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Psycho Paths

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface........................................................................ixIntroduction: The Serial Killer in Fiction.....................................11. The Gothic Legacy and Serial Murder.........................................262. The Psycho Profilers and the Influence of Thomas Harris.....................703. Detectives Versus Serial Killers............................................1134. Serial Killers and Deviant American Individualism...........................1355. The Serial Killer, Myth, and Apocalypse in 1990s Cinema.....................172Notes..........................................................................209Works Cited....................................................................225Index..........................................................................235

Chapter One

The earliest recognizable literary breeding ground for what would become the serial killer fictional narrative is the Gothic tradition. Though the term "Gothic" is overused by critics, nevertheless it remains the most appropriate starting point for this examination of serial killer fiction. Of crucial importance to understanding the destabilizing-of-meaning strategy common to the serial killer subgenre is acknowledgement that its Gothic literary progenitor is devoted to transgression of boundary and breaking of taboo as a textual agenda. Two representative Gothic (or neo-Gothic) texts featuring serial murder will serve as extended illustrations. One is the 1991 Paul West novel The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper. The other is the 1997 Gary Fleder film Kiss the Girls.

West's novel is based on an elaborate but largely discredited theory, popularized by the late Stephen Knight in his 1976 book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, regarding the identity of the Victorian serial murderer nicknamed "Jack the Ripper." According to Knight, the Ripper was not a lone killer but a trio of men who killed five prostitutes who had been blackmailing the British government with their knowledge of Prince Edward's sexual indiscretions and illegitimate daughter. Taking this basic plot outline from Knight's theory, West also portrays three Rippers, each participant representing a different masculine face. The royal physician Sir William Gull is the primary killer-a misogynistic slasher and mutilator who gives the crimes their unmistakable signature. Coachman John Netley and the famous impressionist painter Walter Sickert cooperate, the former gleefully and the latter reluctantly, as corporeal extensions of Gull's formidable but physically incapacitated will. But in and of themselves, none of the three men is "Jack the Ripper." Singular responsibility for the murders is diffused among many contributors and precipitating factors that have joined together at a particular nexus in time, space, and English history.

Gary Fleder's 1997 film Kiss the Girls, based on the 1995 novel of the same name by James Patterson, places its two sympathetic protagonists, forensic psychiatrist Alex Cross and medical intern Kate McTiernan, into a deadly confrontation with two serial murderers, "The Gentleman Caller" and "Casanova." In the film, the monomythic Jack the Ripper has split into two neatly compartmentalized, yet complementary, separate killers-one a self-styled "lover" of independent women and the other a vicious mutilator. Both are quite similar, however, in the way they objectify, torture, and murder women. Casanova, for example, who claims to loathe the Gentleman Caller's sexual "sloppiness" as evidenced by his desire to dismember, nevertheless rapes women savagely enough to tear apart their vaginas and leaves them, hair shorn away and limbs bound, to die alone in the forest. When Alex's niece Naomi is kidnapped by Casanova and faces a similar fate, Alex tries to find her in time to save her life. He is aided in his search by Kate, who was also kidnapped by Casanova but escaped from the underground dungeon in which he keeps his female captives. As the investigation continues, Alex discovers that Casanova and the Gentleman Caller actually know each other and are locked in a gruesome rivalry to claim as many victims as possible. The film concludes with both serial killers dead, Naomi rescued, and Alex and Kate victorious.

Serial Murder and the Gothic

A brief historical summary of the boundary-transgressing Gothic genre is necessary to understand how texts such as West's novel and Fleder's film are most accurately labeled as "Gothic." The Gothic mode is not confined exclusively to any one genre or artistic medium. Rather, the conventions break free of their orderly boundaries and filter out into other popular discursive or artistic modes, which in turn later generations of artists and critics alike draw upon for their respective reworkings of inherited formula. David Punter traces the development of the word "Gothic" from its literal meaning of "to do with the Goths" (the Germanic tribes who are said to have precipitated the collapse of the Roman empire) to its more generalized applications in the European eighteenth century, specifically its suggestiveness "of things medieval-in fact, of all things preceding about the middle of the seventeenth century" (5). The barbaric connotations of the word "Gothic" quickly came to invoke a plethora of associations for Europeans: "Gothic was the archaic, the pagan, that which was prior to, or was opposed to, or resisted the establishment of civilised values and a well-regulated society" (6). Writers of fiction, in turn, turned to the precivilized or the "barbaric" as a metaphor for revivifying the supposedly exhausted English culture with a "healthy" injection of primitivism and prelingual awareness. This was a risky operation, of course, as the cure, represented in the ambiguous figure of the mysterious outsider possessed of Dionysian appetites, could just as easily destroy civilization as save it.

