The Function of Evil across Disciplinary Contexts 1498533426, 9781498533423

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One: Villainous Victimhood in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”
Chapter Two: The Winter’s Tale
Chapter Three: Guilt, Evil, and Hell in Doctor Faustus and Macbeth
Chapter Four: Seasonal Villainy
Chapter Five: The Name-of-the-Monster
Chapter Six: The Communicative Force of Evil
Chapter Seven: When Real Life Isn’t Evil Enough for Fiction
Chapter Eight: Poison and Antidote
Chapter Nine: Ghosts of the Old South
Chapter Ten: Ace in the Hole and Its Public
Chapter Eleven: The Evil Foreigner
Chapter Twelve: Tribalism and the Use of Evil in Modern Politics
Chapter Thirteen: A “Fiend Incarnate”
Index
About the Contributors

Citation preview

The Function of Evil across Disciplinary Contexts

The Function of Evil across Disciplinary Contexts Edited by Malcah Effron and Brian Johnson

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2017 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-4985-3341-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4985-3342-3 (electronic) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For Lynn B. Johnson

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction Brian Johnson and Malcah Effron Villainous Victimhood in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” Chu-chueh Cheng 2 The Winter’s Tale: Art and Redemption from Evil Olivia Coulomb 3 Guilt, Evil, and Hell in Doctor Faustus and Macbeth Jamey Hecht 4 Seasonal Villainy: Radical Evil, Relativity, and Redemptive Relationships Charity Fowler 5 The Name-of-the-Monster: Interpellation and the Construction of Evil Jim Casey 6 The Communicative Force of Evil: The Case of Stephen King Jessica Folio 7 When Real Life Isn’t Evil Enough for Fiction: French Postwar Literature and the Relationship between Evil and Sexuality Marion Duval 8 Poison and Antidote: Evil and the Hero-Villain Binary in Deon Meyer’s Post-Apartheid Crime Thriller, Devil’s Peak Sam Naidu and Karlien van der Wielen 9 Ghosts of the Old South: The Evils of Slavery and the Haunted House in Royal Street Brian Johnson 10 Ace in the Hole and Its Public: Evil and the News Spectacle Julie Michot

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11 The Evil Foreigner: Marvel Villains and the American National Identity from World War II to the War on Terror Joanna Nowotny and Bettina Jossen 12 Tribalism and the Use of Evil in Modern Politics Riven Barton 13 A “Fiend Incarnate”: Sin, Science, and the Problem of Evil in the New American Nation Jeffrey Mullins Index About the Contributors

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Acknowledgments

As anyone who has ever tried to herd cats knows, bringing together academics from multiple countries and multiple disciplines and expecting them to speak coherently to each other in roughly the same language relies on quick wits and supportive partners. To those partners in the project that has ultimately produced Functions of Evil across Disciplinary Contexts, we owe the following acknowledgments and thanks. In 2014, various elements of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, offered their support to the international conference “Evil Incarnate: Manifestations of Villains and Villainy.” In particular, Siegal Lifelong-Learning, Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence, and the Department of English all offered support, either financial or in-kind. If not for their support of the conference, the initial conversations that led to this collection might never have taken place. We owe a particular debt of gratitude to Shannon French and the Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence for their support not only of the conference but also of the post-conference publication. When approached, Inamori has never said no. While they might support Functions of Evil, evil is clearly not one of theirs. Finally, we must thank Lynn B. Johnson, to whom this collection is dedicated. Aside from being willing to take care of their children so Brian could have time to work on the collection, Lynn has been a strong champion of the project, volunteering her services both as conference PR manager and as conference assistant—without ever having been asked. Her thrill in the project kept both editors going even through the roughest patches of conference organization and collection editing. For these reasons, this collection is for Lynn.

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Introduction Brian Johnson and Malcah Effron

In opening his remarks at the 2014 “Evil Incarnate: Manifestations of Villains and Villainy” conference, the final keynote suggested that evil is a well-defined term in theological and religious studies contexts. In these definitions, evil is an abstract, disembodied concept that operates in opposition to the good and the Divine. As conference organizers, we found ourselves confronted with a definition of evil that suggested that the conference—which had previously felt like a brilliantly productive weekend full of discussions of both embodied and disembodied “manifestations of villains and villainy” in a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts—could instead be understood as a colossal waste of time. This conclusion seemed wholly at odds with the responses of participants throughout the weekend, who largely found themselves stimulated by the discovery of a community of scholars working on similar approaches to conceptualizations of evil. This sense of community was a particularly welcome surprise, as many did not necessarily have such in their home departments, as their work in evil tended to be on the margins of field specificity. Given the range of fields represented at the conference—a range we have tried to echo in this collection, though thirteen chapters cannot cover everything—we had to ask ourselves, does theology still hold the right to the categorical definition of evil, or has the term broke loose of its moorings in the world of religion and drifted fully into the realms of the social, cultural, and political? Despite the keynote’s opening, the combined experience of the conference weekend suggested to us that the term evil—sneaky devil that it is— has functionally grown beyond its limited construction in the fields of theology and moral philosophy. Yet, despite its desperate attempts to grow and adapt to meet the needs of an increasingly secularized social construction of reality, evil’s power still clings to its theological roots. Given these tensions, we decided that the overarching question developed over the weekend—and the one that had most utility for a wide range of scholarship—centered on one query in particular: Is there any use in using the concept of evil in cultural, psychological, or other secular evaluations of the world and its productions? Most importantly, if there is, what might these functions be? 1

