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UBC: Halttunen
Feb. 22nd, 2014 08:39 pmHalttunen, Karen. Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
My initial reservations about this book have been vindicated. Halttunen is an unnuanced reader, with the difficulty common to both historians and literary critics of confusing fiction and nonfiction primary sources. (The fact that some of Halttunen's primary sources are heavily-fictionalized accounts of nominally nonfictional events merely underlines in red the need for a nuanced and careful discussion of the nature of fiction here.) She persists throughout in praising the Puritan view of murderers as a compassionate one, as opposed to the Gothic view that alienated them from "normal" human beings. (And she missed a great opportunity to use Kristeva's idea of abjection.) Now, I'm not arguing that the Gothic/Enlightenment formulation of human nature didn't alienate murderers and other criminals from the rest of humanity or that it is not a formulation that desperately needs to be deconstructed, questioned, and debunked. But I still feel that there's something fundamentally flawed about her argument:
I don't think that what she's describing is empathy, and I don't think that the simplistic unquestioning view of human nature as fallen, sinful, and inherently evil is better than the struggle over the past two centuries to question that doctrine, even though she points out, as if it somehow invalidated the process of asking, that we don't have answers to the questions of how and why people commit evil. (She seems to feel that the failure to find satisfactory answers is what feeds our insatiable hunger for true crime. Presumably also for mystery fiction? Since she doesn't distinguish clearly between fiction and nonfiction, I suppose it must be.) Her epilogue, in which she discusses Dead Man Walking and Seven, praises Morgan Freeman's character in the latter and Sister Prejean in the former, aligning both explicitly with the Puritan execution sermons, because "they will not label murderers as moral aberrations, subhuman monsters. They murderer, they agree, is not the devil; he's just a man, subject to sin as they themselves are subject to sin. . . . Significantly, neither Detective Somerset nor Sister Prejean is particularly engaged with the challenge of satisfactorily explaining human evil. It is enough simply to acknowledge its universality" (250). This book suggests that a liberal, secular worldview is a bad thing to have, and I don't agree with that at all
(Also, she's still wrong about the origins of horror as a genre.)
Halttunen also has the slumming problem; she spends the whole book holding her subject matter at arm's length (and she would much rather discuss theories about murderers and victims and narratives than the narratives themselves). Now, I will be the first to admit that true crime, as a genre, is morally and ethically problematic, but I don't agree with Halttunen that that means we get to congratulate ourselves on being above all that . . . as we read a book about true crime. I think that any book about true crime (which is what her book is about) needs to grapple with the fact that human beings do read about murder, and needs to work out a theory of why that can provide something more like an answer than Sam the Eagle's "You are all weirdos."
My initial reservations about this book have been vindicated. Halttunen is an unnuanced reader, with the difficulty common to both historians and literary critics of confusing fiction and nonfiction primary sources. (The fact that some of Halttunen's primary sources are heavily-fictionalized accounts of nominally nonfictional events merely underlines in red the need for a nuanced and careful discussion of the nature of fiction here.) She persists throughout in praising the Puritan view of murderers as a compassionate one, as opposed to the Gothic view that alienated them from "normal" human beings. (And she missed a great opportunity to use Kristeva's idea of abjection.) Now, I'm not arguing that the Gothic/Enlightenment formulation of human nature didn't alienate murderers and other criminals from the rest of humanity or that it is not a formulation that desperately needs to be deconstructed, questioned, and debunked. But I still feel that there's something fundamentally flawed about her argument:
To be sure, defense attorneys routinely appealed to jurors' compassion for their mentally afflicted defendants: Daniel Corey, argued his attorney, "is much more entitled to compassion and protection, than to severity." But such compassion was dramatically different from the early American sympathy invoked for the "Poor Man" Jeremiah Meacham. Whereas the compassion for Meacham was grounded in empathy, a genuine identification of all people with the universal fallen state they shared with the condemned criminal, the compassion invoked for the nineteenth-century mad person was grafted onto radical difference.
(236)
I don't think that what she's describing is empathy, and I don't think that the simplistic unquestioning view of human nature as fallen, sinful, and inherently evil is better than the struggle over the past two centuries to question that doctrine, even though she points out, as if it somehow invalidated the process of asking, that we don't have answers to the questions of how and why people commit evil. (She seems to feel that the failure to find satisfactory answers is what feeds our insatiable hunger for true crime. Presumably also for mystery fiction? Since she doesn't distinguish clearly between fiction and nonfiction, I suppose it must be.) Her epilogue, in which she discusses Dead Man Walking and Seven, praises Morgan Freeman's character in the latter and Sister Prejean in the former, aligning both explicitly with the Puritan execution sermons, because "they will not label murderers as moral aberrations, subhuman monsters. They murderer, they agree, is not the devil; he's just a man, subject to sin as they themselves are subject to sin. . . . Significantly, neither Detective Somerset nor Sister Prejean is particularly engaged with the challenge of satisfactorily explaining human evil. It is enough simply to acknowledge its universality" (250). This book suggests that a liberal, secular worldview is a bad thing to have, and I don't agree with that at all
(Also, she's still wrong about the origins of horror as a genre.)
Halttunen also has the slumming problem; she spends the whole book holding her subject matter at arm's length (and she would much rather discuss theories about murderers and victims and narratives than the narratives themselves). Now, I will be the first to admit that true crime, as a genre, is morally and ethically problematic, but I don't agree with Halttunen that that means we get to congratulate ourselves on being above all that . . . as we read a book about true crime. I think that any book about true crime (which is what her book is about) needs to grapple with the fact that human beings do read about murder, and needs to work out a theory of why that can provide something more like an answer than Sam the Eagle's "You are all weirdos."
