An involving account of the shifting social constructions and
understandings of murder in pre-20th century America. Drawing on a
wealth of sources, including confessions, trial accounts, and court
documents, historian Halttunen (Univ. of Calif., Davis; Confidence
Men and Painted Women, 1983) traces how the burgeoning romantic
movement - and particularly its most extreme manifestation, the
gothic - utterly transformed the Puritan conception of crime and
punishment. She holds that the Puritan belief in predestination
meant that "the early American murderer was regarded as a moral
representative of all sinful humanity, and was granted an important
spiritual role." Murder was not seen as an aberration but as the
terrible culmination of a series of small, quotidian sins, from
drinking to deception. The attitude of everyone from preachers to
their congregations was one of "There but for the grace of God, go
I." And while punishment in this world was still required, the
important thing was to get the murderer to truly and sincerely
repent. With the arrival of the gothic/romantic, Halttunen
convincingly argues, murder came to be seen as a monstrous
aberration, something outside the pale of ordinary humanity. This
shaped everything from methods of punishment to the conduct of
trials. For example, the insanity defense became widely accepted
and its scope enlarged. Repentance was downplayed. Criminal
procedure became regularized, and more importance was placed on
detective work (tellingly, in the 1840s, Poe would create the
detective story). With murder no longer a stem moral warning, the
public began to hunger after the goriest details, fueling a rise in
"true crime" accounts that often bordered on the pornographic. If
all this seems familiar, Halttunen notes that much of our modern
view of crime comes directly from the conventions and tenets of the
19th-century gothic. Formidably researched and well argued, but
frequent discursions and inordinate details make this feel like a
terrific article padded out to book length. (Kirkus Reviews)
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.
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