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With these particular questions in mind, we have gathered in this collection a range of papers that look particularly at the functions of evil within and across the discourse communities in which they are interested. As such, though these papers frame the functional notion of evil within the contexts they study, their goal is not exclusively to offer a definition of evil and certainly not to offer an absolute definition. So, while the authors are aware of major theological hurdles such as theodicy and the so-called problem of evil, this collection is not yet another collection seeking to define, explain, or debate these issues. Additionally, in relation to such debates, because the allowance of natural evils—“instances of human suffering” (Neiman 2001, 29)—falls squarely on the shoulders of a theological debate, these articles take questions of moral evil—“acts of human cruelty” (29)—and how moral evil is ascribed in different communities as their starting points. These bases, particularly in relation to a research question that implicitly rejects theological and philosophical claims to authority over definitions of evil, suggest that this collection might have migrated to the other major twentieth-century touchstone for assessing evil, namely, Hannah Arendt’s so-called banality of evil. The banality of evil has become a catch-all phrase to ascribe evil to the quotidian, rather than maintaining Arendt’s original concept of necessary brainlessness for humans to become a force of destruction like the Nazis: “Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine its premises and principles from which originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil” (Elon 2006, xiv). Instead, the banality of evil has become an excuse that allows for unnuanced and overly excited use of the term (cf. the Nazi meme generated by Seinfeld’s “soup Nazi” sketch). The papers in this collection bring the discussion of evil back from its own banality that allows for an arbitrary relativism to a functional conversation about the consequences of allowing the term evil to crop up ubiquitously, in some sense specifically because these papers themselves engage in the conversation with this ubiquity. Thus, by its focus on the functions of the term evil, rather than the nature of evil, this collection offers a means through the problems that, while productively engaging, do not seem to offer specific ways forward to account for the ways the concept of evil is used outside of its strict roots in theology and moral philosophy. By examining the structures at play in different discourse communities, this collection focuses on the value and utility of evil in structural capacities, sidestepping the confounding issues that otherwise make such conversations feel irresolvable. In this manner, despite the interdisciplinary nature of the collection, these arguments point to issues on the level of discourse, attending to how communities use evil when they communicate with each other.

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This notion of discourse communities also facilitates the cross-disciplinary dialogue engaged in here in this collection. One startling revelation of the “Evil Incarnate” conference is the un-networked nature of scholars all working on similar concepts because they were coming from different conceptual fields. As is evidenced by the field-specific collections that dominate the current market of books on evil, these conversations tend to be written in such a way that speak to those inside the communities and tend to exclude outsiders (which this collection suggests seems to be one of the primary functions of evil as a term). This collection actively bridges that divide, bringing together scholarship from across disciplines into a common language addressing a common question. Our underlying position is that exposure to the thinking across these disciplinary communities can enrich the study of this phenomenon as it is currently occurring in all fields—even to the point of speaking back to its roots in religion and theology. Together, these collected pieces begin to articulate how many fields are attempting to deal with the current position, where, living in an era on this side of postmodernity, marks all considerations of evil as somewhat problematic. Put plainly, we now develop ideas and analyze phenomena with an eye toward the moral relativism that has, for some time, been promoted in our shared, global, multicultural, and politically charged world. What is evil, if evil is culturally constructed—if it changes from person to person, or society to society? At other times during human history, evil might have been synonymous with the demonic or the supernatural, but now it begs consideration as a social phenomenon even as it continues to denote those things that are dangerous to our essences, or which have the power to corrupt, not just social reality, but reality itself. We no longer have werewolves, but we still use the metaphor to describe more mundane evils. The accuracy of such correlations is partly the concern of this volume. Why should such a thing be accurate? Why should we believe that such accuracy even matters? To answer such questions, it’s necessary to first shed light on the origins of evil as a term. The source material for the initial definition of evil—the first impetus for its creation as a thing worthy of consideration and avoidance—is social in nature. This may seem at first somewhat confusing. Evil doesn’t really seem like a social entity in early considerations of its influence. Quite the contrary, it resembles a force, a miasma, a pestilence, or a curse. Evil and good seem to be things in and of themselves, and not value judgments made by the community. Thus, the mythology of the past is peopled by demons and devils, sphynxes and vampires, Medusa and Grendel. The dichotomy of evil suggests that there is a natural world upon which the social world is an overlay, and in opposition to the natural world, is a supernatural world, often a moral world, where evil is as much a force as light or gravity.

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From this other world, the various spirits and monsters stumble forward, unaware of the confines of the human world or the laws of society which they seem to transgress without thought. But in this space the social function of evil immediately becomes evident. After all, Grendel is only evil because he attacks Hrothgar. The being is attracted by the celebration that is taking place there, and he mounts an attack. He ignores the social law of celebrations and turns the mead hall into a bloodbath. Thus, he is evil. If he had stayed in his cave, he would have been dangerous, but that danger would have lacked the necessary social component to make it evil. The myth of the minotaur also reveals the close correlation between the construction of evil and social taboo. Born as a result of Pasiphaë’s seduction of a bull given to her husband by the gods for sacrifice, the result is a creature that is half man, half god-bull. Pasiphaë is able to transgress the laws concerning sexual behavior, because her husband, Minos, has transgressed laws regarding relations with the divine, keeping the god-bull it in his herd instead of sacrificing it. Punishing these transgressions, the resultant creation is a monster (Apollonius 2013, Ill) . Let loose in the wilds, it would be akin to a wild animal roaming around, hunting humans, but the king of Crete decides instead to lock the creature in a giant maze and feed it sacrifices from nearby Athens. He gives the brute a social role; it is the executioner of political prisoners. Interestingly, both creatures have inspired postmodern imaginations, begging for their sides of the story to be told: Grendel describes his complaint in John Gardner’s novel Grendel (1971) and the minotaur tells its story in the short story “House of Asterion” (1947) by Jorge Luis Borges. Not surprisingly, both so-called monsters describe their motives as intensely social. Grendel cannot understand why he has been left out of the celebrations, and, having been ostracized one too many times, goes to make his complaint, resulting in the disaster preceding the poem “Beowulf.” Borges’s minotaur’s motives are much more simple. The remarkable loneliness of being lost in a maze has driven him mad, so he invents another like himself. He imagines that the labyrinth in which he is trapped extends everywhere, and that his fate is the fate of all who live in the labyrinth of human society. Like the minotaur, once we have accepted the necessity of social interaction, loneliness becomes our lot. For the minotaur, the loneliness becomes a cause for violence, and finally, self-destructive behavior. Ultimately, long before the restructuring of thought regarding the presence of evil as a thing independent of supernatural forces—first by the Enlightenment, then by modernism, followed by postmodernism—it was always, nonetheless, described as having a social function. While dangerous things could be dangerous without being evil, transgression into the social world suddenly made the dangerous evil. The social act of

