, some pregnant and with the belly cut open to reveal the foetus, some sexually diseased, had fascinated Sutcliffe. Wilma McCann was not pregnant, nor was she diseased, nor was her body arranged to resemble an exhibit. Rather, she is used here to provide a slick segue, an office Burn makes her perform on a second occasion as he opens the section on Jayne MacDonald with the statement that McCann had been dead for two years ‘but the lives of her neighbours in and around Scott Avenue on the western edge of Chapeltown were crowded with more pressing concerns’ (177). In making a convenience of her textual body as transition device, Burn is inflicting an act of ‘immasculation’ on women readers, of implicating them in a specifically male script which leaves no space for them to express their own situation (Austin 1990: 21). While the living McCann exists for him only in her role as prostitute, explicitly contrasted with the ‘innocent’ victims, her corpse is denied both the status granted by death the leveller and the respect customary to the dead. When she loses in death the high visibility of the streetwalker, available to the gaze, she takes on the invisibility of the socially and sexually marginalized, the bag ladies and the beggars. Even, it seems, in deliberately revisionist accounts of the Sutcliffe case, a confusion surrounds the issues of prostitution and victimhood. The 1996 Yorkshire Television documentary Silent Victims, explicitly advancing CC Hellawell’s view that the murders extended across a much wider geographical and temporal area than was realized at the time of the trial, nevertheless seemed to leave the old polarities inscribed in its production values. Non-prostitute survivors narrated


their experiences over specially filmed reconstructions in which actors portrayed their younger selves. Most of the prostitute victims were represented onscreen by mugshots, as if to underline their criminal status, and their deaths were narrated against a background of clubby music as if in illustration of the term ‘good time girl’.

Stories of speaking subjects It is significant, then, that the most important imaginative works to have emerged from the Sutcliffe case have been concerned with prostitutes: not because he was a prostitute killer, but because he was not. Only a narrative which grants the prostitute woman the status of speaking subject – not target, not victim of secondary importance, not object of exchange – can begin to deconstruct the confusion I have outlined, or to acknowledge the inadequacy of a justice system in which prostitutes had to not only endure this attitude from the police but also the knowledge that they were being used as live bait. Pat Barker’s 1984 novel Blow Your House Down not only challenges the erasure of the prostitute as subject, but it assumes and re-defines the task Donald Rumbelow as Ripperologist delegated as beneath authorial dignity: she deciphers a narrative written on the bodies of women and mutilated by patriarchal codes in its retelling. Like A Pin to See the Peep Show, it is an anti-detective story shaped to exploit and resist traditional structures. While there is no detective, no sense of an intellectual duel between individuals, no unmasking, there is, as in the old-fashioned whodunnit, a community which must expel the killer from its midst. However, ‘community’ is problematized. Despite a complex network of relationships – notably the cameraderie between the prostitute’s identity, both communal and individual, is threatened. The title, in the Agatha Christie nursery rhyme tradition, hints at a feminist version of the Three Little Pigs, advocating vigilance in the face of the Big Bad Sexual Predator. However, its true application is not metaphorical: All over the city people are hurrying to get out of the wind. . . . Those lucky enough to be indoors draw their curtains more closely and switch their televisions on. Every window is shut fast, every door locked, and yet the wind gets in, finding here a gap between floorboards and door, there a space between window and frame. It fingers the material of the curtains, tests the pile on the carpet, as if it were asking: How strong is this? Will it last? How long before it gives? (1984: 39)

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The wind’s exposure of such fragility makes specific links between murder and a poverty which disempowers potential victims. Prostitution – as opposed to the sentimentalized figure of the prostitute – has rarely been treated seriously in English literature. In one of the few works to do so, Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893) Shaw identified it as the Intelligent Woman’s alternative to a life of drudgery. Surrounding his madame with a gold-digging male, a clever student demanding cash for her First and a clergyman lacking faith, Shaw stresses that within capitalism all passions, all talents, are subject to the market and compromise the thinker or the lover as easily as the woman with only her body to sell. This witty moral paradox, however, keeps offstage the suffering of those so poor they lose control of the body as means of production, who do not sell their labour but are consumed. Exploring this absence, Barker’s novel negotiates another gap: a year after the Sutcliffe trial Margaret Thatcher moved ‘morality’ to a prominent place on her agenda, proclaiming to the Conservative Central Council that ‘permissive claptrap’ bred criminality. ‘No riposte, no reply. The time for counter-attack is long overdue’ (Durham 1991: 131). Although the trial coincided with the largest march of the unemployed since the Jarrow crusade, there was no attempt by the government to relate the consequences of its economic policy to its much-publicized views on ‘family values’, sexuality and crime. Barker’s fragmented narrative focuses on three women whose struggles for survival directly relate to their struggles for personal morality and identity. Brenda, a loving and efficient parent, is forced onto the streets because the shift patterns at the chicken factory, the only local employment, make it impossible to fulfil her maternal responsibilities. Jean chooses the streets over the factory because she wants to control her own body. Maggie, who chooses the factory, is attacked, like Olive Smelt, after visiting the pub at the end of her shift. It is Brenda who saves Maggie, clattering after the attacker in her tart’s high heels, and Brenda who reminds Maggie that they were co-workers. This not only disrupts the innocent/prostitute polarity, but also makes explicit the connection between prostitution and capitalism as existential threat. Throughout, the dead victims are humiliated to duplicate the treatment of the chickens; meanwhile the factory workers are forced to simulate desire. ‘It wasn’t enough to say you needed the job and you’d work hard and all that. You had to go on as if you’d wanted to gut chickens all your life’ (Barker 1984: 34). While Marxism postulates the alienation of the worker, the risk when the means of production is your own body is here shown as even greater. The prostitutes deal with physical


disgust by ‘switching off’ the withdrawal of the self; but it is those who have ‘switched off’ too well who are most in danger. Kath, the first victim, moves from controlling the price and process of each transaction, (she advises the novice Brenda) to vacancy and alcoholic stupor, from which the others are unable to rescue her. It is to the gaze of Kath, however, that the whole action is subject. Objectified in death by the murderer, she nevertheless becomes the ‘eye’ of the narrative. Her eyes are open in death, no longer shrinking from the male gaze but ready to ‘outstare anybody’ (71). On a torn police poster, they reproach and judge the women and their clients as the factory wall is used as site of trade and killing ground. This role of minatory ‘eye’ is coupled with the presence of Jean as the book’s ‘private eye’. After the murder of her lover Carol, Jean adopts the strategies of Poe’s Dupin, thinking her way into the mind of the killer: You’ve got to see what he sees, you’ve got to know what he would do, and all that time I’d been trying, pushing against the doors of his mind. And then just as I relaxed, just when for once I wasn’t thinking about him, the doors swung open, but from the other side. (96) Like Holmes, Jean becomes a decoder of signs: she identifies the killer by the smell of violets on his breath, his sweating anxiety to be in a lonely place, the removal of his tie. But she also uses the techniques of the police: working the streets with a partner, she takes the precaution that the Rytka sisters deployed against the Yorkshire Ripper, taking down the number of each car her partner enters. But there are two ways of doing this: to allow the client to see it happen, thus preventing an attack, or to do it covertly in order to have the information if an attack takes place. Choosing the latter, Jean ranks herself with the police who are cynically using the prostitutes as bait. When she kills the man who smells of violets, she is aware of her own corruption, acknowledging that the evidence is all capable of innocent interpretation, and she finds it hard to meet the gaze of Kath. ‘Killer’ and ‘prostitute’ are identities which may be chosen, but can also be forced on individuals. Brenda uses the latter of herself not after her first experience, but after the first time she is labelled as a prostitute. Her lover cannot live with her when he is labelled ‘pimp’ – as she points out ‘he never once said, “Look, love, we’re a bit short, are you going out tonight?” ’ (86). The killer is not given a label like ‘Ripper’; rather, ‘killer’ is a potential identity for all the men in the novel – whose behaviour ranges from the cruel to the sympathetic – because killing is already

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forced on them. As Brenda walks through the blood-spattered factory, she is told that ‘killing’s for men’ (34). Male violence is no more inherent than female promiscuity, but some struggle more effectively than others against its inscription. The reader, like Jean, is denied closure. The narrative sequence is ambiguous, so that Maggie’s story, the last section, may be partly synchronous with Jean’s, or may follow it. The novel ends with an image expressing Maggie’s transition from grief over the loss of her bodily integrity: the evening flight of starlings in the city, a sight Barker evokes with poetic beauty. It can be read as an image of collectivity, the disempowered clustering to become visible, audible and strong. But the final sentence concerns not the beauty of flight, but its aftermath: ‘They hump, black and silent; unnoticed, unless some stranger to the city should happen to look up, and be amazed’ (170). We are left with an emphasis on the unseen, forcing us to reflect on the gaps in the narrative, the unsolved deaths, the failure to achieve peace, or mourn the dead. Blow Your House Down was dramatized by Sarah Daniels in 1995 for Live Theatre in Newcastle. A curiously flip review of Teddy Kiendl’s production alludes to ‘Tyneside tarts . . . being knocked out instead of off by a nutter’ (Guardian 18 February 1995). It ignores among other things the boldness of the play’s challenge to the ‘Jack’ hoaxer on his own territory. This challenge perhaps accounts for Daniels’s major departure from Barker’s text, the ending which reveals Maggie’s husband Bill as the killer. To preserve Barker’s ambiguous conclusion might, perhaps, in this new location, be less a recognition that Gynocide continues to exist despite the apprehension of one man, than an acknowledgement of ‘Jack’s’ status as an uncaptured super-criminal. Daniels’s text retains the emotional trajectory that leads the lover of one victim into obsession with revenge: she trades car numbers with the police and, horrifically, practices stabbing butcher’s meat which she dresses in shirts, suggesting not just a desire for verisimilitude but pleasure in the sight of male blood. However, by unpicking Barker’s subversion of the thriller structure, Daniels abandons any notion of male violence as politically constructed. Onstage, men are only seen in shadow, as clients rather than workers, lovers or friends. The ‘chicken man’ is one of these, seen photographing a dead bird with obscene chuckling delight. Maggie, the only non-prostitute victim, rejects Brenda more smugly and decisively than the Maggie of Barker’s text; implicitly, when Bill is revealed as the killer, she is punished for trusting in marriage rather than women. All men, it seems, are intrinsically


violent. In Barker’s text, on the other hand, the poisoning of Maggie’s relationship with Bill is a consequence of the attack on her; she hears a neighbour gloating over his lack of alibi and reflects that in the world of the factory ‘You thought evil was simple. No, more than that, you made it simple, froze it into a single shape. But it wasn’t simple. This woman . . . she was enjoying it. You couldn’t put evil into a single recognisable shape’ (Barker 1985: 156). The ‘evil’ is partly redeemed for Maggie when she confronts a crucifix in church and sees that the buckled figure of Christ bears marks like ‘the marks left when the spine of a feather is pulled out’ (160). Christ is simultaneously worker and the chickens which symbolize the dead women, at once subject and object of consumption. The crucifix offers the oppressed a sense of identity, one which could shift from the dead ‘chicken Christ’ to collective resurrection embodied in the flight of the starlings. The socialist vision of Barker’s text is mediated through the inner experience of the women; their collective insights and interiority – mistakes and all – point to the possibility of transforming their world. Daniels has to translate this interiority for the stage, on which all thoughts have to be articulated or embodied. Thus she creates two kinds of space. In external space masculine dominance is always implicit: the pub, for example, in Barker’s text a cheerful place where the women keep a penny jar ready to celebrate the killer’s capture, must be negotiated with a publican who may evict them for rowdiness or encourage them in the hope that his premises will attract sensation-seeking ghouls. An image which recurs to stunning theatrical effect is that of the giant inflatable toy from Noel’s House Party. Mr Blobby. Carol1 buys one of these cheerful pink and yellow toys in the pub, larking around pretending it’s a client – an idea sparked by the slang term ‘blob’ for condom – and Blobby becomes part of the fixtures of the flat she shares with Jean. When Jean is killed, her ghost haunts the flat, as does the shadowy figure of the Chicken Man. Carol attacks him with a knife, only to discover she is shredding Mr Blobby. Later, Jean’s ghost is replaced by that of Carol’s victim; he wears a Blobby mask, beneath which lurks the horror her knife has perpetrated. Blobby therefore acquires two levels of signification; he is both ‘man’ and ‘blob’ – both of which the women see as necessary but disposable: he is also ‘killer’, his transformation from cute toy to nightmare implying that no kind of domestic relationship between the sexes is possible. He colonizes and destroys Carol’s safe space just as Maggie’s is destroyed when she surprises Bill at his chicken ritual and is attacked with a hammer.

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Against this brilliantly condensed image of male violence in the material world, Daniels images a female interior space. The play is framed by a séance, with which Daniels has comic fun but also develops the role of Kath as guardian angel and protector to her friends after her death. The action is shot through with images of a female paradise: Kath sings hymns and remembers a Sunday School teacher who loved her. Jean and Carol, eating a Chinese meal, recall a story of Kath’s about heaven and hell – the blessed feed one another with yard-long chopsticks while the damned, caring for themselves alone, starve amid plenty. Daniels often uses images of temporary bliss for women – in her early play Ripen Our Darkness an oppressed wife puts her head in the oven to be welcomed by the Mother, the Daughter and the Holy Ghostess into a female heaven – and they suggest a semiotic space, a chora, contrasting with male-controlled spaces in which there is no peace or justice. The theatrical effectiveness here is stunning and the separatist politics thumb a nose at the self-glorification of ‘Jack’ – but as a response to the Sutcliffe case it offers only despairing images of heterosexual politics. The work of Barker and Daniels, the public response to the mistakes of the police, have made possible a new imaging of the prostitute; a mainstream entertainment, Kay Mellor’s series for Granada TV Band of Gold, used the conventions of the thriller but also took time to explore the economic pressures which drive women on to the streets and the criminal network which ensures they remain. Its ‘happy ending’ and avoidance of graphic images and language reflected the pressures of the TV market but also served to close the gap between the images of ‘innocent’ and ‘prostitute’, to evoke a ‘picture’ more humane and realistic than that constructed by press and police in the 1970s. If I do not close with that ‘picture’ it is not to undervalue what Barker, Mellor and Daniels have achieved, but to avoid a sense of closure which suggests that the questions of poverty, sexuality and violence were in any way resolved as a result of the Sutcliffe case. Shortly after the trial, the Communist University Summer Programme saw a debate on relationships between pornography, violence and activism. Lesbian separatism and direct action like that of WAVAW ranged itself against feminist theory and its insistence that heterosexual relations are socially constructed and transformable. Judith Walkowitz perceived it as an ‘unravelling’ of the temporary consensus the Ripper case forged between radical and socialist feminists, prostitutes and separatists. The ‘picture’ in her account is one of conflict. ‘One famous angry exchange actually transpired in the “loo line” ’ (Walkowitz 1994: 242).


I would like to adduce this image not as evidence of the failure of feminism as diagnosed by David Yallop, but as a sign of hope. Media and spin doctors demand unity: feminism and the left are most honest and productive when they disagree. It is not the conflict that draws me to that comic picture of a row in the toilet queue, but its intimacy. The debate it enshrines is not kept at a theoretical distance, but is inscribed into the minutiae of our lives and while this is so, change is possible.

4 Survivor Stories

Granny lives two hours’ trudge through the winter woods; the child wraps herself up in her thick shawl, draws it over her head. She steps into her stout wooden shoes; she is dressed and ready and it is Christmas Eve. The malign door of the solstice still swings on its hinges . . . (Carter 1979: 141) Angela Carter locates her Red Riding Hood at a moment that is liminal both personally and in terms of a broader magic: she is a virgin at the menarche; she meets her werewolf at the hinge of the year. Through her wit in seizing the unique moment their sexual collision will prove benign. The Company of Wolves is an undeniably dashing and much needed rescue of an old tale from a series of disempowering formulations. Jack Zipes’s The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood – a tribute to Carter – sees the period between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries as the hinge on which the story turned from a tale about the courage and sense of the heroine into the format with which modern readers grow up. In earlier versions, the heroine climbs into bed with the (were)wolf but outwits him by demanding to go outside to relieve herself and running away. Such self-reliance indicates that she has come of age; she drinks her grandmother’s blood, replacing her in the social order. It is Perrault, with his readership of upper-class adults, who disempowers her. He adds the sexy red garment, the coquettishness with the wolf, the silliness that makes her dawdle to gather flowers. She is, in short, Asking For It, and her punishment is to be gobbled up as a warning to children. The Brothers Grimm found this ‘too cruel and too sexual’ (Zipes 1993: 33) to serve their conservative bourgeois interpretation of the tale they collected in 1812. ‘Little Red Cap’ became 83


‘a sweet little maiden’ (135). Passively allowing herself to be gobbled, she is saved, but not by her own wits: the hunter/father cuts her out of the wolf’s body in a parody of rebirth. As Zipes notes, ‘It is not enough . . . to be innocent. The girl must learn to fear her own curiosity and sexuality’ (Zipes 1983: 52). The changing story is an index of shifts in the perception of female sexuality, its regulation and punishment, marked by decisive male authorial interventions into the anonymous territory of folk tale. I begin with it, and specifically Carter’s re-appropriation, because I am searching for a hinge. Not, as in The Company of Wolves, to act as a pivot, but rather the hinge that supports a diptych: on one side fantasies of sexual risk, on the other facts about rape and its consequences. Red Riding Hood, in its primitive incarnation, may have bridged this gap, a succinct parable which simultaneously explores an excess of violence and danger and incorporates practical advice – a gift a mother might make to her daughter at the right moment. Carter’s knowing re-interpretation, with its metaphor of the ‘hinge’ between innocence and experience, desire and fear, has proved controversial. Patricia Duncker voiced a common reservation when she read the union with the wolf as ‘lie back and enjoy it. They want it really. They all do’ (1984: 7). But this undervalues a project which, through a repertoire of metamorphosis-stories, explores all possible steps in the dance between predator and prey, deconstructing their roles until, as Sarah Gamble puts it, ‘the heroine works towards a utopian space where both male and female benefit from the transformation of the old power relations’ (1997: 133). In this chapter I examine the testimonies of women who have endured rape and incestuous abuse, the most aggressive statements of those power relations. I also investigate thrillers by women who explore the territory of vulnerability and victimhood, and allow their characters to walk the path of Red Riding Hood in the knowledge that they may be read as daring or stupid. Such juxtaposition of popular fiction with the records of painful experience may seem to trivialize the latter, but it seems important to attempt it precisely because the erasure of stories like the original Red Riding Hood has widened the gap. While feminists have produced new, hopeful and stimulating readings, we lack the traditions which supported the circulation of those gift-stories. However, the vitality of those testimonies of lived experience is, I would argue, a potent force, making possible fictions which explore notions of excess. If the territory between fantasy and reality is no longer forbidden, it is a tribute to those testimonies, and a source of further empowerment.

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Naming rape Rape has always been a crime. But it has not always been the same kind of crime. For centuries, it was a crime against property, committed against husband, father or owner, a crime not completely distinguished from dissident female behaviour transgressing the ‘rights’ of a man to a woman’s body, such as pre-marital sex. What distinguished criminal from victim was the woman’s ‘word’. Under the Deuteronomic code, a betrothed woman discovered having sex with another man in the town could be executed on the grounds that her transgression was voluntary ‘because she did not cry for help.’ If the act took place in the fields, she received the benefit of the doubt; her cries could have gone unheard. Thus she remained marriageable. If unbetrothed, she was married to her rapist. Her ‘word’ secured ‘justice,’ in that her reputation – without which her life would be intolerable – was restored. Simultaneously, however, this ‘word’ proclaimed her definable solely through her relations to men. A trial could deal with the rapist in terms of his relationship to the community – by death, fine, or wedding. However, the community could acknowledge the woman’s chastity only by treating her as if the rape had never happened; her ‘word’ reiterated her silence as a being capable of sexual choices. No space existed in which that ‘word’ might articulate the effects of rape upon her selfhood. Throughout the legal, social and cultural changes over the following millennia, that silence in which a woman’s ‘word’ was given remained unbroken. The women’s movement was preoccupied from the outset not simply with rape as crime but with how it is constituted in language. Susan Brownmiller’s groundbreaking Against Our Will (1975) crucially identified it as a crime rooted not in sexual desire but in political and social control. It was the women’s movement that raised allied issues of incest and child abuse and broke a silence pervading the culture. The discourses of law, however, proved resistant to change. 1982 was a watershed year in the United Kingdom after an outcry over Roger Gralf’s BBC documentary about the Thames Valley Police, showing an allegation of rape treated with automatic disbelief. The police were not the only offenders. That year Judge Wild told a jury Women who say no do not always mean no. It is not just a question of how she says it, how she shows it and makes it clear. If she doesn’t want it she has only to keep her legs shut and she would not get it without force and then there would be the marks of force being used. (Kennedy 1992: 111)


The incoherence is disturbing not simply because it suggests a kneejerk response but because of that dangerously undefined ‘it’. ‘It’ is something the woman ‘gets’, by force or not. ‘It’ – penetration, or the penis? – is perceived as commodifiable, a thing given or taken, not an act which could be shared; rape, the infliction of a weapon on another person, is thus not adequately distinguished from desired sex. The speech suggests there is a line to be crossed, but an invisible line the woman has a duty to outline and police. Her ‘word’ is insufficient to secure deuteronomic justice; it is the criminal who provides the vital signification, in the form of damage to the woman’s body. Over the next two decades, changes were achieved. ‘Rape suites’ with baths and rest rooms were established. More WPCs were provided to talk to victims. A key distinction was made by the Home Office in 1986 between the recording of false complaints and unsubstantiated complaints, acknowledging that a rape recorded as ‘no crime’ might reflect lack of evidence or reluctance on the part of the victim to pursue the matter. In 1989, Sara Scott and Alison Dickens of Manchester Rape Crisis noted dangers inherent in ‘professionalization.’ While welcoming the more humane treatment of complainants, they felt the issue of belief was unresolved and that new emphasis on ‘sensitive’ treatment of victims marginalized existing work by rape crisis groups in favour of police ‘professionals’ who might treat victims as ‘hysterical’. The previously dominant definition of rape as an issue of crime and punishment left the field free for feminists to define the response of women who had been raped; because no one else was interested. With the reconstruction of rape in medical terms . . . our territory is being usurped. (Dunhill 1989: 90) Their concern is for victims deprived of a discourse in which they can articulate what has happened, forced into language inadequate to their needs. Helena Kennedy bears this out in her analysis of hazards in the witness box, where victims’ life stories are taken and transformed to weapons: The leaps involved in such innuendo are never examined, and the damage can be irreparable unless the woman is given time to explain at length whole areas of her life which have no relevance to the proceedings. (1992: 115)

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The Thames Valley documentary offers a vivid illustration. Details offered by the victim – hazy as to the location, she did recall being given a blue towel – were themselves seen as signifiers of untruth, a fictionalizing process kicking in almost involuntarily. It is too easy for the victim to lose confidence in her own words and memories, dismiss as imaginary details potentially significant in evidence or in therapy, and to substitute in her own mind a scenario in which she has provoked the attack.

From naming to testimony The colour of a towel; a victim’s response; details of a life ripped out of context and reconstructed to fit the case for the defence. In a rape case, what is at stake for the woman is not just the violence done to her or the validity of her word: it is her right to her story. Telling your story – autobiography – is a public act and there were once clear rules for doing so. As a literary form it has traditionally been allied to the idea of selfhood. Georges Gusdorf stated in 1956 that autobiography is not found in cultures where ‘the individual . . . does not feel himself (sic) to exist outside of others, and still less against others, but very much with others in an interdependent existence’ (Benstock 1988: 35). Plenty of works bear out this definition: they indicate traits that make the subject unique, be it a talent for music or military strategy or grand larceny; they describe obstacles overcome, people influential for good or bad, in a narrative that moves steadily forward; they assume a self continuously developing, fully known and fully expressed in the writing without gaps or contradictions. Modernism has problematized such an artificially ordered way of recording experience, and feminist autobiographers and critics have resisted a form which simplistically privileges the individual. They maintain that in writing her life a woman comes to terms, not simply with her individuality but with her situation in a patriarchal society as Other, and that emphasis upon the everyday, the shared, is a source of empowerment. Susan Friedman suggests ‘[T]he self constructed in women’s autobiographical writing is often based in, but not limited to, a group consciousness – an awareness of the meaning of the cultural category WOMAN for the patterns of women’s individual destiny’ (Benstock 1988: 41). Rape attacks not just the body but the self. A rapist denies everything that makes the victim individual: desire, agency, will. A rapist denies everything that makes the victim part of society: rights, freedom, social relations. The purpose of the justice system is to change a rapist’s


situation. A woman’s word, as part of the language of a court of law, can ensure that he is accused and condemned, but does not change her situation as victim. To do this a further language is needed, one denied her under the old legal codes, in which the damaged self can be articulated, restored and reconstructed. Herein lies the importance of testimonies. Other kinds of writing can critique practice; agitate for change; advise about safety; theorize data; prepare the ground for political activity. But in testimony a unique relationship is constructed between reader and victim – or, to use a term preferred by many involved in rape crisis aid, survivor. This term is not unproblematic – it seems to ignore the permanent psychic damage some suffer – but it explicitly combats the tendency common since the Thatcher-Reagan years to treat victimhood as self-created. The OED offers, among definitions of the verb ‘survive’, ‘to continue to exist after some person, thing or event; to last on; to come alive through or continue to exist in spite of.’ This connotation of activity and challenge is present in all the narratives I wish to address. So too is one present in stories of disaster, natural or human, which routinely appear in the news. Interviews with ‘survivors’ of earthquakes and terrorist attacks offer the audience a way to understand their ordeal, and respond to it as a community; they stress common needs – shelter, food, the reunion of the family or space to grieve at its fragmentation. Survivors are ourselves, and the sharing of their stories is a community act. Survivors’ testimonies about rape are thus not primarily duologues between rapist and prey. They invoke a large dramatis personae – medical and legal, friends, parents, siblings, counsellors. The survivor locates herself as a social being rather than a disputed site of violence. This is apparent in Merlyn Nuttall’s account of her rape and attempted murder, It Could Happen to You (1997), essentially a co-operative narrative. Nuttall has a co-author, her sister Sharon Morrison; there is a foreword by Helena Kennedy, the QC who argued her case for compensation; there are chapters by Sharon, by WPC Nicola Holding (who received a commendation for her work on the case), by her psychiatrist and, poignantly, by a friend describing the erosion of their closeness after the incident, part of the cost of rape that is hard to quantify. Survivor narratives include details which situate them in an economic as well as a social network. Nuttall relates the complexity of quantifying the financial changes in her life for the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board. Nancy Venable Raine’s After Silence (1999) cites expenses associated with her recovery process and the red tape – thirty-five pages of forms – involved in claiming from the Massachusetts Victim

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Compensation Program. Seeking literary parallels with her experience, Raine turns to Pat Conroy’s novel The Prince of Tides. The hero, she acidly notes, falls in love with a psychiatrist ‘who, I couldn’t help noticing, did not charge him for their meetings’ (1999: 116). The narrator can assume with more confidence than most authors the nature of her readership: predominantly female and aware of personal vulnerability. Nuttall’s title, It Could Happen to You, could serve for most. Part of the relationship between reader and writer is minatory: narratives include advice about self-protection, self-defence, support; they cite addresses or telephone numbers of organizations which offer help. But the relationship is not one-sided. The reader’s reception of the text completes the act of telling and reclaiming the survivor’s story, and thus her body, for herself. Nuttall writes unsparingly of the attack, of escaping from a burning building naked and bleeding to be ignored in the street. What follows, however, is not a straightforward account of help and recovery, but of persistent difficulty in recovering the right to interpret her own body. Throughout her narrative, she is treated as a text to be read – by the male forensic expert insensitively delegated to take vaginal swabs; by the NHS plastic surgeon who decides on treatment for the scars on her throat without apparent awareness of the significance their continuing visibility might hold; by the legal process which forbids her to meet her barrister, so that her narrative of the ordeal is orchestrated in public by a stranger; by the CICB who refuse police photographs and insist that she show her scars. (Nuttall was compensated under the old CICB regulations. The newer directions operate a tariff system which relieves victims of this humiliation: however, the relationship between the body and money on which they depend – there are set sums to compensate for penetrative rape, for forced oral sex and so on – cannot help but reinscribe a crude signification system at a point where language need to be at its most subtle.) Raine quotes a regulation in the Massachusetts Program stating not only that compensation ‘shall not include funds for abortion’ but that it may not be used for ‘counselling for abortion’ (1999: 100), as if even speaking about the body carries a price tag. Survivors all speak implicitly or explicitly of the danger of becoming what Raine calls ‘a language without punctuation or structure’ (24). The survivor–narrator has to become language, a means of articulating her body back into her own life. Thus she will write not just the story of her rape and its aftermath but the story of her life, contextualizing her body as the sum of her experience rather than defined by its legal situation. Her story demonstrates, as theoretical texts cannot, that the damage of


rape is not simply physical but existential. We are made aware of an individual, with specific experience, professional and personal, who cannot but be changed by what has happened, whose survival will be specific to herself. The narrative process carries risk. Misinterpretation, misuse and misreading are inherent in a written text. When the author is breaking not just the silence surrounding her subject but a more personal silence, the risk is greater still. However, the risks run in a courtroom may make those of creating a text negligible. Sarah (Jill) Saward, for instance, raped at knife point in the presence of her father during a burglary, found her ‘word,’ her articulacy and ability to cope in court, interpreted by the judge as evidence that she had not been seriously disturbed and thus as reason to award the perpetrators a light sentence, a process that partakes of the existentially destructive nature of the original assault (Saward 1991). Readership can be to some extent controlled and defined by publication (the texts I have cited in this chapter, for example, are largely from the feminist house Virago). Some texts also incorporate an acknowledgement of narrative risk in order to challenge it. Jacqueline Spring’s Cry Hard and Swim: The Story of an Incest Survivor meets the problem head-on with a complex and demanding narrative form. Spring does not present experience as conventional autobiography but uses temporal leaps and a collage of styles – poems, reminiscences, a therapy journal, letters. There is a complex relationship between the fabula – abused childhood, troubled adulthood and therapy – and the fragmented szujet, which constantly forces the reader to discard and re-formulate her understanding of Spring’s experience. Take for example the death of her abusive father. He died in her youth and her young self broke into wild laughter on hearing the news. The incident is narrated in one of the letters the adult Spring writes to ‘Dearest Mama’. At a subsequent point in the text, these letters change. They are addressed to ‘Dearest You.’ Only at this point do we learn that Spring’s mother, too, has died; only then can her daughter address her as an individual in her own right. One ‘Dearest You’ letter describes Spring reading her account of her father’s death to a group of survivors: she records their response of infectious and liberating laughter, in which she felt able to ‘bur[y] Daddy for all time’ (1987: 36). Later still, as the narrative changes from epistolary to direct address, Spring records the moment Eve, her counsellor, suggested writing the letters. ‘The casualness of Eve’s suggestion . . . makes me tremble, to think that I might not have taken her up on it’ (100). Her text is profoundly aware of itself as text, as the process which has involved rethinking and rewriting, before committing itself

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to being shared. The reader learns to understand the experience of incest survival by acquiring skill at the complex task of decoding, one which parallels Spring’s own task of assembling a new self through the act of writing. We negotiate shifts in both style and chronology; through this we are made aware, as Spring points out, that the ability to speak of the abuse in the past tense is not a discourse natural to every survivor–autobiographer but a major achievement of the therapeutic process. To read in the past tense is also, therefore, a significant act for the reader, who must be prepared for it. The multi-layered narrative indicates that our task is not to evaluate facts in isolation but to see their significance to Spring in the reconstruction of her own history. This involves the reconstruction of her parents: not only are false images of them discarded – she tells her father, ‘In my dreams you were there, always in disguise, but the terror was the same terror and it was real’ (141) – but they are also painstakingly located. Spring’s gift to her family is not forgiveness but context. She sets them in their world – the sexual mores which forced her father’s mother into a loveless marriage; the ideals of wifely obedience and sexual ignorance which led her mother into emotional confusion – ‘though she worshipped him, she didn’t actually love my father’ (58). What is important is not the accuracy of Spring’s diagnoses but the reclamation taking place: reclamation of her memories, ascribing motivations to events in the past, and reclamation of the right to speech, employing discourses – like feminism and psychoanalysis – which may be alien to her parents but which she has chosen to make sense of her experience. Her story ceases to be one of disempowerment because she has imposed on it her own meaning. Spring found that when read aloud in groups (such as a writers’ circle) her poems were perceived as at worst a threat and at best an exhibition of feeling – she was told that she was ‘lucky to have a way to let out what I was feeling inside’ (93). However, the most radical misreadings of Spring as text – her mother’s refusal to recognize what is happening, her father’s refusal to take responsibility – had already occurred. In telling the story to an audience, Spring accomplishes what J.L. Austin calls as performative utterance (1962), a speech act which changes the situation by the fact of being spoken. She is, in short, testifying. It is no coincidence that Spring turns to accounts of the Holocaust to explain the experience of abuse survivors, while Raine discusses post traumatic stress disorder in Vietnam veterans. Testimony is the literary form most closely associated with the atrocities of war; it does not simply record history, it is itself an event in history changing the consciousness of its readers.


Shoshana Feldman writes, ‘In the testimony, language is in process and in trial, it does not possess itself as a conclusion, as the constatation of a verdict or the self-transparency of knowledge’ (1992: 5). Only the individual can testify, and what she offers is unique, but testimony is not romantic individualism; the individual participates in a public act. Testimony challenges a rape culture whose legal processes perpetuate the silence around a victim’s ‘word’. Testimony asserts the reality of the experience and the permanence of its consequences. Nancy Venable Raine meticulously documents the anniversaries of her rape and her changing attitudes. She writes of celebrating after seven years the survival of ‘the woman who was born on 11 October 1985’ (3), the new person created by the rape and the changes it made; and, at the completion of the book three years later, of becoming, once again, a person with a complete history. ‘I was born on July 26, 1946’ (275). Raine’s emphasis on anniversaries makes explicit what is implicit in all the texts discussed, the importance of not forgetting; again, memory is not simply a function of personal life but part of an act of witness against what Raine calls the ‘cultural psychosis’ (5), which silences survivors because it cannot cope with the implications of the knowledge they impart. She quotes Judith Herman’s study of post traumatic stress syndrome, Trauma and Recovery, on the pain associated not with enduring dreadful events but with dealing with the knowledge that they have happened: When the traumatic events are of human origin, those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between victim and perpetrator. . . It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing . . . the victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering. (Raine 1992: 63) In short, these texts are political acts. But they are also artefacts, and their writers struggle not simply with the facts of testimony, but with presentation. Both Raine and Spring turn to fairy tale, myth, the Bible. They freely adapt and interpret – Spring examines the Orpheus myth and Raine explores the story of Persephone narrated in the classical Greek Hymn to Demeter – and find that they can be used in the process of trying to articulate the unspeakable. Looking at Raine’s account of the Persephone myth, I begin to find the hinge on which this chapter turns. For she is not using it as a vague archetype of sexual violence. Its significance is precise, intimate and personal. The crux of the story lies

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for Raine in the word biazomenes which indicates both Persephone’s sexual rape and the act of snatching her away into the underworld, removing her from ‘meaning, memory, nature, mother, earth and fecundity itself’, a word she feels adequate to her own existential situation: It interested me greatly that the poet described Persephone’s rape as a brutal transition from the world of light to the world of darkness. He had gone to the essence of the matter – the wound to the soul. I thought about rape scenes I had seen in movies, how literal the medium required them to be, drawing our eyes to bodies. (239) Both Raine and Spring implicitly attest to the importance of fantasy as a resource in testifying. Documentation of injury and records of treatment are insufficient to convey what is important. Equally essential are imaginative spaces into which narrator and the reader can project themselves, which they may read differently but which also provide shared ground. Their chosen myths and stories contain the possibility, but not the guarantee, of beneficent outcome. Orpheus nearly made it, though he did not. Alice in Wonderland, whose adventure in the Pool of Tears inspired Spring’s title, survived and learned. Persephone was rescued and lived some of her life in the light. Red Riding Hood, to return to the beginning of this chapter, suffered but escaped. Testimony is unique. It is not reportage or true-crime narrative. Hence its relationship to fiction is different. As I argued earlier, a cause célèbre may generate a variety of literary practices which may interrogate a verdict, correct a spectacle or offer poignant analogies to deflect the reader from consumption to consideration of collective responsibility. These practices are necessarily polyphonic. They make space for voices not heard within the judiciary framework, voices of those tangentially but seriously affected – the supporters, the dead and the imagination itself. For the survivor, however, her own voice is crucial. It articulates itself in direct opposition to biazomenes, the silencing and dehumanizing inherent in the crime and in the search for justice. This needful preservation of the original voice precludes the kind of fictionalizing I examine in other chapters. However, the powerful presence of testimony, its awareness of the need for a language beyond the literal and its willingness to negotiate with fantasy, may have prompted the quest for a fictional form which allows women to explore the nature of sexual risk. Feminisms on both sides of the Atlantic have raised public consciousness and given rise to a number of fictions exploring the rights and feelings of victims.