In this culturewide turn to "barbarism" as a wild zone apart from the dulling complexities of modern civilization lies the genesis of the Gothic sensibility, which gives rise not only to eponymous literary conventions and architecture but a far more generalized rejection of all things classical. As Punter concludes: "Where the classical was well ordered, the Gothic was chaotic; where simple and pure, Gothic was ornate and convoluted; where the classics offered a set of cultural models to be followed, Gothic represented excess and exaggeration, the product of the wild and the uncivilised" (6). The Gothic is rife with ambiguity, sexual perversion, decenteredness, self-referentiality, repetition, and breakdown of boundary. According to G. R. Thompson, Gothic literature dramatizes the philosophical tension between modern, progressive, and secular notions of man's innate goodness (the romantic influence) and medieval conceptions of man's spiritual corruption. The narrative tantalizes but finally refuses to provide metaphysical illumination or revelation. For Thompson, the purpose of the Gothic narrative ambiguity and occult overtones is to force readers to ask questions about human existence, so that the individual must then rely not on institutional authority but the self for determining moral certitude. Tony Magistrale concludes that the romantic freedom from social constraint is essentially positive because there is an underlying "faith in human nature," whereas the Gothic doubts man's moral faculties-"further suggesting that when their impulses remained unchecked humans were more likely to perform acts of perversity than poetry" (31). The terror of the Gothic (but also its repressed tone of narrative romantic excitement) derives from this kind of intellectual liberation.

The themes of classic Gothic fiction include a strong sense of environmental claustrophobia, the destructive imposition of the past on the present, and a metaphysical internalization of evil for which the Gothic landscape stands as objective correlative. Gothic fiction is also often structured around a menacing but nevertheless captivating villain or monster, which is predecessor to the "attractive" serial killers of 1980s and 1990s fiction, such as Hannibal Lecter (Hutchings 100). In the Gothic, this dark, amoral figure stalks a usually female character through the narrative landscape in a metaphoric seduction. The "dark man" is usually perceived to be a killer, or at least a potential one, but paradoxically, the Gothic villain through his murderer's exile acquires special insight into life, and it is his vision of existence that is narratively privileged, as Judith Wilt has noted in Ghosts of the Gothic.

The Gothic, as part of a larger cultural movement of Old World forms and ideologies into the New World, proved readily adaptable to American literature. Not only did the Gothic formulas cross over but so did European romanticism in general, as illustrated by the American reception of the then-popular novels of Sir Walter Scott. Many of the romantic American frontier authors, beginning with James Fenimore Cooper, owed a great debt to Scott. Richard Slotkin elaborates:

The historical romance was itself a European literary form, and [Cooper] adopted the form as practiced by Walter Scott.... The historical romance as practiced by Scott defined history in terms of the conflict between individuals representing nations and classes; and the definition of these class and national types was a primary interest of the writer. Reconciliation between the opposed groups was achieved through the revelation or discovery of a fundamental racial kinship between the parties.... The family ties that bind the chief characters of the historical romance provide the metaphorical structure of the work. The division within the family reflects the social disorder of the nation, and the achievement of a familial peace is the conclusion of both the social problem and the family drama. (Regeneration 472)

Slotkin then argues that American frontier authors claimed for themselves the notion of "family unity" while simultaneously investing it with a certain irony. The frontier hero usually escapes from the reunited family, fleeing from its constraints out into "the Territory." Huckleberry Finn, of course, is the most famous literary character to do this, but he has his antecedents, such as James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking. Thus, to a greater or lesser extent, the sanctity of the family as refuge is called into question by patriarchal frontier writers because the male escape from family can also be read as a juvenile's escape from a threatening, grown-up woman and the civic virtues and responsibilities she represents.