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heresy meant that the dead could not be buried in graveyards, the old women who had lost the social capacity of their attractiveness became witches, the cranky and mentally diseased members of the community began to become wizards or vampires, the babies one could not afford to keep became changelings. Evil was born from social exigence even when it seemed to be wholly the province of a diabolic other world. While the comparisons between the myth and the postmodern might suggest an evolutionary progression of social recognition, even early on, scholars recognized that evil has a necessary social element that supernatural and mythic interpretations seem to ignore. Even as early 300 BCE, Plato notes the social functionality of evil through his call to censure art in his description of the Guardians within the first half of the Republic. Plato claims that, as the Guardians, a caste of warrior/statesmen/police/ poets, are to stand as the epitome of the Republic’s values, they cannot be exposed to the wrong kinds of art lest it corrupt their sense of right and wrong. This censorship goes so far as to include religious doctrine, legends, and myths: the Guardians must be steered away from stories that promote evil. The definition of what stories are considered evil is better laid out by Plato’s student Aristotle who, in The Poetics, explains that tragedy cannot be made through depictions of the punishment of evil since evil should be punished. Moreover, one should not show stories in which evil prospers since the moral nature of such stories is, itself, called into question. Reading these tales, having faith in these religious stories, or believing in these myths all results in the moral degeneracy of the participant, and this danger is, itself, unworthy of note except that it affects citizenship. Thus, even in the texts of ancient Greek philosophy, only social function within the community can establish that which is truly evil. What becomes apparent, then, is that beliefs about evil have always been highly contingent upon socio-cultural constructions. Evil is that which violates social law and corrupts behaviors required to participate the community’s values. Moreover, this definition seems to apply even during times and in places where evil seemed to have no logical connection to the social world—such as those that generate the definitions in the context of theology, philosophy, and religious studies. This absorption suggests just how completely embedded social definitions have become once the various eras of thought have stripped away evil’s capacity as a supernatural force. Today, except in a few holdouts, evil has ceased to be a force unto itself, and is now generally perceived as a value judgment on the various acts and institutions encountered within a society and when crossing societal and cultural contexts. Within this context, it is worth considering what has been gained (and lost) by crossing over the threshold from the ephemera of superstition to criteria such as the measurability of effect, the realism of psychological motives, or the constructedness of social forces.

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What was once supernatural and undergirded by the social is now perceived as primarily social with occasional, almost angst-ridden, reminders of the supernatural. Within realms of analysis that emphasize natural and social forces—all but eliminating the possibility of the supernatural—does anything remain of evil that is still recognizable as such? Though evil has been de-mystified, it continues to be a frequently used term, and—as several of the chapters in this collection argue—some portion of its original definition remains. Finally, the all-important question of what it means to be evil when that designation is social comes to the front. Logic would dictate that if one is evil by transgressing the social, then the designation is one of social transgression. The definition is, at first glance, tautological. Yet, in many cases, the old inferences hold, and the designation of evil continues to evoke a supranatural sense of behavior that exceeds not just the norm but also the human. All of these problems are exacerbated by the fracturing of the narrative of evil. If evil was, at one time, a supernatural force as well-defined by theology and thus identifiable under this singular moniker, as the supernatural has dropped away, the capacity for description has multiplied allowing for evil to be described as a function of laws or of propaganda, as a psychological compulsion toward some socially condemned act, or even just a tendency toward self-doubt or self-deception. This is not to bemoan the possibilities that are presented through this fracturing, but rather to point them out so that the proper consideration may be given to a set of works by individual scholars from multiple disciplines who are all asking similar questions. Ultimately, this volume acts as a matrix by addressing these concerns from the mind-set of these multiple disciplines. What this suggests, the very possibility that such a project can be undertaken, is that to truly understand evil requires a cross-cultural qua cross-disciplinary approach that allows all the different sections of social understanding of that which exceeds comprehension to become explicable in a manner that does not necessitate returning to the origins in every subsequent approach. To address these particular views on the subject, the essays in the collection progress from arguments with strongest roots in a religious conception of evil to its most secular embodiments. They do not, however, move chronologically through primary texts, as the roots of these discussions are not based on historical distance from the definitional logic, but instead engage with each moment in terms of its conceptual framing of the function of evil. We intend for this a-chronistic integration to highlight the similarities in analysis of the subject rather than suggest an evolutionary pattern of research. These connections across periods, fields, and countries emphasize the collective conversation and the international, ahistorical phenomemon that is the contemplation of evil’s role in society.