Fictions of jeopardy While literary history is not part of my project, it is worth pointing out that such exploration is not new and feminist critics have done valuable work in reviving interest in Richardson’s novel of 1747–8, Clarissa. Over a million words long, it has spent the best part of two centuries receiving lip service as a part of a ‘canon’ with which serious students of English Literature were expected to be familiar; but their widespread reluctance actually to engage with the text as opposed to merely knowing about it was not just a function of its length but of an ambivalent reputation. From the nineteenth to the later twentieth century, no account of Clarissa seemed free from accusations of prurience; the death of the central character, a process over which she herself is articulate and in control, has until recently been seen as life-denying religiosity, and its length as self-indulgence. What has interested critics encountering the text in the light of feminism is precisely that it grants its central character space to articulate what has happened: her ‘word’ is not concerned with physical chastity (the rape is never described) but with biazomenes: seeking to escape a domineering family who want to exploit her sexuality by marrying her for gain, she takes a sexual risk, trusting a man who deprives her of liberty. Clarissa blurs the boundary between fiction and testimony. Richardson did not claim authorship on the title page; he had a relationship with his original readers which allowed them a kind of editorial function. Its epistolary form, its use of multiple voices and perspectives, facilitated the status Clarissa acquired as what Terry Eagleton calls a kit, a collection of material which could constantly be improved and added to, and could take account of readers’ responses, so that characters’ ‘destinies [were] not carved in rock’ (1982: 18) any more than those of characters in soap operas. The latter comparison is apt: a BBC TV adaptation of Clarissa in the 1990s refreshed this ‘living’ status of the characters. It felt free to allow Clarissa to articulate what her meditations in the text only hint at: that her self-starvation is a challenge to the society that has commodified her. As she expressed it on screen, ‘Death is my independence’. The power struggle between Clarissa and her rapist Lovelace took on a dimension with which Richardson would have been familiar, the emergence of an entirely new text: the Daily Mirror cartoon strip Garth allowed its time-travelling hero, ‘the strongest man in the world’, to encounter Clarissa. This odd juxtaposition suggests that the text continued to grip the public imagination by offering a chance to explore biazomenes with a fictional character capable of

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interacting with the reader in the kind of relationship that exists between one who testifies and one who bears witness. While it is rare for a character from a novel of another period to attain this kind of status, the detectives of feminist crime fiction have always had a relationship with their readers, both intimate and constantly developing, that makes possible the sense of community that exists between reader and writer of testimony. However, liberal–feminist pioneers of the genre were uneasy with the issue of rape, articulating as they did their conscious opposition to the stalk-and-slash movies that formed a grim backdrop to the Age of Sex Crime. They preferred to take advantage of male private-eye conventions to give their heroines sexual invulnerability. Sara Paretsky, for instance, who began writing in 1978, endowed her detective V.I. Warshawski with street fighting skills and a superhuman capacity to recover from injuries; while this has been modified as V.I. enters the millennium and middle age, Paretsky remains adamant that to confront V.I. with sexual assault would be to betray a readership who feel empowered by her fearlessness in the face of rape culture. ‘[Rape] is prevalent and exploitative, and I’m not going to have that ideology controlling my heroine’s head’ (Guardian 18 May 1980). It was a revolutionary step when in 1987 Barbara Wilson’s series detective Pam Nilsen was raped by the killer at the end of Sisters of the Road while trying to help a more ‘likely’ victim, a young prostitute. As Wilson points out, ‘Investigators may be threatened, drugged, beaten up, tortured and left for dead, but their sexual boundaries are never disturbed’ (1995: 182). The episode was the more shocking given the gently satirical tone of the Nilsen novels, which chart a process of Lesbian self-discovery and celebration, and whose flouting of genre boundaries had previously been teasingly ironic – for example when Nilsen solves the mystery but fails in the romantic stakes. Sisters of the Road refutes an unspoken fallacy behind Chandler’s famous praise of Dashiell Hammett for taking ‘murder out of the Chinese vase and back onto the streets’ (Allen and Chacko 1974) – that only (bad) women are at risk there, while the hero is protected by masculinity from any sexual threat beyond romantic betrayal by a scarlet-lipped vamp. Wilson implies that the bourgeois–feminist detective story has failed to acknowledge the real nature of the mean street and that it has a responsibility to do so. Pam bitterly criticizes ‘feminist’ cop shows like Cagney and Lacey, reflecting that they tidy away trauma by freezing on the arrival of the police, the point at which the victim’s story is only beginning. Such a structure is not so far removed from classical paradigms of female virtue and sexual


jeopardy such as the story of Lucrece, which brand their central figure, however resistant, as damaged goods, narratively inconvenient once the proper sentiments had been expressed. As Lisa Jardine writes, ‘She would submit to enforced sex, tell all afterwards and kill herself. That is what the patriarchy expects of a female hero under such circumstances’ (1983: 191). Clarissa could change the meaning of her death, but nonetheless died. While no contemporary reader would expect a fictional character to expunge herself so completely, they might well expect her to conform to the convention that the detective makes light of her injuries and recovers ‘offstage’. Pam refuses to offer a tidy ending. ‘I had to go on living. And living was hard’ (Wilson 1987: 195). The final chapters repeat the narrative structure of the crime novel as a whole, that mourning trajectory of pain, investigation and acceptance. This parallels the experience of the rape survivor, who replicates Persephone’s journey to hell and back and articulates a new self. ‘You’re still you’, the teenage prostitute Trish tells Pam (199), and the novel closes not with the fate of the killer but with Pam accomplishing her own healing; we see her literally ‘fly’, recovering the possibility of joy while skydiving. By articulating what the genre conventionally treats as unspeakable, Sisters of the Road opens up the possibility for new voices and new languages. Several novels of the last two decades have experimented with the discourses surrounding sexual aggression. Helen Zahavi’s Dirty Weekend (1991), for example, is a comedy of revenge which proclaims from page one that its true target is silence: England’s full of wounded people. Quietly choking. Shrieking softly so the neighbours won’t hear. . . She could have done what decent people do. She could have filled her gently rounded belly with barbiturates, or flung herself, with gay abandon, from the top of a tower block. They would have thought it sad, but not unseemly. (1991: 1) Dirty Weekend delineates with relentless naturalism the culturally sanctioned self-hate with which its heroine Bella initially responds to sexual attack. It then launches into a baroquely ironic style to show Bella accomplishing gleefully gory revenges upon a parade of stereotypical male oppressors. The shift demonstrates that we are in the territory of fantasy, that the text does not legitimate murder; but its lively excess makes it equally clear that it legitimates fantasy. And it explores the root of the silence at the heart of rape: the inequality beneath sexual converse between genders. In a key episode Bella encounters a smug male

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unable to perform. The narrator points out that there are ways to behave in the situation which can save face for both parties – but they are not at bottom rules about sexual equality: They are rules grounded in what each fears most, the most devastating thing a man might suffer from a woman, or a woman from a man. He fears her ridicule. She fears his rage. She might laugh at him. He might kill her. (108) Bella can only redress this imbalance by acquiring male rage while retaining and expressing female ridicule. Her despatch of the flaccid and resentful academic Norman is described with relish: Poor Norman. She cooked his goose. She did him in. She sent him for an early bath. The articles he’d written, the papers he’d marked, the committees he’d graced . . . all gone. Poor Norman. (116) The comedy is simultaneously a guarantee that Bella’s killing spree is to be read as fantasy and a reminder that in the ‘real’ world female ridicule does lead to death. Dirty Weekend, precisely because of its comic tone, is deeply serious at the level of language. It demands a re-negotiation of the codes of heterosexual exchange. It suggests too that for survivors, fantasy vengeance is a healthier strategy than self-blame and selfpunishment which make the victim complicit in her own damage. It restores anger to its place among discourses available to ‘decent people’, silenced by a culture that does not want to acknowledge their trauma. By the 1990s, some women crime writers were willing to explore the notion of sexual risk not simply in terms of resistance to a rape culture but also in relation to female sexual pleasure. They turned to the interplay between fear and desire in the crime novel, replacing key elements of physical excitement in a genre descended from the novel of sensation. This project reflected new critical readings of popular genres which had located a submerged feminist discourse. Tania Modleski (1982) evaluated the Gothic novel as an exploration of women’s ambivalence towards significant figures – mother, father, lover – externalizing and thus resolving conflicts. Barbara Creed postulated that the dominant heroes and submissive heroines of Mills and Boon romances operate not as role-models for gender relations but as transgressive images of the loss of self and eroticization of the abject on a strictly temporary basis prior to the happy ending which replaces the lovers in their social context:


In tales of romantic love in which the couple take up conventional, socially-sanctioned roles, the lure of the abyss, loss of self and perverse desire are held off or denied. Although the subject must exclude the abject, it must nevertheless be tolerated, for that which threatens to destroy life also helps to define life. (1998) The eroticized abject, what Kristeva calls ‘the threshold before death, a halt or a respite’ (Kristeva 1982: 55) is still more powerfully present in the crime novel, a structure which can juxtapose the temporary and desired loss of self in sexual risk in order to define the self, the attempted annihilation of the self in sexual violence and the taking of life itself. As these possibilities collide and recombine, the energy they release may take a form which could acquire something of the status of the gift-story, the tale which both warns and empowers the sexually emergent woman. There is, of course a constant risk of failure, of producing something which seems an insult to survivors of sexual violence. Even naming the genre is problematic. The term ‘erotic thriller’ occasionally appears on dust covers and may evoke for some the liberating possibilities an earlier age found in the phrase ‘novel of sensation’. Sensation, however, can slip into the disempowering formula Ogden Nash dubbed the Had-I-ButKnown story. Here the first person narrative proclaims the central character’s survival but constantly bewails her ignorance or folly. She may emerge from the temporary abyss but lacks the language to articulate a new self and remains stuck in the old one. These difficulties emerge in a recent thriller by male/female team Nicci French, Killing Me Softly (1999). The narrator, Alice, is in thrall to Adam, a charismatic mountaineer; they marry, and while his sexual demands upon her become increasingly dangerous, she begins to uncover his past as rapist and murderer. Abandoning a gentle ‘new man’ and a wide circle of friends, neglecting her career as a scientist working on a new contraceptive device, Alice is in a position to ponder the relationship between erotic obsession and moral responsibility. She is capable of acknowledging her social and professional betrayals and of critiquing her husband’s inability to function at any level but that of desire. She is capable of evading his attacks on her sanity and of seeking justice for his victims. What she cannot do is to find a language beyond silence or self-castigation. Desire obliterates her as a speaking subject. She ‘nods dumbly’ as Adam summons her before they have spoken; when she essays mild jokes about being a ‘kept woman’ he glares her into silence; while as narrator she can describe her ambivalent feelings during violent sex, she rarely speaks during these

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episodes. The ending silences not only Adam, who commits suicide, but also Alice. For the sake of the climbing community she colludes in epitaphs presenting him as hero and herself as ‘tragic widow’. Privately, she embraces the role. While this honestly acknowledges that sexual risk can do permanent damage, it seems to endorse a dangerous binary – foolish woman versus the blinding sexual glamour of the abyss – rather than successfully negotiating the abject. If the term ‘erotic thriller’ suggests the narrative risks of a sensation novel on the one hand, it can also, on the other, connote those movies on late night television, in which a detective plot signals through the interstices of soft pornography. (‘Routine erotic thriller’ ought to be an oxymoron, but the term appears regularly in weekly TV film listings.) Their peculiar deadness springs less from explicit images than from lack of visible social context. The actors are reduced to archetypes: at best, this gives them a comic incongruity when the mundane unavoidably intrudes, at worst, as Angela Carter points out in The Sadeian Woman, (1979a) they become schematic images of rape. Barbara Wilson is again helpful here. The lesbian community vigorously debated issues of sado-masochism and pornography throughout the 1980s, and The Dog Collar Murders (1989) is a product of that debate. Set at a conference on sexuality, it involves the murders of an anti-pornography campaigner and a lesbian S/M practitioner. It confronts the reader with violent death and a sexual dialectic. The self-deprecating Pam Nilsen, in double crises as she comes to terms with her experience in Sisters of the Road and her own developing sexuality, crystallizes for the reader not only the arguments but also the difficulty of negotiating boundaries: ‘The most impossible thing about it all is that everyone is using their own sexuality as a reference point. They don’t say they are, but they are underneath.’ ‘It has to be legitimate for a woman who’s been raped or abused to say that porn is frightening and disgusting to her, that she wants to live her life without it, in safety.’ ‘But it also has to be all right for a woman who wants to explore her sexuality to do so without mass disapproval.’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said ‘. . . we can only speak for ourselves, yet everyone would rather speak for everyone but themselves’. (1989: 188) Striving to ‘speak for herself’, Pam embodies what distinguishes the novel of sexual risk from pornography, a social context from which a


chosen sexuality is articulated. She is part of a family, bonded with her twin and remembering their dead parents, and of a political and economic community; she is a comic figure blushingly knocking over magazines with titles like Lesbian Enema Lust in the local bondage boutiques. Her specificity proclaims the validity of individual responses to the idea of sexual risk. The fact that it is a right-wing fundamentalist who kills both women, the ultimate censorship, appears to settle the debate in favour of freedom of expression. However, the text does not engage directly with mass production of pornography and its relationship to power. Rather, the erotica described – like the art films produced by Pam’s rival in love – are personal and private; the only sexual risk worth taking, Wilson implies, is within a context shaped in a community by and for itself, and one which actively resists the commodification of sex. This adumbrates the ‘Utopian space’ Sarah Gamble identifies in The Company of Wolves but it is not Wilson’s project to investigate whether heterosexual desire can function within it. I want to turn to two crime novels that envisage the possibility and locate language as a crucial site of resistance. Sarah Dunant’s Transgressions (1999) appropriates the rhythms of a genre which has been a major site of feminist resistance, the stalker narrative. Her central character, Elizabeth, lives alone, her sexual life under her own control, a situation the stalker motif stereotypically presents as hubris. The novel and its heroine, however, have a more creative relationship with the genre. Judith Fetterley coined the term The Resisting Reader for a woman who inserts into the male text the question of female desire (1978). Elizabeth is a resisting translator, working on a noir Czech thriller. Initially she sees herself as maintaining a transparent relationship with the language of the author, dispassionately testing words against his presumed intentions – ‘pants’, ‘knickers’ or ‘panties?’, ‘crotch or snatch?’ However, she feels sufficiently threatened by its violence to work it only by daylight; she also finds in its ‘dodgy eroticism’ a source of (potentially alarming) sexual empowerment, a way to ‘orchestrate and control the pace and flow of her pleasure’ (1997: 36). Her ambivalence towards the translation prompts her to experiment and give a new ‘voice’ to some female characters, charged with power not granted by the original author. Transgressions thus foregrounds the relationship between sexuality, violence and a woman’s word. Elizabeth attempts to replicate her linguistic control with another kind of ‘translation’. When a stalker she assumes to be a much publicized rapist, the Holloway Hammer,

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materializes in the bedroom, her response is not to fight but to take a sexual initiative. It is not only an act of survival, but one of discovery: she feels fear and disgust, but also power, the possibility of pleasure, pity for his vulnerability. You looked into the eye of the nightmare and survived. And having done it, this should be the end of it and both of them would be forgiven and redeemed, even if that redemption may have had to grow out of a landscape of humiliation and fear. (172) Survival, however, is not so easily won. The attacks continue. Aware that her stalker is reading discarded drafts of her translation, Elizabeth baits a trap for him with specially composed fragments. Their inevitable final confrontation is fought over the relationship between text and reality. She articulates her own self-contempt in the language of the novel’s sexist hero – ‘You wrote it, babe, You better live it’ (332). The stalker insults her in words he has picked up from her text. When she has stabbed him she learns that he is not the Hammer but has targeted her alone, and faces complex questions about responsibility and language. Has she interpreted him too glibly through the discourse of a sexist novel and taught him to understand himself in the same way? In a world where sexual violence is endemic and there is always a second, or a third, killer, can an individual act of risk redeem? When Carter’s Red Riding Hood lies down with the tamed wolf she does so in a world where the transition from innocence to experience is hedged with magic and ritual. Elizabeth traverses the winter solstice in an urban wasteland hedged in by the discourse of the serial killer novel. Yet it proves not to be the only available discourse. Spooked by early signs that she is being stalked, Elizabeth consults a priest, Catherine. They meet amid the graffiti that disfigure Catherine’s church while she restores its numinous Christmas beauty. Catherine counters the scrawled obscenities of the symbolic order, transforming the space into Kristeva’s chora, a powerful and healing place beyond words. It is Catherine who saves Elizabeth from the final attack, visiting on Christmas Day with a heroic, saving energy, ‘a woman who would climb walls when she couldn’t get in through front doors. But most of all, a woman who recognized a spiritual need as well as a physical one’ (338). While she does not negate Elizabeth’s erotic choices, Catherine embodies a different language in which to comprehend them. On the level of the chora, Elizabeth can acknowledge that her involvement with the eroticized abject in the person of the stalker is the product of her own


lack of ‘a vested interest in life’ (261). Translation, the text implies, is not enough. Elizabeth and her attacker struggle in a language that damages them both. Only Catherine’s total shattering of linguistic boundaries has the potential to transform the culture. Frannie, the narrator of Susanna Moore’s In the Cut, is also searching for a killer, a man she has seen with one victim, and who kills her best friend. Like Elizabeth she has a professional preoccupation with language. Her concern is not simply with her own ‘story’, but with linguistic research, the component parts people need to assemble ‘stories’. The ending radically subverts story-telling convention. Franny has faced the killer. She is alone. She addresses us. ‘The dying sometimes speak of themselves in the third person. I was not speaking that way. I said: I am bleeding.’ She recalls a song she has seen on a subway poster. ‘I know the poem. She knows the poem’ (1996: 180). The final page makes us aware not simply of Franny’s death but of its meaning for the narrative we have read. She quotes another poem, Ralegh’s Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage: ‘Give me my scallop-shell of quiet’. Ralegh (like the killer’s last victim) was about to be beheaded. The poem is a testimony, Ralegh’s attempt to draw his senseless execution into the sphere of meaning. Its placing suggests that the reader should reinterpret Frannie’s narrative as a testimony, the linguistic form in which, as we have seen, ‘language is in process and in trial’. Throughout the narrative, the reader is equipped with Frannie’s own lexicon and invited to consider issues of language. One slang word in her collection is testilying – testifying on oath/lying to women. We are thus implicitly involved in the construction and completion of a testimony that refuses to lie about sexuality. The importance of doing so is reflected in the structure of the plot. It constantly deceives the reader into identifying the killer in a way that supports the conclusion that Frannie is ‘asking for it’, only to smash that assumption. Franny engages in risky and passionate sex with a man she does not know well, the cop Malloy. She initiates sex with one of her students who likes to write about murder, only to change her mind moments later. She walks mean streets alone. None of these actions lead to her murder – a random and misogynist act. If the reader seeks its meaning, it does not lie in the area of cause and consequence. Frannie discusses her students’ response to the term stream of consciousness, ‘which some of them thought at first was a stream of conscienceness’ (3). This is an appropriate pun in a book which is, despite Frannie’s disregard of convention, fiercely moral. Her morality utters itself through a play on words. Frannie learns about ‘signatures’

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left by serial killers: this murderer ‘disarticulates’ the body, pulls limbs from their sockets. ‘Articulation’, speaking yourself, is Frannie’s moral passion. She gives her (mostly impoverished) students the gift of articulacy, imposing the rules of grammar until they play language with the confidence of a jazz musician; she makes them tell stories that reach beyond the narcissism of ‘self-expression’ and hopes that they may someday articulate their justified political anger. Language is thus her weapon against the killer and his culture. Her mistake, the one that directly brings about her death, is her failure to read Malloy correctly in terms of language. Suspecting him of the murders, she sums him up as action driven forward by will, not understanding. It was this that made him dangerous. Not the sex. the deferral of consciousness. The deferral of meaning. And with it . . . was the old brooding effacement of the female. (88) This might be a fair summary of the chauvinist Malloy on the symbolic level: but it is the literal truth about the real killer, his partner Rodriguez. Malloy uses racist words, but protects all races; Rodriguez beats up a black colleague. Malloy is sexually dominant – which Frannie enjoys – while Rodriguez hits his wife. Malloy and Frannie play with handcuffs, domesticating the sign of law, but Rodriguez carries a water pistol when his gun is taken away. He resents the confiscation of a letter from a psychiatrist which declares him fit for duty, as if words render him sane. Malloy’s actions speak. Frannie trusts material signs suggesting Malloy’s involvement but ignores the deeper codes of sexual communication. Her last act is to rectify this. She fights, so that Malloy will read the signs of misogyny inscribed on her body. Testimony is risky. The law asks the victim for the ‘word’ it needs to operate, but does not give her the words to re-articulate herself. In testimony, the victim tests out and changes language itself. Fiction cannot become a substitute for that process, for what she must articulate is specific to herself. What it can do is to offer lexicons on which to draw, beyond the legal, the rational, the socially acceptable. We need narratives of risk, and the languages they offer – languages of rage, of trust, of the uncanny, languages of desire – and we need the communities of Barbara Wilson’s vision in which all those languages can be explored. These narratives are both a gift to survivors and a guarantee to them that there is a language in which testimony can be spoken and heard.

5 Picture of Infamy

This was one of the first chapters to be completed. The book itself had just been finished when the death was announced of the subject of this chapter. Originally open-ended in its conclusion, it is now bounded by a time frame. However, it seems possible to present the chapter largely as originally written precisely because as far as representation is concerned nothing seems to have changed. I begin and end with two very specific images to provide a clear chronological frame through which readers may be able to read more recent developments.

Mugshot I – 1997 We are confronted by an image of an image of an image. The front page of the Daily Mirror on 19 September 1997, is taken up by a photograph of Marcus Harvey’s nine by eleven foot painting of Myra Hindley, who colluded with her lover Ian Brady in the abuse and murder of five young people between 1963 and 1965. Comprised of what appear to be children’s handprints, it replicates the mugshot taken at Hindley’s arrest more than 36 years ago. The Mirror photograph shows the portrait shortly after two protesters defaced it with paint and eggs on the first day of the Royal Academy exhibition Sensation. The headline reads EXHIBITED BY THE ROYAL ACADEMY IN THE SO-CALLED NAME OF ART DEFACED BY THE PEOPLE IN THE NAME OF COMMON DECENCY The text beneath similarly attempts to polarize representation and morality. There are quotations from an organization picketing the 104

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gallery, Mothers Against Murder and Aggression. Ann West, the mother of Lesley Ann Downey who was murdered at the age of ten by Brady and Hindley, is recorded as saying, ‘No other galleries should consider displaying this disgusting portrait.’ There is a short counter-statement from the secretary of the Royal Academy, David Gordon, ‘The image of Myra Hindley is a horrific part of our history,’ a remark which, juxtaposed with the stark pain of Mrs West, cannot help but sound feeble. But while the story suggests a spontaneous outpouring of emotion captured in on-the-spot reportage, the Mirror’s presentation is far from transparent. The front-page picture has been carefully achieved. The red and blue stains on the portrait stand out vividly but the figure itself is blurred, the handprints indistinguishable, as if a wet cloth had been smeared across the painting before it had dried. In front of it stands a stepladder, its apex obliterating one of the eyes, seeming to take a slice out of the face. The photograph implies an act of irreparable destruction rather than the ‘slight’ damage subsequently estimated by the deputy secretary (Daily Telegraph 19 September 1997). It seems as if the Mirror is determined that no intact image of Hindley should deface its pages. Closer examination of the text, however, suggests a public willing to engage in a debate more complex than that assumed by the Mirror to be taking place between between Harvey and ‘every right-thinking person in Britain’. One of the attackers, himself an artist, is quoted as shouting at visitors to the exhibition, ‘You are all idiots to come and pay for this s***’ (sic) and referring to the painting as ‘pornography’. While the Mirror constructs this as a simple cry of outrage at the mere presence of the picture, it might equally be read as an objection to what the speaker considers an emotional exploitation of the murders for gain, and thus as a contribution to a controversy amongst artists – some of whom resigned from the Academy – which was to continue for the duration of the exhibition. Winnie Johnson, the mother of another victim, Keith Bennett, expressed a view different from that of Ann West: ‘I hope they leave it up so other people can have a go at it.’ This view affirms the basic ground of the debate far less crudely than the Mirror headline, which seems to equate the portrait with Hindley herself. Mrs Johnson problematizes the relationship between the subject and the representation, and the respective emotional weightings attached to each. She acknowledges that there is a measure of responsibility involved in the act of making or disseminating an image, and that it will have repercussions for both the person represented and those who view it. Marina Warner offers a way to enter the debate in a less emotionally charged spirit by placing Harvey’s picture in a tradition: that of the


pittura infamante, an image designed to brand criminals with their crime (1998: 378). She likens it to Guiseppe Arcimboldo’s profile of Herod, composed of the bodies of the Holy Innocents. In it, a headless child bends its body to form the hook of the nose; the parted lips are made of legs drawn up in agony; two children fling out an arm and a leg, curving round to form the socket of an eye which is simply a black and expressionless hollow. The pale handprints which seem to float in the dark mass comprising the eye of Harvey’s Hindley have the same disturbing quality, a grisly parody of the old superstition that the eyes of murder victims retain the reflected image of their killer. There is a difference, however. Arcimboldo, as a court painter of the sixteenth century, was making an image exclusively for specific patrons. Harvey’s picture is a unique work of art. Its luxury status is made clear by the way the sponsors of the exhibition, Saatchi, trumpet their ownership of it. However, it is grounded in a relationship to mechanical reproduction. Part of the point is its likeness to a poster or a pin-up inviting an eroticized gaze. Reproductions of Andy Warhol’s silkscreen images of Marilyn Monroe invite the buyer to share a fantasy that ownership is possible. It is a fantasy legitimated by the dependency of the image on films which already commodify Monroe as an object of desire. She is trebly rendered an object of sale even as the picture seems to repudiate its kinship with the cheap and the disposable. We contemplate Herod. Beyond any boundaries of time or space, we own Monroe. And we own Hindley. Or rather we cannot refuse to own Hindley. Harvey’s painting depends not on a willingly purchased sexual fantasy but on an image it would be difficult to ignore. For three and a half decades British tabloids, including the Mirror, have continued to reproduce and circulate Harvey’s source, the mugshot of a young woman with bouffant blonde hair starring with apparent defiance at a camera in a northern police station in 1965. The name ‘Hindley’, invariably prefixed as a matter of editorial policy by the adjective ‘evil’ (Stanford 1994: 441) sells papers, and no story is complete without the image. Walter Benjamin links the rise of the detective story with that of photography, ‘the most decisive of all conquests of a person’s incognito’ (1973: 48). Early mugshots testify the reluctance of criminals to face the camera. Heads are fixed in clamps; arms belonging to unseen constables grip shoulders; a face appears to wear a kind of bonnet of hands as a violent struggler is held down. Some are aware of the career implications of being photographed. Others, perhaps, are disturbed by the fact of conquest, that they are no longer lords and owners of their faces. To be photographed is to encounter the possibility of being known, more


intimately than in a face-to-face contact which involves a courteous reluctance to stare. Ronald Thomas’s article Double Exposures (1997) charts the differing paths of early British and American phototechnology. In 1851, the British sculptor Frederick Scott Archer developed the technique of sensitizing glass plates with silver salts using collodion, thus making possible the cheap and easy mass production of photographs. The USA preferred the daguerrotype, incapable of reproduction but offering greater depth and naturalism. As Thomas points out, the pleasures of the irreplaceable individual portrait and the satisfaction of disseminating widely one’s own image are distinct, and provide a starting point for ideologically different types of crime fiction. They could be seen as roughly analogous to the original photograph of Hindley and its treatment. The original proclaims police ownership of the camera, the magic eye; its presence in police files, or on posters asking for information, stresses that the criminal is caught in Foucauldian panopticon, the inescapable gaze of the Law. The press endlessly (cheaply) reproduces this same image of Hindley, so confident of recognition that it can fragment and stylize – for example, showing only the heavily made-up eyes and blonde bouffant. This ubiquity of the image in the press implicitly relocates the panopticon’s seat of power. It is no longer the monopoly of a legally constituted authority directly concerned with surveillance and punishment; it belongs to all of us. We have read about Hindley’s every petition for release, every transfer, every permitted step in the world beyond prison. Tabloids have demanded not our opinion, but our verdict, the Sun organizing a ‘You, the Jury’ poll which resulted in the headline, ‘42,000 SAY LET HER ROT’ (Sun 26 October 1989). It is as if the power of our collective gaze could keep her behind bars. The price of a paper buys the conquest of Hindley’s identity, renders it knowable. This is a dangerous illusion, because it fosters a notion of Hindley as metonym. It implies that to ‘know’ the figure in the mugshot is to gain access to a complete criminology of child abuse and murder. A complicated nexus of personal motivation, social responsibility, punishment, prevention, rehabilitation and policing is reduced to a commodity to which our response is overdetermined. While there are questions to be asked about the artistic merit and the appropriateness of Harvey’s portrait, it does not conceal the fact that it is an artefact, a selection from other, equally possible, kinds of representations, not a record of the ‘truth’ about Hindley or about the murder. It thus forces spectators to confront their own involvement with the representation of both.


Myth To clear the ground for such a confrontation, it is important to refute Hindley’s unique criminality. Helena Kennedy documents the case of a couple convicted in 1970 of the murder of a ten-year-old girl after a trial at which sexual assaults upon numerous children between 11 and 15 were graphically described. Kennedy narrates her ‘great difficulty’ (1992: 247) in tracking the case via the press. And while the woman evidently experienced sufficient aggression in jail to force her into solitary confinement, she was not subject to media campaigns demanding that her tariff be increased or to media harassment after her release. Kennedy suggests that the difference resides in Hindley’s evident ability to survive unbroken, while the later murderer was described in prison as ‘a broken creature’ (247). She argues that Hindley’s own articulacy, whether describing her thralldom to Brady or her reasons for helping the police to find the graves of the victims, could only be perceived as brazen. However, I would argue, no word or act of Hindley’s would dislodge that image of her from 1965. Our investment in it is too high. The case was the first to confront the British public with the unmistakable existence of the violent and murderous abuse of children. The couple had both photographed and recorded the ordeal of Lesley Ann Downey. No euphemisms or evasions were possible. The press coverage, restrained by present standards, was massive. To read it felt voyeuristic; yet to evade the knowledge it offered seemed irresponsible. The public had lost a kind of innocence. Brady, the judge remarked, was ‘wicked beyond belief’. He did not say the same of Hindley, and this, paradoxically, seemed to implicate her more deeply in that loss of group innocence by implying that she had a choice. Her gender made her the Eve who could have preserved us from the knowledge of evil and, failing to do so, became the gatekeeper to a new and more terrifying world. It was not only a world in which such acts were shown to be possible. It was one in which the nature of their punishment was unimaginable. The death penalty was abolished while the couple were awaiting trial; what long-term imprisonment for such a crime might mean could only be guessed at. In BBC2’s Modern Times documentary on 1 November 2000, Hindley expressed the wish that she had been hanged, partly for the sake of the bereaved who have suffered from continual media exploitation. But, as she pointed out, she was not. Thomas Hardy was disturbed by the picture of Edith Thompson as a woman about to be hanged. The image of Hindley is that of a woman not hanged; it


continues implicitly to demand our understanding, not of Hindley’s psychology but of its meaning to us. Helen Birch remarks on the ‘deafening’ feminist silence on the subject, despite the fact that ‘Hindley’s notoriety is endemic in her femininity, and this has resonances for all women’ (1993: 34). Birch’s essay breaks silence in important ways. She explores the image of Hindley as the blonde temptress of film noir, in whom sexuality is inextricably linked with destructiveness and constructed as the polar opposite of maternity; and she calls attention to the silencing of Hindley herself, contrasting the proliferation of rumours (SEX ROMPS WITH AN EX NUN ON E WING) (Sun February 1998) with the refusal of the Home Office to allow her to continue the counselling sessions that prompted her in 1987 to confess to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. As Birch points out, these sessions would not have benefited Hindley alone. Lacking as we do a language in which to make sense of her actions, no articulate source, including the killers themselves, should be ignored. Hindley’s status as the Eve of a new criminological world meant, however, that her story was mapped against a number of fictional paradigms, most of them misogynist. There was, for instance, Pamela Hansford Johnson’s invocation of classical myth: Sturdy in build and broad-buttocked, though her face, hands and feet appear to be narrow, she could have served a nineteenth-century Academy painter as a model for Clytemnestra. (1968: 22) Clytemnestra killed, not children, but the husband who sacrificed her daughter to obtain a fair wind for Troy. This invocation of the flagship tragedy of patriarchy, the Oresteia, an explicit celebration of masculine rule, indicates a readiness to situate Hindley in a monolithic category of female wickedness, in which a capacity for one crime indicates a capacity for every crime. Similarly, there is folk tale. Not satisfied with the image of terrifying beauty, Hansford Johnson also projects Hindley’s face forward to future ugliness: It is the lines of this porcelained face which are extraordinary. Brows, eyes, mouth are all quite straight, precisely parallel. The fine nose is straight, too, except for a very faint downward turn at the tip, just as the chin turns very faintly upward. She will have a nutcracker face one day. (23)


This reduction of a face to a few sketched lines evokes not just the witch of Snow White or the wicked stepmother of Cinderella, but specifically the realization of these figures in Disney cartoons, the source through which the youth of the early sixties experienced them. These images have, Marina Warner suggests, ‘done more than any other creation to naturalize female–maternal–malignancy in the imaginations of children worldwide’ (1995: 205). The characters who transform these tales into the empowering gift-stories discussed in the previous chapter – the ghost of Cinderella’s mother or the wise old crone who gives advice – have vanished. What remains is a virtually unopposed enemy, irresistible evil; the simpering heroines, the muddled fairy godmother, and the bumbling bachelor dwarfs lack the physical and moral authority to combat it directly. What pulls them through is a mixture of luck and desire, of wishing on a star at the right moment. To ignore the youth of Hindley at the time of the murders in favour of this projection of timeless malice is to assume the existence of demonic female energy that can be temporarily contained (with the help, perhaps, of a press which continually campaigns for its confinement behind bars) but can never be permanently overcome. A third fictional paradigm frequently invoked, implicitly or explicitly, in discussion of the murders is that of melodrama. The setting ensured that. ‘The Moors Murders’ sounded like something from a Victorian playbill and the second most common image in the press has been that of Saddleworth Moor where Brady and Hindley buried the bodies of Lesley Ann Downey, John Kilbride, Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett, and where Keith Bennett lies still. It is a bleak landscape, misty and treacherous, suggestive of Lancashire witches and lost travellers. In the black and white of the newsprint it seems a vast hostile space where distant policemen searching for bodies vanish into insignificance. The picture first appears in 1965 with the discovery of the body of Lesley Ann Downey; it is eerily echoed in 1986 and 1987 when Hindley accompanied police in the search for the other graves and located that of Pauline Reade. It is an evocative backdrop in which the media have pitted the figures of evil, the two murderers, against those of good, the parents and friends of victims often cruelly harassed into re-living the horror by a press seeking new images of grief to buttress a manufactured story. Melodrama, however, is not simply about condemnation but catharsis. It articulates a political position and gains empowerment through so doing. Simon Shepherd describes its project:


A villain will try to organize circumstantial evidence in order to use law to achieve his aim. This procedure is usually defeated by an eruption of truth produced from real experience and emotion . . . what’s here is a structure of feeling about the individual in relation to law, where the conflict is produced as nature versus institution. Law is the crucial institution because it is seen to address individuals from outside them, to turn subjects into objects by inventing narrative about them. The institution is class-based, so the truths claimed by its narratives authorize control by an often corrupt dominant. The organization not only foregrounds the tension between different knowledges and narratives, but more importantly it specifically cathects the irruption of natural truth into the apparent logic of law. (1992: 11) Here, however, the melodrama’s accustomed protagonists, the charismatic working-class lovers who fall foul of the law, themselves wield the corrupt and cruel power. It is the forces of law who have to carry the emotional freight of the narrative. No-one reading an account of the trial can fail to detect the pain inscribed in the ordered presentation of evidence by those who discovered the child’s dress stained with earth, the tape recording of her cries spliced with jaunty Christmas music. While it is not surprising that thirty thousand people signed a petition demanding the reintroduction of the newly abolished death penalty, such an ending to the narrative would not, perhaps, have been enough to dislodge the painful awareness of a radical distortion of the familiar pattern, the ‘irruption of truth’ fatally aborted. For, if we are dependent only on law to protect us from what Hindley and Brady could imagine and perform, rather than on the decency of ordinary people we take for granted which produces that moment of truth in melodrama, our understanding of the world shaken to its roots.

