not yet a book review: Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination
I 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.
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