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The discussion begins with assessments of evil’s function where the term is still tightly tied to its religious origins. The first chapter in this section, Chu-chueh Cheng’s “Villainous Victimhood in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’” examines evil in terms of revenge by contemplating human conceptions of divinity through the notion of the applicability of divine retribution through intentional human action. Cheng puts as the central problem of revenge the implications of infallible beings playing god when the divine fails to punish evil and where revenge is, itself, an immoral act. Set against the backdrop of Edgar Allan Poe, she explores evil in one of its more famous literary explorations. The collection then shifts to explore how differing religious constructions of redemption complicate human ability to come to terms with the notion of redemption. Olivia Coulomb argues in “The Winter’s Tale: Art and Redemption from Evil,” that William Shakespesare’s A Winter’s Tale uses art, a sign of religious evil in the Jacobean period, as the means of inspiring recognition and thus setting the protagonist on his redemptive path. By highlighting conflicting religious approaches to statuary, Coulomb’s argument shifts the conversation away from religious conceptions of evil to a more social function: art as it is used as a means of control and as a means of rebellion. Jamey Hecht uses Renaissance drama to articulate how shifting faith systems in his paper “Guilt, Evil, and Hell in Doctor Faustus and Macbeth.” Hecht explores the central question of whether audiences can take seriously the faith of characters who make deals with the Devil. By exploring these works in regards to their problematic view of cosmic evil, Hecht is able to argue that the texts present a look into the author’s refutation of evil as a supernatural force. As a transitional capstone to the religious notions of evil in relation to redemption, Charity Fowler uses current depictions of evil in popular television to argue against secular devolvement in absolute moral relativism. In “Seasonal Villainy: Radical Evil, Relativity, and Redemptive Relationships,” she uses the redemptive arcs of television villains-turned-heroes to argue compellingly that the notion of a moral spectrum does not necessarily imply the death of the concepts of good and evil, but rather that people acknowledge limited access to unassailable definitions even faced with post-apocalyptic tyrants and sadistic vampires. Fowler leads out of the realm of religious positioning of evil, and the next series of chapters lead into a contemplation of evil based on a comparison to that which is considered human. In his essay, “The Name-ofthe-Monster: Interpellation and the Construction of Evil,” Jim Casey argues that even primitive depictions of monsters, in particular literary creatures like Grendel and the monster from Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, are generated as bearing a relationship to humankind through the very language used to describe their nature. By suggesting that evil must have personhood, he offers up a definition of evil rooted in humanity that is often overlooked when the character in question is a monster.

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Jessica Folio’s essay, “The Communicative Force of Evil: The Case of Stephen King,” explores evil in some of its more famous pop cultural representations. By exploring the way that King chooses to describe evil, Folio shows that, even in cases where the evil is intensely supernatural and seems at its most distant from the failures and foibles of humanity, the real evil of King’s nightmarish visions is always steeped in human vice. Marion Duval’s “When Real Life Isn’t Evil Enough for Fiction: French Postwar Literature and the Relationship between Evil and Sexuality” bridges the gap from the supernatural to natural, social forces in her exploration of fictional Nazi biographies in post-World War II France. Demonstrating the heightened sexual deviance of fictional Nazi figures, Duval argues that these French authors refuse to accept Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil because they insist on showing that only nonnormal humans could become Nazis. However, she notes, by using homosexuality as the signal of sexual deviance, these fictional biographies maintain the ideological discriminations that initially enabled Nazi practice. With these complications, the collection moves to consider the problems of defining evil when social context becomes a key point in determining what exceeds the bad, the illegal, and criminal crosses into the sphere of evil. In their chapter, “Poison and Antidote: Evil and the HeroVillain Binary in Deon Meyer’s Post-Apartheid Crime Thriller, Devil’s Peak,” Sam Naidu and Karlien van der Wielen explore the meaning of good and evil as well as law and criminality through the lens of the South African detective novel. Presenting a different take on what it means by moral law, Naidu and van der Wielen are able to show how eras of social corruption have the capacity to blur the lines between acts of good and evil and how, in some cases, the most moral acts can end up taking on evil dimensions through traditional social constraints. Brian Johnson’s essay, “Ghosts of the Old South: The Evils of Slavery and the Haunted House in Royal Street” explores the ways in which one of America’s most haunted houses has been used to describe the evils of slavery through the legends that surround the atrocities committed within its walls. Primarily, Johnson focuses on the outrage expressed by the people of New Orleans at different eras of the house’s history to demonstrate what it was, and is, that people find abhorrent about the institution of slavery. By doing so, Johnson demonstrates that even an institution such as the slave system of the Antebellum South is subject to judgment by socially derived morality. In Julie Michot’s chapter, “Ace in the Hole and Its Public: Evil and the News Spectacle,” the film noir of Billy Wilder is explored in its capacity to comment upon the evils arising out of a consumer driven entertainment industry. Michot demonstrates that Wilder’s criticism of the crowd within the film has its counterpart criticism in the crowd watching the film. Thus, however evil the character within the film are,

