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The Subject of Murder

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments...............................................................................viiIntroduction..................................................................................1PART I. Murder and Gender in the European Nineteenth Century..................................33CHAPTER 1. "Real Murderer and False Poet": Pierre-François Lacenaire.....................35CHAPTER 2. The "Angel of Arsenic": Marie Lafarge..............................................54CHAPTER 3. The Beast in Man: Jack and the Rippers Who Came After..............................72PART II. The Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Killer..........................................97CHAPTER 4. "Infanticidal" Femininity: Myra Hindley............................................99CHAPTER 5. "Monochrome Man": Dennis Nilsen....................................................126CHAPTER 6. Serial Killing and the Dissident Woman: Aileen Wuornos.............................148CHAPTER 7. Kids Who Kill: Defying the Stereotype of the Murderer..............................168By Way of Brief Conclusion ...................................................................193Notes.........................................................................................199Index.........................................................................................233

Chapter One

Pierre-François Lacenaire

    Here's a gripping and terrible sensation; here's Lacenaire!
    He carried a lyre and a dagger!
    He was a poet and he killed!

    —(Hippolyte Bonnelier, Autopsie physiologique de Lacenaire, 1836)

    At once soft and ferocious
    Its form holds for the viewer
    I know not what atrocious grace
    The grace of the gladiator!

    Criminal aristocracy,
    Neither plane nor hammer
    Has hardened its skin
    For his instrument was a knife.

    For sacred calluses of honest labor
    One searches in vain the trace.
    Real murderer and false poet
    He was the Manfred of the gutter.

    —(Théophile Gautier, "Etude de mains: Lacenaire," 1852)

The lines of verse that form the epigraph of this chapter tellingly reveal a characteristic of the discourses that surrounded the case of Pierre-François Lacenaire (1803–1836), a murderer, forger, and thief, a dandy, and a poet, and the figure at the center of an aesthetic, media, and medical circus in the first years of the July Monarchy in France. Into his medical report on the phrenology and physiology of the killer, Hyppolite Bonnelier inserts lines of doggerel attesting sensationally to the qualities of Lacenaire—poet and murderer both. In his poem, which meditates on the severed hand of the infamous poet-murderer, Théophile Gautier meticulously dissects the appearance of the hand to read traces of the murderer's personality in a passable imitation of the methods of the science of the time. Both writers, then, physician and poet alike, bend and blend their discursive resources in order to draw attention to the extraordinariness of Lacenaire and to celebrate the proximity of his artistry and criminality. These examples of testimonies to Lacenaire's singularity are only two of many, produced in the discourses of science, politics, the press, medicine, and art. The considerable proliferation of texts inspired by the case, and more specifically by the figure of Lacenaire, who was tried in 1835 and executed in 1836, bears witness to a very specific and long-lasting cultural fantasy of the links between destruction and creation, individuality and society, for which Lacenaire provided the locus in the French nineteenth century.

Lacenaire's actual crimes were neither particularly numerous nor particularly impressive. He was convicted of a double murder and a bungled attempted third killing. The murder victims were the Widow Chardon, whose body was found in a severely mutilated condition, and her son. The surviving victim was a bank employee, Genevay, whom Lacenaire attempted to kill with his sidekicks, the petty criminals known as "François et Avril" (Victor Avril and François Martin). Lacenaire had previously served prison terms for forgery and theft, and reputedly considered prison to be a "school of crime." As Edward Baron Turk has put it, Lacenaire "distinguished himself less for his crimes than for his aesthetic attitude toward them."

If the case of Lacenaire excited a disproportionate wealth of reactions and opinions from a variety of ideological and political factions, this is perhaps due to his status as an educated, creative, and bourgeois killer—a "new" type of criminal subject. Foucault calls Lacenaire the "symbolic figure of an illegality kept within the bounds of delinquency and transformed into discourse—that is to say, made doubly inoffensive; the bourgeoisie had invented for itself a new pleasure, which it has still far from outgrown." The idea that criminality might issue from, and appeal to, the bourgeoisie was seen as a different kind of danger than the one delinquency had previously been seen to pose. As Chevalier's influential book on crime in nineteenth-century France demonstrates, criminality became a paranoid obsession of the nineteenth-century imaginary owing to the assumption that delinquency was a product of workingclass insubordination, and that, like the "masses," its threat was plural and anonymous. Balzac summed up this idea that criminals constituted a subterranean group, operating secretly to destabilize society, when he described, in 1825, "a nation apart, in the middle of the nation." In contrast to this perception, Lacenaire embodied dissidence from within the ranks of the artistic elite. The cult of personality that blossomed around Lacenaire announced the underside of the rise of the individual associated with post-Revolutionary society. For, in Lacenaire, crime had both a single name and a single face, and it articulated its reason in articles sent from prison to the newspapers and promptly published, and in rhyme.

Gautier famously termed Lacenaire "vrai meurtrier et faux poète" (real murderer and false poet), a formula about which I will have more to say later with regard to the discourses of subjective authenticity to which it appeals, while Lacenaire, in his own memoirs, had identified himself more simply (and flatteringly) as a "poète-né" ("born poet"), endowed with "a veritable natural gift." The myth of Lacenaire as both murderer and poet is indeed extraordinary in its ability to extend beyond his own personal history and immediate cultural context. Not only did the case and trial of Lacenaire set the tongues of 1830s Paris wagging, but the figure of Lacenaire would go on to be associated with the creation of a particular kind of murderer in the European cultural imaginary—the artistic creator of the murderous act, who produced poems in addition to corpses, and both...