![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyI am not giving up on Karen Halttunen's Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Harvard UP: 1998) because I have hopes that it's going to improve, but I have to note my dissatisfactions with the first couple of chapters while I can still remember how to articulate them:
1. Halttunen is portraying secular horror as the invention of the late eighteenth century Gothic movement, which it isn't. This is the result of two problems with her argument: (a) she can't quite seem to decide if she's writing about America only or if she wants to include British and European examples and (b) tunnel vision, which ignores pagan ideas of horror (granted, a millennium or two before the texts she wants to talk about) and secular horror before and contemporaneous with the Puritan American execution sermons that are where she starts her argument (see, for example, my icon, and the entire genre of revenge tragedy).
2. She is a very unnuanced reader, so that she is portraying Puritan execution sermons as if they represent, unproblematically, the reaction of Puritan society to murder. The fallacy in this argument is perfectly present in her commentary, which notes that these same sermons tend to bewail the falling away of Puritan people from godly Puritan ideals, and also notes that they are ritual and therefore a stereotypic series of literary gestures. Both of these characteristics suggest that these sermons may, in fact, have very little to do with how the members of Puritan societies reacted to murders and murderers in their midst.
3. I have been left with the impression that she finds the reaction to murder in the Puritan execution sermons more morally commendable than the Gothic reaction, because the Puritan reaction is more compassionate toward the murderer and more inclusive, portraying him or her as a fallen sinner like other human beings, instead of a horrifying monster completely alienated from the moral norm. My problems here are four:
(a) I fully admit to being a left-wing bleeding heart liberal, and I do believe that the practice of compassion is one of the most crucial and literally vital in the human species' capability, but I am made very uneasy when compassion for the murderer seems to eclipse any kind of judgment of their crime. I have not read any Puritan execution sermons and I frankly don't feel that I will be any time soon, so I don't know if the impression I have received from Halttunen's discussion of them is correct, but when compassion for a mother who murders her newborn is offered not on the basis of the terrible circumstances that forced her to it, but on the basis of "we're all depraved sinners whose sin is inherent and inescapable" I'm actually reluctant to call it "compassion" at all.
(b) I disagree with her implied contempt/distaste for the Gothic (because, duh, horror writer), so I feel that I am also being judged and found wanting (or "ungodly," to use a particularly Puritan piece of terminology). Any reader of genre fiction will be familiar with this feeling and will know why I am not happy about it.
(c) I don't particularly like moral judgments in my social/literary history ANYWAY, and if the author has to make them--and I fully grant that sometimes an author does--I want them to be EXPLICIT and honestly owned up to. (Robert Jay Lifton's The Nazi Doctors is the best example I know.)
(d) Puritanism, as a socioreligious movement, is all about intolerance and exclusion AS VIRTUES: the whole idea of the "godly community" is that you shut out everybody who isn't exactly what you want them to be. (Don't let anybody tell you otherwise, that is the reason the Puritans hired the Mayflower and sailed to America: religious "freedom" by way of eliminating everyone who disagrees with you; see also, gestures being made by certain people today.) So if we're going to argue for compassionate inclusion on the part of Puritan divines, I really need to see a lot more digging around in the contradictions invovled.
Now, I understand that the Puritans are not the point of Halttunen's book--which is why I have hopes for improvement--but I'm not best pleased with her handling of the material.
We shall see.
1. Halttunen is portraying secular horror as the invention of the late eighteenth century Gothic movement, which it isn't. This is the result of two problems with her argument: (a) she can't quite seem to decide if she's writing about America only or if she wants to include British and European examples and (b) tunnel vision, which ignores pagan ideas of horror (granted, a millennium or two before the texts she wants to talk about) and secular horror before and contemporaneous with the Puritan American execution sermons that are where she starts her argument (see, for example, my icon, and the entire genre of revenge tragedy).
2. She is a very unnuanced reader, so that she is portraying Puritan execution sermons as if they represent, unproblematically, the reaction of Puritan society to murder. The fallacy in this argument is perfectly present in her commentary, which notes that these same sermons tend to bewail the falling away of Puritan people from godly Puritan ideals, and also notes that they are ritual and therefore a stereotypic series of literary gestures. Both of these characteristics suggest that these sermons may, in fact, have very little to do with how the members of Puritan societies reacted to murders and murderers in their midst.