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their condition is redeemable, but the crowd that watches the human drama, silently capitulating, have no recourse to moral redemption. From the social considerations in the previous chapters, the collection moves into specific national and political considerations. In “The Evil Foreigner: Marvel Villains and the American National Identity from World War II to the War on Terror,” Joanna Nowotny and Bettina Jossen use Captain America, as well as other heroes and villains from Marvel Comics, as temperature gauges for the association between nation, race, good, and evil. By following the evolution of Captain America, Nowotny and Jossen are able to how the American enemy has changed over the years from a xenophobic fear of the other to an internalized paranoia regarding the institution of a surveillance state. Also considering American international politics, Riven Barton analyzes how, after centuries of refining a diplomatic global view of mankind, tribal definitions of evil still erupt in reference to the enemy in her essay “Tribalism and the Use of Evil in Modern Politics.” In particular, she looks at how the events of September 11th promoted a new recurrence of tribal morality, and what it means exactly to be motivated by tribalism in a time defined by a global economy. After such contemporary considerations, the collection ends in the past with Jeffrey Mullins’s In A “Fiend Incarnate”: Sin, Science, and the Problem of Evil in the New American Nation.” Mullins describes the legal problem of defining evil and differentiating it from insanity by analyzing the landmark case argued by William Seward. Mullins shows a dramatic cultural shift in American definitions of evil. By exploring the invention of the insanity plea in cases of murder, Mullins shows the necessary social constitution of evil at a point where it is most contentious: the criminal courtroom. What our conference showed, and what this collection bears out, is that discussions of evil have always been questions of how cultures represent that which they find socially abhorrent. The miasma of evil, its position as a palpable force, is as much a metaphor for the social scorn suggested by the designation of evil as it is a nod toward the supernatural force which evil is thought to represent. In fact, these chapters, written by a variety of authors in a variety of disciplines and covering a variety of cultural moments, suggest that a discussion of evil cannot happen without considering social ramifications. Without such exploration, the conversation is simply incomplete. Thus, collectively, this work aims at opening up a conversation about evil while, simultaneously, demonstrating the assumptions that undergird the manner by which such a conversation proceeds. REFERENCES Apollodorous. 2013. The Library: Primary Source Edition. Nabu Press.

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Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. 2000. Translated by Seamus Heaney. Bilingual Edition. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1998. Collected Fictions. New York: Viking Press. Elon, Amos. 2006. “The Excommunication of Hannah Arendt.” In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt, vi–xxiii. New York: Penguin Books. Gardner, John. 1971. Grendel. New York: Vintage. Neiman, Susan. “What’s the Problem of Evil?” In Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by María Pía Lara, 27–45. Berkeley: University of California Press. Plato. The Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Seinfeld, Season 7, Disc 2. “The Soup Nazi.” Dir. Andy Ackerman. Columbia Tri-Star (2005).

ONE Villainous Victimhood in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” Chu-chueh Cheng

Evil is delineated as the ultimate other of Good. Yet, in the case of revenge, the dichotomy becomes problematic because every human endeavor for justice inevitably entails malice against another human being and a usurpation of divine sovereignty. In avenging a wrong, the avenger exchanges positions with the initial aggressor because retaliation engenders a new wrong and inverts the victim of the initial offense into the villain of the new violation. In one example of revenge, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” retaliation obfuscates victimhood and villainy, and confession conflates guilt and guile, complicating the easy definition of evil as good’s counterpart and creating the paradoxical position of villainous victimhood. “The Cask of Amontillado” effectively complicates these dichotomies because the story arrests the treachery of evil when it appears most innocuous in a religious context. The story’s protagonist, a villainous victim, manifests this type of evil, as he defends his monstrous cruelty as divine retribution and camouflages his villainy with grieving victimhood. “The Cask of Amontillado” reveals the complexity of evil because it simultaneously encases a revenge murder in a confession and contains malice in the execution of justice. Two types of revenge are typed up in the story of the Montresors as metonymized in their family crest. One, that of the snake, is bestial; it attacks simply because it has been attacked, and thus multiplies evil. The other, that of the heel, is divine: God punishes the snake for Eden. Because it is associated with divine retribution, this second kind of vengeance is not evil. In Poe’s story, the protagonist’s 11

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claims suggest that he is attempting, as best as possible, to imagine his crime against Fortunato not as bestial response but as divine retribution, rendering it acceptable. To show Montresor’s confessional rhetoric at work, this chapter begins by describing the two kinds of vengeance, emphasizing the characteristics necessary for divine retribution. It then illustrates how Montresor attempts to use these tropes of the divine to characterize his behavior. The story thus reveals how revenge, despite its attempts to tie violence and aggression to divine justice, thus goodness, always seems to become a mask for evil, perpetuating cycles of villainous victimhood. The story begins with the first-person narrator Montresor claiming that he has suffered innumerable injuries from his enemy Forunato and thus vows to avenge a wrong: “THE THOUSAND INJURIES of Forunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge” (Poe, [1846] 2000, 202). Montresor then relates how he avenges himself. Amid the jubilant chaos of a carnival, he lures Fortunato to the catacombs of his castle on the pretext that only Fortunato has the expertise to authenticate the cask of Amontillado he has recently purchased. In the family vaults of his palazzo, Montresor entraps Fortunato within the walls he erects, burying him alive amid the deceased. The account of retribution concludes with Fortunato’s immurement in the crypts, and it is instantly followed by Montresor’s closing remark for the entire confession: “For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed [the old rampart of bones]. In pace requiescat!” (207). Montresor’s confession shows circularity in its configuration and in the complexity of its significance, as the closure of his confession refers back to the vow for revenge at the start of the tale. Such circularity yokes atrocity and spirituality, just as the Montresor’s family motto—“Nemo me impune lacessit [No one provokes with impunity]” (204)—fuses rectitude and cruelty. The family crest also highlights the circular relationship of these ideas, as it depicts “A huge human foot d’or, in a field of azure; the foot crushes a serpent rampant whose fangs are embedded in the heel” (204). This variation on the Ouroboros, or serpent eating its own tail, highlights how the evil in revenge parallels the mythical creature that obfuscates beginning and ending, consuming itself in the process. Montresor deliberately confuses villainy and victimhood by presenting himself as a victim of Fortunato’s “thousand injuries” in the opening paragraph of his confession (Poe [1846] 2000, 202). While this passage rhetorically needs to inform the reader, it more actively puzzles her. The first three sentences clearly express Montresor’s determination to avenge a wrong: THE THOUSAND INJURIES of Forunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave

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utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitely settled—but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved, precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish, but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong. (Poe, [1846] 2000, 202; original italics)