Leslie Fiedler maintains that the "classic" American novel, while in many ways replicating the tired formulas of European prose fiction, is readily distinguishable by precisely this "pre-adolescent" (4) mentality and its consistent terror of mature sexuality and feminine consciousness. In fact, Fiedler continues, (male) American writers typically shun any adult treatment of heterosexual relations and present their female characters as "monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality" (5). Hence, while the female gender looms large (even its narrative absence) in most patriarchal American literature, it exists as a largely impersonal force of nature to be dominated or a pull toward socialization and domestication to be fled.

Nina Baym argues that critical definitions of what constitutes American literature are inherently phallocentric, mythologizing the male individual "divorced from specific social circumstances, with the promise offered by the idea of America" (131). The individual male thus exists before and apart from socialization, and in fact seeks to escape from the "female" entrapment of civilization into the self-affirming, mythic, asocial landscape. Paradoxically, the wilderness is also signified as female in essence, but "no longer subject to the correcting influence of real-life experience" (136) and consequently more and more fantastic and recognizably less contextualized. This realm is ripe for the Gothic treatment. As Baym and Fiedler both observe, the male alone in the asocial wilderness becomes a celibate, infantile wanderer freed from familial obligation and mature sexual relationships. He may have lost his family to hostile outside forces on which he seeks revenge but which have also enacted in reality a murderous agenda he imagined in fantasy (as does the protagonist of Robert Montgomery Bird's Nick of the Woods, a prototypical avenger of the sort found in popular films such as The Searchers or Death Wish). Or, like Cooper's Leatherstocking or Twain's Huck Finn, two celibate perpetual-adolescent figures, he may avoid domesticity altogether.

In such a cultural and literary atmosphere, it is little wonder that murder, that most melodramatic and Gothic expression of the objectification and victimization of the usually feminine or feminized Other, flourishes first in American literature and, later, in cinema. Multiple murder, of a sort roughly comparable to what is now called serial killing, appears quite early in American prose. In addition to the aforementioned Nick of the Woods (1835), the novels Ormond (1799), The Partisan (1835), and The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall (1845), while mostly derivative of the European Gothic, all present multiple body counts and Shadow villains in which one can see the literary prototypes of the contemporary American serial murderer. For example, George Lippard's The Quaker City features a grotesquely deformed multiple murderer named Devil-Bug, who according to David Brion Davis is "interesting primarily as an early ancestor of the countless creatures of horror that infest contemporary comic strips and cheap literature generally" (127). Richard Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation makes the same point: "Many [horror/slasher movies] invoke bogeys whose ancestors appear in the literature of the Puritan witch trials, like the Indian or voodoo spirits ... or murderous backwoodsmen ... whose literary ancestors are the Harpes and Simon Girtys of early frontier romances" (635).

The kind of cross-fertilization between true-life murder accounts and fictional representation that so troubles contemporary cultural critics is also evident long ago in American letters. No less a luminary than Herman Melville argued in the 1850s that popular literature was overly concerned with the likes of Kentucky's Harpe brothers, two multiple murderers of the 1790s (Jenkins, "Serial Murder" 383). Some of the first nationally prominent cases of "motiveless" or "lust" murder also became known in America during the nineteenth century, such as Thomas Piper's series of child murders in Boston in the 1870s or the murders committed by H. H. Holmes in Chicago during the 1880s and 1890s. Another instance of what we would now call mass murder occurred at a Kansas farm owned by the "Bloody Benders" in the 1870s. All of these cases, in tandem with the popular literature of murder and thuggery, further established a cultural climate in which multiple murder as thematic organizing principle played a minor but definite role.

The Gothic genre's adaptability to film in the twentieth century, made possible by the Gothic reliance on visual imagery (Bunnell 84), ensured the vitality of the fictional murderer to the present cinema-dominated age. The character of the multiple murderer flourished in the new medium. The first cinematic multiple murderers-Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), Jack the Ripper in Waxworks (1924) and Pandora's Box (1929), Franz Becker in M (1931), and Count Zaroff in The Most Dangerous Game (1932), among others-were European Gothic villains in transition between the premodern romantic era and the modern industrial one. By midcentury, such murderers (Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt [1943] providing the best example) were more unmistakably American in attitude and ideology and much more lethal. In these films and ones to follow, the Gothic has lost many of its superficial trappings (haunted castles and such), but the mythic, ahistorical territory reserved for taboo violators remains central to what many call the neo-Gothic formula-often seen as a category of postmodern fiction.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Psycho Pathsby Philip L. Simpson Copyright © 2000 by Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University. Excerpted by permission.
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