Documentary That disturbance resonates through one of the first attempts to explain the couple in the dock, Pamela Hansford Johnson’s On Iniquity, written shortly after she covered the trial for the Daily Telegraph. While her text employs fictional paradigms without attempting to interrogate them, it also presents an account of causes and effects. Hansford Johnson quotes Lady Elwyn Jones: It is almost like a Computer. . . you feed in all the conditions and you get just all the crime to be expected. I found the affluent-society


symbols (car, transistor set, tapes, wine, cameras) made it all an especial horror. (Hansford Johnson 1968: 134) This is at bottom the old argument that if you give the poor bathrooms they’ll only keep coal in them. Hansford Johnson, however, develops it into something more troubling. On Iniquity attacks not only the new affluence of the working class, but also their education – Hindley would have been one of the early beneficiaries of the Butler Education Act – and ability to negotiate the field of representation: the early school-leaver, in his (sic) dead-end job, is earning far more than was conceivable as little as twenty years ago. Blood is hot, experience still either fumbling or negligible. Not unnaturally he wants to ‘know’ . . . the trouble is that they are entirely without instinct for selection and unfitted by their meagre schooling to take a serious work of sexology, for example, in the spirit in which it was written. (112) The post-war gift of a little learning is constructed as both cause and effect of ‘permissiveness’; Hansford Johnson’s remedy is not to improve education but to police it. The book is a call for censorship to the many by ‘experts’: she recommends restricted access to the works of de Sade (which Brady had read), Krafft-Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, the ‘stuff loading down our railway bookstalls . . . the stuff of corruption’ (41), and most pertinently, Edward Bond’s play Saved, then embattled with the still-functioning Lord Chamberlain’s office. The play shows the stoning of a baby in its pram, an act the play sets in a political context. The male characters are shown as alienated and corrupted not by education but by the industrial machine which controls their lives. The women are crippled by emotional and economic dependency on them. Nobody responds to the needs of the child, whose humanity they fail to acknowledge. Rather than engaging with Saved as an intervention into existing debate about violence, Hansford Johnson treats it as a potential cause itself and makes it the lynchpin of an appeal to artists to censor themselves in order to protect others. ‘Artists’ and ‘experts’ are thus invited to construct linguistic and epistemological boundaries, only challengeable by fellow ‘experts’ selected on class lines; refusal of access to their analysis would, presumably, apply not only to a potential Brady but also to a working class autodidact like Bond, thus sealing those boundaries on a permanent basis. (What would happen to On Iniquity itself in this world of censorship is not clear.)


Hansford Johnson’s position is, as Birch points out, the last stand of a bourgeoisie threatened by the new world ushered in by the welfare state and the economic boom of the fifties (Birch 1993: 48). It would be pointless, therefore, to refute the arguments of a text whose confusion reflects the sheer distress of reporting the trial. Its interest lies rather in a speaking absence: Hansford Johnson’s failure to find a coherent narrative about Hindley. She admits changing her opinion and eventually identifying Hindley as the weaker partner. This does not, however, lead her to open up the question of gender relations. Hindley is still constructed as more culpable by her lack of ‘natural’ maternal feeling, and the Attorney-General’s question, ‘Madam – a child, of your own sex?’ is allowed to remain purely rhetorical. Hansford Johnson records that the jury was exclusively male, adding, ‘I myself think, somewhat against my own principles, that three weeks of the horror ahead might have been a greater strain than many women could have contemplated’ (Hansford Johnson 1968: 10). Female effacement is thus complete: no place in court other than the dock, no access to ‘experts’, a disparagement of educational policies that with all their faults offered unprecedented opportunities to women, including the eventual architects of the women’s movement. Hansford Johnson may imagine women readers, as opposed to jurors, but she offers them no possibility of articulating a gendered reading of Hindley. She is assumed to be unsexed by her act, like Lady Macbeth who, while her husband receives justice within the community he has outraged, is reduced to an isolated freak. Also written in rapid response to the case, Emlyn Williams’s Beyond Belief appeared in 1967. A text not only prefeminist but also presenting itself unashamedly to the market, it nevertheless offers the possibility of reading Hindley as a gendered being in a social context. In contrast to Hansford Johnson’s queasy reluctance, Williams confronts the sleaze factor head-on; he admits to a desire for the ‘details’ of which Wendy Lesser speaks. The acknowledgement prepares us for a degree of narrative risk-taking. The risks do not always pay off; despite an avowed intention to be ‘serious and dispassionate’ (Williams 1976: 9) the book often adopts a rhetoric bordering on the self-righteous – ‘When on Judgement Day [their] souls are dug up, they will stink to heaven’ (367). There is also a struggle to find an adequate language to contextualize its subject. Williams locates the source of Hindley’s motivation in masochistic desire. Lacking a framework to address the possibility of independent sexual self-definition for women, the text treads


perilously close to prurience: it hypothesizes a bedroom scene in which a young and ignorant bride is at the mercy of a man who chooses brutality over gentleness and thus condemns her to only two possible identities – ‘frigidity’ or – for Hindley, ‘the woman in a thousand . . . ten thousand’ – arousal by brutality itself. A feminist discourse might have permitted such a discussion to move from the personal to the political. But Sylvia Plath’s comment ‘Every woman adores a fascist’ was not yet common currency, and the effect is to offer Hindley to the gaze as a spectacle rather than as a subject. However, Beyond Belief negotiates other risks more successfully. Williams recognizes that the imagination inevitably plays a role in presenting the ‘details’ which alone render such an account apprehensible: Marshalling the facts of most chronicles of murder the writer is faced with gaps. . . . Hence the necessity of ‘surmise,’ that is, between one set of established facts and the next, a reconstruction of behaviour, conversations and thoughts based entirely on the facts . . . (10) Williams’s project is not a diagnosis but a coherent narrative: ‘surmise’ extends not only to scenes of violence but to the mundane: The thin winter light wanes, and low in the city sky the thicket of television aerials is dwindling into the dark. School-children wheel their bikes up back entries, the paper-boy crushes the Manchester Evening News into the odd letter-box and saunters whistling on. Top bulbs click on in front rooms, and thin curtains close on tables laid for high tea. (17) This level of affectionate observation is important. It stresses the context shared by the murderers and their victims, and replaces Hansford Johnson’s élitist analysis with the reminder that the victims, too, were part of the class newly enjoying cameras and television sets. Far from propounding a link between material goods and immorality, these descriptions of modest prosperity only serve to make the sudden termination of those young futures more poignant. Such a detail also ensures that the killers are implicitly, if not explicitly, located ideologically. While Williams offers an essentialist view of Brady’s ‘evil’ – ‘From the day of his birth, the spell had been woven. And nothing could have changed him. Nothing’ (102) – he also outlines the matrix which determined its shape. He dwells not only on the social deprivation that thwarted Brady’s ambition, but also on


his relationship to representation. Brady’s interest in the works of de Sade – in the sixties, not available without some effort – co-existed with one in Nazism; as Williams points out, this material lay all around him in the fifties – in war films, memoirs of POWs and in reminiscences of survivors. Both of these strains are constructed as fodder for a specific kind of egotism. The text presents Brady undergoing an epiphany: He stood and stared at the vast empty hills as if they were staring back at him and holding his look. For the first time he was alone at the centre of a limitless terrritory. His own, it belonged to him . . . the lone Laird of all he surveyed. (64) If this is fictionalizing, ‘surmise’, it also offers the reader an opportunity to situate Brady in relation to the myth of Romantic masculine identity, the image of the self as a criminal superman. It is a trajectory impossibility to Hindley. The contrast of her story permits us to explore the gendered aspects of her criminality at a level more complex than the binaries of good mother/evil seductress presented in the media. For Williams’s Hindley is not just a masochistically obsessed woman ultimately capable of cruelty; she is also a comic character gone wrong. The free indirect speech which is Williams’s major technical device to indicate ‘surmise’ constructs a figure with a drive towards ‘bettering herself’: Her hair wasn’t too much between colours and she looked striking without being a sketch, just enough make-up and sensible in a coat and skirt and bit of fur, no brooch it kills the ensemble. (127) ‘Sketch’, definitely lower-middle-class, and ‘ensemble’, once connoting haute couture and now merely signifying pretentiousness by the user, combine to evoke a figure from an Alan Bennett monologue or even a matriarch from Coronation Street, a sense endorsed by a pithy quotation from a former suitor: tried it on i’the car but no go, it was like pressin’ yourself against a shopwinder. . . (125) The comic note does not trivialize the murders, but implicitly postulates a difference between the murderers. While the text shows Brady opting for a tragic pose of lone masculinity, Hindley is constructed in a


web of relationships in which Brady was the most powerful force. Williams cannot envisage her sexually or professionally autonomous in a world offering only romance or marriage as goals for a young woman, but does postulate an alternative Hindley, content as the wife of an upwardly mobile husband, perhaps just a little smug – a genuinely imaginable alternative which allows us to judge her as a person with a history rather than a monster without context. (Oddly, the same comic note was struck by Hindley herself in the Modern Times film which used some of her own words spoken by an actress. Of Brady, she remarked, ‘He was a lousy kisser’. Suddenly it was possible to imagine a different Hindley, capable of making a tart rejoinder to a would-be suitor, finding a different future.) This combination of mundane detail and ‘surmise’ does not provide a context which explains Hindley. But unlike On Iniquity, it presents the context as a site on which moral choice is accessible. It also serves to remind the reader of Hindley as a temporal being. In all highly publicized cases of murder, there is a media-induced tendency to perceive those involved occupying an eternal present. Murder victims, of course, do. The perpetrators, however, grow old and change. The illusion of panoptical insight through those fragments of Hindley’s life in the press is dangerous in its failure to recognize this. The old mugshot embodies the myth of a Hindley unable to ‘change’, assuming ‘change’ to be the opposite of ‘evil’. But Hindley began to change from the moment the photograph was taken. Being mortal, there was nothing she could do but change. What mattered was whether such a change would be for better or for worse.

Fictions of release The thrusting of Hindley into an eternal present defined by the sexuality of the mugshot could at its worst transform panoptical reportage into blatantly commercial and irresponsible fiction. For example, the Daily Express in November 1995 alleged a ‘friendship pact’ with Rosemary West, caustically labelled by Joan Smith as ‘Nightmare on Cromwell Street Meets the White Devil’ (1997: 133). It is only fiction avowing itself as such which offers us ways of responding, not to Hindley’s (imagined) psychology, but to the real issues raised by her crime, and by the nature and limits of its punishment. In 1992, a former policeman, Peter N. Walker, published Grave Secrets, a thriller focussed upon the practical problems inherent in the release of a high-profile prisoner. The hero, D.S. Pemberton, is responsible for the


protection of the newly released Louisa Potter, like Hindley a killer of children. She was an enigma . . . such a bloody puzzle. Charming, beautiful, clever, capable- but utterly evil . . . I could not establish her motive for such sustained and awful cruelty. (1992: 20) Pemberton agrees to the job despite these feelings in the hope of proving an unsolved case against the apparently repentant Potter. Her co-operation with the police mirrors that of Hindley in search of the bodies on the moor – but here the issue is money. Potter’s partner, now dead, embezzled from the IRA and the murder of the children took place as he tried to hide the money. Potter helps the police thwart the IRA and recover the money, risking her life to do so – but she also turns out to be entitled to inherit some of the laundered cash: ‘Knowing that, do you still believe she has reformed?,’ asked the Chief Constable. ‘Only God knows the answer to that,’ answered Detective Superintendent Pemberton. ‘And He is not going to tell us.’ (191) At first the text seems to be exploiting ‘the Moors Murders’ – not to mention Anglo-Irish politics – to spice up a routine plot. However, that very routineness more clearly defines the task of the justice system – and the reader – at the point when a tariff is up for review: not to investigate the psychology of the criminal at the moment of the crime, but to acknowledge the possibility (not the fact) of rehabilitation. The banality of motivation here allows Walker to sidestep all the arguments which are basically grounded in speculation about Hindley’s sexuality and which, inevitably, return the debate to the disturbing figure in the mugshot. The text is left free to focus upon the notion of responsibility: to the public, protecting them from the criminal, but also to the criminal, protecting her from the public. It confronts the reader with a fact not faced at the trial in 1965: a society which does not imprison people till they die will, like Pemberton, be forced to work out a modus vivendi with its killers without the luxury of ‘understanding’ them. PD James also takes the moment of release as her starting point, to interrogate the implications of punishment and rehabilitation, as they impinge on both criminal and community. Mary Ducton in James’s novel Innocent Blood is guilty of concealing the sexual abuse and murder


of a child by her husband. Her frozen image is outlined by one of her former neighbours. ‘Fucking murderer[s] . . . they should’ve been hung’ (1989: 19). Her release, however, means that a process of unfreezing takes place which is not, or even chiefly, about Mary herself. The crime has locked other characters into that eternal present from which they now have to emerge and face buried issues. Although this is not an explicitly feminist novel, one such issue is that of female selfhood. James’s central character, Philippa, the adopted child of wealthy parents, sees the search for her real mother as a rite of passage – ‘I’m hoping to find out who I am’ (4) – but the information that she is Mary Ducton’s daughter problematizes any simplistic notion of family ties as an existential prop. Philippa initially chooses to rebel against her well-heeled background and the coolness of her adoptive father Maurice by taking a flat with Mary on her release from prison. James charts their developing relationship with an account of the finding and the decorating of an apartment on a budget. Through a set of material signifiers – Wedgwood china from market stalls, transformations achieved with fresh paint – she adds a fairytale element to the episode; its charm lulls the reader into accepting a dollshouse fantasy of the mother/child relationship, until the revelation that the adoption was prompted not by Mary’s life sentence but her inability to cope with a child. Philippa’s biological daughterhood becomes a site of struggle between the political and the personal. She is capable as a citizen of ‘forgiving’ Mary for murder, but emotionally unable to excuse her abandonment. Despite her political intelligence, she makes those tacit assumptions about ‘natural’ maternal feelings which make Hindley a more hated figure than Brady. Yet Mary’s recognition of her lack, and resulting ‘abandonment’ of Philippa for her protection, is arguably her most responsible act. Mary Ducton also attempts to define herself: in a manuscript she offers to Philippa as her prison journal, she describes her own violent background, her marriage to a malleable man as unlike her father as possible and her betrayal of that malleability by refusing to join him in a suicide pact to avoid the horrors awaiting a child killer in jail. The journal offers a coherent reading of an explicable, flawed personality that we and Philippa imagine we know. James then knocks away the prop of certainty. The journal proves to have been written in the flat. It may be an elaborate deceit or a genuine offering of love. As Philippa rejects her and the media begin to close in, Mary commits suicide and leaves a note. ‘These five weeks have been worth every day of the last ten years. . . . I love you. Never be afraid’ (155).


This explicit espousal of maternity is the moral complement of her earlier choice. It makes it clear that female morality does not depend on the existence of ‘natural’ maternal feeling; rather, it suggests that both genders need to recognize their desires, and then make moral choices grounded in that recognition. Mary does learn maternal love, and it prompts her to set Philippa free of the burden of being a Ducton. It is to Maurice that Philippa then turns, and turns sexually. ‘An affirmation, a curiosity satisfied, a test successfully passed, an obstacle ceremoniously moved out of the way’ (312). It is a complex recognition of her blood tie with Mary and an acknowledgement of Maurice as the architect of her values and outlook – ironically similar to the recognition imbibed by Mary via the prison education system. There is, however, a price to be paid for this resolution: not only Mary’s death, but also the real pain caused to Hilda, Philippa’s loving stepmother. All identities, especially those of women, have to be renegotiated as a direct consequence of both crime and punishment; and yet the media have an investment in preventing the process. Mary Ducton’s journal comments, ‘She realised that she wasn’t a person any more. She was a Ducton, categorised by crime, partner in an unholy alliance, indissolubly linked by infamy’ (155). It is not only the family of the criminal who have to reconfigure identities after the release, but also that of the victim. The leisurely development of the Philippa/Mary relationship is counterpointed with suspense in the story of Norman Scase, father of the murdered child, bound by a promise to his dead wife to kill Mary on her release. He has, in a sense, postponed his own act of self-definition for the duration of the life sentence. He now has to struggle with his sense that ‘avenger’ is a self he seems to have outgrown. In the course of his investigations he falls in love with a blind woman who teaches him to enjoy rose gardens and human company. He is free to marry her because on one level he keeps his promise: he does break into Mary’s flat, and stab her – only her still warm corpse. Mary herself renders him innocent of murder. As a crime novel, Innocent Blood has to provide a formal ending, but in doing so problematizes the notion of closure. Mary’s suicide is beneficent. It terminates Norman’s grief; it represents a new willingness to take responsibility for an act she claims to have blanked out of her memory; it saves Philippa from obloquy and dissipates the coldness at the heart of her adoptive relationship, so that she becomes Maurice’s chosen love rather than a substitute for his dead son. However, it also serves to emphasize that no other ending – capital punishment, revenge, accidental death or even forgiveness – could accomplish


this. Innocent Blood promotes closure as an ideal, whilst blocking every available route to it; it is an impossible object, like an Escher drawing. This is emphasized by constant foregrounding of its own artifice. It repeatedly employs the image of roses, most self-consciously literary of all symbols: roses appear in the office where Philippa learns her identity, in the garden where Norman meets his blind lover. Neither wild nor hothouse, but invariably, garden roses lovingly cultivated but of informal beauty, they provide a visual correlative of the debates Maurice conducts about crime as intrinsic evil or as social construct. Philippa herself engages in fantasies about her birth based on Victorian novels, eventually becoming a writer – a skill, we may assume, she has inherited from her mother. It is, the text suggests, impossible to know the ‘truth’ about a crime in an avowedly transparent language like that of the courtroom; however, the continuous and conscious production of narratives offers an opportunity to choose a personal history to shape a tolerable future.

Fiction of retribution Val McDermid’s A Place of Execution (1990) is a bold intervention into the debate in that it situates the figure of Hindley on the margins of a murder story set in a Derbyshire village, Scardale, in 1963. It centres on the disappearance of a teenage girl, Alison Carter; the investigation under a young DI, George Bennett, is played out against constant allusions to the (then unsolved) disappearances of Pauline Reade and John Kilbride in close proximity to the imagined location. Bennett and his team encounter passive hostility from the locals, but eventually uncover not only Alison’s blood- and semen-stained clothing in an abandoned mine, but also photographs which prove she was repeatedly abused by her stepfather, Philip Hawkin, who owns most of the village. Hawkin is tried for her murder and hanged. A Place of Execution fits Todorov’s definition of the detective story as the ‘narrative of narratives’; Bennett’s task is to disentangle the fabula of Alison’s murder from various artful arrangements of ‘facts’: a suggestion that Alison’s simple-minded uncle Peter Crowther may have been responsible leads directly to Crowther’s death in hounded terror on the moors; Hawkin’s brilliant defence constructs Bennett as blinded by ambition and ready to forge the photographs; above all, the virtual orchestration of the evidence by Ma Lomas, related to everyone in the village, who controls the flow of information to the police – such as the existence of the mine workings – in conscious matriarchal opposition to the material power of Hawkin.


But, more than half way through the novel, it becomes apparent that this is a narrative of narratives of narratives. A Place of Execution is not only the title of McDermid’s novel but also of a text within the novel, a book about the investigation by journalist Catherine Heathcote – identical with the narrative up to this point. The flow is then ruptured with a ‘handwritten’ page, a letter from George Bennett asking Catherine to withdraw the book. The narrative backtracks to show the genesis of Catherine’s research, a fortuitous meeting with George’s son Paul and his fiancée Helen; it details her own investigation among Alison’s contemporaries in Scardale, including a visit to the Hawkin house courtesy of the new owner, Helen’s sister Janice Wainwright. The action shifts into the present again as George has a heart attack, and Catherine, meeting Janice for the first time, realizes what prompted it – Janice is Alison Carter, and Helen is Philip Hawkin’s child. The evidence of Alison’s ‘murder’ was fabricated by the whole village in order to hang Hawkin. Catherine and George’s old colleague Tommy Clough quarrel violently over whether the truth should be published; Alison then reveals that the conspiracy was not to protect her alone: she has photographic proof that Hawkin was viciously and systematically abusing all the children of the village. The elaborate convolutions of the plot, the maps and letters, and newspaper cuttings dotted throughout the text, link the novel to the golden age puzzle detective stories. The juxtaposition of these stylized conventions with the cruel realities of the Moors murders could be seen as trivializing the latter. In fact, the confrontation between the real and the imagined is a fruitful one. A Place of Execution is a homage to one of the most famous puzzle novels of all, Agatha Christie’s 1934 tour de force Murder on the Orient Express, in which Poirot concludes, ‘They were all in it. . . . I visualised a self-appointed jury. . . forced by the exigencies of the case to be their own executioners’ (Christie 1974: 186). But it is not simply Christie’s ingenuity which is invoked, as Tommy Clough makes clear: ‘Whoever’s got [Alison] could be holding her captive.’ Clough looked sceptically at his boss. ‘With the Lindbergh baby, like as not.’ (McDermid 1999: 123) Murder on the Orient Express posits a crime like the kidnap and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s baby, which horrified the United States in the twenties; it offers a fantasy of justice in the face of the perceived inadequacy of the judicial system. A Place of Execution interrogates that fantasy. There is a price to be paid for the rough communal justice visited


on Hawkin. George feels responsible for the execution of a man guiltless of murder, and his health is broken; Peter Crowther dies even though the village knows he is innocent; there is a legacy of bitterness among the villagers; Alison’s life is turned upside down. Although George and Catherine, like Poirot, opt for silence, it is not a silence indicating unqualified approval. The ambivalence is aptly symbolized by the links between birth and death: Paul Bennett is born on the day that the father of his fiancée is hanged because of his own father’s mistake. There is, however, another side to A Place of Execution. If it has intertextual links with Christie’s fantasy it also resembles another narrative, Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna. First printed in 1619, the play shows a whole village rising up against the feudal overlord who rapes their women; when questioned, even under torture, the villagers assume collective rather than individual responsibility, ‘Fuente Ovejuna lo hizo.’ (Fuente Ovejuna did it.) Based on real events in the fifteenth century, it faithfully reflects the leading role taken in rebellion by women. Lope’s play, which ends with the vindication of the village by the King, tracks the slow growth of collective power in the hands of the marginalized and the exploited. Philip Hawkin’s near-feudal power – ‘he owned our livelihoods, our homes . . . not even the grown-ups questioned the squire’ (1999: 395) – and the setting in the years just before the shift in public awareness of child abuse created by ‘The Moors Murders’, prompt similar political questions, as the structure of the text emphasizes. Chandler’s sneer about Murder on the Orient Express failed to understand the text’s function as fantasy justice. Here, however, the stakes are higher. We are dislodged from the position of omniscience offered by Poirot as a reward for following him to the end. The final revelation about Hawkin’s abuse of the children is not part of the puzzle, nor even of the surprise reversal which shows Alison’s personal motivation for his death. Rather, we are expected to form a judgement on Alison’s version of the narrative, incorporating as it does issues of both empowerment and revenge. By the time [Helen]’d really started to resemble him, I’d learned that I could use that to help me. That bastard destroyed my childhood, he deprived me of family and friends . . . I never want to forget the way I helped turn the tables. Let me tell you, taking control over your own life is a very powerful thing. And that’s what I did. But it’s a lot easier to lose control over your life than it is to win it. That’s why I wanted to make sure I never got complacent . . . Helen was there as a constant reminder that we’d fought back against the man who tried to strip us of everything that made us who we were. (399)


The novel closes with George’s own awareness that he and Alison need to reach a measure of forgiveness. By its temporal and geographical setting, A Place of Execution constructs an image of sexuality and power in the England of the early sixties which refutes Hindley’s status as a lone gatekeeper to a new iniquity. For, although the plot depends on the feudal isolation of Scardale, the pressure to sexual conformity experienced, for example, by Alison’s gay cousin Charley, the uneven balance of power in the Hawkin marriage and the virtual impossibility of challenging the abuse of one class by another, image an England in which the possibility of such crime co-exists with the impossibility of discussing it. The novel refutes both the élitism and the pessimism of On Iniquity: in the world in which Catherine and the children of Scardale have reached adulthood and their education allows them to speak what was once unspeakable and to begin to come to terms with it in a way their elders cannot.

Fiction of representation Gordon Burn’s 1991 novel Alma Cogan offers to defamiliarize the frozen image of Hindley in an ostensibly more flexible and experimental form. The popular fifties singer Alma Cogan, ‘the girl with the laugh in her voice,’ died in 1966. Burn imagines her alive and middle aged, reflecting on her eclipse by rock ‘n’ roll and her eventual status as a camp icon. The passage of time from the sixties to the eighties is charted by glimpses of Hindley on TV screens. In an encounter with an obsessed fan who collects Cogan memorabilia, Alma is confronted with a copy of the notorious tape made by Hindley and Brady which spliced the cries of Lesley Ann Downey with the Christmas song Little Drummer Boy. The aural collision between the cruelty and the song’s brassy innocence was the most shocking episode of the trial. Burn reproduces the impact of the shock through Cogan’s encounter but produces no fresh epiphany. She describes being imprisoned by her public image, one of ‘conscious and total artifice’ (1991: 95); the portrait of her painted by Peter Blake at the height of her fame parallels the fixing of Hindley’s image. The juxtaposition, however, is not illuminating. In 1967 Peter Brook’s Theatre of Cruelty season at the Aldwych showed a memorable collage: Glenda Jackson as Christine Keeler stepped into a bath to emerge transformed into Jacqueline Kennedy: the figure who symbolized the corruption of British politics in the early sixties became the icon of political martyrdom. It offered a (then) genuinely new deconstruction of the whore/madonna polarization of women. Burn’s


Hindley/Cogan collage deconstructs nothing. Cogan’s narrative, detailing a way of largely vanished life is refreshing and clearly imagined; the other side of the diptych has no reason for its presence: Is it possible to discern evil, as many have supposed, in the cavernous upturned eyes, the pasty planes, the heavy bones, the holed hedge of deep blonde fringe, the fondant of deep shadow, like a choke-collar, under Hindley’s chin? (100) Burn plunders this extract for his Guardian account of the Marcus Harvey painting at Sensation, reinforcing the status of the image as a free-floating sign dragging its accumulated connotational weight from one text to another – a status Alma Cogan ostensibly exists to subvert. Like Harvey’s painting, Burn’s project appears to be the investigation of our fascination with the abject the image represents. Harvey, however, admits that to engage with the image is not to consider the meaning of the murders. ‘I’m not going to read a lot of trashy books to find out the nuts and bolts of the case’ (Guardian 6 September 1997). ‘Trashy’ suggests that for Harvey meaning does not inhere in language: Hindley becomes an object, and we, gazing, are reduced to silence.

Mugshot II – 2002 Myra Hindley died on 15 November 2002. A succession of home secretaries had confirmed her ‘whole life’ tariff. David Blunkett had pledged to keep her behind bars. However, the Human Rights Act came into force in the UK in 2000, and the power of the Home Secretary to change a tariff imposed by the judiciary no longer existed. A potentially embarrassing situation had been avoided. The mugshot appeared on every tabloid’s front page. The front pages of the Sun, the Express and the News of the World proclaimed that Hindley was in hell, their theological confidence grounded, perhaps, in the idea of hell as the one place where change is totally impossible. The Sun offered ‘sensational revelations’ that week, including the facts that Hindley had been allowed visits from a hairdresser and food from the local supermarket (20 November); the inevitable phrase that accompanied these revelations, ‘taxpayer’s expense’ reinforced the sense of aggrieved ownership inherent in the frozen image. Meanwhile, Marcus Harvey’s picture provided the broadsheets with an image that allowed them to lead the story (rather than, say, with the situation in Iraq) without overt tackiness. Alastair Grant’s photograph in the Guardian on 16


November is typical: it shows the painting framed in the archway of the Royal Academy. A soberly dressed young woman is walking past it; her head is slightly turned as if to look at the painting, but not to glare or confront; she carries some kind of folder, like a student. It is a reflective image; it speaks less of the controversy of the Sensations exhibition of five years back, than of a need to think again about the image and our response to it. Several articles bore this out in their discussion of the mugshot and its role in demonizing Hindley, including one in the Guardian quoting Hindley herself on the subject. ‘Most people don’t want to accept that people like myself can change . . . they prefer to keep me frozen in time together with that awful mugshot’ (16 November 2002). Some people accept that Hindley was genuinely repentant. Some do not. There is an argument that some crimes are so terrible that only a whole life sentence will serve. There is another argument that people do change for the better and that this should be recognized. All of these positions can be maintained with integrity. No real debate is possible, however, while the media collude in endowing a single image with such power. Meanwhile, Hindley’s death has resolved her own future, but not the wider debate, and so I will close this chapter with another and less famous image. In 1991, a nurse, Beverley Allitt, was charged with the murder of four children and the attempted murder of a further eight. Briefly, the papers were saturated with the image of a plump young woman with slightly protruding teeth; it appeared on the cover of Nick Davies’s book Murder on Ward Four, subtitled, ‘The story of Bev Allitt and the Most Terrifying Crime Since the Moors Murders’ (1993). Allitt’s gender and profession fuelled the rage which made her the most reviled figure in England. By the time she came to trial, she had starved to skeletal thinness and was too ill to hear the verdict. Whether the metamorphosis had anything to do with the freezing of her image in the press is debatable. But a frozen image is not an adequate text for our understanding of crime and punishment. Words are the stuff of confession, analysis and discussion. Bodies, especially women’s bodies, are too easily robbed of their history and reduced to archetypes, a process we allow at our peril. ‘When history falls away from a subject,’ Marina Warner writes of the Disney witches, ‘we are left with Otherness’ (1995: 249). We need history. Otherness is not an explanation for female crime.

6 Nanny State

Kings and mothers It is sometimes called the first detective story, and every child used to know it. Two women come before King Solomon. Both have infant sons, but one has died and both lay claim to the surviving child. Solomon passes judgement. Cut the living boy into two, he says. Yes, agrees one woman, but the other cries out that she would rather lose the child than harm him. That one, says Solomon, is the true mother, and everyone applauds. Who are these women? They live together, they give birth in the same house. No-one looks after them, no attendant or midwife to testify what really happened when one child died in his mother’s bed. They are described as ‘harlots’. Is this to explain the absence of men on a permanent basis and invest the king with the rights of a father? Or to underline the contrast between the women, slaves to bodily desire, and the king, whose sole concern is justice? What happens afterwards? Does the king deal not only with the needs of the living child’s mother but with the unhinged bitterness of the one bereaved? Does he comprehend the economic necessity that yokes these ill-assorted housemates? The appeal of the story lies in its confidence. A complex interaction between mother love, childhood, violence and desire confronts a clear, state sanctioned and enforceable definition of parenthood. Yet the narrative’s positioning of both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothers, on the fringes of society, suggests that this confidence concealed a more troubled reality. Throughout the last century, women have been engaged in struggle over their rights and responsibilities under the law. In the process what has been seen as a ‘natural’ mother/child relationship has been deconstructed. However, as Carol Smart points out in her article 126

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‘Deconstructing Motherhood’ (1996) we need a revisionist history to indicate how the consequences of historically specific assumptions are still impacting on the present. Solomon’s understanding that maternal feeling is innate has been enthusiastically promoted by women as well as men. In the nineteenth century, for example, it was cited by wives fighting to secure their right to leave a violent marriage while retaining custody of their children. On the other hand, an unmarried woman had no opportunity to give up a child in safety and it was considered a stigma she should visibly bear regardless of her feelings, pour encourager les autres. Under the Connecticut Laws of 1919, for example, a widow could be deprived of financial help for her children if her sexual conduct did not satisfy government agencies (Giovannini and Becerra 1979). An unmarried mother in the 1950s would be pressurized to show true maternity by giving up her child for adoption, sacrificing her own desires to give it a ‘better’ future. Twenty years later, in a more optimistic spirit, she might choose to keep it; but the Thatcher state of the eighties was to give her a near-demonic status that must have made such a decision far more painful. If the idea of maternal love has been constantly redefined, so too has the boundary between parental and state responsibility. In 1793, Blackstone’s Commentaries stated that a parent’s duty to maintain a child is a ‘principle of natural law’. This implies that a child is part of a community and that the community will ensure it receives its rights. In the nineteenth century, however, the idea of ‘family’ became increasingly privatized. Charities might work for the welfare of children, but with an increasing sense of ‘the family’ as self-contained. By the twentieth century the concept of the nuclear family was in place and responsibility for children lay within it. State intervention was itself an indication that the family was somehow deviant. ‘Childhood’, the state and duration of dependency, is also differently defined by different kinds of legislation. Children can consent to sexual intercourse or join the army at sixteen, but not marry without consent, see certain films, or drink alcohol in a pub. At eighteen they can do all these things but cannot claim Income Support as they are assumed to be dependent on their parents. A ten-year-old can do none of these things but can be tried in a court of law as if capable of independent moral judgement: however, if s/he plays truant from school, the parents shoulder the responsibility. In this section I chart through fiction some major shifts in our understanding of the relationships between mother, child and state over the last fifty years. While it is impossible to draw clear lines of demarcation, Chapter 7 will focus primarily on the figure


of the mother, while this chapter concentrates on the state when it assumes the parental role.