The use of the past tense indicates that, at the time of narration, Montresor has already executed the task. In contrast, the final three sentences of the story are in present tense, hinting at a wish unfulfilled or a motto unrealized. These six sentences, when taken together, reveal an inconsistency between what Montresor claims to achieve and what he has actually attained. Montresor’s equivocation engenders the ambiguity intrinsic in the conjunction of the family motto and crest. “Nemo me impune lacessit” (204) captures the Montrsors’ fierce vindictiveness, and the wording of the maxim positions the family as defenders rather than aggressors. The coat-of-arms, however, is not as definite. The circular combat between the human and serpent presents them as two enemies ensnared in reciprocal belligerence. Walter Stepp (1976) claims the crest arrests “a scene of mutual destruction” (448), and such synchronized antagonism obfuscates whether the “me” in the motto refers to the human’s brutality or the serpent’s deviousness. The corporeal entwinement of the provoker and the retaliator corresponds to the conflation of villainy and victimhood in Montresor’s revelation, for it remains indeterminate whether the murder he has committed is indeed a victim’s retribution or a villain’s belligerence. MONTRESOR AND THE SYMBOLS OF GENESIS Montresor’s confession and family emblem indicate his Catholic background, highlighting the relation between the serpent imagery in “The Cask of Amontillado” to the serpent imagery in the biblical Book of Genesis. In its Catholic interpretation, Genesis begins with the chaos before God’s creation of humans and animals which is followed by the perfect harmony between God and his creations in the Garden of Eden. The peace and order is disturbed when the serpent instills Eve with thoughts of disobedience, leading Eve to tempt Adam to try the fruit of knowledge in defiance of God’s command. Adam and Eve’s disobedience is punished by ending their carefree life in Eden and beginning their torment in the mortal world. The serpent is condemned to crawl on its belly, forever an enemy to Adam and Eve’s offspring. In this interpretation, Genesis gives a straightforward account of human transgression and divine retribution, yet the deceptively simple sto-

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ryline contains provocative contradictions. In her feminist psychoanalytic approach to Genesis, Julia Kristeva (1982) addresses incongruities in the origin of evil, the concept of sin, and the cause of Adam’s fall. She argues that the villainy in Eden is misplaced on Eve, and the sin is unjustly associated with Adam’s acquisition of knowledge and assertion of free will (126). Kristeva asks, “Was Adam a sinner to begin with, or did he become one of his own ‘free will’?” (125). This question foregrounds how Genesis portrays evil through the relationship between the mortal and the immortal and between the human and the animal. 1 Such framing of evil means the story in Genesis presents a questionable crime and a problematic punishment, and this dubious relationship prompts contested readings. This chapter postulates that God contrives a situation that necessarily leads to Adam’s transgression, so his transgression is not an impetuous act of his own folly. This theory relies on the notion that Adam’s free will is never his of his own making but is created by God. Instead of a retaliator against Adam and Eve’s transgression, God is the instigator who veiled His distrust under the guise of grievance. In this reading, God’s transference of guilt equally explains the serpent’s role in the biblical story of crime and punishment. The serpent is depicted as the arch-villain, inciting Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God. So, when God punishes the three offenders, He uses the serpent to remind Adam and Eve of human sin and God’s rage. From this perspective, Kristeva’s query concerning Adam’s subjectivity applies equally to the serpent, rephrasing it as such: Was the serpent created to be an instigator or did it become one of its own “free will?” The guile of the serpent is either innate to God’s creation or intended in God’s scheme. In either case, the circumstance, rather than the serpent, is the originator of the evil. The intermediatry figure the serpent plays in this scenario obscures the cause of God’s distrust and the human’s transgression. Hence, the mutual belligerence between the human and the serpent not only confuses the identities of provoker and retaliator but also conceals the origin of evil. GENESIS AND MONTRESOR’S DIRECT DOUBLING Poe uses this version of Genesis as a model for the confusion of villainy and victimhood in “The Cask of Amontillado” in two main forms. On an iconic level, the biblical story of the Fall is central to the image on the Montresor family crest depicting the reciprocal hostility between mankind and the serpent. On a rhetorical level, Montresor’s confession uses the rhetorical ploy of incriminating the victim to transfer the villain’s guilt to the innocent other(s) so as to justify a particular version of justice. These double layers combine to show the complexity of human use of malicious acts as a vehicle for (supposedly) divine retribution.

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The aggression depicted in the family crest fuses divine justice, human malice, and animal instinct. Such entanglement renders ambiguous the referent of “me: in the family motto.” Ambiguity inspires rigorous interpretations. Some critics consider Fortunato the serpent and Montresor the human foot because the latter retaliates with the former’s provocation (Felheim 1954, 448; Stott 2004, 86). Others hold that Montresor’s deviousness is closer to the serpent’s cunning and Fortunato’s naïveté the clumsiness of the huge human foot (Stepp 1976, 448; Pribek 1987, 23; White 1989, 552–53). To these two antithetical interpretations, I add that, reading the family maxim through the lens of Genesis, “Me” can be understood to refer to God, even though His presence is not depicted explicitly in the coat-of-arms, in which God determines what sin is and what punishment each sin deserves. When “me” is understood to refer to the human foot, the motto can be interpreted as the human executing God’s punishment of the serpent. If the serpent stands for the Montresors, then the motto can be read as the serpent executing God’s punishment of the Original Sin, namely, human suffering. In the case of “me” referring to God, the motto describes a vindictive God overseeing the sinners’ mutual torment. The biblical allusion contained in the emblem complicates the righteousness of the motto. Taken together, the crest and the maxim indicate the equation of personal pride with family honor and compares both to divine justice. This metonymic relation, which is central to Montresor’s confession, obscures the divide between the singular and the collective as well as the mortal and the immortal. Patrick White (1989) highlights this indeterminacy in relation to the operation of evil in Montresor’s confession and revenge, asking why the family motto uses the singular voice of “me [me]” rather than the collective “nobis [us]” (552). I argue that the use of me in the motto permits each Montresor to position himself as a loyal defender of family honor. Additionally, using the ambiguous referent of “me”—either the Montresor family or God—the affiliation between me and Him in the maxim also affords the defender a religious justification for cruelty. The defender avenges personal injuries in the name of guarding the Montresors’ dignity, subtly likening this defense to executing God’s vindictiveness. Thus, the indeterminate referent of “me” and the subsequent conflation of singular with collective and mortal with divine discursively veils evil with the guise of good. Moreover, the magnitude of an insult is proportionate to the insulted one’s self-perceived social status, and Montresor adopts such correlation to heighten the severity of “the thousand injuries” he has suffered (Poe [1846] 2000, 202). He believes that to accept animosity without returning more is to subordinate himself to Fortunato and the Montresor family to the Fortunato family. Not only does he consider an insult to him an offense against his entire family, but also he equates his family motto with a religious decree. Through crafty rhetorical maneuvering, Montre-