3. I have been left with the impression that she finds the reaction to murder in the Puritan execution sermons more morally commendable than the Gothic reaction, because the Puritan reaction is more compassionate toward the murderer and more inclusive, portraying him or her as a fallen sinner like other human beings, instead of a horrifying monster completely alienated from the moral norm. My problems here are four:
(a) I fully admit to being a left-wing bleeding heart liberal, and I do believe that the practice of compassion is one of the most crucial and literally vital in the human species' capability, but I am made very uneasy when compassion for the murderer seems to eclipse any kind of judgment of their crime. I have not read any Puritan execution sermons and I frankly don't feel that I will be any time soon, so I don't know if the impression I have received from Halttunen's discussion of them is correct, but when compassion for a mother who murders her newborn is offered not on the basis of the terrible circumstances that forced her to it, but on the basis of "we're all depraved sinners whose sin is inherent and inescapable" I'm actually reluctant to call it "compassion" at all.
(b) I disagree with her implied contempt/distaste for the Gothic (because, duh, horror writer), so I feel that I am also being judged and found wanting (or "ungodly," to use a particularly Puritan piece of terminology). Any reader of genre fiction will be familiar with this feeling and will know why I am not happy about it.
(c) I don't particularly like moral judgments in my social/literary history ANYWAY, and if the author has to make them--and I fully grant that sometimes an author does--I want them to be EXPLICIT and honestly owned up to. (Robert Jay Lifton's The Nazi Doctors is the best example I know.)
(d) Puritanism, as a socioreligious movement, is all about intolerance and exclusion AS VIRTUES: the whole idea of the "godly community" is that you shut out everybody who isn't exactly what you want them to be. (Don't let anybody tell you otherwise, that is the reason the Puritans hired the Mayflower and sailed to America: religious "freedom" by way of eliminating everyone who disagrees with you; see also, gestures being made by certain people today.) So if we're going to argue for compassionate inclusion on the part of Puritan divines, I really need to see a lot more digging around in the contradictions invovled.
Now, I understand that the Puritans are not the point of Halttunen's book--which is why I have hopes for improvement--but I'm not best pleased with her handling of the material.
We shall see.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2014-02-18 02:21 am (UTC)People who try and force their narrow-minded views on others through written discourse always annoy me. As for the author in this case, I have no idea how she got the idea that horror got kick started in the eighteenth century. There are old Irish fairy tales that would make anyone shudder.
Hell, even some of the ones Disney prettied up, in their original form, are pretty damn dark and gruesome. Sleeping Beauty didn't wake up to true love's first kiss-she woke up because she was giving birth. Because the prince didn't seem to feel a need to wait for an engaged partner, raped her, and got her pregnant. Happily Ever After was more of a Disney thing than a fairy tale thing. Everyone seems to overlook the fact that the huntsman tries to kill Snow White three times. And at the end of Cinderella, when the two sisters try to win points by standing next to Cinderella, who they had treated like crap, and got their eyeballs plucked out by a couple of birds.
So, yeah...this lady's research is missing a complete side area of horror literature that existed long before the Brother's Grim came along and their version was still pretty gruesome. It wasn't until Disney that things ended with sweetness and light. We won't go into the old Irish Fairy Tales, that's an even darker arena.
Oh, and as to the compassion those Puritans showed to a murderer? Reminds me too much of how predatory pedophiles who rape kids and/or sell and film them for profit get called 'sick' and put in special places for 'treatment'. I've got nothing to say to that type. I would have hated the puritans for that alone.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-18 06:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-20 03:18 am (UTC)"Yeah, but that doesn't happen in modern society. Today people get "Sick" and "Evil" mixed up because Evil is such an old school term and it makes people uncomfortable. So predatory pedophiles aren't "Evil", they're "Sick" which means they get treatment instead of jail time and better privileges too. Some of those so-called treatment centers look like the inside of a mall.
So if you ask me right now, the situation is reversed. You don't hear politicians railing about child protection, and as a result? Home made bombs built in hell are walking into our schools and malls and killing whoever is in their line of sight and half the time, themselves. So now the predators and politicians are reading the sermon over us while silently laughing in our faces, and you know who's wearing the noose? The human race.
The death penalty wouldn't work the way I'd want it to, because unlike TV show depictions, guys sent on Death Row tend to stay there for life. Lawyers make a lot of money and face time off of "Pro Bono" work on appealing them. If that weren't so, and if there weren't a lot of innocent people who got put on death row only later to be exonerated by DNA evidence, I'd be all for it, but that's just not the reality.
I prefer the more recent addition of seize and forfeiture laws in regards to child pornography (see Daily News article) Unfortunately, this world runs on cash and only when we hit those who would profiteer from the rape of children in their pocketbook will we get them, and organized crime in general to look elsewhere for illegal profits.
Child protection and the laws being made, and in some cases, finally unmade (New York only closed the incest loophole back in 2005) are my lifetime cause and the only thing I'll spend my whole life fighting for. Imagine a Puritan getting that? I doubt it, since marrying a 13 or 14 year old off to your 50 year old friend was common as grass back then."