The fifties It is a West End hit, but the small theatre has the intimacy of a fringe production. Conspicuous consumption is evident – you can buy a T-shirt, a glossy booklet, a key ring – but the audience is not passive. The action is confined behind the proscenium arch, but the play is incomplete until one actor steps out of the curtain call to address us: we would have been disappointed if he hadn’t. What he asks us, of course, is to ‘keep the secret of The Mousetrap locked in our hearts’, deftly reinforcing an existing sense of community. That sense has been fostered partly through narrative: there is a puzzle to be collectively solved and the audience responds, sometimes quite audibly, to each clue or red herring. It is also fostered through a pleasurably camp style. The ‘naturalism’ is that of a fifties repertory company, the enunciation just a little too crisp to be contemporary, the gestures suggesting an old-fashioned deportment class. It’s an enjoyable excursion into a period the programme specifies as ‘Agatha Christie time’. The Mousetrap sells itself not as emotionally or intellectually demanding theatre but as a piece of tradition, like the monarchy – in fact, opening in 1952, it is the present monarch’s exact contemporary. Like the monarchy, it resonates with domesticity. The programme embodies its identity as family show with a cartoon, Giles’s famous Granny grimly four-square in the stalls while the children commit mayhem behind her. It’s a good clean family fun of a kind they don’t do in the theatre these days. It is also a play about child abuse. Three children have been fostered out to a vicious couple, the Stannings; one of them dies. The play begins with the murder of Mrs Stanning on her release from jail. One child, now grown, intends to exact three deaths for the three blighted lives. With brisk economy, Christie lays out her wares. The impassable blizzard, the wrecked telephone lines, invite us as cozily as if we were eating crumpets by the fire into her usual game of judging means, opportunity and motive. This time, however, the last is clear. We are looking for a killer who has undergone a specific kind of pain: which of the eight in the snowbound house mostly resembles a damaged child? Clues are dropped. One guest, for instance, evokes a memory with a physical impact suggesting personal experience: ‘Ice on a bedroom jug, chilblains raw and bleeding – one thin ragged blanket – a child

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shivering with cold and fear’ (Christie 1994: 308). While the play does not engage directly with the question of sexual abuse, some of the ‘clues’ to the identity of the avenger raise questions of sexual as well as physical damage. These inhere only partly in the fact that the stage conventions code some of the suspects as homosexual – Miss Casewell is described as a ‘young woman of manly type’ while Christopher Wren betrays an interest in ‘unmanly’ things like cooking and décor. Christie does – in, for example, A Murder is Announced, which appeared in 1950 – depict lesbian couples bound in loyalty and mutual respect. Here, however, sexual orientation is a symbol of deeper isolation. Wren is alienated from his family; Miss Casewell has no home and we see her writing a letter which indicates the breakup of a relationship. Mollie, the young hotelier in The Mousetrap, expresses the dilemma of any character in a Christie whodunnit: You ask yourself questions and you begin to doubt. You feel that somebody you love and know well might be – a stranger. That’s what happens in a nightmare. You’re somewhere in the middle of friends and then you suddenly look at their faces and they’re just not your friends any longer – they’re different people – just pretending. Perhaps you can’t trust anybody – perhaps everybody’s a stranger. (1994: 342) This might relate to her marriage – she barely knows her husband, who is acting strangely; it could be a hint to the audience that she herself is one of those damaged children. Precisely because, like many a speech in the country-house detective genre, it is capable of multiple interpretation, it crystallizes the issues of the play. It is an accurate summary not only of the feelings of a child who has experienced abuse and the consequential disintegration of its sense of self, but also of a society in which pre-war certainties have begun to erode. Yes, this is a humourless analysis of a drama that is also playful, full of slapstick jokes and cheerful red herrings. (Christie directs that one character’s make-up should suggest Hercule Poirot in disguise.) And as I write I am aware that I am also playing, taking care not to give away the ending. The title, however – which has for fifty years gained an extra laugh for any actor playing Hamlet – reminds the audience that a stylized and old-fashioned piece ‘full of inexplicable dumb shows and noise’ can reflect political realities. The coy allusion in the glossy programme to its setting in ‘Agatha Christie time’ is an invitation to escapism, but in fact the play has a very specific context; it is full of


allusions – to rationing, to shortages, to the 1945 Labour government – which reflect its origin as a radio play, Three Blind Mice, written to celebrate Queen Mary’s birthday in 1947. Christie’s conservatism did not preclude a celebration of social change which generated better opportunities for women or the less well off. Christopher Wren caricatures the pre-war patriarchal order: ‘Stern father with a beard, faded, prolific mother, eleven children of assorted ages, a grim governess and somebody called ‘poor Harriet, the poor relation who acts as general dogsbody’ (293). Miss Casewell, self-proclaimed ‘pale pink’, has a row with the frosty Mrs Boyle who complains that in this new world ‘the lower classes seem to have no idea of their responsibilities’ (306). The political spat reveals a faultline in the ideology of class and ‘family’ underpinning both Labour and Conservative adminstrations before and after the war. For Mrs Boyle is not merely a comic figure but the magistrate who took the three children from their ‘drunken’ mother and absent father to place them with the Stannings of Longridge Farm. ‘It seemed most satisfactory. Eggs and fresh milk and a healthy outof-doors life’ (321). Such classbound arrogance ensures that the audience receives her death as a pleasurable sign the action is hotting up. That pleasure, however, tends to conceal the fact that Mrs Boyle’s decision is not untypical of its period. An extract from the St John’s Newfoundland Evening Telegraph describes the experience of a real child in 1924, which closely resembles that of the foster children in The Mousetrap: Holding that there was no legal responsibility to provide medical attendance and care, Judge Maclean, sitting at Moosomin Assizes, Manitoba, Canada, acquitted George Ford, a farmer of Broadview, who was charged with the manslaughter of a British immigrant boy named John Bayns. In ordering Ford’s discharge, his lordship severely censured him for his harsh and cowardly treatment . . . Bayns was alleged to have been neglected and ill-treated, and to have received no medical attendance when suffering from the double pneumonia which was the cause of his death. (Humphreys 1994: 126) Transplantation of children as cheap labour to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the then Rhodesia took place on a vast scale between the wars. Just one year after The Mousetrap opened in 1952, the first annual report of the Overseas Migration Board made plain what the priorities of a State in loco parentis would be:

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Children . . . have not yet begun to contribute to the economy. . . frequently come from broken homes and might, if they stayed in the United Kingdom, eventually become or continue to be a charge on the rates. (Humphreys 1994: 306) The benefits to the receiving communities were made brutally plain: the children would bump up the war-depleted white population. The Australian Record noted with approval the lead given by the Christian Brothers in setting up boys’ homes with a racial agenda: At best the war with Japan is postponed. Asia presses from the north and the most effective rampart we can raise is a human one. (Record 28 November 1945) The Child Migrants Trust, set-up by Margaret Humphreys in 1992, fielded more than 20,000 enquiries from migrants hoping to trace their parents and relatives, many of whom recalled physical and sexual abuse, notably in institutions. Their fate arose from a construction of maternity which saw children whose family lives, however personally satisfying, did not reflect their function as economic units to be deployed by the state. Working women, for instance, who left children temporarily in the care of local homes suddenly discovered that they had been shipped abroad. Children were told their parents had died. Attempts to trace them yielded documents both censored and censorious, like this note from the Fairbridge Home: As you say (blanked out) point in disclosing all the facts (blanked out) would not help Joan to know that (blanked out) had six illegitimate children by (blanked out) others. (Humphreys 1994: 188) This social engineering existed in an uneasy relationship with the powerful influence of John Bowlby on child welfare policies. Bowlby first worked for the World Health Organisation in 1948; his report, published by HMSO in 1951 and followed by his seminal text Child Care and the Growth of Love (1953) emphasized the need for a continuous and intimate bond in the formative years and insisted that ‘the mother of young children is not free, or at least should not be free, to earn’ (Bowlby 1971: 108). The state responded selectively. It pressurized middle class wives into giving up careers, but felt free to underpin the role of full-time bourgeois mother by exploiting women from former British colonies. As Julia Hallam points out in Nursing the Image, immigrant


women, many of them highly educated, were briskly channeled in the post-war years into the unskilled jobs vacated by full-time British mothers. They were left in no doubt by a welfare system which persistently denied them housing and nursery places that they were wanted as workers, not as mothers (Hallam 2000: 65). The Welfare State was less attentive to Bowlby’s point that even a mother who did not work could be ‘providing much’ of what a child needed (Bowlby 1971: 78) and that extended families and a more accepting attitude to illegitimacy had a vital role in creating a stable environment for a child. Rather, it chose to demonize women who rejected the domestic role, a stance reflected in ‘social problem’ films about ‘delinquent’ women such as Yield to the Night and The Weak and the Wicked, and to define the impoverished working mother as socially inadequate and ripe for replacement. The culprit in The Mousetrap is, therefore, as logical a product of his time as Jimmy Porter of his. There was, as yet, no vocabulary to articulate what happened to the children to whom the state decided to play mother in the post-war years. Christie did not offer a chance to debate the issue, but the thriller convention in which everyone is a suspect does provide a framework to explore the consequences of cruelty and the boundaries of responsibility. The magistrate who treated children as cheap labour, the teacher who opted not to rock the boat, the child who turned to crime and the child who did not all have to explain themselves. Given that in the fifties it was fashionable to be seen at The Mousetrap, it is possible that several architects of government policy sat through the only truly populist work about child abuse for several decades and failed to feel a twinge of recognition.

The seventies If the comforting shape of the Mousetrap puzzle made it possible to overlook its unflattering picture of the state, the reception of John Mackendrick’s Lavender Blue at the National Theatre in 1977 suggested that we still lacked a language in which to speak of it. While the Moors murders had lodged the fact of child sexual abuse in the public consciousness twelve years before, it was perceived as monstrous, freakish and explicable only in terms of the individual psychology of the perpetrators. Beatrix Campbell points out that awareness of abuse within the family – and, one might add, within the substitute families chosen by the state – was minimal, that ‘sexual abuse was deemed to be not so much a problem of the family as something to fear from strangers’ (1997: 101). Mackendrick’s play breaks down this distinction to show

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the sexual abuse and murder of a little girl at the centre of a complex web of circumstance. Damaged individuals both within and without family networks fatally converge, while the social workers who represent the state in a quasi-parental role are prevented from doing so adequately by the state itself. The critical notices were the worst of the season, the worst, indeed, for many seasons. An Irish bishop announced that ‘Britain has sunk’. The tabloids labelled the play ‘Putrid Purple’, ‘a sorry spectacle of murder, masturbation and sex acts’ and even the broadsheets, though unwilling to deny Mackendrick’s right to his subject matter, concentrated queasily on individual performances as the only aspect worth taking seriously. (Lepage 1978) Plays and Players reveals, perhaps unconsciously, the disquiet that underlay the hostility: If John Mackendrick’s play had been written by a woman, a black, an American or a Czech its reception would have been more reverential. This would not have been a good thing. (Lepage 1978) Minority status, presumably, would have allowed critics to patronize Mackendrick’s dramaturgy while allowing them to dismiss his subject matter. As it was, the play’s reputation was to be wrecked on a series of misunderstandings about realism and representation. The seventies began in a spirit of liberal promise; the Finer Report proposed radical reforms to the welfare system to help single parents without drawing distinctions between the divorced, the widowed and the unmarried. However, the oil crisis meant that it was never implemented, and a programme of extensive welfare cuts began under the Callaghan administration. The end of the decade saw the rise of the new Right, with ‘law and order’ rather than welfare as the central plank of Thatcher’s revival campaign. Coupled with existing silence on the subject, it meant that the abuse of women and children was directly linked to the violence associated with deprivation. Middle class domestic violence went unchecked while the inner city poor were typecast as unfit and abusive parents. It was this spirit, perhaps, which led the National to treat Lavender Blue as if it were a documentary exposing the underside of Midlands urban life. The set, dividing individual, character-linked spaces filled with naturalistic detail with a realistic-looking ‘road’, invited the word invariably used of naturalistic exposés, ‘gritty’. In a similar espousal of naturalism, the relationship between the young girl and Peter, her killer, was played out in front of the audience. Mackendrick’s script explicitly


forbids this, stressing that the child’s presence should be indicated only by a voice uttering snatches of nursery rhymes. It is Peter who vocalizes both the sexual games he plays with her – which, although shocking, are charged with a tender lyricism – and the ugliness of her eventual response, knowing, obscene and mocking. The murder is an attempt to preserve her in the innocence her situation has chipped away. What Peter does is appalling, but it is not arbitrary or mindless and it is important that the audience is aware of the girl not only as the murdered corpse we see on stage but as she exists in his mind: ‘Glass girl. Crystal. Wind ring in her, singing’ (1977: 23). Because all aspects of the relationship are enacted for us on Peter’s body the narrative is prevented from polarizing murderer and victim; rather, the focus is on the similarity of their fates in a corrupting environment. By bringing the figure of the child on stage, the National production wrecked this careful balance. The problem was exacerbated by an inevitable consequence of this decision: it was clearly impossible to permit a real child to perform such scenes, which meant that the age of the child had to be raised from nine to twelve to allow an adult actress to play the role. The result was that instead of observing poetic stylizations which permitted them the distance to contemplate and judge a terrible possibility, the audience were confronted with a fake ‘reality’ inviting either voyeurism or disgust. It was all too easy to dismiss the play as an overblown account of ‘problem families’ responsible for the breakdown of law and order, and one which certainly did not demand a political response. The text of the play, however, is shaped precisely to resist such a reading. The language encompasses not only the technical vocabulary of the social workers and the day to day slang of the clients but a poetic vein in which they all share, violating unspoken dramatic decorums which equate articulacy with class to allow all characters to express themselves fully. Like a Greek tragedy, the play takes place in a single day. The setting, achieved through props and lighting rather than realistic rooms, makes it possible for all the characters to converge at nightfall on Peter and the body of the child, an expression not of geographical proximity to a ‘road’ but of their interconnectedness. For this is not a play about blame but about responsibility. We see Peter, for instance, in his most private moments; we hear his dreams and the rituals, suggestive of incestuous abuse, which he goes through when alone. His social worker, Claire, gently explains that the behaviour of his foster mother was a function of illness rather than deliberate cruelty, ‘She’d had an aneurism. A small vessel in the brain gets ruptured . . . that part of the mind stops working properly, becomes, well, waterlogged.’ In turn, the

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anonymous social worker who placed him there is described as ‘fantastically unlucky’ (17). This painstaking removal of blame is not a liberal ‘plea for tolerance’. What Peter does is never seen as tolerable. Rather, it problematizes notions such as ‘family’, ‘care’ and ‘responsibility’ and the way a patriarchal state places them in polar opposition to terms like ‘case’, ‘inadequate’ and ‘problem family’. The text makes explicit links between the immediate instruments of state policy, the social workers, and their clients; all of them can be seen in terms of family units which are in some way dysfunctional. The Child Care Officer, Claire, is, like Peter, the product of an unsuccessful adoption. ‘Positive deprivation. Good stuff’ (15). Her boss Roy has a failed marriage and wants to have children with Claire, and even the man briefly her lover, Alan, was estranged from his now-dead father. On the other hand the families in their caseload, notably the women, do not lack coping skills. Margaret is on the game to keep her children, including Kathy, the girl Peter loves, and struggles to keep this side of her life apart from them. Arthur and Mary, with a mental age which means they are unable to cope alone with a baby, have a mutual passion and joy which erupts in songs, dances and infantile sexual games charged with real affection. What precipitates the action into tragedy is neither the inefficiency of the social workers nor the personal inadequacy of their clients but the consequences of economic policy. Mary and Arthur are in temporary accommodation because the Coal Board have evicted them when Arthur is made redundant; Margaret and Kathy end up in the same accommodation when her husband, maddened at the loss of his job down the pit, becomes violent. The cramped quarters mean that Kathy is vulnerable, and her sexual precocity leads to her death at the hands of Peter. The text draws a sharp distinction between a patriarchal order which includes both ‘Power creeps. Little men. Nobodies with bellybags’ (14) and the thwarted masculine rage of Margaret’s husband, and the idea of ‘motherhood’. Motherhood – as horrific scenes in which Peter imitates his mother make clear – is not innate, nor exclusive to women. Claire offers an image of God as mother. ‘It’s all “Our Father which art in heaven” when it ought to be “Our mam, up there, down here, all round, look after us and hold us”’ (60). This is less an image of the safe female space imagined in Sara Daniels’s version of Blow Your House Down than a model for a state which behaves as mother rather than patriarch. Lavender Blue shows a commitment to ‘children’ – not young people only, but human beings as vulnerable selves rather than as economic


units – made alike by mothers like Margaret and professionals like Claire and Roy. All of them pay a high price in terms of personal pain. It is interesting that in 1977 Claire was seen by most of the reviewers as a neurotic character rather than one under pressure from the structure within which she operated. The events of the play remained firmly unacknowledged as anything but a catalogue of excess; the dramaturgy, the poetic cast of the speech, were dismissed as functions of that excess rather than as insights for a welfare state in need of a new language. It was soon to get a new language, but one which chose to demonize the whole idea of a ‘nanny state’ at the very point when the silence about familial and institutional abuse was finally broken.

The eighties The Mousetrap and Lavender Blue assume very different audiences. Neither, however, assumes one on the far side of this silence, one with a knowledge of real cases discussed at length in newspapers rather than exploring the unfamiliar in fiction. As a culture we now find it difficult not to speak of abuse, and this has brought its own risks. One is that while fiction can uncover new meanings it can also exploit them; the horror of the crime can be almost buried beneath a marketable obsession with the punishment of offenders. The work of Andrew Vachss is particularly interesting in this respect. Vachss is a noted and influential expert in the relations between abuse and juvenile crime; he is Director of the Juvenile Justice Project and a member of the Expert Advisory Panel on Catastrophic Child Abuse for the New York State Office of Mental Health. He has written and spoken extensively on child abuse and has been expressly cited as an influence within the justice system: for example, Judge Antonio Brandveen referred directly to an article by Vachss in 1998 when passing a 100–300 year sentence for Sodomy. Vachss is also the recipient of the Raymond Chandler Award for his work as a writer of crime novels which deal with the subject of abuse. He presents himself as novelist in a self-consciously crusading spirit: For the material in this book and in others to come, I am indebted to many people, some as close as my blood, some forever to be my enemies. I will never forget any of them. (Vachss 1986) This is Vachss’s own voice in the preface to his novel Flood, but the style and tone are virtually identical to those of his series detective, Burke.

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Hunting down child abusers, Burke draws his associates from sexual and ethnic minorities: Max the Silent, a deaf Tibetan, Michelle, a transsexual prostitute, Mouse, a Jewish hacker. He is a crusader, a Robin Hood figure and a challenge to an uncaring state. On the other hand, Burke’s very marginality serves to re-inscribe him at the very heart of capitalist individualism. Flood demonstrates this clearly in its treatment of the eponymous heroine. On the surface the plot could serve as a template for a bourgeois-feminist detective novel: Flood, a woman brought up in a home, surviving and avenging her own vicious rape, educated in martial arts, sets out to avenge the rape and murder of her best friend’s child. In fact, however, Flood is constructed as a figure of potential power largely to reinforce the patriarchal authority of Burke. He frequently silences her, only bothering to explain later about the existence of a bugged phone or a watchful dog. His comment to a girl he casually rescues from prostitution in the course of his mission is ‘keep your little mouth shut and your eyes down’ (15). While Flood is in control of her sexual choices (it is of course a foregone conclusion that she will sleep with Burke) he imposes sexual authority on her body in other ways. When she needs to adopt a disguise he delivers a lecture to the effect that tarty clothing means men forget a woman’s face (a piece of information which, apparently, no woman could work out for herself) and proceeds to dress her accordingly: She turned and walked away from me. It was the finest combination of sex and comedy that I’d ever seen. From the ankles to the upper thighs she was sheathed in pink metal, and from there on up it looked like pink Jello bitterly resisting confinement. Flood spun around. ‘Burke, if I even see so much as a smile on your face I’m going to put you in hospital.’ (103) This is a comic sparring in the tradition of detecting couples, but it also puts Burke in control of the gaze as well as speech; it is not so much the imposition of a street-smart persona which jars as the virtual erasure, not simply of Flood, but of the fact of motherhood, from the anti-abuse crusade. It is perhaps no coincidence that Flood is only a substitute mother for the child they are to avenge, and that the child is already dead. Moreover, not only must Flood come under Burke’s control to play the role of avenging mother, but she is explicitly denied the chance of having his child. The family, even at its most positive, is wiped out of the narrative and replaced with the lone male figure.


This figure himself acknowledges no maternity – ‘The fucking State was my father’ (153). Burke’s rejection of outward conformity may be seen as Oedipal rebellion; but, like Oedipus, he retains the values of his ‘father’ – the assertion of individualistic power and the legitimation of violence. On the margins of the state, Burke also embodies it, administering the death penalty when its hands are tied. It would seem that his answer to the impotence of the father-state in the face of abuse is not to empower the mother but to proclaim that only his individuality, with its highly specific combination of talents and contacts, can provide an answer. It is a deeply pessimistic position. There is no real attempt to explain the genesis of the abuser. Burke tells a story about a ‘Pakistani shrink’ in the tradition of the racist comedian Andrew Dice Clay in which psychiatry is a joke. This might lead us to look for the political origins of abuse and the text does make it plain that sexual abuse is a function of power rather than desire (significantly it is Burke who explains this to Flood rather than vice versa). However, this is not followed through. Rather, the frequent deployment of words like ‘evil’ suggest that the crime can only be engaged with only at the point of punishment. With prevention impossible there exists a cycle in which evil creates abuse and produces a demand for revenge that Burke will supply. The textual contract between reader and author mimics this relationship. It assumes a hunger for violent narrative which is legitimated by the magnitude of the crime and satisfied by a long and graphic climax. Here, Flood brings her whole arsenal of martial arts to bear on her enemy the Cobra, while Burke disposes of the body – and with it the entire building. In the process the reason for their actions tends to disappear. Vachss’s project of raising public consciousness via the novels depends to a considerable extent on the reader’s willingness to identify with Burke as hero while remaining simultaneously aware that Burke is not fully representative of the body of knowledge he transmits: he can respond to a contingency but does not seek to change the wider situation. Without such awareness there is a constant risk that abuse becomes not the narrative’s raison d’être but a McGuffin, Alfred Hitchcock’s name for the device that sets the plot in motion but is not of itself significant. At best, any demand for change arising out of such fiction will occur at the point of sentencing rather than in the analysis of power relations which make abuse possible. If fiction is to illuminate as well as identify the issue it needs to render the whole of that body of knowledge visible even if it does not engage with it. The work of Alison Taylor, I would argue, does this by juxtaposing the complex and

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numerous fields of discourse which have clustered around the issue of institutional abuse over the last twenty years. Before examining her fiction I shall therefore turn to the languages with which she has engaged.

Into the nineties In 1981 the Incest Survivors Campaign began to challenge the silence surrounding the issue of abuse in the family; they uncovered widespread incidence of what had hitherto been considered a shocking anomaly, and which, if it came to trial, was not treated as a special category of crime. Until 1908, in fact, cases of incest were tried before the Ecclesiastical Courts, whose main concern was with the violation of the bloodline rather than with the age of the child or the use of force. The choice of the Survivors’ Group, however, was to use the word ‘incest’ to denote the abuse of power by any authority figure, whether family, friend, social worker, babysitter, priest or teacher (ISG 1981). This analysis implies mutual trust and responsibility. The parent has a duty to the child, and if the parent fails, the state must give the child justice. The state has a duty to the child, and if the state fails it must be answerable to the parent. Even as this analysis was being formulated, however, the waters were being muddied. On the one hand the government was proclaiming itself the party of the (nuclear) family, ‘the heart of our society and the nurse of civic virtue’, as Margaret Thatcher trumpeted to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (Frost and Stein 1989). On the other it was prepared to abandon its responsibilities to vulnerable members of the community and dump them on the family to a degree many find intolerable. As a leaked memo to the cabinet put it in 1983, ‘What can be done to encourage families – in the widest sense – to reassume responsibilities taken on by the state, for example the disabled, the elderly and unemployed 16 year olds?’ (Brown 1989: 149). It was perhaps small wonder that as the 1980s drew to a close the state’s relationship with parenting and abuse was fraught with contradiction. There were interventions by the state to protect children from their families – in Cleveland in 1987, in Orkney in 1991 – which proved abortive and inconclusive. There were incidents of abuse by the state itself in the person of care workers in loco parentis, most notably in Cheshire and North Wales. A marked split, what Brian Appleyard called ‘a political issue in its own right’ (Sunday Times 31 May 1998) was discernible between those whose priority was to protect children and those concerned to protect innocent families and care workers.


The Lord Justice Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss called attention to the dehumanizing nature of the debate in her 1988 report on the Cleveland case with a remark which has been widely quoted: ‘The child is a person and not an object of concern’ (Asquith 1991). Three years later at a conference on the Orkney case she was to point out that the earlier report remained largely unread by anyone in authority, and called for an improvement in communication skills (Asquith 1991: 62). What had become clear was that no common language existed in which to address the issue, but only a series of fragmented and conflicting discourses. There was, for example, that used by the police. In the eighties ‘law and order’ was equated with a high conviction rate; on both sides of Appleyard’s political divide a sense prevailed that this kind of police work needed a different and less aggressive masculine culture. Inspector Trevor Buckroyd of the West Yorkshire force remarked, ‘If you’ve been hours interviewing kids and you haven’t come up with a body or a complaint, where’s your credibility?’ (Campbell 1997: 108). Detective Inspector Keith Lawrence, who supervised child sexual abuse work in West Yorkshire, described ‘dinosaurs who always wanted results. They’d compare child sexual abuse with a burglary’ (112). If the available police language did not help children, however, it was also felt – by Richard Webster for example – that ‘the homophobia which has always been a powerful element in police culture’ co-existing with a genuine concern for children, could compromise the interviewing of adults presenting as past victims from children’s homes. ‘Male police officers could therefore reassure themselves that, although they were in theory dealing with allegations of sexual abuse against children, they were really doing “a man’s job”’ (Webster 1998: 43). The language of care workers did not mesh naturally with this kind of discourse, and was itself further split. There was the precise and anatomically accurate language required by the prosecution service, the kind of terminology developed, for example, by Leontine Young in her seminal work Wednesday’s Children, categorizing levels of sexual and non-sexual abuse. But there was also a language which tapped into that of the victims themselves, which might involve the use of art or of toys and which might be so strongly metaphoric (for example, a small boy spoke of ejaculation as ‘a bomb exploding’) (Driver and Droisen 1989: 113) that it did not fit the linguistic needs of a courtroom. If there were conflicting discourses, there were also conflicting silences. In 1996, the Independent called attention to the suppression of the Jillings Report, commissioned by Clwyd County Council following the conviction for paedophile offences of seven men working in

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children’s homes. The Municipal Mutual Insurance Company, already in difficulties because of claims in other counties, was concerned about the financial implications of publishing such material, stating that ‘every enquiry is a dress rehearsal for claimants’ (Independent 7 April 1996). As the Independent put it, Kafka seemed to be at large in Clwyd (Independent 17 April 1996). This silence pulled against another, the suppression and erasure that characterizes the language of abuse victims. ‘When you say it out loud to someone it is almost like admitting you’re nothing,’ one told an NSPCC commission (Prince’s Trust 1997). ‘[Trying to write] was like I was writing a pornographic story about a small child, as if I was being abusive,’ said a survivor (Renvoize 1993). Fiction offers a way of experiencing these discourses not as incompatible, or as a false synthesis, but as a polyphony, in a way no enquiry has achieved. It can impact the elliptical and metaphoric language of the victim on the structures of law and government; in aiming, as a detective story does, for closure, it also enforces narrative crises which uncover the weakest parts of those structures. The work of Alison Taylor has moved from silence into this polyphony. In 1985 Taylor, then head of Ty Newydd home near Bangor, reported incidents of abuse in several homes run by Gwynedd County Council – information she had collected over a number of years – to a local councillor, who passed it on to the local police. Her contract was terminated and she was labelled ‘subversive’. She successfully sued for unfair dismissal, but was still unable to place the information where it could be acted upon: a letter to the Prime Minister forwarded to the Welsh Office under William Hague was ignored. She finally testified at the North Wales Child Abuse Tribunal launched in 1997. It was not, however, until 2000 that the Waterhouse Report Lost in Care finally appeared. It mentioned 575 witnesses, 95,000 files and 3500 statements to the police, and found widespread evidence of abuse, bullying and bad practice in more than a dozen homes over periods of up to ten years. The Welsh Office was chided for treating Alison Taylor as a troublemaker. Mention was made of a ‘cult of silence’ and the report quoted a poignant letter from a representative of social workers and child care officers to the Principal Officer for Children at Gwynedd, ‘we are all being hoodwinked, manoeuvred and degraded’ (Waterhouse 2000: 123). Such a statement speaks of a culture in which abuse not only takes place but is positively fostered by a lack of communication and a language all parties are willing to comprehend, even in the face of caring and clearly expressed concern. Some of the value of Taylor’s second novel In Guilty Night, which appeared in 1996 and contains incidents


similar to those outlined in the Waterhouse Report, lies in the richness of its context. It makes use of an already established series detective, Michael McKenna, and an established milieu, North Wales. This permits the reader to evaluate possible courses of action within a structure already familiar. Simeon’s Bride, the first McKenna novel, appeared in 1995 and traces the conflicting ideologies which propel a murder investigation. The story is haunted by persecution from a past age: the skeleton of Simeon’s bride herself, Rebekah, a Jewess hanged for the alleged murder of her child in the eighteenth century, is found in the search for a more recent corpse. The ghost of Simeon, who stole her body from the gibbet, is an occasional fleeting presence, as if to comment on the assumption that the consequences of any crime are limited by time or by the process of law. The Gothic element is reinforced by vivid descriptions of landscape which seem to luxuriate in the pathetic fallacy – ‘dripping trees,’ ‘rags of storm cloud’ and woods full of ‘dark magic’. However, it plays against an explicitly political counterpoint. The scenery also contains ‘the encroachment of decay. . . the true nature of the beast of poverty which dwel[ls] within the mountains and lakes and forests of North Wales, for all the disguises of the beautiful setting’ (1996: 102). A young Welsh detective constable, Dewi Prys, is brutally specific about the causes of the decay. Prowling the nineteenth century folly built by an English slavetrader happy to exploit the locals while posing against the picturesque backdrop, he ‘pray[s] for the ghosts of all the souls, black and Welsh, from which greed had stripped all dignity’ (18). Prys, moving between his non-Welsh superiors, the decaying council estates breeding petty crime and the older generation with chapel values, is the site on which the law intersects with nationalism; the police force offers him escape from poverty but at the price of imposing the law of a foreign government. It is a government which, as McKenna’s superior points out, also drove a wedge between public and police by its handling of the miners’ strike. Hence the relationship of Taylor’s detectives to their community is not that of flâneurs. They do not walk on city streets that can be intimately, if perilously, known, but push against currents of resistance embodied in landscape and language. Although they succeed and the novel reaches closure, the traditional trajectory of the whodunnit is undercut. The murder victim is an English woman, corrupt, selfish and unregretted, who has committed at least one act of child abuse. When the solution is discovered through painstaking analysis of clues, McKenna is informed that ‘the whole fucking village knew’ (417).

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However, the text precludes any response to the murder as rough justice. In the course of the investigation the child’s father is accused of abuse, and we are left in no doubt as to the cost of the accusation; as he bitterly tells McKenna, he will not be allowed to live with his daughter again. The potential cost to children in what McKenna calls ‘the growth industry’ (57) of abuse investigation is, as the text makes clear, also abusive. Simeon’s Bride mirrors In Guilty Night in its preoccupation with the dangers of false accusation. However, it also carefully untangles the familial, political and national loyalities underlying the silence around the crime which does take place. In Guilty Night develops the process of contextualizing that silence while bringing the issue of institutional abuse to the foreground. Its distinctive rhythms counterpoint the brisk trajectory of the whodunnit, whose climax is the knowledge of the criminal’s identity, against the slow rhythms of a justice system which cannot always act upon such knowledge. The first chapter, for example, encodes the novel as a police procedural, seizing the reader’s attention with a corpse and setting up the expectation of a narrative throughline to justice. It also offers a spectrum of police responses to the status of children’s homes. The local institution, Blodwel, is taken to task for its failure to report an absconder. DI Jack Tuttle complains that ‘your tax and my tax pays for cosy places like Blodwel and those kids go missing in droves every week . . . they should be locked up . . . thieves and muggers and arsonists on the loose’ (1997: 11). The so-called absconder, a beautiful and evidently abused boy named Arwel, proves to be the murder victim on whose death the detective plot is predicated. However, the initial presentation of Arwel’s story as two apparently separate incidents in a police day is resonant. It takes, the text implies, the artificial structure of a specific genre to shape such a dialectic between the state as law and order, and the state as parent. As the pathologist remarks over Arwel’s body, ‘the world and his wife assume a child in care is as safe as houses. If the state decides the parents aren’t good enough, then by definition the state must be better than good’ (33). This assumption is deconstructed by bringing state-sanctioned pseudo-parenthood and genuine family into collision through a single figure. Tuttle’s kneejerk prejudice about children in care is challenged when one of his daughters proves to be close to another Blodwel inhabitant, Gary. Gary, taken from a home where his mother struggles in single poverty, becomes uncontrollable after the horrors of Blodwel and runs away with Tuttle’s daughter. The borders between teenage rebellion


and crime, between the responsibilities of state and family, become significantly blurred, and the rapidity of Tuttle’s change of view is a reproach to a system’s failure either to recognize or practice adequate parenting. McKenna explicitly disavows any connection between life and detective fiction: It’s not a story where clues are laid out to be picked up one after another, it’s not a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces simply jumbled in a mess … something happens but you don’t know why. If you know why, you don’t know who, and even if you know who you can’t prove it. Murder tears holes in the neat orderly fabric we weave about life, exposing the chaos underneath. (162) In Guilty Night differs from a traditional detective story with ‘clues’ in that while the reader is kept in suspense as to the identity of the killer, it is instantly clear that the responsibility for Arwel’s death rests with the couple in charge of Blodwel, the Hoggs. Their casual cruelties – similar to those noted by Taylor and related in the Waterhouse report – construct a moral vacuum in which the death at the heart of the narrative seems inevitable. We are concerned less with the conflicting evidence of suspects than with aspects of the ‘social fabric’ and how their particular discourses support or undermine the silence of Blodwel. Taylor interrogates the nexus of ideas that the Conservative administration liked to call ‘Victorian values’. Blodwel is a nineteenth century orphanage, a house for children placed by illegitimacy or poverty outside the social order. Specific incidents are closely reminiscent of the 1987 Barnardo report to the Home Office which hits out at ‘Victorian’ assumptions – for instance, that children should not get ‘luxuries beyond their station’ such as handkerchiefs or sanitary towels. The freelance philanthropy that formed a more acceptable face of Victorian capitalism is also shown to have its dangers: Arwel is taken up by a local celebrity, Elias ab Elis, who encourages his love of horses. Elis’s own motives, however, are disturbingly mixed: his own son is brain damaged, he himself was abused as a child, and seems incapable of a relationship not ultimately destructive. The lottery of private philanthropy is not an option for a state anxious to avoid parental responsibility. Nor, the text suggests, is the institutionalized homophobia that passes for concern about abuse. Hogg refers McKenna to a gay man known as Dai Skunk. Dying of AIDS, Dai expresses fury that he could be

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considered capable of corrupting a child or wilfully infecting anyone. ‘I wouldn’t even breathe on a beautiful boy like him’ (26). Hogg’s betrayal of Dai’s essential decency in order to taunt Arwel – ‘men go with him, then they go with you, then they fuck your sister’ (276) – provokes Arwel to attack Hogg. Hogg then kills Arwel in self-defence. Disease haunts In Guilty Night. One of Hogg’s inmates, a girl called Mandy Minx, is suffering from venereal disease and he does not notice. The police pathologist remarks that it is now obligatory to assume the presence of HIV in a corpse showing signs of abuse, while expressing no interest in the source of the abuse itself. These priorities resemble those of the Contagious Diseases Act, protecting nineteenth century men from syphilis by treating all women as potential sources of infection. In contrast, Elis’s interest in the diseased genius Beethoven suggests that the state’s failure to value and suppport damaged individuals, rather than treating them as sites of potential disease and crime, is a more deadly kind of plague. Alongside the medical, legal and institutional discourses that fail Arwel, Taylor tests out more specifically local languages. The chapel culture, for instance, which might be simplistically interpreted as puritanical repression, is seen dialectically through a young policewoman, Janet, and her pastor father. While characters like Gary’s downtrodden mother leave no doubt about the overall correctness of Janet’s assessment of patriarchy, her father’s refusal to admit a young single mother to the ceremony of churching is seen in a more complex light. Quarrelling with the daughter he knows is on the verge of leaving, he articulates a conviction that he can at least offer a form of containment. ‘We all harm each other, I try to limit that capacity for harm’ (173). If the chapel has a more realistic view of its limitations than the state, it is an older, matriarchal culture which has the final word. As Doris Hogg arrives to pay her hypocritical ‘last respects’ to the body of Arwel, his sister Carol invokes a practice more ancient than the churching of women: her poor dead brother[’s] embalmed and mutilated corpse lay in a coffin on the table, a vase of giant white chrysanthemums at his head, and a feast upon his breast. Carol grabbed a handful of Doris’s hair and pushed her face down on the coffin, to gorge upon the sins of others, and on death itself . . . [McKenna] thought her marked forever, feared and shunned like the Aghoris of India, who feast on rotting human corpses and their own excrement in their quest for redemption. (209)