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sor elevates himself to the rank of “God’s agent” and his revenge to an execution of God’s wrath on Fortunato” (Stott 2004, 86–87). As God’s agent, Montresor asserts his divine right to execute his revenge and masks his reversal from victim to villain. DIVINE RIGHT AND DUPLICITOUS DOUBLING Though the family motto equates the Montresors with God, the narrator parallels the serpent in Eden to ensnare his enemy by camouflaging malice with camaraderie. This feigned congeniality wins him the trust of his foe: “It must be understood, that neither by word nor deed had I given Fortunato cause to doubt my good will. I continued, as was my wont, to smile in his face, and he did not perceive that my smile now was at the thought of his immolation” (Poe [1846] 2000, 202; original italics). Montresor also affirms this affability through deliberate emulation, as proven in the recounted dialogues that are comprised of numerous reverberations in that Montresor directly repeats Fortunato’s words. Some of Montresor’s repetitions answer Fortunato’s questions: “Niter” as a reply to “Niter?” (203) and “A Mason” to “A Mason?” (205). He utters other repetitions to humor Fortuanto, such as “True, the Amontillado” (206) and “Yes, let us be gone” (207). These repetitions become more ambiguous, such as when Montresor echoes Fortunato’s pleading “For the love of God” as the narrator walls his enemy into a corner of the family catacombs (207). Here, the plea for mercy turns into a (questionable) assertion of divine justice. Though this repetition reiterates the narrator’s goals, the duplication inevitably betrays the language’s and the speaker’s duplicity, and this particular reiteration registers bifurcation of meaning. In general, the same expression, when uttered by two different persons sequentially, produces different and even antithetical meanings. This observation also applies to critical interpretations of the connotative shifts in Montresor’s echoes. Several critics read Montresor’s duplications as explicitly duplicitous. For instance, Sam Moon (1954) characterizes Montresor’s reiteration as “cold Godless mockery” (448), and Joseph Kishel (1982) associates Montresor’s mimicry with “murderous irony” (30). Similarly, John Gruesser (1998) holds that in repeating those words, Montresor “boldly defies God, damning himself for all time” (130). Yet, some critics read Montresor charitably. White (1989) discerns seriousness rather than profanity: “Montresor is apparently quite sincere in equating the family dictate with a divine commandment” (554). Bill Delaney (2005) likewise detects candidness in Montresor’s reverberation: “Once he has punished Fortunator to his satisfaction, he can now feel sorry for his victim” (39). These two, antithetical critical views of Montresor’s repetition evince the equivocality of his confession and the duplicity of his intention.

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More than simply duplicating Fortunato’s speech, Montresor positions himself as his enemy’s double. From Montresor’s standpoint, the two of them have switched their places, and—for the love of God—he must reverse the downturn to restore his rightful position and to reclaim his former prestige. Two declarations from Montresor’s dialogue with Fortunato illustrate this relation to his rival: “You are rich, respected, admired, beloved; You are happy, as once I was” and “The Montresors were a great and numerous family” (Poe [1946] 2000, 204). “I was” and “The Montresors were” indicate that the Montresor family has lost its former glory, and the Fortunatos now occupy the social position that the Montresors once had. Yet, before he can reveal himself as his enemy’s opposite, to defeat his rival a rival, the retaliator camouflages himself as an ally. His duplication of Fortunato in words and deeds gives the impression that the two are doubles, as the contrived similitude conceals innate differences. This sense of a “reverse image” explains Stepp’s (1976) description of Montresor and Fortunato as “the ironic double” (448). Here, revenge repeats the provoker’s villainy, returns it to him, and reverses the relation between the avenger and the provoker. As Stepp’s argument shows, outward resemblance conceals but never obliterates social, religious, and temperamental divergences that have already placed Montresor and Fortunato in different positions. Because the Catholic Church banned freemasonry, Montresor, a Catholic, could not be a mason (Rocks 1972, 50–51; Rodrigues 1985, 41). For the same reason, Fortunato, as a Mason, could not be Catholic. The origins of Montresor and Fortunato are less definite (Adler 1954, 33–34; Cooney 1974, 195; Benton 1997, 19), yet Montresor’s statement suggests their different nationalities: “In painting and gemmary, Fortunato, like his countrymen, was a quack—but in the matter of old wines he was sincere” (Poe [1846] (2000), 202; italics added). Such differences prevent readers from fully accepting the doubling proposed by Montresor’s narrative. Affected rather than innate, Montresor’s resemblance to Fortunato is as deceptive in form as it is sinister in intent. As Eric Gans (1997) aptly puts it, “the hunter’s movement must obey the rhythms of the animals he hunts rather than his own” (27). Mimesis, according to Gans’s observation, is a principal tactic of entrapment, for it blurs the disctinction between the predator and the prey. To ensnare Fortunato, Montresor uses the hunter’s tactic of mimesis. He entices Fortunato by using their shared interest in wines as bait, flattering him that he has the superior knowledge of wines and thus is a better judge of a cask of Amontillado that Montressor may have imprudently bought (Poe [1846] 2000, 202; Moldenhauer 1968, 293; Dern 2001, 61). By using behavioral mimicry with a dose of flattery, Montresor ensures the execution of his nemesis. However, as Montresor immures Fortunato, he becomes the provoker he vows to eliminate, and this reversal of victim and villain turns the two rivals into each other’s doubles.

