Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination

by Karen Halttunen

Confronting murder in the newspaper, on screen, and in sensational trials, we often feel the killer is fundamentally incomprehensible and morally alien. But this was not always the popular response to murder. In Murder Most Foul , Karen Halttunen explores the changing view of murder from early New England sermons read at the public execution of murderers, through the nineteenth century, when secular and sensational accounts replaced the sacred treatment of the crime, to today's true crime literature and tabloid reports.

The early narratives were shaped by a strong belief in original sin and spiritual redemption, by the idea that all murders were natural manifestations of the innate depravity of humankind. In a dramatic departure from that view, the Gothic imagination--with its central conventions of the fundamental horror and mystery of the crime--seized upon the murderer as a moral monster, separated from the normal majority by an impassable gulf. Halttunen shows how this perception helped shape the modern response to criminal transgression, mandating criminal incarceration, and informing a social-scientific model of criminal deviance.

The Gothic expression of horror and inhumanity is the predominant response to radical evil today; it has provided a set of conventions surrounding tales of murder that appear to be natural and instinctive, when in fact they are rooted in the nineteenth century. Halttunen's penetrating insight into her extraordinary treasure trove of creepy popular crime literature reveals how our stories have failed to make sense of the killer and how that failure has constrained our understanding and treatment of criminality today.

Genres: True Crime, History, Nonfiction, Crime, Literary Criticism, American History, 19th Century

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Dr. Karen Halttunen is a historian who specializes in U.S. cultural and intellectual history.

Reviews

[Katherine Addison · Rating 1 out of 5]

I disagreed with this book violently pretty much from start to finish, but she got off on the wrong foot with her discussion of the Puritans:

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, 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, unproblematicly, 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 doing so 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 also am 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: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide 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 involved.

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 Julia 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: The Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty That Sparked a National Debate and Se7en, 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."

[Katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating and meticulously researched examination of the American conceptualization of murder from the 17th century up through the mid-19th century. The sheer volume and breadth of Haltunnen's research is breathtaking, and the textual evidence (including some wonderfully interesting illustrations) that she includes render this a must-read for anyone interested in gothic literature, genre studies, true crime, and American history more broadly. Cannot recommend highly enough.

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting overview of the changes in public interaction and perception of murders and justice proceedings. It was a bit dry and a little repetitive at times, but there was a lot of good information. It does show that it was published almost 20 years ago, I would love to see an update with some thoughts on the more recent true crime media boom in public consciousness.

[Jared · Rating 5 out of 5]

This books was an incredible explanation for how murder narratives have changed from execution sermons that saw everyone as universally depraved to trial reports that grasp at the meaning of murder while trying to maintain that human nature is fundamentally good.

[Danny · Rating 3 out of 5]

An excellent examination at shifting cultural understandings of murder and who (of what) the murder is. Halttunen is specifically looking at what is being published and not as much what the response was. An interesting read and well written.

[Eric Harrington · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reads really well, my only problem was that toward the end of the text it started to drag (from repetition of more of the same, little variation in style). Very informative and well-done though.

[Maddie Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

i've now read this 2x for my thesis (it's a core building block of my argument) and it's just such a good piece of scholarship

[ally douglas? · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read an excerpt from class and now i want to read the whole thing.

[Nicole]

This is a scholarly history that examines the transition in printed texts related to murder in America from seventeenth-century execution sermons to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century trial transcripts, "confessions," and newspaper coverage. Halttunen argues that execution sermons aimed at showing that the condemned murderer was just like the other members of the community: flawed, due to Original Sin. The sermons were cautionary tales to other members of the community and also served to re-integrate the murderer into the community - and potentially into the heavenly community of the saved - after his or her crime. By contrast, subsequent trial literature took up the more secular, Enlightenment concept that human nature was fundamentally good, and so the literature presented murderers as horrible, mysterious, and separated from "normal" people.

It was quite interesting to me to see how little narratives of crime have really changed in the past 200 years, especially in the specific genre of true crime, which I'll admit really isn't my thing.

I'm using this book for my "Crime & Justice" class, and it will work very well for that, since it effectively demonstrates close readings of primary source texts and images. (One down side: her editor didn't make her get rid of her stand-alone quotations, so I can't hold out the book as a perfect model for students to emulate in their own writing.) There are also some places where I think she makes some overly ambitious arguments without really backing them up, so there will be stuff for us to discuss.

[Jesselyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting read tracing the documentation of murderers and their trials from the late 1700's to the early/mid 1800s. Fairly well written, though my one annoyance was that the author would allude casually to subjects she had mentioned much earlier in the book, which were difficult to recall at that point. A good read, not written in an overly-academic style, but covering a very small time period on a very specific subject.

[Anne · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's terrible to think that a book that's all about the American fascination with murder could be boring, but it was. I understand that it was an academic book, but her way of writing made it a very depressing read, especially considering that the subject held such potential. Nevertheless, it made some very interesting parallels and points about our modern-day obsession with the murder mystery. Would you believe that it started with the Puritans? Go figure.

[Mary Catelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

A study of the change in literature from the Puritan execution sermons -- which treated it as extreme sin, but nevertheless the logical outgrowth of habitual sins that just about everyone has, and downplayed both the crime itself and the immediate motive -- to the Gothic treatment, which went far more into individual motives, the gory and morbid details of the crime, and the treatment of murderers as alien monsters. Various themes, such as murder within famile

[Carrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall, I found Halttunen's writing style too dry for the subject matter, but this book is worth it for chapter six, Murdering Medusa, alone. It examines how female sexuality was talked about in trials and in murder literature as well as the growing male influence in childbirth practices. I also enjoyed the discussion in the epilogue about why true crime stories remain compelling even today.

[Uticapat Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This scholarly study of changing perceptions about murderers in American society is actually an easy read because Halttunen's style is accessible and she doesn't presume the reader has an extensive background in American history.

[heidi]

a must read for the heidi

[Courtney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though some of the details are on the disturbing side, the book was a pretty fun read. Halttunen is thorough and clear in her prose. I enjoyed this one.