This is not just a Hardyesque set piece but arguably the climax of the novel, the sole point at which the criminal is challenged by the innocent within a structure which addresses the moral, if not the legal, implications of her act. Carol’s primitive rite is the only form of justice visited on the Hoggs. They leave for Europe, escaping not only prison but even professional disgrace. The melodrama of the sin-eating scene attests to the power of a loving imagination to intervene in a situation rendered morally bankrupt by Arwel’s real parents and the parenting of the state. Carol and Arwel have constructed a culture for themselves, and it is the only one to manifest clearly the guilt of the Hoggs and what it means. The ‘solution’ to the detective aspect of the plot comes about as a result of a ‘clue’ as blatantly unlikely as anything in a country house ‘cosy’. Arwel has kept a coded record of the car numbers of wealthy local businessmen to whom he has been prostituted by the Hoggs. He hides it in a book of medieval Welsh poetry stolen for him by Carol. The device resembles nothing so much as the appearance of a surprise legacy at the end of a Victorian novel. It provides us with an ending, but only if we acknowledge its status as a device; the problems remain, and can only be solved politically. The information is narrated in a scene in which the director of social services blandly refuses to acknowledge that he has ‘cause for concern’ (274). Arwel’s dazzling imagination and intelligence, qualities which enable him to provide the evidence, also make him a marketable object to Hogg. Those who lack his gifts – like Mandy Minx and Gary – will not even have this chance to reach out to the justice system. The narrative closes not with lament for the exceptional Arwel, the hero of a fiction, but with the ordinary Gary, already so damaged that he cannot fight back, a metonym for all vulnerable children in his situation. Gary wept and raged, and brushed the coquette’s hair from his eyes, making denial after denial in that lisping affected voice which spoke so surely of the way ahead for this boy, who would travel everywhere and nowhere in flight from himself. (283)

7 Cruel Mother

Judging parents It is the silly season. There is no obvious lead story: there is a sidebar about Manchester United and a strapline, I HATE MY BOOBS, THEY’RE SO AWFUL. But the banner headline, as the holiday season begins, is BRITAIN’S NASTIEST PARENTS (Daily Mirror 23 July 1999). Underneath is the story of a couple whose ten-year-old daughter has broken her arm at the airport: they send her off in a taxi to her grandparents and take the other children on the planned holiday. That word ‘nasty’ instantly makes apparent the jejune nature of this story. The accident is not described, presumably because it reflects nothing to the parents’ discredit. To dump a child in distress is not admirable, but the reader must be all too painfully aware that there are parents who inflict broken arms rather than react to them with little sympathy, who maim, abuse and kill. What is signified by the headline on the page associated with war, murder and political scandal is that the Daily Mirror has constructed this couple’s behaviour as criminal. While they have done nothing illegal – they have taken steps to ensure that the child has received treatment, that she will not be unsupervised – the language deployed is that used routinely in accounts of criminal violence: the child is ‘screaming with pain’ while passengers ‘watch in horror’. This is the fag-end of a paradigm evolved in the early nineties, the ‘home alone’ story about a child left by a mother going out to work, or, more culpably, on holiday.1 So popular did these narratives briefly become that it seemed the airports of England were largely populated by absconding parents and tabloid reporters. What they did was to situate the reader as viewer in a panopticon whose gaze had shifted from the 147


public sphere as the chief site of criminal behaviour and directed itself at the family – in particular, at the mother. The desired shape of the paternal role can be inferred, perhaps, from a story in that same edition of the Mirror. The actor Ewen McGregor proclaims – creditably enough – his support for the NSPCC. McGregor’s own speech does not move beyond innocuous cliché – ‘I find it impossible to contemplate that anyone would want to hurt [children]’. But the language with which the article frames these sentiments is strikingly violent. ‘Ewen McGregor looks menacingly into the camera . . . looking at his own three-year-old daughter Clara, the star’s legendary laid-back temperament gives way to fury.’ A reference to McGregor’s role in the film Trainspotting strengthens the inference that the lawless vigour of his movie persona has been acceptably channeled into fatherhood; responsible parenting, it seems, does not simply reside in caring for the child but in ‘fighting’, in some unspecified physical way, crime against children. The Mirror’s invocation of the scene in Trainspotting in which a child dies neglected by its drug-addict parents underlines the assumption that the family is both what Alison Young has described as ‘a potential site for criminogenesis’ (1996: 12) and masculinity’s natural battleground against it. Breadwinner, defender and playmate, wife and child grouped around him, McGregor is clearly the desired paternal role model as far as the Mirror is concerned. However, although it might be acceptable to run a story in which a mother ‘fights’ (usually ‘like a tigress’) to protect her child from a specific attacker, it is hard to imagine a celebrity mother constructed in McGregor’s aggressive posture. The desired mother in the family-sized panopticon is not imaged with any clarity. However, as the tabloids demonstrate, it is not necessary to violate the law, or for harm to come to a child, to be named and shamed as a criminal mother. Before the growth of a body of theory about child development, the criminal mother was simply the one who broke the law. The anonymous literature of folk song constructed her relationship to that law as problematic. The ballad The Cruel Mother, for example, narrates the story of a woman who kills her child only to encounter at the door of the church a beautiful infant who tells her that she is going to hell. But it also contains a haunting and ambivalent verse: Smile nae sa sweet, my bonnie babe: Fine flowers in the valley; And ye smile sae sweet, ye’ll smile me dead. And the green leaves they grow rarely. (Grigson 1975: 82)

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The child may be a signifier of an illicit relationship, or an economic burden. Its murder is a wicked act, for which the mother is judged fully responsible, but it is by no means unmotivated. It arises from a social situation, which the text takes for granted and makes no attempt to interrogate or change. But it is not an act predicated on the quality of her maternal feelings; her response to the infant’s smile indicates capacity, even desire, to be like a legitimate mother. The dead child does not doubt her lack of feeling: it reproaches her for the act of murder. Today, however, a mother would seem to have a limitless capacity, not for crimes against the law but against maternity, for damaging her child, or society through her child. Bowlby is still cited to prove that working mothers deprive children of security, while the newly elected Labour government in 1997 trumpeted its success in getting single mothers ‘off benefits’, that is forcing them to work. As war with Iraq drew closer, a former CIA official and practicing psychiatrist found the root of Saddam Hussein’s intransigence in ‘his mother’s womb’ (Guardian 14 November 2002). However, the criteria for maternal failure and the language to describe it are constantly changing. In 1999, the Guardian carried a debate about ‘sin’ and abortion; the ‘sin’ in this case was not abortion – itself only de-criminalized in 1967 – but continuing a pregnancy after the detection of foetal abnormality (Guardian 24–31 July 1999). In this chapter, I examine texts imaging two kinds of maternal failure which have in the last fifteen years been specifically presented in the media as criminal or criminogenetic: failure to protect a child and failure to raise a child who lives within the law. Both ‘failures’ are exemplified by specific cases which have generated both fictional and non-fictional texts.

Failing the child – the USA In 1987, six-year-old Lisa Steinberg died in a New York hospital, bearing signs of horrific injuries. In 1988 Joel Steinberg, an attorney styling himself her adoptive father, was convicted of first degree manslaughter. The chief witness against him was his lover, Hedda Nussbaum, an editor of children’s books, whose body also bore marks of violence. Her face, with split lips and smashed nose which caused several observers to liken it to a lion’s, became one of the most potent and widely circulated images in the media. Exactly what it signified, however, was the subject of fierce debate. The context for that debate was one in which certain lines of demarcation had been clearly and recently drawn. The Women’s Movement of the seventies had ensured that marital violence was no


longer easily dismissed and landmark cases had been won: in 1985, for example, Tracy Thurman sued the city of Torrington, Connecticut, when police had failed to prevent her spouse from breaking her neck despite a protection order, and was awarded $1.9 million. It was not surprising, then, that Nussbaum was first seen as a victim pure and simple, her face a feminist icon bearing witness to her willingness to fight for her child. Support came from high profile sources, such as The STEPS to End Family Violence Campaign, and from leading feminists such as Gloria Steinem. As details emerged of legal loopholes which had made possible the adoption of Lisa and a second child, Mitchell, Nussbaum formally relinquished her right to the custody of Mitchell. Her ‘letter of heartbreak’ ran in the New York Times alongside details of the beatings she had received. As the case against Steinberg was assembled, Nussbaum’s lawyer, Barry Scheck, successfully argued that she should not stand trial, laying the ground for what has become known as the Nussbaum Defence: namely, that a woman with an abusive partner can be battered into a state in which she is incapable of intervention on behalf of her children. For some feminists, however, this immunity raised different questions. They perceived the passivity which allowed Lisa to lie comatose for twelve hours before calling for medical help as culpable, and considered that the Nussbaum defence constructed women as morally infantile. Joyce Johnson echoed the feelings of many when she wrote in What Lisa Knew: If women were men’s equals, were they not equally responsible for their acts? It seemed to me . . . that to make Hedda a heroine would set the cause of women back considerably. . . when we heard Peter Casolaro speak of Nussbaum’s “weakness of mind” in his opening statement, weren’t we hearing him express a very old and retrograde view of women? (1991: 265) The manslaughter verdict had been an anti-climax. There was a need, perhaps, to hear the word ‘murder’ spoken. A campaign to introduce into the New York statute books the crime of ‘homicide by child abuse’, and the judgements by detractors and supporters of the absent Nussbaum, all indicated a profound desire that the case should articulate the meaning of parenthood in a world where gender relations were undergoing re-evaluation. Two books in particular, by Susan Brownmiller and Joyce Johnson, explored the limits of responsibility in the light of the Nussbaum Defence.

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Brownmiller’s Waverly Place (1989) is a novel, completed before all the details of the trial were available; as such it makes no attempt to investigate the specific psychology of Nussbaum and Steinberg, but examines the milieu in which their situation can arise and continue without intervention from neighbours, colleagues or concerned citizens. What chiefly defines this milieu is language, or rather its failure to offer a language in which the child’s fate can be defined and changed, a failure in which the central characters collude. The story of ‘Judith Winograd’ begins in 1970, the year in which the Women’s Movement began in the UK, two years after the WITCH manifesto in the USA. Judith is, in fact, invited to a meeting of ‘something called the Women’s Liberation Movement’, as if to emphasize the political and linguistic road not taken. She chooses, rather, to hand over the control of her language to others. Her link with her violent partner ‘Barry’ is forged through the language of emotion alone. It begins in romantic fiction. While, as I have mentioned in Chapter 4, feminist critics have claimed to find empowerment in reading the formal structures of the genre, Judith consciously engages in acting out its clichés: meeting the dominant and sexy male in a picturesque market setting, she flirts over an antique vase and lets him define her in words. ‘You’ve got it filled with posies already. What kind? Roses? Nah, nothing as common as roses. Nothing ordinary for you’ (13). It seems, initially, as if mere consciousness of this cliché of dominant masculinity is sufficient to subvert its dangers. But, like Nicci French’s dangerously complicit heroine in Killing Me Softly, Judith rapidly enters a state of linguistic disempowerment too often the fate of the heroine in romantic fiction (while men are permitted a variety of speaking tones, the phrase ‘I gazed at him dumbly’ – or ‘numbly’ or ‘humbly’ – occurs with depressing frequency). Soon Barry not only does most of the talking, but also interprets the world to Judith. Both Jewish, they compare childhoods. He describes a time of violence, she can only remember insults from the older generation. ‘When I did something awful . . . she’d wail, Aiii, livergut, that’s how I heard it. Livergut. A bloody bruised squirming sickening purple mass of innards’ (29). It takes Barry to decode this as Aii, Lieber Gott, a deduction so obvious that it seems Judith has deliberately refrained from any attempt to make sense of the world, or the body, through language. She fails as a teacher through an inability to stop the children shouting. Unlike the reasonably successful Nussbaum, she fails as a writer, producing a single book for children called Vegetables That Grow Underground. (She can’t tell a turnip from a parsnip.) Stoned, she is inarticulate, in contrast to Barry,


whose language becomes yet more complex, ‘a singsong dialect of offbeat stresses, unfinished phrases, ellipses, slurs’ (85) which she cannot decode. After a long period of abuse and violence, she still favours the language of romantic emotionalism, whispering ‘I feel so close to you’, while he silences her by unzipping his pants. Judith, in short, wilfully refuses the responsibilities of a speaking subject. Nor is she ever confronted by a language sufficiently powerful to overcome her own. Friends and colleagues make a tentative approach to a social worker, whose monumental, unarguable pronouncements are concerned to establish her own authority rather than deal with the situation. ‘They have to ask for help, do you understand what I’m saying. This is a classic case of denial’ (134). Brownmiller also makes clear their own linguistic limitations. They may ridicule Judith’s own anaemic vocabulary of feeling without political analysis – ‘They’re going to talk things out and renew their understanding’ – but they lack a vocabulary of genuine and appropriate indignation: ‘Do babies retain such memories?’ ‘They do if they’re Freudian babies.’ ‘Joanne, look over there, isn’t that Bianca Jagger?’ (141) The linguistic surface not only conceals the abuse from the authorities: it also effectively conceals it from the reader. The book goes on for more than a hundred pages before Barry is seen by us to strike a blow, and for more than two hundred before we see him strike his daughter. We are implicated in a silence which can only be broken by stepping out of the narrative frame, applying knowledge (and language) which we have gained from the courts and the newspapers to fill the gaps. When we pass judgement on a relationship which, right to the end, is framed in romantic passivity – ‘Her man. He always knew what to do’ (294) – we are also assenting to the need for a shift in our own use of language. By contrast, Johnson’s book, first published in 1990, gives names and dates, quotes documents and interviews, assembles evidence and makes overt judgements. Its title, however, What Lisa Knew, situates it in a literary context, and the idea of intertextuality is developed throughout. Henry James’s What Maisie Knew is about the selfishness of lovers who use a child as a pawn in their affairs. Johnson also overtly compares Nussbaum and Steinberg to the couple in James’s The Turn of the Screw, corrupt even beyond the grave and betraying their responsibility to children in their care. Mark Twain once lived in the Steinberg home on Tenth Street, and Johnson evokes his hero Huck Finn, able to abandon

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a cruel parent and make his own destiny as Lisa is not. She also taps into the traditions of the detective story, comparing the women who shared the building and watched for signs of abuse in Lisa with the hero of Rear Window. The constant literary allusion sets the story against narrative traditions which assume the existence of certain possibilities: that evidence can be assembled, and behaviour logged to decide responsibility for a situation; that motives can be exhaustively explored by an author who can assume the posture of omniscience; that readers can arrive at clear moral judgements on characters, or articulate them on behalf of linguistically deprived characters like the instinctive abolitionist Huck. Johnson implicitly contrasts her own narrative which is like a ‘smashed mirror’ (Johnson 1991: 41). A generation can view itself in the story she tells, see its likeness as well as its difference to the protagonists, and in doing so is inhibited from what Johnson sees as the whole point: ‘Don’t blame the victim!’ became the rallying cry of Hedda Nussbaum’s supporters. Those four increasingly loosely applied words are emblazoned on the banner of the Battered Women’s Movement. For me, they have come to mean, Don’t think! Don’t judge! Don’t differentiate! (248) Johnson implies that judgement must take place even in the absence of Grand Narratives. She acknowledges that to write about a real crime is to construct fictions about events which have already become a kind of fiction to the protagonists: Joel Steinberg as he appears in the narratives concerning the hours of Lisa’s death is Joel Steinberg as narrated by Hedda Nussbaum, the chief witness; she herself is the prosecution’s Hedda, the defence’s Hedda, the Hedda of the therapists, the Hedda of whom one radical feminist declared ‘I could have been Hedda Nussbaum’ (265). But this proliferation of images, and consequent reluctance to judge, springs, as Johnson makes clear, from the status of the protagonists as white and middle class; America does not feel a need to probe so deeply into violence to children in the households of the poor. Thus economics form a backdrop to Johnson’s story, but the central theme is that of desire. Hedda and Joel are constantly revealed as the product of an individualist culture which assumes self-gratification as a right. Johnson perceives the sexual revolution of the 1960s as parasitic on that of the Beat Generation, and the ‘second hand’ experience available to Hedda’s contemporaries, growing up with the older values but


never having to fight for the new ones, as potentially dangerous for women. ‘Men still had the edge over women; in fact, they had never been freer to behave badly and with less guilt’ (89). The stress on individual freedom in the seventies – ‘you owed it to yourself to be yourself’ (115) – is constructed as lethal when impacted on the confused gender politics of the sixties generation. Johnson suggests that Hedda handed over to Joel the responsibility for designing her a self: professionally assertive but sexually masochistic; free to freebase and to care for a child as equal facets of a desired self-image rather than dangerously incompatible choices: In an acquisitive decade, The Child – the white, middle-class child – became the prime acquisition, the essential accessory for the good life. This message was taken up by the mass media and given a special twist. . . . Daddy or a surrogate Daddy was often shown to be better at nurturing a small child than a mother. (143) The existence of his adopted children as luxury products to enhance Steinberg’s lifestyle was, this narrative suggests, never challenged: if Hedda’s masochistic absorption in the relationship precluded an awareness of Lisa as a subject, in need of protection and love, the father–daughter image had enough surface charm to deflect the concern of the friends and neighbours who noticed the bruises. For Johnson, the ubiquity of the self-gratification philosophy explains ‘the extraordinary reluctance Americans have, these days, to pass judgement’: Along with the notion of evil, the notion of the noble, unselfish and courageous act also seems to be disappearing from our culture. It was difficult for a great many people to imagine a scenario in which Hedda Nussbaum might have redeemed herself by defying Joel . . . (248) While this diagnosis of Nussbaum is pertinent in the face of a victim culture which denies women the dignity of agency, it does leave the book stuck in a similar ideology of individualism. Although it rightly insists on personal responsibility as the necessary moral accompaniment of personal desire, it engages with the idea of responsibility only at the point where it intersects with violence. Certainly Hedda (like Marie Belloc Lowndes’s Mrs Bunting, and with less excuse), can be judged as a bad citizen. However, the processes by which society mishandles desire in relation to parenthood are given less narrative weight.

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This is partly because those processes themselves are so obscure as to defy narrative coherence: through what private channels did Joel Steinberg gratify his wish for a child, despite a lifestyle that would have given pause to any state-run agency? How was Hedda given a child, despite a demeanour proclaiming a desire to please a partner rather than to be a parent? If the relationship between society and the desire for children forms one narrative lacuna, so does that between society and the desire not to have them. Lisa’s birth mother, Michelle Launders, haunts the narrative as a figure of Hardyesque irony. Johnson records the words of a woman juror after the verdict, ‘Michelle, you did the right thing having that baby, you decided against abortion. That was the right decision’ (16). For Johnson, the significance of this incident lies in the contrast between the energy of the anti-abortion lobby and society’s habitually lukewarm response to the abuse of living children. But although rightly scathing of the journalist who accused Michelle Launders of ‘handing out’ her daughter ‘like a loaf of bread,’ (54) the text never really gets to grips with the wider implications of the juror’s comment. When the women’s movement campaigned for abortion, it was concerned with the rights of the individual woman over her body. It did not postulate abortion as the only way to save an unwanted child from the ordeal of a Lisa Steinberg. Michelle Launders attempted to exercise her freedom not to abort but to place her child in a loving home. Society failed to offer her a context which made her action meaningful. Johnson’s text does not appear to envisage the possibility of a state in which a parent can raise a wanted child with adequate support regardless of her circumstances or give up an unwanted one with the knowledge that it will be safe. Her rhetoric is at its acid best when dissecting the more baroque capitalist refinements of the trial, for example, her reflections on Nussbaum’s clinic and its rise to celebrity status: ‘Nothing could be more indicative of Hedda’s progress towards recovery than her decision to sue Joel Steinberg for forty million dollars’ (251). Yet the gap between economically powerful individuals who wanted and got a child and Michelle Launders, as representative of a group forced into commodifying their own children, is never explicitly negotiated.

Failing the child – The UK Frances Hegarty published The Playroom in 1991, the year the British text of Johnson’s book appeared. The fictional case it narrates has strong


overtones of Lisa’s story: a well-heeled husband dominates his wife Katherine until she is too weak to resist his abuse of their daughter: equally well-heeled neighbours resist the knowledge until the situation is at crisis point. Here, however, it is possible to interrogate the situation through socialist–feminist politics. While Katherine’s inadequate parenting is not excused, the complexity of construction is laid bare. Katherine and her sister Mary have both been removed from an abusive home; shorn of family identity, they have to construct their own, a process governed by economics. Mary, chosen by a middle class couple, channels her sense of rejection into charity work. Katherine, passing through foster homes and institutions, has no social status and hence no vocation or beliefs. Encountering an immigrant beggar, she recognizes the fear on his face as endemic to the institutionalized. Assembling a self much as she assembles patchwork quilts from stolen scraps, she marries a man for validation. David, the child of a drunken and psychopathic fraud, is, like Katherine herself, able to offer a convincing imitation of bourgeois style. Hegarty’s account of their social mobility uncovers connections between the apparently natural state of family domesticity and commodification. David is a designer, his home a showcase for his work, his social life a covert selling process. Katherine is a part product, one of the beautiful things he has created, part employee, with a nominal job to save tax, and part domestic slave. Humiliated by David at a party, Katherine cannot ‘afford’ anger. She is, in short, a phenomenon the resentful care worker who fails to intervene cannot comprehend: an affluent woman with nothing. Hegarty’s repeated use of folk tale motifs implies that Katherine’s situation is not uncommon, but as recognizable as the power relations imaged in the original tales. David’s house is a ‘castle’ like Bluebeard’s whose keys he obsessively controls; locked up, Katherine tries to escape in a red cloak, and David tells the neighbours that his daughter, shut in with Katherine without food, has ‘gone to visit Granny’. Katherine, however, lacks the chief support of Red Riding Hood and Bluebeard’s final bride – the knowledge of other women to help her through rites of passage. Because the women around her are part of a commodified domesticity which leaves no truly personal spaces (privacy, here, is an index of property values rather than a psychic resource), they do not exchange information to shape a potentially subversive female community. Katherine cannot discuss her own economic plight, because one of the functions of a wife in this social group is to construct a financial profile for her husband, one of wealth without ostentation. As a motherless mother, Katherine needs to learn parenting, but within

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the consumerist language of her world, in which the charm of children is part of the process of marketing domesticity, there is no possibility of articulating this need: one of the wives, Susan, hears her working-class babysitter’s fears for Katherine’s child and remarks ‘I can criticize: Mrs Harrison cannot’ (40). Katherine is eventually permitted the kind of epiphany whose absence is marked in the work of Brownmiller and Johnson. She realizes that her own infantilism and submission have empowered, rather than satisfied, the hungers that drive David, ‘unbelievably, for the first time, where the real threat lay and who might be the victim’ (198). The term ‘learned helplessness syndrome’, as R. and R. Dobash mordantly point out in their book Women, Violence and Social Change (1996), has been used to describe the conditions of battered women, welfare recipients and Third World countries, but was originally observed in Seligman’s experiments on rats and dogs; it was not when the rats were deprived or even harshly treated that they lost the will to fight back, but when they were exposed to incidents of random and meaningless violence. Hegarty’s text juxtaposes the issue of Katherine’s individual responsibility in the face of David’s individual, psychopathic randomness with the possibility of community. The narrative stutters through a series of aborted endings in which class barriers are repeatedly assaulted but fail to give way, preventing material signs from being properly decoded. Trapped by David, Katherine leaves her red cloak as a signal for help. It is correctly read by the beggar who steals it, but the police ignore what he has to say. Mrs Harrison is concerned at the gaunt and troubled appearance of Katherine, but the richness of her clothes seems to belie suspicion. Susan considers listening to Mrs Harrison, but, ditched by her own husband, lacks confidence to listen to a ‘servant’. Eventually, her eye geared to pass judgement on clothes and possessions, she is led to investigate garments belonging to Katherine and her daughter which David has dumped in a rubbish bag; she moves from decoding signs of affluence to action, enduring her own epiphany: ‘If I hold on to this child, I shall warm her. Don’t do this to me, God, you bastard, can’t you see I was learning already?’ (298). The conventions of the suspense novel allow Hegarty to set disparate parts of a complex community in a dynamic juxtaposition in order to bring about a dénouement. We are aware that, whatever the outcome, it will not be achieved by Katherine alone, but we do not know until the end which character, from which class, will precipitate the conclusion. The narrative is able to offer us a microcosm of social relations in which groups initially see one another as disparate: the vagrant would like


there to be such a thing as society; the social worker believes there is, even if he cannot recognize that Katherine is a member; the neighbours believe that there are only families with no responsibility beyond themselves. What the novel achieves, almost at the cost of Jeanetta’s life, is a temporary image of community.

Criminal children and maternal failure On 12 February 1993, a two-year-old boy, James Bulger, ran out of a shop in the Strand centre at Bootle where his mother was buying food. Two days later his body was found on a railway line. A security camera in the centre showed him being led away by two boys, who were subsequently convicted of his abduction and murder after a trial in the adult court at Preston. As they were sentenced to detention at Her Majesty’s pleasure, James Bulger’s uncle, Ray Matthews, shouted, ‘How do you feel now, you little bastards?’. It was inevitable that this remark would become a tabloid heading, and it duly appeared on the front page of the Daily Star on 25 November 1993. Blake Morrison has suggested that in the Scouse vocabulary the word ‘bastard’ can carry a variety of connotations, not all of them hostile or malicious. Even if the intention behind the outburst was hostile, it can be read as a wholly understandable eruption of feeling by a member of a grieving family. By running the words as a banner headline, however, the Star implicitly removes them from the mouth of Ray Matthews and puts them into that of the reader. It is similar to the sentiment articulated by the Mirror’s image of Ewen McGregor as the ideal, combative father, setting the tone for the ways in which the media largely constructed the story. Bastards. Children without fathers, without the right of inheritance, without a place in the world, without status in law. The children of single mothers. The story of James Bulger’s death was configured by the media not so much as a story about children, but as a story about gender; not, however, as a story in which two sides were balanced or set in opposition, but one in which they seemed to ignore one another. It was a story about maternity, but as that word bastard suggests, not paternity. And it was a story about masculinity. The prevalent image of the boys, Robert Thompson and John Venables, was of embodied ‘evil’. The Daily Express for example, captioned their pictures, ‘The faces of normal boys but they had the hearts of evil’ (Express 2 November 1993), stressing the deceptive nature of their looks in contrast to the innocent beauty of their victim. Wreaths were placed with infinite tenderness at the murder site, bearing inscriptions

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like ‘These monsters should be hanged’. There was also, however, a haunting fear that they might not be unique, that a generation of male children moving from childhood to adolescence were in some indefinable moral jeopardy. No less than 135 boys were questioned at police stations in connection with the enquiry; when one twelve-year-old was brought in for questioning at Snowdrop Street there was a near-riot, and the Liverpool Echo carried the headline ‘Keep Calm’ (17 February 1993). Several newspapers invoked the novel Lord of the Flies. Its image of schoolboys cast away on an island where they degenerate into murdering savages was, William Golding remarked, prompted by his experience of the Nazis and of an all-boy school. Just possibly, what was on trial here was masculinity, and male writers explored the fragile border between permissible ‘boyish’ mischief and something closer to the actions of Thompson and Venables. Andrew O’Hagan wrote in the London Review of Books about a boyhood in which something happened when we got together. . . it’s not that any of us were evil . . . what started off as a game of rounders would end up as a game of clubbing the neighbour’s cat to death . . . (March 1993) Blake Morrison’s book about the Bulger case, As If (1997), problematizes masculinity in a more complex fashion. It contains a confessional sequence in which he imagines himself on trial for an incident at a party when he was fourteen years old; answering the imaginary prosecution in his adult voice, he is able to draw fairly complex moral distinctions: between rape and sexual coercion, between passive and active choice, between technical and moral responsibility; but to be a boy, he implies, is to drift across these borderlines without moral awareness. Although he mentions the passivity of the girls at the party, he seems queasily aware that the real energies behind the incident were specifically male. As If also contains a long narrative sequence about the so-called Children’s Crusade. Beginning with the kind of romanticized account provided by children’s history books in the 1950s, Morrison rapidly reconfigures it. It becomes a story about disaffected youths, not children, and a charismatic leader, Stephen, being corrupted by a more streetwise youth, Pierre, who eventually makes a deal with Algerian slave-traders. The sentimental text of the trusting children, he suggests, is a strategy to permit adults to remove themselves, and their responsibility, from a narrative about the abuse of trust. Again, then, we are invited to contemplate not so much a story about children, as a story


about gender, about masculinity, about the violence of which men seem capable, and of the structures of the law which they both hide behind and control: I’m struck . . . by the overwhelming maleness of the proceedings. The two accused; the judge, barristers, solicitors, social workers; most of the press; nine of the jury. . . . If T and V had taken a girl, would they have acted differently? . . . Whatever, masculinity dominates the trial. The Roman arena aspect of it, the gladiatorialism, is quintessentially male. And I suspect that if the legal profession had more women in high places, these boys would not have been brought to trial in an adult court. (1997: 30) This problematization of masculinity brings its difficulties; it assumes a ‘femininity’ which is innate2 and maternal, belying the presence of women in the angry crowd at Snowdrop Street. Moreover, the separation of this aspect of masculinity from that of the Law opens up no possibility of change. It leaves the way open for disempowered masculinity to retreat to the sidelines like a child who has kicked a football through a window, setting the Law of the Father free to vent its anger specifically upon maternal failure. For the story of the boys was also constructed as a story about mothers. Against the loving and stable family unit, Denise and Ralph Bulger and their child James, the media ranged two kinds of inadequate mother, polar opposites of maternal criminogenesis. On the one hand was Ann Thompson, with children in care to indicate that she could not control them, a husband who had left her to indicate that she could ‘destroy’ men (Young 1996: 124), who liked to drink, and who was described by the Daily Star as ‘dry-eyed and defiant’ (Daily Star 28 November 1993). Her language in defending the children – ’they are scallies, little scallies, but they are not f***ing murderers’ quoted in the same edition of the Star – complete with the asterisks in deference to the sensitivity of its readership – indicated a foul mouth, not the passion which fuelled Ray Matthews. On the other hand was Susan Venables; she lived apart from her husband but still slept with him, indicating not relative stability but what Gitta Sereny called ‘desperat[e] role-playing’ (Independent on Sunday 6 February 1994); she was, according to the family solicitor, the ‘disciplinarian’ of the couple, a statement used to indicate that she was ‘the hard one’ (Morrison 1997: 164); concerned and always present at the trial, she was seen as the ‘anxious’ mother who ‘suffocated’ her child with the ‘wrong kind of love’.

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In contrast, the fathers and siblings of the boys were shadowy figures. Case conference notes on the children which detail domestic violence in the Thompson household and the breakup of the Venables’ marriage under the strain of caring for two children with special needs concluded that there was ‘no connection with the alleged offence’ (Morrison 1997: 164). As Blake Morrison points out, to admit of such a connection would not have helped the image of the City Council. Nor would it have supported current government thinking on responsibility and the family. As newspapers reported the trial day by day, they also carried details of continuing welfare cuts orchestrated by the Secretary for Social Security, Peter Lilley. Many of these were to impact particularly on the single mother and it was clear that an element of the punitive was involved. On 6 October 1993, the Home Secretary expressed to the Conservative Party Conference his approval of Lilley’s comment that ‘getting married to the state’ as a single parent was to perpetuate a link between dependency and criminality, and that this would no longer be an option. The Law of the Father, the paternal state, was best served by the maximum visibility of Ann Thompson and Sue Venables as scapegoats, and their sons as ‘bastards’. The viciousness with which the press was later to report the break-up of the Bulger marriage, stigmatizing Ralph Bulger as a ‘Merseyside Love Cheat’ and Denise Bulger as a ‘drunk’ (Sunday People 6 November 1994) reflected the intensity of the investment in the polarization of parental images. No-one asked what, in their terrible circumstances, the couple could find to say to one another. Throughout the whole story, indeed, no language existed to speak of the issues at stake. Norman Tutt of the Justice Working Party on Children and Homicide has pointed out that in the whole/entire media coverage of the trial, the body language of the boys was read as unacceptable. Tears did not indicate remorse, but any lapse of concentration was inevitably construed as indifference (Cavadino 1994: 53). Arguably, this was equally true of the mothers. Despite the fact that child killers are not unknown to the legal system, the media constructed the situation as unprecedented. Both the mothers and the children faced the task of inventing and living out a language of body and speech that would be considered adequate to it, one that served, in the face of all the conflicting discourses about welfare, masculinity, criminality and childhood, to explain what had happened. They were, it seems, to explain even in the face of a refusal to accept that explanation was possible. ‘Society needs to condemn a little more’, said the Prime Minister John Major about juvenile crime, ‘and understand a little less’ (Cook 1997: 1). Controversy over the sentencing of


Thompson and Venables was to continue, and their tariffs were to be set and reset. However, Major’s use of the word ‘understand’ as the opposite of ‘condemn’, his repudiation of ‘airy fairy theories’ (Times 7 January 1994), and his espousal of the slogan ‘back to basics’ (Conservative Party Conference October 1993) connote more than a statement of a harsh but not untenable point of view on tariffs for juvenile killers. Such language implies that the state should make its power over the individual visible solely through punishment; that to explore the relationship between individual and state is necessarily to weaken the latter. It makes inevitable the transfer of sole responsibility for the moral consciousness of the individual to the mother.

Masculinity, children and fiction In one of the most significant pieces of writing about the case, Alison Young resonantly suggests that the horror of the Bulger story lay in the notion of visibility (Young 1996: 111–45). The image which symbolized the case in the media was a still from the security camera in the Strand centre, frozen at 3.42.32, on which James was seen with his hand in that of John Venables while Robert Thompson walked on ahead – an apparently harmonious family group which resembled the old advertisement for Start-Rite shoes. The image demonstrated not only the power of the panopticon, but also its failure; witness after witness was stricken with self reproach for interpreting what they had seen as an image of the family, not a crime against it. The artist Jamie Wagg mounted an exhibition which included laminated versions of this image; the press vilified him as they did Marcus Harvey. Wagg withdrew his exhibits and apologized to the Bulger family for any distress he had caused; unlike Harvey’s image of Hindley, however, Wagg’s pictures did not seem to reproach the criminals but the collective failure to act. And beyond the image, beyond the view of the camera, was a killing by a darkened railway line: James covered in blue paint, the attack with stones, bricks, an iron bar and the dumping of his body on the line. Pieced together from forensic evidence, with no witnesses, with confessions in fragmented, childish form rather than coherent statements expressing triumph or remorse, it seemed beyond imagination and beyond representation. ‘They did it all in the dark’, said a court attendant, ‘I can’t get over that’ (Independent on Sunday 13 February 1994). If, however, it was unbearable to imagine the death of the child and impossible to understand what drove the children who killed him, it

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was possible to attempt another kind of representation. Two novels have taken as starting point not that frozen image of the child with a trusting hand in that of an older boy, but a later moment, unseen, when a boy stands with a stone in his hand. The finishing point of each is a kind of redemption. Neither text replicates the exact circumstances of the Bulger case, and they cannot therefore be seen as attempting to ‘explain’ it. They could, however, be seen as offering a chance to understand it through the representation of difference. Each postulates a complex web of circumstances – economic, psychological and social – which ensure that a child, although in a state of disturbance, does not finally kill. And each reconfigures the crude polarities of gender relations which shaped the images of masculine evil, or criminally inadequate maternity, in media constructions of the Bulger case. Michelle Spring’s Standing in the Shadows (1998) is part of a detective series; as such, it signals to the reader to assume that inquiry, the search to understand, will bring about an outcome if not beneficent, at least better than the status quo. An eleven-year-old boy, Daryll Flatt, is convicted of killing a sixty-three-year-old widow, crushing her skull with a concrete block. He is a problem child, hyperactive, disturbed by witnessing the death of his grandmother and the victim of a violent stepbrother: in fact, a credible suspect. The function of private eye Laura Principal, however, is to reopen, rather than solve the case; hence, there are no baying crowds, no family wildly grieving and threatening revenge. What energizes the suspense is that Daryll’s selfhood is at stake; confined, lonely and guilt-ridden – for he has thrown a rock at the widow, and believes incorrectly he has caused her death – he has ceased to use the word ‘I’. Spring problematizes the treatment of juvenile criminals, while making it clear that culpable children exist. If the genre necessitates the innocence of Daryll, the text does not exploit a false notion of childhood. Laura Principal, a Cambridge historian, not only researches contemporary instances of child criminals but is also aware that her image of children as innocents is socially constructed: ‘any decent inhabitant of the sixteenth-century England would have thought me mad’ (1998: 101). Around the vulnerable and flawed figure of the child issues of sexuality and maternity circulate in complex and shifting patterns which undermine the rigid patterns grounded in polarity. Daryll’s mother is genuinely torn between her children and violent lover. The sexual competitiveness of older women is featured prominently in Laura’s investigation and proves to be one of the forces underlying the murder: the


victim’s relationship with Daryll is motivated not by her desire to be a foster-mother to him but by her desire for his charismatic social worker, Kelsey McLeod, the real killer. A sub-plot about a flasher who menaces the children of Laura’s best friend dramatizes a question implicit in Laura’s research on other child killers. ‘Could be . . . that we’re on a point of decision today. Unable to make up our minds whether children are victims or villains’ (104). But it also denies the reader a simple answer: the flasher himself, tracked down by Laura, proves to be a key witness and is responsible for breaking the silence that has led to Daryll’s conviction. A world in which sexuality is compromised and confused is, nonetheless, shown to be capable of change. Standing in the Shadows also has a complex relationship to the issue of parenting. The figures who surround Daryll are morally flawed, and thus believable suspects, but several of them also offer images of goodenough parenting and cannot be easily blamed for his putative killer instinct. His mother is raddled, resentful and avid to sell her story to the press, but she loves the son she cannot control. Nor does she hand him over easily: she has suspicions about the motives of the widow, Geraldine, by no means grounded in class envy, but largely ignored because they can all too easily be read as such. Geraldine herself, presenting a conventional image of benevolent, home-baking maternity, is too needy sexually and too dependent on male approval to think about Daryll’s needs. The state fails, as a satisfactory substitute parent, in that it is partly represented by the corrupt Kelsey McLeod who preys on elderly women. Having killed Geraldine, he exploits Daryll’s affection for him to convince him that he is the killer, and his credibility as a social worker allows him to construct damning case reports. However, the state is also represented by Murray Eagleton. He tells Laura that ‘to understand all is to forgive all,’ (46) a sentiment which might, had the novel been written earlier, have connoted a clichéd mentality or suggested sloppy writing by Spring. In the wake of John Major’s comment, however, it reads like a direct challenge: to commit ourselves to understand what we can about the kind of crime of which Daryll is accused and to consider our own priorities. Kelsey McLeod murders for money. While society rightly abhors such an action, it is seen as ‘natural’; the mercenary killer does not attract the label, bastard. The best ‘mothering’ in the novel is offered neither by the state nor by the parent but by Daryll’s brother Howard, who wants to take him to Australia, and by Laura herself, who is trying to establish a relationship with her lover’s children and extends her care to Daryll. Mothering is

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not seen as a function of gender or of blood relationship; it is, however, a necessity without which Daryll could become ‘lost’, the killer that he as yet only appears to be. Mothering also, in the narrative, arrives as a deus ex machina. Emigration to Australia, the Victorian technique for solving a dilemma at the end of a complex social novel, the benevolent detective who uncovers the vital clue, are devices on which the state cannot afford to depend, and the figure of Eagleton implicitly demands that the state fulfil the parental role by empowering, not undermining, the vulnerable figures of the single mother and the troubled child. A passage in Pat Barker’s novel Another World (1998) reaches out to the limits of representation: He comes up again, hair plastered to his skull, T-shirt draped in green slime. He doesn’t look like Jasper now, he’s crying and his head’s bleeding and Gareth’s terrified of him, terrified of what he’s done, so terrified it’s easier to go on than go back. He feels Miranda behind him, not speaking, watching, and throws again. He didn’t mean this. The stone catches Jasper on the side of the head, knocks him over, and yet still he gets up. He’s got to make him stay down, stop crying, stop making that awful noise. He picks up a bigger stone, draws back his arm to throw again, but Jasper’s screaming has woken Fran. (1998: 191) This is sufficiently close to the testimony of Thompson and Venables to bring the image of James Bulger’s death in the dark painfully close. It also contains the horror of the story through crucial differences. It takes place in a landscape with figures in the light of day; Gareth is within his family’s field of vision and his act is not allowed to be irrevocable. However, the novel does not offer the image of family as unproblematic. Rather, it has a role both in causing and restraining Gareth’s murderous rage. By presenting the violence through his eyes, Barker shows the point at which the human figure – to which words like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ can accrue – becomes non-human, the abject. She then makes a link between the state of abjection (Gareth himself is subjected at school to ritual bullying in which his dirty underwear and childish genitals render him an object of disgust) and the need to recover one’s subjectivity by creating a scapegoat. The family are preoccupied with themselves: Gareth’s mother Fran is pregnant and exhausted, his stepfather Nick’s grandfather is dying, his stepsister Miranda is in the throes of confusion about her own sexuality. Sibling rivalry becomes an obvious outlet for aggression.


This family is neither the nest of Victorian values celebrated by Peter Lilley nor an impoverished ‘marriage’ partner to the state. Rather, it is a complex extended unit; the network of ex-wives and stepchildren is not uncommon in a society in which sexual alliances break and re-form, but here it is shown to be one which does not repudiate its responsibilities to a generation who lived in more conventional patterns. This, in the end, is the source of a solution. Gitta Sereny quotes the mother of the child killer Mary Bell as saying at her birth, ‘Take the thing away from me’ (Sereny 1998: 330). It is cited to shock the reader, to elicit understanding for the daughter, and yet it also intimates a possible way out from an undoubtedly wretched childhood. Ann Thompson too was in no doubt that problems beyond her own capacities needed to be addressed whatever the verdict on her son: ‘I asked them – give him help. They said he can’t have help because he hasn’t been found guilty. I said, if he isn’t guilty, he should have help anyway, and if he is guilty, he needs help, now’ (Sereny 1995: 330). Fran in the hospital realizes that maternal feeling is not a panacea; it has averted a situation but not prevented the factors which gave rise to it. Gareth’s family have the money and the family network to get ‘help now’ for themselves and the imagination to challenge the nuclear family structure when it is failing them. Gareth goes to the grandmother who loves him and the pressures are lifted. It is, for all its limitations, a utopian image; there is no guarantee that mothers who challenge the (economically useful) ideology that maternal feeling is both innate and in itself sufficient will be acknowledged and helped before a crisis occurs, as Ann Thompson was all too aware. If Another World offers a family politics of redemption, it also defamiliarizes that image of the boy with the stone in a more radical way. The Bulger case was read within a relatively small range of discourses, all of them contemporary. Crucial to the widening of this discursive framework is a debate between Nick and Helen, the historian who is collecting the war reminiscences of Nick’s grandfather Geordie. Helen assumes an interaction between personal and public memories of history. She points out that Geordie has moved from silence about his experience in the trenches to sharing and discussing it with the young with intent to warn. She points out that his narrative corresponds with current popular images shaped by Britten and Owen, and that he is not as yet prepared to view his experience in terms of class or sexual politics. Nick’s position is that trauma is ‘not accessible to language’ (Barker 1998: 85), that Geordie is doomed endlessly to live and re-live the reality of Thiepval with identical and hallucinatory clarity. For him

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Geordie cannot give a message to the next generation, but only transmit ideology. ‘Isn’t the real message: You can get away with it?’ (85). The ambiguity of that pronoun you is important. Whatever Nick wishes to believe, it is applicable to the classes who profited from the war – such as the arms manufacturer Fanshawe, in whose house Nick is now living; to individuals who committed acts of violence during the war – like Geordie, who stabbed his mother’s preferred son Harry as he lay screaming and disembowelled in No-Man’s land and cannot be sure whether he did it in mercy or in hate; to the unborn generations who will be haunted by the consequences of war; or even to Nick’s own family whose latent violence is beginning to emerge. It suggests that the debate cannot reach a single conclusion about the nature of memory, but problematizes the ownership of experience. There is no clear dividing line, for example, between Geordie’s recollections and communal myth. He describes his mother turning to him at his brother’s memorial service to say ‘It should have been you’ (153). Helen tells Nick that many veterans tell this identical story. Has Geordie appropriated the myth as a judgement upon his act of sibling violence? Or is his memory of that act coloured by the ‘survivor guilt’ that underpins the myth? All that Nick, or the reader, can know, is that Geordie suffers, and his suffering cannot be shared or interpreted. (Are his last words ‘I am in hell’ or does he say ‘Thiepval’?) Nonetheless Geordie also feels that as a living record he has value and meaning, and he loves Helen. The drawing of his experience into the frame of history offers him – and us – a chance to see that the process of ‘understanding’ any act of violence does not end with the fate of the individuals but continues to produce new meanings. Barker offers a third story of sibling violence, one in which several fields of discourse intersect: the language of familial and gender politics which frame contemporary accounts of child murderers, the historicization produced by Geordie and Helen, and the criminological history. Nick and Fran uncover an obscene drawing, a parody of a family photograph, on the walls of the Fanshawe house. Nick’s daughter Miranda states, ‘It’s us’. Nick later finds a book about northern murders – which includes the story of Mary Bell – and it contains the story of the horrific murder of their young stepbrother by Muriel and Robert Fanshawe in 1904. Strongly reminiscent of the real-life murder committed by the adolescent Constance Kent, it serves to stress that child killers are not without precedent and that their stories are necessarily subject to constant reinterpretation. The original ‘not guilty’ verdict is a function of the Fanshawe’s economic power; Robert’s death on the Somme,


however, ironically comments on Nick’s ‘you can get away with it’, and his last letter to Muriel is ambivalent. ‘Remember how young we were’ (115). For the image on the wall with its disturbing images of father and stepmother suggests sexual abuse rather than simple sibling resentment. Just as the story of Constance Kent was read at different times as a story of a father unselfishly protecting a child, a story of disturbed adolescence and a story which indicates parental abuse, so also the story of the Fanshawes will never, the enigmatic picture suggests, be definitively explained, but will yield new meanings. ‘Make me happy’, says the murdering child of the most famous single parent in literature, ‘and I will again be virtuous’. Victor Frankenstein has access to all that a society grounded in male primogeniture can give: wealth, family ties, the Law – which he invokes to condemn to death the mother-substitute, Justine, for the murder committed by his creature – the power to confer or withold the right to reproduce legitmately. It is now common, and illuminating, to read his situation through a knowledge of the trauma of childbirth and its aftermath. But if he has an experience unique to women, he also embodies all the power that patriarchal society can wield over its children. His failure is personal and political, maternal and paternal. His (bastard) creature makes its demands equally upon his power and his psyche: both criminal and victim, standing in an icy waste, it is all lack, all need. As the last three decades have continued to unpack the complexity of social and personal meaning contained in this nameless child, he has become a more apt symbol of the responsibility of Solomon in the twenty first century than that other nameless baby. The need for a judgement, however, is as great as ever.

8 Writing the Dead

The speaking body Cranmer’s prayer book of 1549 calls for the priest to turn to the corpse at the moment of its committal to the ground and address it directly: ‘I commend thy soule to God the father almighty and thy body to the ground, earth to earth, asshes to asshes, dust to dust’ (Duffy 1992). The dead and the living were understood to interact with each other through action – works of charity and the performance of deathbed commissions – and through speech in prayer. This process was evisaged in a world in which it was impossible to escape the physicality of death: heads rotted on city gates, criminals dangled from gibbets till they fell apart, and even the tombs of the godly might show their imagined fate with a sculpture of their own decomposition carved on a shelf beneath the more serene effigy above. We speak of our own dead in the past tense. It is a cliché that as a culture we are reluctant to face the fact of death. Philippe Ariès has outlined the fate of many of us as ‘the modern lonely death’ (1983: 500) which replaces the sociable deathbed with the clinic and pushes the dying out of the community even before their passing. However, alongside this discomfort and denial exists what has been described as an ‘explosion’ of academic studies of death across all disciplines (Clark 1993). There is an increase, and thus an increase in visibility, of workers in palliative care. The border between euthanasia and pain control wavers as medical research clashes with government spending over the bodies of the dying, often ignoring their voices. And every day we are confronted with images of dead bodies, more, perhaps, than at any time since the close of the Middle Ages. Some, as then, are fabricated: images of torture and decay appear not just in horror movies but in exhibitions 169


marketing themselves as educational such as the London Dungeon. TV cop shows feature photographs of naked corpses and blow-ups of entry wounds by way of adding verisimilitude. Others are not artificially generated: images of genocide fill our television screens; and if some of these are censored or played down1 it is at least possible for us to be aware of the possibility by utilizing our knowledge of what we have seen of the Holocaust and Vietnam. Our awareness of the images of mortality, however, exists in the absence of consensus about its meaning which allowed the old funeral rite to address all the dead as functioning members of the community. It is the exceptional, the outcome of violence, which generates the images which shape our theoretical understanding. Small wonder, then, that a new kind of crime story has emerged featuring a detective who reads not only material clues like the parsley in the butter but the body itself. The forensic detective allows the dead effectively to speak and bear witness. And, so far, this field has been dominated by women. The chief exponents of the forensic detective novel, Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwell, both feature female pathologists, as does the television series Silent Witness. All combine the authority of the fictional detective with the traditional functions of the women of Staithes in their complex negotiations between society and the dead. Their investigations create a liminal space between the moment of murder and the moment of justice. Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta makes explicit her duty to people who were not allowed to scream until they were wheeled into my morgue. For it was only there the body could speak freely. It was only there someone cared about every awful thing that had been done. (1995: 196) This duty is often constructed in explicitly ritualistic terms. Three of the Scarpetta novels (Cruel and Unusual, Cause of Death, From Potter’s Field) not to mention a cookery-book-cum-mystery, Scarpetta’s Winter Table, take place on or around Christmas, an occasion marked by the regular characters with social, if not religious, rites and a feast. This sense of the other-worldly is reflected in the plainchant soundtrack to Silent Witness. The effect is to associate the detective with funeral rites even though these are denied the victims until she has solved the riddle of their deaths. Cornwell’s The Body Farm closes with an image which underlines the role of Scarpetta as psychopomp with far more gravitas than Christie permitted Poirot at his death:

Writing the Dead 171

Ice rose in slender columns from the red clay on Emily’s grave. I did not know the physics for a fact but concluded that when the moisture in the non-porous clay froze, it expanded as ice does and had nowhere to go but up. It was as if her spirit had gotten caught in the cold as it tried to rise from the ground, and she sparkled in the sun as pure crystal and water do. (1995: 335) In this episode we see Kay Scarpetta perform the multiple roles fiction demands of the forensic detective heroine. Disclaiming precise scientific knowledge, she links herself, through the folksong image of the speaking grave, to a poetic, even priestly, function. Yet she also claws back her claim to the discourse of science by the very precision of her analysis of the phenomenon. Part of the pleasure of the forensic novel lies in its technical detail, offering insight into a specialized world with its own codes. But it also assumes certain securities: blood, semen and DNA form a system of signifiers it is possible to read with the (apparent) certainty Holmes once applied to material far more slippery and ambiguous. Scarpetta, a qualified physician with a degree in law, frequently armed to the teeth, the better to deal with villains who regularly attack her, assumes alongside this certainty an almost limitless power over life, law and liberty, acting not only as the interpreter of the dead but their executive arm. Her role, like that of most series detectives, is simultaneously that of a maverick within the structures of policing, and conservative at the actual point of law enforcement. Similarly, Kathy Reich’s Tempe Brennan and Sam Ryan, central character of Silent Witness, hold academic posts which allow them both detachment and high status in dealing with the police while remaining on the side of law. All are constructed as explicitly feminist figures, in that the intransigence and incredulity encountered by all mavericks is here shown as specifically male, rather than prompted by differences in class or education.

Reading the body The forensic heroine is thus an outright challenge to the representation of the female corpse as guarantor of male power. Elisabeth Bronfen’s seminal study Over Her Dead Body (1993) outlines the complex functions of the image of the beautiful woman whose death, in Poe’s notorious statement, constitutes ‘the most poetical topic in the world.’ A double mystery, death and femininity, the dead woman is constructed both as Other (in relation to the artist who makes a muse of her or the scientist


who dissects her) and as an only partially repressed articulation of the fact of mortality. Bronfen opens with a discussion of Gabriel von Max’s painting, Der Anatom, in which a male anatomist confronts the body of his young female subject: [E]ven as he signs his description of this dead woman’s body, in a gesture of triumphant power over femininity and over mortality, he is signed by death. His contact with the dead body of another turns into a sign of his own dis-empowered submission to death. He desires the feminine corpse as signifier for wholeness even as he desires this dead body as signifier for his own fragmentary and mortal nature. But – the medium for his articulation is the dead woman . . . signification in all possible cases occurs over her dead body. (1993: 13) This is perhaps too explicit an image of masculine power (not to say violence) for the present century;2 certainly the image of the male pathologist tends to be relegated to the margins of the TV cop show. In the Inspector Morse series, for instance, the male pathologist makes brief appearances to contrast his callous professionalism with the concern the squeamish hero shows for the dead. Yet the reversal implicit in the figure of the female forensic detective seems sufficiently disturbing to require a degree of modification. A convention that has rapidly accrued to her is that of sexual solitude. Reich’s Tempe Brennan has a child old enough to be leaving home, and has no partner. Sam Ryan of Silent Witness has a troubled affair with a married man which is always on the verge of collapse; in one episode she turns from him to a professional crook her expertise has saved from a murder charge. At the end of the episode he is shot and dies in her arms. This ending is adumbrated by the casting of the comedian Jack Dee, whose status as an unusual guest star indicates that he will not appear again, underlining the impossibility of a ‘real’ relationship for Sam. Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta has no less than two dead lovers. The second, a married man, effectively ‘dies’ twice; his murder is graphically narrated in Point of Origin, while its sequel, Black Notice, marks a milestone in the mourning process when Scarpetta confronts the details of his destruction in a report on his post mortem. Only Benton and I knew about the two inch linear scar on his left knee. He had cut himself on Black Mountain, North Carolina. where we had first made love. That scar had always seemed a symbol of adulterous love . . . now it seemed to turn his death into a punishment. (1999: 323)


The relentless sexual isolation of the forensic heroine suggests that her knowledge is a potential power too great to be seen to be used on a living man. Nonetheless, her very existence serves to deconstruct Der Anatom; the knowledge she brings to bear on the cadaver is not a way of assuming (illusory) power over its sexuality, but a means to empower the dead to become speaking subjects: Kay Scarpetta grants to the bodies, bequeathed to forensic research, a role in the community that is active and morally powerful, ‘silent armies I mustered to save us all’ (1995: 325). The idea of the speaking dead is the logical extension of developments in victimology, a process Mawby and Walklate have called the rebirth of the victim (1994: 69). If victim support organizations such as NOVA in the USA and Victim Support in the UK have arisen to offer living victims of crime assistance in articulating their grievances, the forensic pathologist can be seen as their counterpart for the dead. However, the possible relationships between living and dead are as multiple and problematic as those among the living, a difficulty largely glossed over by forensic fiction. Scarpetta, for instance, may offer the disempowered dead, especially women and children, an equal voice, but she also mediates that voice until it speaks as the monolithic patriarchal Law. In All That Remains, for example, there is a chilling passage extolling the Hydra-Shok exploding bullet and its impact on human tissue, ‘designed with law enforcement officers in mind’ (1993: 253). Cornwell’s villains are superhuman evil, ‘black holes which . . . suck light from the planet’ (1994: 236), self-evidently deserving the death penalty which is often forestalled by an end so violent that the spectacle bleaches out any awareness of justice for the victim herself. Cornwell’s alliance of bourgeois feminism and the Law is inextricably entwined with an assumption common to forensic fiction, that forensic science has unproblematic access to the ‘truth’. In fact, certain signs are less stable than they appear and the process of decoding them is subject to ideology. For example, a technique which has seized the public imagination in both detective fiction and popular history is that of facial reconstruction. It has featured in Prime Suspect and Silent Witness, as testimony to the imagination of the detective in employing state-of-the-art technology to produce an unmistakable likeness of a victim from the (literal) bare bones. However, while such reconstruction can restore the contours of the soft tissues, other factors – age, ethnicity, and the effects inscribed by social status, such as fat or the lack of it, weathering, lines of worry – are a matter of conjecture. Choices will have to be made, some of them inevitably touching on racial or class politics.3 When the


dead are made to speak, a degree of ‘fictionalizing’ is unavoidable. While the forensic novel may promote the dignity of the dead, it is bound by its narrative trajectory to frame the deathbed ‘speech’ of the corpse, the fabula, to fit the sjuzet.

Speaking the dead However, the rise of the forensic detective parallels, perhaps nourishes, a literary development of a different, non-fictional kind, a form which resurrects the murder victim in narrative. There is no single term which seems to suffice for this. It is partly biography, for it narrates a life rather than a crime. It shares a common feature with the work of contemporary biographers like Peter Ackroyd in that it sometimes employs the techniques of the novelist, including impossible meetings and imaginary conversations, as if to stress that the fragmented, subjective and ideologically determined nature of any life history will always withhold the fabula from our scrutiny. It is partly autobiography, for it is grounded in the relationship between author and subject and uncovers the profound effect each has on the other. Its starting point, however, is the body, rather than the life, of the deceased, the narrative of her acts and words being generated by the presence of her corpse. It is a form which resists the one-sided relationship between living and dead depicted in Der Anatom: rather than using the corpse as a signifier of temporary power over death, the narrator ‘s own mortality is the condition of the work, the common factor shared with the deceased (and with us). It also resists the monolithic authority of the forensic detective who retains the sole right to articulate and interpret the secrets of the dead. Rather, it assumes that there will be a degree of fictionalization and develops meta-narratives and conversations in which the reader, as well as the dead, can participate. While the forensic novel disempowers the detecting reader with apparently unshakable sign systems, the forensic epitaph involves her as confidante, mourner, and celebrant. I intend to examine the ways in which two writers approach such epitaphs, so differently that they can hardly be seen as defining the boundaries of this emergent genre but rather as engaging with some of its possibilities. In 1994 the American crime novelist James Ellroy was shown the file on his mother’s murder, still unsolved after thirty-six years. It included the photograph of her corpse in situ which forms the frontispiece of his book My Dark Places, published in 1996. Comprising not only an account of the crime and its investigation in the 1950s and the 1990s


but also an autobiography, this forensic epitaph has a complex intertextual relationship to the body of Ellroy’s work about Hollywood as murder site. It relates its own textual origins as an article for GQ , a piece subsequently reprinted in Crime Wave (1999), a volume combining short stories with non-fiction detailing Ellroy’s investigations into Hollywood killings. A chapter on OJ Simpson serves to emphasize that Jean Ellroy’s death should be understood not just as individual tragedy but as a function of power relations operating across half a century. My Dark Places also links the development of Ellroy’s own literary imagination to the murder and its personal and political consequences, discussing in detail two of his Hollywood novels, Clandestine and The Black Dahlia – the latter a fictionalized account of the horrific murder and mutilation of a young woman, also unsolved. In The Poetics of Prose (1977) Todorov pointed out that the detective story involves two stories, that of the crime and its investigation, and two ‘murders’, that by the killer and the detective who reconstructs it. As befits its status as unsolved murder report, My Dark Places involves not two but an endless series of proliferating texts – not only the books and articles relating to the murder to which it alludes, but also repetitions and redundancies within the narrative. The photograph on the first page, for example, is implicitly described in the opening paragraphs, which narrate the discovery of Jean Ellroy’s body from the point of view of the police. These details recur later in the central pages of the text: Ellroy, after detailing the initial failed investigation, his own motherless youth and his first literary attempts to come to terms with the murder, returns to the murder file as both writer and son: I went back to Connecticut and wrote my piece for GQ. It wasn’t cathartic. It didn’t click that little gear off. She was always right there with me. It was a clumsy embrace and a reunion. It was a reckless pass. It was a blind date . . . Now you go where she leads you. (1996: 216) The ambiguity of this direct address – to himself or to the reader? – emphasizes the key position of this passage. It embodies a notion central to Ellroy’s reading of his mother as a figure of resistance rather than an object of consumption. The book is constructed to echo the trajectory of a detective story: the first-person narrative employs the idiosyncratic language of Ellroy’s novels; there are typical detective story tropes – Bill Stoner, the middle-aged homicide detective who assists Ellroy, is a TV stereotype, the cop on the edge of retirement who takes


one last case. But there are also false starts, details which in a novel we might dismiss as tedious but which cannot be considered irrelevant until the case is solved. Geraldine Pedersen Krag has argued that the whodunnit is a symbolic search for the primal scene, that the detective who decodes cries and stains and cryptic remarks allows the reader to relive and master childhood experiences which have initially caused guilt and anxiety (1949). While her body is revealed as a text which proclaims her own sexual adventurousness as well as its victimhood, Jean Ellroy continually defies the kind of explanation that permits reader or author to arrive at this sense of mastery. The author narrates his own obsessive adolescent conflation of his mother and the Black Dahlia into violent sexual fantasies of a ‘redhead’, but his language embodies a caution to the reader: My narrative skills advanced sixfold. Speed-induced palpitations kineticized the whole process. Speed highs went through my brain and lodged in my virgin genitalia. Speed was sex. Speed gave my sex fantasies a new coherent logic. Speed gave me 40-ish redheads. . . . I pounded my pud for 12 to 18 hours straight. It felt so gooooooood. I’d lie on the bed with the dog asleep beside me. I’d slam the ham with my eyes shut and the lights out. (1996: 129) This is a highly self-conscious performance. It blends free indirect slang which both evokes and ironizes the teenage Ellroy – just a touch of excess with two euphemisms for one act in a bare inch of text – with an essayist’s Latinate diction and natty anaphoric riff on ‘speed.’ It reminds the reader that this is an established writer of that genre which mimics the search for origins, whose narrative skills will eventually be deployed in marketing the story, ‘reduced . . . to sound bites and vulgarized . . . in the name of accessibility’ (209). In short, it will resist any presumptuous Freudian reading by anticipating it. It flaunts a multiplicity of texts through which any primal scene must be endlessly deferred, texts which are necessary if Jean Ellroy and her son are to converse in the present tense with the unselfconsciousness of Cranmer’s rite. Ellroy’s text conforms to, but also moves beyond, the structure associated with the conventional detective story and with mourning. On the one hand it articulates a process of closure. It moves from Book 1, ‘The Redhead,’ in which Jean Ellroy is objectified as a corpse in a city which is ready to consume her story as it consumes both human and natural resources, through Book 2, ‘The Kid in the Picture,’ a section


detailing Ellroy’s surrender to his father’s values, and Book 3, ‘Stoner,’ narrating his investigations with Stoner – cop and substitute father. It culminates in the celebration of his mother not as the Dahlia of fantasy but as an individual with a social, ethnic and sexual identity. Book 4 bears her original name, ‘Geneva Hilliker’. This structure follows the grieving process defined by Cixous as the retrieval of emotional investment in the lost object (Bronfen 1993: 295). Ellroy becomes aware that his own story – transcending his father’s careless upbringing to reach literary fame, the American Dream incarnate – is the legacy of his mother’s own Protestant work ethic, an insight he attains by the re-investment of emotion in another woman, his lover Helen. On the other hand, the text also resists the simplistic imposition of a psychoanalytic grid by deconstructing the capitalism inherent in that metaphor of ‘investment’. The process of re-investment, unlike that Bronfen detects in Poe’s Ligeia, for example, does not obliterate the individuality of Helen, or of Jean, but situates them in their political contexts – Helen a product of contemporary American feminism, and Jean living out the sexual contradictions of the fifties. The narrative is punctuated with addresses to the dead woman which become increasingly intimate and tender until they close with a strong sense of her simultaneous presence and absence. ‘I can feel you. You’re brushing against me. You’re gone and I want more of you’ (355). While this overcomes the sadism of the Dahlia fantasies to locate Jean Ellroy in a semiotic chora denied by the patriarchal values of ‘The Kid in the Picture,’ its disruption of chronology to allow living and dead to communicate also acknowledges that while grief may end, justice is yet to be achieved. Jean Ellroy has emerged from the text a speaking subject. No longer identified with her shadow, the Dahlia, her history of ‘competence and rectitude’ (240) is set in the context of fifties’ hypocrisy that denied women the right to make sexual choices and exalted the patriarchal Right in the person of the Dragnet cop. The intertextual relationship between The Black Dahlia and My Dark Places ensures not only that Jean Ellroy is freed from the demeaning typology of the fifties’ sex crime victim who ‘asks for it,’ but that Elizabeth Short, the Dahlia, is liberated from the position of shadow and asserts her own subjectivity and right to be mourned. To read the novel in the light of My Dark Places is to be aware of how it politicizes the passive role of muse. ‘She came to me in a book’ (1996: 101) could serve as the epigraph to both The Black Dahlia and My Dark Places. Ellroy’s childhood encounter with Elizabeth Short, a would-be actress whose naked and bisected body was found on a pavement in 1947, was


mediated through Jack Webb’s The Badge. In this book Webb, auteur of the TV cop show cum LAPD mouthpiece Dragnet, replicated Dragnet’s butch, brutal, anticommunist paranoia free from the constraints of censorship. He offered a reading of the Dahlia – and by implication Jean Ellroy – as a slut complicit in attracting her own butcher. Ellroy’s 1987 fiction resists this reading via a political analysis of Hollywood values. The site of Short’s murder is tracked to the Hollywood sign just as the letters LAND are being hauled down. She is thus part of the birth throes of what Baudrillard has termed hyperreality, where images in the media overcome objects in the world to refer only to themselves (1994). Betty is obliterated in a stream of murderous simulacra. All that remains of her is a pornographic film, in which crying ‘No, please!’ she adumbrates her death agony. The film is made on a site owned by the tycoon Emmett Sprague; his presumptive daughter Madeleine has slept with Betty in narcissistic pleasure at their mutual resemblance, and now prowls bars in morbid imitation of her. Madeleine’s real father, George Tilden, desires Betty for this resemblance. Her mother Ramona kills Betty because she resents the incestuous longings of Sprague and Tilden, and she and Tilden both mutilate the corpse. This hall of mirrors is not penetrated by the LAPD but exploited by them. Short’s murder is important as a chance to earn promotion, to proclaim the values of The Badge. The cop protagonist Bucky Bleichert and his partner, Lee Blanchard, have names suggestive of whiteness, indicating both purity and an opacity that refuses to be a mirror. But their ‘whiteness’ does not indicate unsmirched records but a partnership created by the LAPD propaganda machine, a high-profile boxing duo of ‘wholesome white boys’. As ‘Mr Ice’ and ‘Mr Fire’ in a ten-round spectacular (‘Anything else would look cissy. . . Or communistic’) (1987: 29) they are as vulnerable to spectacularization as Betty Short. Both are obsessed with her. For Lee she resembles his dead sister; he is corrupted and eventually killed by her mirror, Madeleine. Bucky, obsessed with the fragment of film, becomes embroiled with Madeleine. ‘I made Madeleine Betty. . . made her silently mouth “No, please”’ (210). Later a prostitute will do, a ‘naked fraud’ (213); he virtually rapes while voicing this same obsession. Lee and Bucky, comrades and rivals, embody the mechanism discussed by René Girard (1976). As he points out, desire is mimetic. The model who teaches the subject to desire inspires hatred through rivalry over the object of that desire; but he is also the guarantor of that object’s value. The rivals thus wish to possess or become each other, at which point, difference is erased. To preserve that difference they converge


upon a single scapegoat, who becomes the ‘cause’ of their violence. Betty is the scapegoat on whom the lusts of the conflicting powers in Hollywood are inscribed. She vanishes as a subject. The rival obsessions of Bucky and Lee make it clear that this mechanism is a function of masculinity. For all their compromised status, they do not lack the ability to solve Betty’s murder; but in a rivalry which destroys their integrity they only confirm her erasure. Josh Cohen (1997) suggests that the crisis of masculinity in The Black Dahlia is insoluble: the murderous rage inflicted upon women can no more be halted than the drive for political and financial power of which it forms the dark underside. ‘Despite the relentless identification of the palpable material forces of politics and economics at work in the construction of the dazzling semiotic surface of Los Angeles . . . there is little sense that history and geography can illuminate a path of resistance to urban domination’ (1997: 185). However, a potential source of resistance emerges more clearly when the text is read in the light of My Dark Places. The one man who genuinely loved Betty tells Bucky that ‘what Beth was good at was writing, She was brilliant’ (Ellroy 1987: 319). In writing, the hall of mirrors can be evaded, and new readings become possible. While the circumstances surrounding the Dahlia’s death are covered up, there is also a positive outcome when ‘Mr Ice’ is cut loose from ‘Mr Fire’. Like Gilgamesh and Enkidu, they seem unthinkable apart even when they fight, but when one proves mortal the other is forced to reflect on the meaning of duality. The rupturing of doubles offers grounds for a more optimistic reading of The Black Dahlia, particularly as the final chapters of the novel articulate a sharp division between word and image. The clue to Ramona’s involvement is a painting of a figure resembling the mutilated Elizabeth. But while for Ramona this is a silent thing to be sold, as a writer Elizabeth is a voice capable of articulating a dissident self. It is this Elizabeth Bucky, in his role as narrator, increasingly imitates. His original description outlines a muse fit for a cynical cop – ‘Working backward, seeking only facts, I reconstructed her as a sad little girl and a whore’ (9). His final narrative, in which he flies to the lover expecting his child, testifies to a change in the relationship. Betty is now neither evidence nor object of desire, but an agent working upon Bucky: It was Elizabeth Short who was giving us our second chance. Near Boston, the plane got swallowed up by clouds. I felt heavy with fear, like the reunion and fatherhood had turned me into a stone plummeting. I reached for Betty then: a wish, almost a prayer.


The clouds broke up and the plane descended, a big bright city at twilight below. I asked Betty to grant me safe passage in return for my love. (383) Ellroy’s Dahlia is not the ‘real’ Elizabeth Short. Rather, the elaborate doubling and intertextual allusion destabilize the assumption that ‘only facts’ can make sense of such a story. It offers instead a strategy by which the reader can embrace the shift in the power relations between Bucky and Elizabeth to read the victimhood of women marginalized and pathologized by the post-war right. ‘You go where she leads you’ directs the reader to Elizabeth Short and Jean Ellroy, not as muses to inspire male narratives but as speaking subjects who can articulate their own.

The dead speak This book has not yet made use of the term ‘ghost’, nor, probably, was it expected to. And yet ghosts were once an almost inevitable feature of stories about violent death. Keith Thomas has suggested that the decline in belief arises from the fact that it is no longer common for men [sic] to be carried off in the prime of their life, leaving behind them a certain amount of social disturbance, which ghost-beliefs helped to dispel. (1984: 723) Ghosts in the literature of the seventeenth century, he points out, had a variety of functions, rebuking those who were careless or crooked in dealing with their legacy, warning of impending disasters, consoling their wives and children, even uncovering murders. This is the kind of behaviour we are familiar with in literary characters like Old Hamlet. But while literature does have plenty of lively female ghosts, it is rare to find one behaving with his personal and political authority, a fact which perhaps accounts for the gender bias pervading the passage above. While shifts in both religious and criminological perspectives have devolved the detective function away from supernatural agencies, the dialogue between living and dead permitted by the ghost as literary or dramatic convention has an undoubted attraction for the author of the forensic epitaph. My Dark Places continually trembles on the edge of it: Ellroy addresses Jean directly, refers to her touch, permits her to be seen expressing her living self. While all this subverts the passivity of the muse role, however, the text evades


direct engagement in dialogue; this might involve, perhaps, the risk of masculine erasure, the removal of the last trace of the selfhood Ellroy articulates as male and as son ‘over her dead body.’ A dialogue between women, between equals of the same generation, is a different matter; it offers, even, the chance for feminist appropriation of Old Hamlet’s role – not his detective function but his authority in articulating the social disturbance created by his death. Ann E Imbrie’s Spoken in Darkness (1994) develops its own conventions through which living and dead can speak together. In using them to examine the murder of a young woman by a serial killer, Imbrie challenges the limits of representation. In using them to examine the murder of a woman who was also her friend, she is committed to understanding, in the widest possible sense, the nature of the ‘social disturbance’ created by this death. For when a parent dies, you have to re-imagine the structure of the family, with the unspoken rider, It’s my turn next. When a contemporary dies, what seems to shift is the relationship of your generation to the social order. The death of Lee Snavely Fletcher was absorbed with too much ease into the social fabric. She and another young prostitute, Debbie Henneman, were among the victims of Gary Taylor. He tied them up in the basement of his country home and tortured them, carving swastikas into their skin. The bodies lay for a year in a shallow grave before they were discovered and the murders never came to trial. After verbally confessing to the killing of a number of women of varying age and social class, slowing up the judicial process with an appeal on a technicality, Taylor eventually stood trial and was convicted for the murder of a young married woman, Vonnie Stuth. The evidence was clear, Vonnie Stuth was widely respected and could in no way be seen as complicit in her own death, and she died so terribly that the judge recommended that Taylor should never be paroled. In a sense, then, Lee could be seen to have obtained justice, but in another she appears marginalized and silenced, her name forgotten even by her killer who referred to Lee and Debbie as ‘a couple of whores’ (220). Spoken In Darkness is not about investigation, for the detective work has been done. It is about research; Imbrie narrates her own restlessness as a newly tenured academic and her need to launch a new project. The literary critic Caroline Heilbrun, who as Amanda Cross wrote some of the first feminist detective novels, has described the early conflicts within her two disciplines and identities. It occurs to me now that . . . those with some assured place and pattern in their lives, with some financial security. . . are in danger of


choosing to stay right where we are, to undertake each day’s routine, and to listen to our arteries hardening. I do not believe that death should be allowed to find us comfortably seated in our tenured positions. (1988: 131) In Imbrie’s book, the professional (tenured) present is destabilized by the private past, while personal reminiscence is disrupted by subjecting it to political analysis using the resources of a profession. Her negotiation of the gap between her own life and that of the childhood friend which ended in an unsought grave involves relating them both to the sexual and political upheavals in the USA in the second half of the twentieth century. The women who grew up in this period, including Imbrie and indeed myself, lived a transition from an adolescence grounded in an extremely narrow conception of what a woman’s life might be to an adulthood in which it seemed possible for her to write an infinite number of possible scripts for herself. Inevitably, this transition had to take place within a family (or substitute family) context, which might not itself change, but whose support was crucial for the emerging adult woman. In part, then, this is a feminist Bildungsroman which shifts about in time and space to refract memories through different literary styles. Some of it suggests a consciousness-raising group of the seventies reunited to let its hair down with comic recollections of a now vanished era: there is a spirited account of cheerleading trials at which Ann4 and Lee both fail to produce the desired image of ‘the ultimate lady and the ultimate tramp [who] flashed her panties in front of everybody, not just by permission but by design,’ (Imbrie 1994: 17) and of the repressive sexual politics which laid upon young women the burden of reconciling their own desire with the fragility of their reputations. This is allied to more serious and painful analysis of the politics of the family in legal, social and personal terms. As Ann uncovers the troubled family history which leaves Lee a homeless teenager, she finds a patriarchal language at work: custody hearings gloss over the way Lee’s father abused her mother, framing her anorexia and depression as inherent rather than as responses to that abuse; speeches put into the mouths of the children glibly evaluating disorganized mother versus homemaking stepmother are uncritically recorded as their own. Childhood itself is, Imbrie suggests, constructed according to gender. Boys have the possibility of ‘wildness’: they can hang around pool halls, dodge school, get drunk and have unsuitable friends without being seen as sexually transgressive, but ‘when a girl said “I’m in trouble” she didn’t


mean she was on the way to the principal’s office for detention’ (52). Trapped in this construct, Lee is a sexually charged figure: to the older generation, she is ‘asking for it’ before she is even sexually aware; to her contemporaries, she is simultaneously a role model for emergent sixties feminism and an awful warning, lacking as she does a family structure which allows her transgression to proceed at a pace she, as well as they, can handle. While the youth that Ann and Lee shared is narrated in the past tense, the narrative constantly slides from memory into the present tense of research, and research slides from abstract to concrete as it is conducted in Ann’s own former home. Here family politics subvert the closure of the conventional feminist Bildungsroman which leaves the heroine with her past safely interpreted and a promising future. Unresolved issues and squabbles with her mother litter the text not only to expound the ongoing development of Ann’s own psyche but to offer a continuing ideological challenge. When her mother voices the reserve of an older world, remarking on the code which made battered women wear concealing garments whose meaning was all too plain, or implies that the story of a drug addict and prostitute is better not told, she may serve to indicate the distance feminism has travelled. But she also raises more complex points which deny Ann the possibility of taking her own generation for granted; she is pushed into reclaiming the sexual revolution for feminism, not only in response to her mother but, implicitly, to the new feminist generation that sees the sexual revolution as counterproductive, offering not the right but the obligation to say yes: Some women found women on the other side of the wall. And whether that discovery was political or sexual, it moved us toward freedom and change . . . it’s probably the major thing we did right. (103) From Ann’s perspective one function of that change is the freedom to imagine and verbalize the sexual bond between Lee and her husband Eric, profoundly damaged by his experience in Vietnam and not yet able to control his capacity for violence. The objections voiced by Ann’s mother begin in sexual prudery but slip into a reasoned case against Ann’s sentimental assertion that ‘Eric loved her and he abused her and Lee couldn’t tell the difference’ (117). While on the surface Ann’s debates with her mother about sexuality and about Vietnam move in parallel, this suggests that such a statement can only be properly understood if both are seen as impinging upon each other. The ideology that


perpetuated the war fuelled the Nazi misogyny of Gary Taylor. After the humiliation of the Tet offensive it retained an image of heroic masculinity by refusing to acknowledge the trauma of its veterans, men like Ann’s lover Wesley who came home to cope with impotence and displacement and committed suicide. In perpetuating the heroic myth it reinscribed male violence onto the erotic freedoms both sexes were beginning to develop. Lee and Eric are seen to be living out the consequences: domestic violence poisons a love capable of surviving unemployment and imprisonment; drugs, and the crimes that finance the drugs, become their life together. The emergence of this analysis as the product of a relationship between Ann and her mother allows Imbrie to take narrative risks. The right to express the meaning of Lee’s death has been won in the face of family silences: Lee’s father, silencing her mother: Ann’s father, whose silence denies Ann the emotional articulacy to comfort Lee when she meets her on the street, wearing the marks of Eric’s violence like jewellery. And this hard-won right of imagination and expression moves from the erotic tenderness of love scenes between Lee and Eric to the re-construction of Lee’s last hours into which Ann writes herself. In Ann’s dialogue with Lee no event can be changed. But anything can be narrated, from childhood violence to the nature of marriage. The figure of Lee thus acquires the authority and dignity of a ghost in a seventeenth century play, the one character who knows the reality of her death and can speak from beyond the grave. Yet it is Ann who initiates the encounter, Ann who invades physical and temporal space not her own, and thus Ann, arguably, who is the ‘ghost’ in her own narrative. Lee does not appear as the embodiment of social disturbance: rather, that disturbance is a willed political construct by Ann in a society which too lightly asks ‘Who cares about the death of a prostitute, anyway?’ (248). Consequently, the form of the book is highly structured, borrowing from those narrative shapes that assert the meaning and coherence of a death. Like a detective story, it begins with the discovery of a body and ends with the reconstruction of a murder. Like mourning, it begins with the fact of death and ends with acceptance. Like a deathbed, it articulates the social space left by the dying in the presence of witnesses. Ann summons other ‘ghosts’, both living and dead: there are representatives of all the discourses who define the social being – lawyers, teachers, parents, all the figures of authority who failed Lee and are forced to see the consequences of that failure; and there are the


murdered women who come in love and solidarity, stressing that the failure of social agency does not devalue the person who is failed. They pass through the walls. They slip out from the corners; they sweep in from the windows. They pool up like blood from the floor. . . they are here to speak ‘no.’ (254) Like a poem, it begins with an image of birds beating against a window and ends with the resolution of that image: A bird beats its wings in my heart. It swoops and chatters in the frenzied air, without its bearings, unable to find the way out. Here, Lee, I say. The window is here. I wave my arms in the air. The sky is a wide and terrible place. I open my heart, and she flies. (255) The release of Lee’s soul evisaged here is of course a shift in Ann’s experience, not Lee’s; the only person capable of being changed by this imagined encounter is Ann. And on both personal and political levels her awareness is changed. She can pay tribute for the first time to Lee as an instrument of her own feminist growth, helping her become separate from her parents, and begin the journey to the professional and sexual independence an earlier generation of women could not envisage. But she also articulates a difference between herself and Lee which has prevented Lee from reaching that state: the difference between parental mistakes which leave space for a new generation to negotiate the relationship in the light of a new analysis, and parental betrayal which leaves the psyche too vulnerable to undertake it. Ann is able to narrate this final encounter with Lee because the investigation has also reconciled her with the mother who was ‘always there’ (230) despite political differences. The scene takes the greatest risk inherent in the forensic epitaph: failure to interrogate power relations between dead muse and living writer, leading to romantic individualism and a display of self at a moment of life-changing intensity. Spoken in Darkness does not so privilege the living over the dead; it avoids it by the strength of the conflict between its status as academic project and the continuing eruption of a story which cannot fit easily into ideological parameters. Caroline Steedman suggests that ‘Personal interpretations of past time – the stories that people tell themselves in order to explain how they got to the place they currently inhabit – are often in deep and ambiguous


conflict with the official interpretative devices of a culture’ (1986: 7). Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman explores the difficulty of integrating the figure of her working class, Conservative mother into socialist grand narratives of class consciousness. Lee’s biography cannot be assimilated into a theoretical feminism which equates the raising of consciousness with the transformation of lives. Her sophisticated deconstruction of the high school dating scene co-exists with an ambivalent relationship to domestic violence. Her victim status exists alongside and arguably independent of her criminal status as blackmailer and armed robber. Yet her centrality to Ann’ s own feminism challenges both Imbrie and the reader to find a language and a theoretical structure in which to explain her. The presence in the basement of Lee, Ann and the reader during Lee’s last moments tests out the limits of language and representation. The narrative is at times direct and brutal: Imbrie describes in the present tense exactly how the women are stripped, tied, cut. Potentially this places us in an untenable relationship to the victim, destroying the posthumous privacy that is her only remaining dignity. But Ann’s imagined presence is active rather than reactive, focused not on her own responses but on the restoration of Lee’s dignity, stressing her role as social being rather than as an object of criminal violence. It denies the reader the opportunity to affect concern for the spectacularization of the victims in order to evade the knowledge of what happened. The actions Ann performs in offering to Lee’s words of comfort, memories of better times, a lullaby at the moment of death, function so clearly on the non-naturalistic plane that they do not minimize the horror of what takes place. What they do, by giving us the task of reconciling brutal action with lyrical vision in our own imagination, is to enforce the reader’s participation rather than her gaze. Torture chamber is transformed into deathbed with all the rights a deathbed accords the dying to attest to the meaning of their completed lives in the community.

Embodying the dead All narrative, says Margaret Atwood, is ultimately about negotiating with the dead. ‘The dead control the past, they control the stories.’ (2002: 178) Imbrie’s journey from remembering to researching to entering Lee’s death attests to her pain and personal transformation. Its existence between the covers of a book, however, also proclaims her control over the story. ‘I have suspended her in time’ (214), she writes just before the point where she chooses to enter her text to hold her impossible


conversation with Lee. As a playwright dramatizing Spoken in Darkness at Liverpool Playhouse, in 1997, I found that to stage the story changed the nature of this control. It was essential to preserve Imbrie’s structure, as on it depended Ann’s role as a narrator changed by her own narrative. However, while it was easy to develop stage conventions which allowed the audience to understand spatial and temporal leaps, with Ann becoming eleven or forty years old in a moment, it was important to impose some kind of consistency on the figure of Lee. The shift into that final impossible dialogue needed preparation. Hence the stage version opened with Ann in present time, casually recalling her past at the fag-end of a dinner party, and as soon as she was alone Lee walked on as a ghost to encounter her over the washing up. As a result, the right to tell and interpret the story no longer resided straightforwardly with Ann, but became a matter of negotiation. While Lee did not emerge from a specifically Christian afterlife or command Ann to avenge her, she took on many of the attributes of Old Hamlet. In Imbrie’s own text she shares his orneriness – Ann often argues with the imagined Lee – his insistent physicality – before Ann and Lee enter the basement, they engage suddenly, look closely at each other’s hands – and his refusal to allow Hamlet to do things his way. Hence it seemed logical that each of the books’s major shifts – from childhood memory to research, from research to participation – was argued about rather than smoothly achieved. As the first act – Ann’s own memories – drew to a close, Lee was withering about the sentimentality of a ‘trip down memory lane’. Ann was forced into research by the command ‘Go home. Find out. Find me.’ In short, the narrative was now partially driven by Lee. And when Ann, in the course of her research, discovered that Lee had lied to her as a child, that her mother had not died, but rejected her, she had a furious quarrel with the ghost who responded by forcing her to think out what such abandonment might mean. Lee, in short, was more than a memory: she had desires. These were not concerned with justice, or with revenge. Rather, they were about representation, and this was to drive the end of the play. I had been aware from the beginning of the project that the closing scenes of Spoken in Darkness were problematic. It seemed to me that to show what Imbrie describes would compromise the integrity of a vulnerable young actress turned into spectacle and the dignity of Lee and Ann, and a carefully restored life would be reduced again to the violence of its ending. While I took pains to establish the details of Lee’s fate elsewhere in the play, I did not show the scene in the basement. However, given its importance in the text as a site of resistance


to spectacularization (perhaps Imbrie’s greatest achievement) I could not simply omit it. But with narrative control restored to the figure of Lee, it was possible for Lee herself to challenge any attempt at toofacile representation, to deny Ann’s (and thus our own) right to be present. As she left her own car to enter Taylor’s – the moment when she was last seen alive – Lee forbade Ann to follow, refusing her the right to share a pain she cannot truly experience. ‘It’s my death, not yours.’ This seemed to restore to Lee onstage some of the deathbed rights that Imbrie grants her in the basement scene. It also kept her in the resistant, assertive tradition of the old stage ghosts which the process of dramatization had taught me to value and to perceive as a vital aspect of the emergent genre of forensic epitaph. For while modern horror movies bring the dead out of their graves in messy corruption, these earlier dramatic figures are more vital than their living counterparts, furious desiring energies that only rest after the restoration of the personal and social integrity of their place in the world. The achievement of Spoken in Darkness – as of My Dark Places – is not simply to challenge patriarchal violence or show what needs to change, but to allow the dead women it celebrates to be more than the speaking corpses of the forensic detective story. It permits them to be dissidents rather than tools of political ventriloquism, to shatter their status as simulacra in a world which obsessively buys and sells stories of murdered women. Jean Baudrillard offers the dead in the millenium a role of almost heroic resistance: So, everywhere, objects, children, the dead, images, women, everything which serves to provide a passive reflection in a world based on identity, is ready to go on to the counter-offensive. Already they resemble us less and less. . . . I’ll not be your mirror! (1996: 149) It has not apparently dawned on Baudrillard that feminism may have given women a head start in the process: that perhaps they are already talking back; and that it is time to embrace the willingness that resounds through those earlier rituals, the Jacobean tragedy and Cranmer’s funeral rite, to join that conversation.

Afterword

You have lived to read the end of this book. You probably took that for granted. Yet every book about crime challenges this assumption; we are reminded not only of our own mortality but also of its potentially random and violent nature. Our fictions express both our desire for this to be otherwise and our awareness that it is not so. Individual works may impose a meaning upon criminal destruction, but they contain within them the sense of their own contingency. The ancient Greeks watched Aeschylus’s Oresteia and felt they had achieved a fresh enlightenment about revenge and murder and our place in the universe, but they also knew that the last word had not been spoken, that the next year they would watch another writer’s version of the same myth. When the detective in the final chapter of a country house ‘cosy’ performs his tour de force in the library, rendering coherent a pattern of means, motive, opportunity, we are already deciding to repeat the experience with the next book. We know that the pattern is not an answer; it is a ritual which we enact to express our desire for an answer. When we turn to a narrative about real crimes we look for the specifics – the words actually spoken, the smallest details of a scene, an act – which mark its uniqueness, as if we might find an explanation this time. But it will ultimately elude us. If we are offered reasons, if a pattern is found, we are only too aware that our answer is provisional, that there is more we do not know. There are, in short, no conclusions to be drawn. Nonetheless, every effort to represent crime to ourselves is also a struggle within language and even if we could desist – perhaps we cannot – to do so would be to close a major avenue through which change is achieved. As language about crime, including that of fiction, is challenged, so do perceptions alter and so, finally, does the machinery of justice. The process is painfully slow: to read any 189


newspaper, any day, is to be aware of children betrayed by the state, of women in shallow graves whose murderers are never found, but the very presence of such stories signifies that issues once buried are being named, or spoken of in a different language, and that women have gained at least some control over the discourses of law, justice and morality. I want to close by examining an individual and powerful intervention into the discourse of murder. Marian Partington’s essay Salvaging the Sacred (Guardian 18 May 1996) does not use the literary strategies of the forensic epitaph discussed in the previous chapter, nor, although full of lovingly recounted anecdotes, it is a biography. Rather, it develops a performative language of words and signs which resists the spectacularization of the victim and articulates her moral centrality to her own story. Lucy Partington disappeared on 27 December 1973. She was 21, a student in her final year at Exeter University. In 1994 her body was recovered from the house of Frederick West. West sexually abused an uncounted number of women, some with the complicity of his wife Rosemary, he raped and prostituted his own children, he tortured and murdered more than ten women including his first wife and two of his daughters as well as students and young transients. He committed suicide in prison leaving the full extent of his crimes a matter of speculation. Subsequently his house in Gloucester was utterly destroyed. The act symbolized a kind of closure for the families of victims; it prevented souvenir-hunting, attempting to contain at least part of the spectacularization process discussed in the Introduction. It reflected a widely felt desire to forget. For to read the details of these murders is to experience Lesser’s sleaze factor almost undiluted. This makes them different from cases discussed in the body of this book. They have been horrific, but there have always been alternative languages to consider them. These modes of discourse may have largely been in conflict with one another: some have been controversial, unacceptable, or inappropriate, but there have been counter-discourses, new languages, from which to choose, so that it has been possible to enter into debate and reach out to the possibility of change. The crimes of West do not seem to permit this. It is possible to point out faultlines in the social structure which they reveal, faultlines this book has traced in other crimes and fictions: the failure of the social services to deal with the abuse of the West children and save them from worse, the wider indifference that left the disappearance of young and vulnerable women unremarked, the blindness of earlier generations to the

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incestuous abuse of West himself in childhood. It is possible to speak of such faultlines with differing emphases – on punishment or compensation, on personal or political responsibility – but it is clear that however we choose to do so, we are making massive omissions. The variety and scale of the crimes apparently render any attempt to find an answer so partial as to be pointless. Our awareness that so much is submerged, that there are deaths unacknowledged and testimony which can never be given, means that to read the details we do possess is necessarily to bring the imagination to bear upon them, and with this comes the possibility of prurience. Lucy Partington’s cousin Martin Amis sketches this process in action: Geoffrey Wansell, in his disgraceful book An Evil Love: the Life Of Frederick West, permits himself to concoct a decathlon of torments for my cousin. (‘The possibility must be that . . . there must be a suspicion that . . . there must at least be every possibility that . . . may have . . . may have . . . almost certainly. . . It seems only too probable that . . . It seems only too possible that . . . It seems only too possible that . . . The only possible conclusion is that. . . .’) But the fact is we don’t know – and almost certainly never will. (2000: 350) Any account of murder calls upon the imagination of those who did not witness it; when there are gaps like those in the West story it will be further exercised. Yet the imagination loses at its peril the awareness that it is, all the time, making choices. It can slip from negotiating with the evidence to negotiating with itself, to ‘permitting’ itself the right to present speculation as spectacle. When it does, it detaches itself from the possibility of resistance. It freezes itself at the moment of (imaginary) re-creation. It tips finally into complicity. However, to evade knowledge is to risk abandoning those who cannot evade it, those close to the victims, to a discourse that is already, as Marian Partington puts it, ‘sticky and staining’. West’s suicide meant that his wife Rosemary faced trial alone. He was represented solely by his interrogation tapes, a slew of lies and distortions describing an affair with Lucy, ‘purely sex, end of story,’ which ended when she ‘come the loving racket . . . said I wanna come and live with you and all this crap . . . I just grabbed her by the throat.’ This section of the tape was played in court precisely because it was such evident untruth, easily refuted by Lucy’s mother, her university, and the priest preparing her to become a Roman Catholic. The press, however, reported the tapes verbatim with sensationalist subheadings and without rebuttal.


The words were, in a sense, an extension of the murder, a further obliteration of the individual already destroyed. Yet at this point where the discourse of law met that of sensationalism there was an absence, a linguistic lack: no official space existed within the judicial process or in reportage to remove their effect. The ‘truth’ as far as both were concerned was simply that West had lied: it did not necessarily embrace the personal integrity of his victim. It was left to her loved ones to ‘crusade’ for her: I was fighting for the refinement of Lucy’s whole being that is so clearly reflected in the carefully chosen words of her poems. Russ [DC Russell Williams of the investigating team] gently reminded me that we were dealing with murder, not Lucy’s life. The campaigning energy of Marian Partington secured a public rebuttal of West’s lies. The gap in the language of justice and reportage remains, however, so long as other victims, lacking such lucid and articulate champions, remain vulnerable to posthumous violation. Salvaging the Sacred uses the medium of the newspaper to repeat the rebuttal originally withheld by the press; it thus reiterates the need for a discourse of intervention which replaces the ‘whole truth’ of the court’s single focus on the act with the wider ‘truth’ of the victim’s integrity. More than this, it begins to develop beyond the immediate situation and moves towards a new discourse of ‘salvage’, a language that allows the reader to participate in making meaning. The need for such language is made clear in Marian Partington’s account of the twenty years when her sister’s fate was not known; lack of even the most painful knowledge is crippling. ‘Somewhere inside I became disconnected from the past and disabled by the future.’ Nor can resistance to spectacle allow details to remain unspoken. ‘Euphemisms . . . present the unpresentable,’ concealing the fact that it is ’unpresentable’, that the unthinkable has indeed happened. Hence she records the facts that she knows: They beheaded and dismembered her and stuffed her into a small hole, surrounded by leaking sewage pipes – head first, face down, still gagged. Her flesh decomposed into a tarry black slime that stained the clay walls of the hole and coated the bones. The rope that held her in bondage, two hairgrips, a few strands of hair and the maskingtape gag survived with most of her bones. Who knows what happened to her missing bones?

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The detail is presented to the reader not as a horror to be passively contemplated but as the ground on which ‘salvage’ must take place. The paragraph is buttressed on both sides with details of another kind, the physical facts of a life. A significant number of these are to do with gifts, those Lucy gave and those she received. Old-fashioned memorial stones often contain lists of the deceased’s ‘gifts’ in the sense of virtues. In Salvaging the Sacred the ‘gifts’ are firmly material, but they lead the reader into an awareness of a personality in its context; they place the dead within a nexus of social rituals which reveal her. Marian Partington describes a bag Lucy gave her when they were children – made from wool she had carefully gathered on country walks, carded, spun and woven with simple tools she had made herself. She mentions the Victorian night light of amethyst glass that was her last Christmas gift to Lucy, ‘the colour of the air at dawn, just before the sun appears’. We might choose to call such items ‘symbolic’. Martin Amis in his memoir Experience does write about Lucy in terms of specifically literary symbolism. He recalls Donne’s poem on the radiant saint of light, ‘A Nocturnall upon St Lucies day, being the shortest day,’ and the darkness into which Lucy Partington walked on her last journey, during a winter gripped by an energy crisis that extinguished all street lights, a darkness reflecting the moral vacuum at the heart of her murder. ‘Everything about her, even her name, pointed towards the light’ (172). This is part of the texture of a consciously crafted autobiography, expressing the effect of both a powerful figure and her fate upon its subject; as such it is in a sense closed; we are not free to read it differently. The material gifts mentioned in Salvaging the Sacred, although they could be read with a similar set of literary tools at our disposal, have not been foregrounded by a writer structuring experience with a novelist’s priorities, nor invented by an author to fill an expressive need in the text. Rather, like all gifts, they represent part of an intimate dialogue of specific personal relations. The essay records them to allow that private language to become public and dynamic, drawing the reader into the process of creating and interpreting on the symbolic level. The process enables us to understand the more striking and innovative language of material objects which the writer goes on to describe. I have already indicated the gaps in our culture where there were formerly rituals for coming to terms with the dead. Where once the women of Staithes gave a shape to grief, mourners are largely left to find their own. For an experience like that of the Partingtons, unable to hold a funeral until the ‘remains’ ceased to be classified and held as ‘exhibits’, there are no prescribed structures at all. Marian Partington writes of ‘the


need to rescue and protect, in some way, Lucy’s physical remains.’ She writes both out of desire for such a ritual and the equal awareness that ‘some people might not understand’ the ritual she herself has created. By enabling us to read it through a narrative about childhood and giftgiving, however, she offers those who do understand and respond a new kind of performativity, a way for the living to enact the identity of the dead. It counters the objectification of the body as ‘evidence’ and celebrates it as something to ‘love and cherish:’ I gasped at the beauty of her skull. It was like burnished gold . . . I marvelled at the sense of recognition in its curves and proportion. I wrapped it, like I have wrapped my babies, in Lucy’s ‘soft brown blanket, her ‘snuggler.’ The language of childhood – both verbal and material – gives the body back its history. The gifts placed in the boxes containing Lucy’s bones – beloved old toys, sheep’s wool and heather from a loved landscape – continue the dialogue of gift-giving, this time between living and dead. This is a radical intervention into the silence and powerlessness created by murder, in Marian Partington’s words a chance to ‘reclaim’ the victim and to ‘act in a situation that was still out of our hands’. It is not surprising that the final rites also made use of this same language of transformation. Marian Partington speaks of the reordering and arrangement of Lucy’s bones with gifts from the family in a coffin they had made, an act so intimate that we can envisage the possibility of direct address from the living to the dead like that of the Cranmer rite. It is a rubric for a new ritual in which it is possible to speak of a victim’s individuality and also of her political right to live it out, a ritual allowing us to engage in mourning as a process within the self and also as a moral necessity to a society aware of its own failure. The language of Salvaging the Sacred is also transformative in that it dislodges the usual narrative structure of reportage, which moves from the discovery of the body to the outcome for the killer, a chronology which privileges the point of view of the murderer over that of the victim. Here there is constant movement between the immediate experience of loss – the trial and its aftermath – and the memories that are part of any family history, which recall Lucy as child, as student and as friend. It disrupts any sense of her murder as the central fact in her life and stresses that it is an arbitrary rupture, not part of a logic of cause and effect but a flaw in the fabric of society. And it closes with an account of a dream, that part of our experience in which time dissolves:

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Four months after her disappearance I had a dream. Lucy came back and I asked her where she had been. She said: ‘I’ve been sitting in a water meadow near Grantham and if you sit very still you can hear the sun move.’ This image filled me with a profound feeling of peace. Located as it is towards the end of the essay this becomes not a fleeting record of momentary comfort but a poetic assertion of Lucy Partington’s continuing agency, of the power of the dead to go on changing the situation of the living. The language of Salvaging the Sacred is, as Marian Partington states, ‘a rite of passage,’ not simply in the sense that it recounts personal mourning and acceptance but in that it removes us from the isolation of the voyeur into the activity of a community which also mourns. It offers a suggestion for collective public action, a practice derived from the use of prayer flags in Tibet and from a favourite poem of Lucy Partington, Yevtushenko’s I Have Hung a Poem on a Branch: Maybe we could start with each one of us writing a poem on a small piece of cloth and tying it to the branch of a tree, in memory of all victims of violence and as an act towards hope . . . It has become customary in the case of high profile murder cases, especially those involving women and children, for a site to become a shrine. Floral tributes and toys, large-scale public attendance and wide media coverage of victims’ funerals and memorial services have become an extension of the spectacle by other means; high-jacked by the media, they offer little opportunity for genuinely reflective grief. What is suggested here is closer to the term coined by Freud, ‘grief-work’. It liberates the imagination from gazing rigidly at a spectacle ready-made by reminding the reader that mourning is a precise and intimate act, and one which does not follow the artificial time-scheme of media anxious to pass on to the next cycle of murder, punishment and closure. I did not expect to be writing about fiction in connection with the West’s murders. There seemed no possible point of entry for the imagination that could lead it to offer an insight or open a debate. It is a measure of the power of Salvaging the Sacred that it generated a fiction, Bryony Lavery’s play Frozen, first performed at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1998 and revived at the National in 2002. The play is perhaps unique among fictions derived from real crimes in that its focus is not upon a figure based on a real criminal – Lavery’s murderer bears little resemblance to West – but upon an actual experience of bereavement. It draws extensively on the mourning rituals described in


Salvaging the Sacred, the care of the bones, the prayer flags, even the experience of watching the murder site destroyed; its fictionality, however, allows Lavery to explore the process not only from the point of view of the victim’s family but from that of the criminal and the criminologist, and to offer this exploration as public act. Frozen is about intensely private experience. The audience learns personal information about each of the characters. Nancy, the mother of a child who disappears and whose body is found years later, has a troubled marriage, a sometimes stormy relationship with her growing children. Ralph, the killer, lies about himself and to himself, but his background of violent abuse slowly manifests itself against his will. Agnetha, the psychiatrist investigating him, is consumed by grief and guilt over the death of a married colleague who was also her lover. This is not, however, a naturalistic play in which complex facets of personality emerge as figures interact in a ‘real’ setting. Their secrets are revealed to indicate the spiritual and emotional forces brought to bear on the central fact – the death of the child Rhona. The stage is almost bare, the few pieces of necessary furniture bleached of colour. There is no attempt to suggest a world offstage. Sometimes doors are visible – to indicate a prison, for example – but characters also emerge from a profound and formless darkness. As their lives begin to converge near the end of the play they converse in pairs, but there are no three-sided scenes. Most often, they are alone, conveying us their thoughts directly. Despite the intensely private nature of these thoughts, the play is as formal as a Greek tragedy – an appropriate structure in that to attend a play in Ancient Greece was to engage both a ritual and a civic obligation. Frozen demands our response as citizens rather than as consumers of a spectacle, it commands our attention not only to the pain of individuals but to the questions of responsibility and forgiveness which the story raises. This was underpinned by the performances of the three actors (who retained the roles they had created in Birmingham for the transfer to the National). While unsparingly realistic in their approach they made no effort to persuade the audience that they were anything but actors. Much of the power of the play, indeed, sprang from the casting of familiar figures. Anita Dobson, who played Nancy, starred in Eastenders for years, appearing in the living rooms of fourteen million homes twice a week. Josie Lawrence, who played the psychiatrist, is best known for her work in Whose line is it anyway?, a show in which a team of performers improvise comic sketches on themes suggested by the studio audience. Tom Georgeson, who played the killer, is one of those actors appearing

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so frequently on so many different television dramas that his face seems disconcertingly familiar while hard to place precisely. Each has, as it were, a past history with us. We are not likely to identify them with the character they portray but, lacking the distancing glamour of film stars, they can be identified as part of our own community. The familiar figures on stage are our representatives at an event which involves us as citizens of a world where the young and vulnerable are at risk. I saw the play at a time when it was impossible not to think of two young girls whose murder was filling the newspapers and it is hard to imagine a time when a revival of the play will not bring to mind a specific crime. Frozen offers us a way to ponder such crime not simply in a discourse of punishment or policing but in that of salvage. Thus, like Salvaging the Sacred, it subtly dislocates our sense of time. It is easy to assume that we are watching a naturalistic trajectory as we see Nancy’s experience unfold from the squabble with her daughters which is her last sight of Rhona (‘I don’t love either of them at all at the moment,’ she says with heartbreaking cheerfulness) through her struggles to come to terms with Rhona’s disappearance, the discovery of the murder twenty years later, her mourning and her eventual meeting with Ralph. It is intertwined both with Ralph’s experience of murder and imprisonment and the story of Agnetha. This last, however, cautions us against any simplistic interpretation of the timeframe. We see her leaving for England before Nancy’s story begins, but the lecture she is to deliver a day later occurs when Ralph has already been arrested and she moves freely between his cell and the podium. She thus functions as a chorus, out of time, punctuating the action with details about the formation of ‘the Arctic frozen sea that is . . . the criminal brain’ (2002: 35). Her personal experience of bereavement is not treated in naturalistic time, but in terms of its effect upon the others. We are looking not at three parallel strands of action moving at an identical rate, but at three individual journeys through a personal hell which nonetheless have power to intersect and comment upon one another in unexpected ways. For instance, Agnetha breaks down when she hears her lover speaking the voice-over to a video; Ralph responds to her distress with a crude sexual overture, unwittingly glossing the point made by the video, that children who have been abused lose the capacity to show compassion. His question ‘Was I out of order?’ (60) can be seen as a tentative intervention in the debate about ‘the difference between a sin and a symptom’ which Agnetha is conducting through her lecture. It may even prompt her own act in the next scene – she telephones her lover’s wife, comforts her and refrains


from a confession to lighten her own sense of guilt, thus mapping one boundary between ‘sin’ and personal responsibility. Ralph’s small epiphany seems to suggest that while her reply to his attempt at apology – ‘you can’t help it’ – is a fair response to his inappropriate treatment of her distress it is also too rigid a way of defining the boundary of a ‘symptom’ in that it seems to preclude the possibility of learning or change on the part of the offender. If the characters are on a purgatorial journey of transformation it is not an uninterrupted progress towards the light. Nancy gains in strength and stature: she founds an organization, ‘Flame’, for the parents of vanished children and finds that she is a charismatic speaker. The play, however, refutes the economy of ‘triumph through tragedy’ articulated in some bourgeois-feminist success stories which suggests that pain can be made to yield a psychic profit. Nancy fails her other daughter, Ingrid. She describes her manifestations of grief without sympathy – ‘Size of her since she gave up her smoking and drinking,’ and when Ingrid leaves for Nepal she says, ‘I don’t care’ (42). Ingrid is responsible for her own transformation into a redemptive figure, returning home just as Rhona’s remains are released and helping Nancy devise a ritual of protection like that described in Salvaging the Sacred. Anita Dobson narrated this with such power that the audience was held in profound silence; she enabled them to share a leap forward into a new language, one which gave the childish clutter of Rhona’s bedroom a grave ritual significance and revealed the bones themselves as things of beauty rather than fear. However, the action does not stop here. As she narrates Ingrid’s next challenge to her – to forgive Ralph – Nancy erupts in rage, screaming for his death (and, briefly, blindly, for Ingrid’s) and the first half of the play concludes with the clear sense that the journey is not over. This shape of multiple peaks rather than a steady movement to climax and resolution is typical of much feminist drama, employing a ‘broken-backed’ structure to reflect the fragmented experience of women for whom maternal and personal trajectories are often in tension. While the narrative encourages the audience to long for a confrontation between Ralph and Nancy, the power of the scene which finally takes place lies in its recognition not only of the value of forgiveness but of its cost and its limits. Nancy speaks to Ralph through pictures of her daughter, a language which is an extension of that she acquired in cherishing the bones. She has, however, been disowned by all her family except Ingrid as ‘criminal’ for attempting to share that acquisition with Ralph. And it shatters Ralph’s own language. This is a

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mixture of chilling euphemism – the place where he kills is called his ‘centre of operations,’ he perceives Rhona as ‘interested’ in him – and a collage of TV commercials and children’s stories he substitutes for the real and terrible memories of his own childhood. (He uses, at one point, a phrase spoken by Rosemary West, who lured a victim to the house with the promise that she could ‘ride horses and read poetry,’ (41) a suggestion perhaps of her own longing for a different past.) Experiments with Agnetha, too, have indicated his abuse-born inability to adapt and play with words. In the face of forgiveness Ralph’s speech crashes in flames, slipping from describing an imaginary father to speaking in the voice of his real, violent and threatening one. Nancy seizes on this experience to point out to him what he has never yet acknowledged: that Rhona felt the same kind of fear and pain, and that he is the cause. Ralph struggles to articulate this. He attempts a letter of apology, and cannot write it. He complains of a pain in his heart, which Agnetha identifies as remorse. He cannot finally deal with what he has done in words alone. Pain is the only truthful language he knows. (Getting a new tattoo after every killing, Ralph is the only character whose physical suffering we actually witness.) Fucking hurts Burns. Eats. Gnaws. Fucking cancer. (92) He hangs himself, and the two women attend his funeral; they do not mourn, but they are there. His death is acknowledged and it prompts a series of further questions about personal responsibility by the others. Nancy has to accept that her visit, made against Agnetha’s wishes, may have caused his suicide. She advises Agnetha, still wanting to confess to her affair, to accept its consequence alone. ‘No. You just suffer’ (100). The women also remark on the presence of a woman who may have been Ralph’s foster mother, and who, we assume, will never take responsibility for what he was On one level the ending is bleak. Nothing can change Rhona’s fate. Ralph’s self-inflicted capital punishment seems to make a mockery of Nancy’s own change from hate-ridden campaigner for the death penalty. It is also the same death as that of West, who never articulated any kind of regret. But the characters have all ceased to be ‘frozen.’ The discourse of salvage has allowed Nancy to begin a new relationship – she


tells us, exuberantly, of her first night with a new man; it has allowed Agnetha to move on – she leaves not for New York but for Iceland, a new beginning; and even Ralph’s final word suggests that even though he cannot express sorrow adequately he has entered the struggle to do so; the ‘hello’ with which he has initiated every murderous encounter has become his greeting to the new self he would like to be but cannot. Frozen received the TMA Best New Play Award and the Eileen Anderson Central Television Award for Best Play and its reviews have been excellent, a marked contrast to the reception of Lavender Blue in the 1970s. While this marks both a wider public consciousness of the issues raised by the play and a more sophisticated awareness of the theatrical techniques needed to handle them, it also, perhaps, reflects a desire for the kind of language it makes available to us. Women have entered into the discourses of law and crime and justice and death and helped to shape them, but the sheer volume of material we encounter every day has rendered these stale. Women have brought the personal into the political, but every day the media exploitation of private grief debases and spectacularises the personal. The relationship between the carefully narrated experience of Salvaging the Sacred and its adaptation and ordering into a public rite of Frozen is a timely reminder of the need for continuing innovation in language, for the collapse of boundaries between family and society, personal and social, legal and moral, and of the power of women’s imagination in making it happen.

Notes 2 Guilty victims 1 Thus an advertisement in the People, 11 June 1995. Given that the victims were risking their lives for pennies, there seems little likelihood of their having much access to a silver coin worth 25p. 2 See Walkowitz’s account of the book’s reception in America in City of Dreadful Delight, p. 314n. 3 The most recent high-profile version of the Knight theory can be found in the film From Hell, based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. While the text develops the characters of the women the film allows Keanu Reeves’s Abberline the heroic role rather than stressing the wit of Marie Kelly in saving herself and the prince’s child. 4 A complex examination of this possibility is undertaken in Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly, whose heroine is the maid featuring briefly in Jekyll and Hyde. Mary, with a dead mother and a violent father, constructs her own domestic space in a garden she makes for Dr Jekyll’s house. This gives her the energy to disrupt the servant hierarchy and befriend her master directly. She debates with him the nature of ‘goodness’ and implies that his efforts to become a force for ‘good’ via his experiments are doomed to failure because ‘good’ must necessarily spring from the social equality they have achieved between them. She implies that the duty of the politician is precisely to foster the kind of material conditions symbolised by the garden’s plenitude and democracy.

3 Speaking victims 1 Throughout, Daniels reverses Barker’s use of the names ‘Carol’ and ‘Jean’.

7 Cruel mother 1 For example, the case of Yasmin Gibson who flew to the Costa del Sol leaving her eleven-year-old daughter at home. The Mirror headline read YOU BITCH, while the Sun claimed full credit for flying her home. 2 It is interesting here to examine Morrison’s description of undressing his infant daughter in the light of Germaine Greer’s discussion of it. She has labelled the passage (The Whole Woman, Anchor 2000, p. 279) a ‘violating text’ – albeit artful and beautifully written – which offers the child to the gaze. The section of As If in which this occurs is an analysis of paternal/parental feelings in their complexity, which can include both sexual desire and its loving suppression, and their volatility, which can include murderous rage. It suggests, perhaps, a simultaneous willingness to examine the problematization of the masculine and an instance of the process in action.

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202 Notes

8 Writing the dead 1 See for example Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995). 2 Or maybe not. On 20 November 2002, Gunther von Hagens conducted an autopsy in front of a ticket-buying public and the Channel Four cameras. His subject, however, was an elderly male, and this may well have been a strategy to undercut any potential sexual frisson. 3 For example, a reconstruction from a skull discovered in the Siberian mountains involved the decision to give this figure of undoubted rank and power the face of an Altai woman rather than that of a Caucasian Russian, a choice which had clear political significance for the community in which she was found. 4 I use the name ‘Ann’ to denote Imbrie as she appears in the text, ‘Imbrie’ when discussing those authorial choices she does not herself discuss within it.

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206 Bibliography Kennedy, Helena, Eve Was Framed, Chatto and Windus 1992. Knight, Stephen, Jack the Ripper: the Final Solution, Harrap 1976. Koestler, Arthur, The Trail of the Dinosaur: Reflections on Hanging, Hutchinson Danube 1970. Krag, Geraldine Pedersen, ‘Detective Stories and the Primal Scene,’ Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1949. Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror, tr. L. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, NY 1982. Lavery, Bryony, Frozen, Faber and Faber 2002. Lepage, Robert, ‘Lavender Blue and the Critics at the Cottesloe,’ Theatre Quarterly, Spring 1978, vol. 8, no. 29. Light, Alison, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars, Routledge 1991. Listowel, Judith, A Habsburg Tragedy, Ascent 1978. Lombroso, Cesare and Ferrero, The Female Offender, Fisher Unwin 1895. Lowndes, Marie Belloc, The Lodger (ed.) Laura Marcus, Oxford Popular Fiction 1996. McDermid, Val, The Mermaids Singing, HarperCollins 1993. McDermid, Val, A Place of Execution, HarperCollins 1999. Mackendrick, John, Lavender Blue, Eyre Methuen 1977. Maggio, Rosalie, The Non-sexist Word Finder: A Dictionary of Gender-free Usage Oryx, New York 1987. Marcus, Steven, ‘Freud and Dora,’ In Dora’s Case, (eds) C. Bernheimer and C. Cahane, Virago 1985. Marsh, Ngaio, Death on the Air and Other Stories, HarperCollins 1995. Marsh, Ngaio, Scales of Justice, Fontana 1964. Martin, Valerie, Mary Reilly, Black Swan 1991. Masters, Brian, She Must Have Known, BCA 1996. Mawby, R.L. and Walklate, Critical Victimology, Sage 1994. Miller, D.A., ‘Cage aux Folles: Sensation and Gender in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White,’ Speaking of Gender, (ed.) E. Showalter, Routledge 1989. Modleski, Tania, Loving with a Vengeance, Routledge 1982. Moore, Alan and Campbell, Eddie, From Hell, Knockabout 2000. Moore, Susanna, In The Cut, Picador 1996. Morrison, Blake, As If, Granta 1997. Morrison, Toni, Birth of a Nation ‘hood, Vintage 1997. Munt, Sally, ‘The Invertigators’, Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender and Popular Fiction, (ed.) S. Radstone, Lawrence and Wishart 1988. Munt, Sally, Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel, Routledge 1994. Naish, Camille, Death Comes to the Maiden: Sex and Execution 1431–1933, Routledge 1991. Nicholas, Margaret, The World’s Wickedest Women, Hamlyn 1994. Nuttall, Merlin and Morrison, Sharon, It Could Happen to You, Virago 1997. Palmer, Alan, Twilight of the Habsburgs, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1994. Partington, Marion, ‘Salvaging the Sacred,’ Guardian Weekend, 18 May 1996. Perry, Anne, Highgate Rise, HarperCollins 1995. Poe, Edgar Allan, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, Poems and Essays, Everyman 1969. Poovey, Mary, Uneven Developments: the Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England, Virago 1988. Prince’s Trust, Abuse and Survival pamphlet, Cheam 1997.

Bibliography 207 Raine, Nancy Venable, After Silence: Rape and my Journey Back, Virago 1999. Rendell, Ruth, The Keys to the Street, Hutchinson 1996. Renvoize, Jean, Innocence Destroyed A Study of Child Sexual Abuse, Routledge 1993. Rothfield, Lawrence, Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth Century Fiction, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1992. Rumbelow, Donald, The Complete Jack the Ripper, New York Graphic Society, Boston 1975. Saward, Jill, Rape: My Story, Pan 1991. Sayers, Dorothy L., Strong Poison, Folio 1998. Sayers, Dorothy L., Whose Body?, NEL 1975. Sayers, Dorothy L., Gaudy Night, NEL 1992. Sereny, Gitta, The Case of Mary Bell, Pimlico 1995. Sereny, Gitta, Cries Unheard: The Story of Mary Bell, Macmillan 1998. Shepherd, Simon, ‘Pauses of Mutual Agitation,’ Proceedings of the National Film Theatre Conference on Melodrama 1992. Unpublished. Showalter, Elaine, Sexual Anarchy, Virago 1990. Smart, Carol, ‘Deconstructing Motherhood’ (ed.) Bortolaia Silva, Good Enough Mothering? Feminist Perspectives on Lone Motherhood, Routledge 1996. Smith, Joan, Misogynies, Faber and Faber 1989. Smith, Joan, Different for Girls: How Culture Creates Women, Chatto and Windus 1997. Spring, Jacqueline, Cry Hard and Swim: the Story of an Incest Survivor, Virago 1987. Spring, Michelle, Standing in the Shadows, Orion 1998. Stanford, Peter, Lord Longford, Heinemann 1994. Staples, Mary Jane, The Ghost of Whitechapel, Corgi 1997. Steedman Caroline, Landscape for A Good Woman, Virago 1986. Stratton, John, The Desirable Body: Cultural Fetishism and the Erotics of Consumption, Manchester University Press 1988. Sugden, Philip, The Complete History of Jack the Ripper, Robinson 1994. Taylor, Alison, Simeon’s Bride, Penguin 1996. Taylor, Alison, In Guity Night, Penguin 1997. Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Peregrine 1984. Thomas, Ronald, ‘Double Exposures: Arresting Images in Bleak House and The House of the Seven Gables,’ Novel 31: 1 Fall 1997. Todorov, Tzvetan, The Poetics of Prose, Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1977. Tutt, Norman, ‘Some Issues for the statutory Agencies,’ Children Who Kill, (ed.) P. Cavadino, Waterside Press for British Juvenile and Family Courts, Chippenham 1994. Vachss, Andrew, Flood, Pan 1986. de Vega, Lope, Fuenteovejuna, tr. W. Colford, Barron’s Educational Series, Woodbury, NY 1969. Walker, Peter N., Grave Secrets, Constable 1992. Walklate, Sandra, Gendering Crime, Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf 1995. Walkowitz, Judith, City of Dreadful Delight, Virago 1994. Warner, Marina, From the Beast to the Blonde, Vintage 1995. Warner, Marina, No Go the Bogeyman, Chatto and Windus 1998. Waterhouse, Ronald, Lost in Care: Report of the Tribunal of Inquiry into the Abuse of Children in Care in the Former County Council Areas of Gwynedd and Clwyd Since 1974, Report to House of Commons, London Stationery Office 2000.

208 Bibliography Webster, Richard, The Great Children’s Home Panic, Orwell Press, Oxford 1998. Weis, René, Criminal Justice: the True Story of Edith Thompson, Penguin 1988. West, Paul, The Women of Whitechapel, Serpents Tail 1991. Williams, Emlyn, Beyond Belief, Pan 1976. Williams, Patricia, ‘American Kabuki’, Birth of a Nation ’hood, (ed.) Toni Morrison, Vintage 1997. Wilson, Barbara, ‘The Outside Edge: Lesbian Mysteries,’ Para: Doxa, vol. 1, no. 2, Vashon Island, WA, 1995, p. 182. Wilson, Barbara, Sisters of the Road, Women’s Press 1987. Wilson, Barbara, The Dog Collar Murders, Virago 1989. Woolf, Virginia, ‘Three Pictures,’ The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, Hogarth Press 1942. Worboyes, Sally, Whitechapel Mary, Coronet 2001. Yallop, David, Deliver us From Evil, Macdonald Futura 1981. Young, Alison, Imagining Crime, Sage 1996. Young, Filson, Trial of Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson, Notable British Trials Series,William Hodge and Company, 1923. Zahavi, Helen, Dirty Weekend, Flamingo 1992. Zipes, Jack, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, Honeymoon, NY 1983. Zipes, Jack, The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, Routledge 1993.

Index Abberline, George, 48–50 Ackroyd, Peter, 174 Adler, Irene, 12–16, 17 Adler, Victor, 15 After Silence (Raine), 88 Against Our Will (Brownmiller), 85 Age of Sex Crime, The (Caputi), 42–3 Albert Victor, Prince (‘Eddy’), 48, 50 Allitt, Beverley, 125 All That Remains (Cornwell), 173 Alma Cogan (Burn), 123–4 Amis, Martin, 191, 193 Anderson, Sir Robert, 45 Another World (Barker), 165–8 Appleyard, Brian, 139–40 Archer, Frederick Scott, 107 Arcimboldo, Guiseppe, 106 Ariès, Philippe, 169 Armstrong, Alun, 65–6 As If (Morrison), 159–62 Asche, Oscar, 1 Atwood, Margaret, 186 Austin, J.L., 91 Baffle Book, The (Jesse), 31 Bandara, Uphadhyda, 73 Band of Gold (Mellor), 81 Badge, The (Webb), 178 Barker, Pat, 76–81, 165–8 Barnardo, Dr Thomas, 45 Barnett, Joseph, 46, 47 Barthes, Roland, 25 Baudrillard, Jean, 177–8, 188, 202n. Beerbohm Tree, Mrs, 1–2, 4 Bella Donna (Hichens), 27 Bell, Mary, 166–7 Benjamin, Walter, 106 Bennett, Alan, 115 Bennett, Keith, 105, 109, 110 Between Pulpit and Pew (Clarke), 7–8 Beyond Belief (Williams), 113–16 Birdsall, Trevor, 72 Birch, Helen, 109, 113

Birmingham Repertory Theatre, 195–6 Birth of a Nation ’hood (Morrison), 2–3, 5 Black Dahlia, The (Ellroy), 174–80 Black, Joel, 4 Black Notice (Cornwell), 172–3 Blackstone’s Commentaries, 127 Blake, Peter, 123 Bloch, Robert, 43, 53–4 Blow Your House Down (Barker), 76–81, 135 Blow Your House Down (Daniels), 79–81 Blunkett, David, 124 Body Farm, The (Cornwell), 170–2 Bond, Edward, 112 Boreham, Justice, 67 Borgia, Lucrezia, 11 Bowlby, John, 131–2, 149 Brady, Ian, 104–16 Brass Eye, 72 Brieux, Eugene, 2 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 171–3, 177 Brook, Peter, 123 Brooks, Peter, 21 Browne, Tracy, 65 Brownmiller, Susan, 85, 150–2, 157 Buckroyd, DI Trevor, 140 Bulger, James, 18, 158–68 Bulger, Denise, 160, 161 Bulger, Ralph, 160, 161 Burn, Gordon, 5, 68–9, 74–5, 123–4 Butler Education Act, 112 Butler-Sloss, Lord Justice Dame Elizabeth, 140 Bywaters, Frederick, 20–40 Cagney and Lacey, 95 Caine, Michael, 48–50 Callaghan, James, 133 Camden Town Murder, 1–2 Camden Town Murder Series (Sickert), 2 209

210 Index Campbell, Beatrix, 132 Canary, The (Jesse), 31 Capote, Truman, 5 Caputi, Jane, 42–3, 47, 53, 62, 66 Carter, Angela, 83–4, 99 Cause of Death (Cornwell), 170 Central News Agency, 44 Chandler, Raymond, 16, 17, 95, 122, 136 Chapman, Annie, 44, 46, 49, 58 Chesterton, G.K., 22–3 Child Care and the Growth of Love (Bowlby), 131 Child Migrants Trust, 131 Christian Brothers, 131 Christie, Agatha, 9, 16, 27, 28, 31, 76, 121–2, 128–32, 170 CID, 45 City of Dreadful Delight (Walkowitz), 44 Cixous, Helene, 9, 70, 177 Clarke, David, 7–8 Clarissa (Richardson), 94–5, 96 Clemens, Sarah, 54–5 Clytemnestra, 25, 109 Clwyd County Council, 140 Cohen, Josh, 179 Colenbrander, Joanna, 35 Collins, Lewis, 49 Collins, Wilkie, 11–12 Company of Wolves, The (Carter), 83–4, 100 Complete Jack the Ripper, The (Rumbelow), 41 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 13–16, 31 Connecticut Laws (1919), 127 Conroy, Pat, 89 Cornwell, Patricia, 170–4 Coronation Street, 115 Coroner to the Stars, 5 Court of Criminal Appeal, 20 Courtroom Television Network, 5 Coward, Noel, 37 Cranmer, Thomas, 169, 176, 194 Cranny-Francis, Anne, 62 Creed, Barbara, 97 Crimewatch, 65 Crime Wave (Ellroy), 175 Crime Writers’ Association, 29

Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, 88–9 Criminal Justice (Weis), 21 Crook, Annie, 50, 51 Cross, Amanda, 181–2 Cruel and Unusual (Cornwell), 170 Cruel Mother, The, 148–9 Cry Hard and Swim (Spring), 90–3 Cullen, Tom, 41 Currie, Edwina, 49 Curtain (Christie), 9 Daily Express, 116, 124, 158 Daily Mail, 24, 31 Daily Mirror see Mirror Daily Telegraph, 111 Daniel, Mark, 47–50 Daniels, Sarah, 79–81, 135 Davies, Nick, 125 Dawson, Jill, 38–40 Day-Lewis, Cecil, 37 Decline of the English Murder (Orwell), 33 Deconstructing Motherhood (Smart), 126–7 Dee, Jack, 172 Deliver Us From Evil (Yallop), 64 Der Anatom (von Max), 172–3, 174 Deuteronomic Code, 85, 86 Dice Clay, Andrew, 138 Dickens, Alison, 86 Dimmock, Emily, 2 Diogenes, 23 Dirty Weekend (Zahavi), 96–7 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 22 Dog Collar Murders, The (Wilson), 99–100 Dobash, R. and R., 157 Dobson, Anita, 196, 198 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen), 34 Dominici, or the Triumph of Literature (Barthes), 25 Donne, John, 193 ‘Dora’, 14, 17 Double Exposures (Thomas), 107 Downey, Lesley Ann, 105, 108, 110, 123 Dragnet, 178 Dressed to Kill, 64

Index 211 Druitt, Montague, 43 Dunant, Sarah, 100–2 Duncker, Patricia, 84 Dupin Auguste, 13, 42, 78 Duttine, John, 66 Eagleton, Terry, 94 Eddowes, Catherine, 44, 46 Eliot, TS, 24, 27, 38–9, 47 Ellroy, James, 174–81 Ellroy, Jean, 174–80 Evans, Richard, 22 Executioner’s Song, The (Mailer), 68 Experience (Amis), 193 Fantastic Freaks, 11 Farson, Daniel, 41 Feldman, Shoshana, 92 Fetterley, Judith, 100 Finer Report, 133 Fletcher, Eric, 183–4 Fletcher, Lee Snavely, 181–6 Flood (Vachss), 136–8 Foucault, Michel, 6, 7, 22, 44, 50, 107 Frankenstein, 168 Fred and Edie (Dawson), 38–40 French, Nicci, 98–9, 151 Freud, Sigmund, 14, 30, 32, 36, 70 Friedman, Susan, 87 From Hell, 201n. From Potter’s Field (Cornwell), 170 Frozen (Lavery), 195–200 Fuente Ovejuna (de Vega), 122 Gamble, Sarah, 84, 100 Garth, 94 Gaudy Night (Sayers), 17 Georgeson, Tom, 196 Ghost of Whitechapel, The (Staples), 58 ‘Giles’, 128 Gilmore, Gary, 68 Girard, René, 178–9 Godley, George, 48–9 Good Night’s Work, A (Clemens), 54–5 Golding, William, 159 GQ, 175 Graef, Roger, 85 Grant, Alistair, 124 Grave Secrets (Walker), 116

Greer, Germaine, 201n. Greg, W.R., 10 Gregory, Det. Supt. Ronald, 66 Grimm, the Brothers, 83–4 Guardian, 72, 124, 125, 149 Gull, Sir William, 48, 50–2 Gusdorf, Georges, 87 Gwynedd County Council, 141 von Hagens, Gunther, 202n. Hague, William, 141 Hale, Robert, 46–7 Hall, Edward Marshall, 1 Hallam, Julia, 131–2 Hammett, Dashiell, 17, 95 Hamlet, 129, 180–1, 187 Hansford Johnson, Pamela, 109–13, 114 Happy Like Murderers (Burn), 5 Hardy, Thomas, 24–5, 69, 108 Harm Done (Rendell), 6 Harvey, Marcus, 104–6, 107, 124, 162 Have His Carcase (Sayers), 29 Hegarty, Frances, 155–8 Heilbrun, Caroline, 181–2 Hellawell, Keith, 63, 75 Henneman, Debbie, 181 Herman, Judith, 92 Herrick, Robert, 35 Hichens, Robert, 27 Hicks, Seymour, 1 Highgate Rise (Perry), 59 Highsmith, Patricia, 68 Hill, Jacqueline, 72, 73 Hindley, Myra, 18, 104–25, 162 Hirst, Damien, 5 Hitchcock, Alfred, 138 Hobson, Det Chief Supt. Jim, 66, 73 Hogarth, Basil, 1–2 Holding, Nicola, 88 Holloway Prison, 20–1 Holmes, Sherlock, 9, 13–16, 78 Home Office, 21–2, 86, 109 Houen, Alex, 15 Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 152–3 Human Rights Act, 124 Human Shows (Hardy), 24 Hussein, Saddam, 149 Hymn to Demeter, 92

212 Index Ibsen, Henrik, 2, 34 Illustrated London News, 22–3, 38 Imbrie, Anne E., 181–8 Incest Survivors’ Group, 139 In Cold Blood (Capote), 5 Independent, 140, 141 In Guilty Night (Taylor), 141–6 Innocent Blood (James), 117–20 Inspector Morse, 65, 172 In the Cut (Moore), 102–3 Irving, Henry, 1 It Could Happen to You (Nuttall), 88–9 Jackson, Glenda, 123 Jack the Ripper, 41–60, 62–3 Jack the Ripper (Daniel/Thames TV/Euston), 47–50 Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (Knight), 50–1 Jack the Ripper: The Mystery Solved (Hale), 46–7 James, Henry, 10, 11, 152 James, P.D., 117–20 Jardine, Lisa, 96 Jesse, F. Tennyson, 22, 30–8 Jillings Report, 140 Johnson, Joyce, 150, 152–5, 157 Johnson, Winnie, 105 Jones, Lady Elwyn, 111–12 Jouve, Nicole Ward, 62, 69–71 Julius Caesar, 37 Justice Working Party on Children and Homicide, 161 Keeler, Christine, 123 Kelly, Mary Jane (Marie), 44, 45, 46, 50–2 Kennedy, Helena, 22, 86, 88, 108 Kennedy, Jacqueline, 123 Kent, Constance, 32, 167–8 Keys to the Street (Rendell), 13 Kiendl, Teddy, 79 Kilbride, John, 110, 120 Killing Me Softly, 98–9, 151 King, Tim, 3 Knight, Stephen, 50–1 Knox, Ronald, 13 Koestler, Arthur, 22 Krafft-Ebbing, 45, 112

Krag, Geraldine Pedersen, 9, 176 Kristeva, Julia, 24, 54, 98, 101 Lacan, Jacques, 44 Lacquer Lady, The (Jesse), 35 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence), 27 Landscape for a Good Woman (Steedman), 185–6 L’Angelier, Pierre Emile, 10 Laptew, D.C., 65 Lavender Blue (Mackendrick), 132–6, 200 Law and the Lady, The (Collins), 11 Launders, Michelle, 155 Laurenson, James, 66 Lawrence, Josie, 196 Lawrence, DI Keith, 140 Lavery, Bryony, 195–6 Lesser, Wendy, 6, 7, 19, 113, 190 Ligeia (Poe), 177 Light, Alison, 30 Lighter Side of My Official Life, The (Anderson), 45 Lilley, Peter, 161 Lindbergh, Charles, 16, 121 Liverpool Echo, 159 Liverpool Playhouse, 187 Lodger, The (Lowndes), 55–7, 71 Lombroso, Cesare, 8, 13, 32 London Dungeon, 42, 170 London Review of Books, 159 Lord Chamberlain, 112 Lord of the Flies (Golding), 159 Lost in Care (Waterhouse), 141 Lowndes, Marie Belloc, 55–7, 64, 154 Lucrece, 96 Lusk, George, 48 McCann, Wilma, 74–5 McDermid, Val, 5, 6, 120–3 MacDonald, Jayne, 63, 66, 73–5 McGregor, Ewen, 148, 158 Mackendrick, John, 132–6 Madame Tussaud’s, 42, 45–6 Maggio, Rosalie, 72 Mailer, Norman, 68, 69 Major, John, 161–2, 164 Manchester Rape Crisis, 86 Marcus, Laura, 56, 57

Index 213 Marcus, Steven, 14 Married Love (Stopes), 26 Marsh, Ngaio, 17, 29–30 Martin, Valerie, 201n. Mary Reilly, 201n. Mason, AEW, 1 Massachusetts Victim Compensation Program, 88–9 Masters, Brian, 4, 5 Matthews, Ray, 158, 160 Mayerling, 15 Mellor, Kay, 81 Mermaids Singing, The (McDermid), 5 Miller, D.A., 10 Mills and Boon, 97 Mirror, 4, 94, 104–5, 147–8, 158 Modern Times, 108, 116 Modleski, Tania, 97 Monroe, Marilyn, 25, 106 Moore, Susanna, 102–3 Morris, Chris, 72 Morris, William, 1 Morrison, Blake, 158, 159–61, 201n. Morrison, Sharon, 88 Morrison, Toni, 2–3, 4, 5 Mothers Against Murder and Aggression, 105 Mousetrap, The (Christie), 128–32, 136 Mrs Warren’s Profession (Shaw), 2, 77 Municipal Mutual Insurance Company, 141 Munt, Sally, 16, 30 Murder and its Motives (Jesse), 31–2, 35 Murder Is Announced, A (Christie), 129 Murder on the Orient Express (Christie), 16, 121, 122 Murder on Ward Four (Davies), 125 My Dark Places (Ellroy), 174–80, 188 Naish, Camille, 23 Nash, Ogden, 98 National Theatre, 132–4 Netley, John, 50, 52 News of the World, 2, 4, 124 Nicholls, Polly, 44 North Wales Child Abuse Tribunal, 141 Notable British Trials, 36, 38 NOVA, 173

NSPCC, 141, 148 Nursing the Image (Hallam), 131–2 Nussbaum, Hedda, 149–55 Nuttall, Merlyn, 88–9 Observer, 67–8 Odell, Robin, 41 Odyssey, The, 23 Oedipus, 43, 70, 138 O’Hagan, Andrew, 159 Oldfield, Asst. CC George, 63, 65–6 On Iniquity (Hansford Johnson), 109–12, 116, 123 On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (De Quincey), 52 Oresteia, 71, 109, 189 Orkney, 139 Orpheus, 92, 93 Orwell, George, 33 Othello, 72, 73 Over Her Dead Body (Bronfen), 171–3 Overseas Migration Board, 130–1 Paretsky, Sara, 95 Partington, Lucy, 18, 190–5 Partington, Marian, 18, 190–5 Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage (Ralegh), 102 Paulsgrove, 6 Pentonville Prison, 20 Perrault, Charles, 83 Perry, Anne, 59 Persephone, 92–3 Pinero, Arthur Wing, 1 Pin to See the Peepshow, A (Jesse), 32–6, 76 Place of Execution, A (McDermid), 120–3 Plath, Sylvia, 114 Playroom, The (Hegarty), 155–8 Plays and Players, 133 Poe, Edgar Allan, 13, 171, 177 Poetics of Prose, The (Todorov), 175 Point of Origin (Cornwell), 172 Poirot, Hercule, 9, 121, 122, 129, 170 Prime Suspect, 173 Prince of Tides, The (Conroy), 89 Private Eye, 72

214 Index Psychopathia Sexualis (Krafft-Ebbing), 45, 112 Punch, 44 Punch and Judy, 43, 44 Purloined Letter, The (Poe), 13 De Quincey, Thomas, 52 Raine, Nancy Venable, 88–9, 91–3 Rattenbury, Alma, 36–8 Rattenbury, Francis, 36 Reade, Pauline, 109, 110, 120 Rear Window, 153 Red Riding Hood, 83–4, 93, 156 Reeves, Keanu, 201n. Reichs, Kathy, 170–1 Rendell, Ruth, 6 Resisting Reader, The (Fetterley), 100 Richardson, Samuel, 94 Ripen Our Darkness (Daniels), 81 ‘Ripperology’, 41, 42, 50, 59, 60, 76 ‘Ripper Roadshow’, 63 Rituals of Retribution (Evans), 22 Rogulskyj, Anna, 73, 74 Rothfield, Lawrence, 13 Royal Academy, 104–5, 125 Rudolf, Crown Prince, 15 Rumbelow, Donald, 41, 42, 76 Rytka, Elena, 78 Sade, 112, 115 Sadeian Woman, The (Carter), 99 Saatchi, 106 Saddleworth Moor, 110 Salisbury, Lord, 50, 52 Salvaging the Sacred (Partington), 190, 193–200 Saved (Bond), 112 Saward, Jill, 90 Sayers, Dorothy L., 16–17, 28–9, 31 Scales of Justice (Marsh), 29–30 Scandal in Bohemia, A (Conan Doyle), 14, 49 Scarpetta’s Winter Table (Cornwell), 170 Scheck, Barry, 150 Scotland Yard, 44 Scott, Sara, 86 Second Mrs Tanqueray, The (Pinero), 2

Sensations exhibition, 104–5, 124–5 Sereny, Gitta, 160, 166 Seymour, Jane, 49–50 Shaw, George Bernard, 2, 77 Shearman, Lord Justice, 23–4, 28 She Must Have Known (Masters), 5 Shepherd, Simon, 110–11 Short, Elizabeth (see also Black Dahlia), 177–80 Showalter, Elaine, 45 Sickert, Walter, 2, 50–2 Silent Victims, 75–6 Silent Witness, 170–3 Simeon’s Bride (Taylor), 142–3 Simpson, O.J., 3 Simpson, Nicole, 3 Sisters of the Road (Wilson), 95–6, 99 Smart, Carol, 126–7 Smelt, Olive, 73, 74, 77 Smith, Joan, 62, 65, 69, 73–4, 116 Smith, Madeleine, 10–12 Solange Stories, The (Jesse), 31 Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son (Burn), 63, 68–9, 74–5 Spoken in Darkness (Imbrie), 181–8 Spratling, Inspector, 48 Spring, Jacqueline, 90–3 Spring, Michelle, 163–5 Standing in the Shadows (Spring), 163–4 Star, 4, 45, 158, 160 Star Trek, 42 Staithes, 7–8, 18, 170, 193 Staples, Mary Jane, 58 Stead, W.T., 56 Steedman, Caroline, 185–6 Steinberg, Joel, 149–55 Steinberg, Lisa, 149–55 Stephanie, Princess, 15 STEPS to End Family Violence, 150 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 45 Stoner, Bill, 175–6 Stoner, George, 36 Stopes, Marie, 26 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The (Stevenson), 45, 63, 201n. Stratton, Jon, 44 Streetcleaner, The (Jouve), 69–71

Index 215 Steinem, Gloria, 150 Stride, Elizabeth (‘Long Liz’), 44, 45, 51, 54–5 Strong Poison (Sayers), 28–9 Stuth, Vonnie, 181 Sun, 4, 107, 109, 124 Sutcliffe, Peter, 18, 47, 61–82 Sutcliffe, Maureen, 68 Sutcliffe, Sonia, 68–9, 72 Symons, Julian, 68 Taylor, Alison, 138, 141–6 Taylor, Gary, 181, 184, 188 Thames Valley Police, 85, 87 Thatcher, Margaret, 77, 133, 139 This is Personal, 65–6 Thomas, Ronald, 107 Thompson, Ann, 160, 161, 166 Thompson, Edith, 18, 20–40, 108 Thompson, Percy, 20, 26, 39 Thompson, Robert, 158–68 Three Blind Mice (Christie), 130 Thurman, Tracy, 150 Times, 31, 67 Todorov, Tzvetan, 26, 120, 175 Trainspotting, 148 Transgressions (Dunant), 100–2 Trauma and Recovery (Herman), 92 Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood (Zipes), 83–4 Turn of the Screw, The (James), 152 Tutt, Norman, 161 Twain, Mark, 152 Ty Newydd Homes, 141 UFO Mysteries, 11 Ulysses (Joyce), 27 Vachss, Andrew, 136–8 Vane, Harriet, 28–9 Vecsera, Marie, 15, 17 de Vega, Lope, 122 Venables, John, 158–68 Venables, Susan, 160, 161 Victim Support, 173 Wagg, Jamie, 162 Walker, Peter, 116–17 Walklate, Sandra, 8, 173

Walkowitz, Judith, 44, 45, 69, 81, 201n. Walls, Marguerite, 73 Wansell, Geoffrey, 191 Warhol, Andy, 106 Warner, Marina, 105–6, 110, 125 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 27, 38, 39 Watergate, 50 Waterhouse Report, 141–2 WAVAW, 64, 81 Weak and the Wicked, The, 132 Webb, Jack, 178 Webster, Richard, 140 Wednesday’s Children (Young), 140 Weis, René, 21–2 West, Ann, 105 West, Frederick, 4, 18, 190–2, 195 West, Paul, 51–3 West, Rosemary, 4–5, 116, 190, 199 Waverley Place (Brownmiller), 150–2 Westminster Review, 10 What Lisa Knew (Johnson), 150, 152–5 What Maisie Knew (James), 152 Whitechapel Mary (Worboyes), 58 Whitechapel Murders, 18, 42–60 Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, 44, 48 Whose Body? (Sayers), 16–17, 28 Wimsey, Peter, 17, 28–9 Wild, Judge, 85 Williams, Emlyn, 113–16 Williams, Patricia, 3 Williams, DC Russell, 192 Wilson, Barbara, 95–6, 99–100, 102 Wilson, Colin, 41, 42, 43 Winslow, Lyttleton Forbes, 56 WITCH, 151 Women of Whitechapel, The (West), 51–3 Women, Violence and Social Change (Dobash), 157 Wood, Robert, 1–2, 4 Woolf, Virginia, 61, 62 Worboyes, Sally, 58 World Health Organisation, 131 World’s Wickedest Women, The, 11 Wuthering Heights, 37

216 Index Yallop, David, 64, 82 Yevtushenko, 195 Yield to the Night, 132 ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ see Sutcliffe, Peter Young, Alison, 148, 162 Young, Filson, 21, 26, 38

Young, Leontine, 140 Young, Ruby, 2, 4, 15 Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper (Bloch), 53–4 Zahavi, Helen, 96–7 Zipes, Jack, 83–4

Women, Crime and Language

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