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DOUBLING BACK TO CONFESSIONAL CIRCLING By doubling his enemy, the victim in turn becomes the villain, so while retribution incites the avenger’s monstrosity, Montresor’s confession encloses evil in the religious practice of atonement. In the Catholic Church, confession is a religious practice of repentance to communicate with God, who is outside the admitted offense but is invoked to hear the declaration of guilty and requires the confessor’s sin. Yet, confidential and self-reflexive, confession proceeds in a closed circuit. It is a revelation to the self through the symbolic present of the other. The word confessor refers to both the one who confesses and the one who listens to confession. This double meaning suggests that confession is essentially a monologue performed in the form of a dialogue. The function of confession is thus dual and dubious. The ritual of admission similarly allows Montresor to accuse and to excuse himself simultaneously. To “You” (202), he admits an offense committed earlier, yet the “You” remains silent throughout the narration, You is called upon merely to hear the confession, not to judge the content of the confession nor to condemn the act of transgression. The You here can thus take on the multivalence of the me in the family motto, standing perhaps for a human listener and perhaps for God. If revenge aims to rectify an earlier wrong between humans, confession of revenge intends to correct the wrong enacted by the act of vengeance. Confession does this by mending a broken relation with God and returning the villainous victim to the realm of divine agent. Yet, Montresor’s confession is more convoluted than that. As his narration shifts between the inner narrative of earlier revenge and the outer narrative of current disclosure, his thoughts vacillate between monstrous malice, human penitence, and divine benevolence. Such convolution is evidence in his final utterance “In pace requiscat!” (207). These words could be a prayer for the peace of Fortunato’s soul in heaven or a wish for the peace of his body in the catacomb. The first interpretation undermines the effectiveness of his revenge. Alternatively, Montresor’s obsessive vigilance to his enemy’s remains in the catacombs denies Fortunato the very peace the benediction implores. Though the concluding benediction is convoluted as a linear conclusion, it brings the story full circle. “In pace requiescat!” also resonates with Montresor’s earlier invocation of God in the opening paragraph: “You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat” (202). With the final prayer, Montresor’s confession returns to where it starts and to “You” it addresses. The circular structure of Montresor’s narration thus delivers a feel of perfect closure. Yet, the prologue and the epilogue, when read contrapunctually, render unclear whether guilt or guile prompts Montresor to account for his earlier transgression, especially because confession of revenge is a double paradox. If revenge is indeed justifiable, it is not an act of villainy but one

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of virtue. Similarly, if sin does not exist, both confession and absolution are superfluous. Thus, if Fortunato is truly a provoker, and Montresor has indeed avenged his insults, then the confession is superfluous. In this regard, Montresor’s confession is only meaningful in two cases. First, the confession is prompted by guilt because what he reveals about Fortunato’s insult is untrue and the retaliation is in fact a provocation. Alternatively, Montresor, driven by complacency, needs to boast about his undiscovered and unpublished crime, which makes his revelation blasphemy before God. In both circumstances, Montresor’s confession intends to contain evil, but evil exceeds confession. In the first, possibility, his guile desecrates justice, whereas his conceit defiles atonement in the second. For either possibility, his revelation adopts a spiritual form but betrays spiteful content. Evil, however, tames these contradictions. John A. Dern (2001) claims that: [i]f he is to succeed, [Montresor] must use words not only to lessen the cruelty of the deed (by showing to be just) and gain the sympathy of his auditor, but also to hide any scruple he feels. Were Montresor overtly to reveal any guilt, the deed may be interpreted as excessive even for just revenge. (65)

Aware of such concerns, one of the rhetorical tactics adopted is to situate Montresor’s retribution in the framework of religious sacrifice. He smiles to Fortunato “at the thought of his immolation” (Poe [1846] 2000, 202). “Immolation” intimates that Fortunato is sacrificed in a religious ritual and that the killing is a sacred duty (Burns 1974, 24; Rodríguez 1985, 44; Ammary 2010, 58; Bennett 2011, 50). He admits retaliation but denies provocation; he prays for the peace of the dead while he obscures the unrest of the living. The discrepancies between what he excessively reveals and what he cautiously conceals hides a hideous image of evil in action. Such discrepancies, inconsistencies, and equivocations align Montresor with the position of an unreliable narrator, whose reliability is compromised by insanity, guilt, or guile. Montresor’s unreliability originates from the treachery of his soul rather than the implausibility of his memory. Three “buts” and one “however” in the very beginning of his revelation suggest the capriciousness of his mind and the duplicity of his character (Poe [1846] 2000, 202). Furthermore, as James Phelan (2013) observes, “we accept the convention that the retrospective character narrator can reliably report [dialogues uttered fifty years earlier]” (170), so guile rather than senility underlies Montresor’s unreliability. His confession, oblique and incongruous, prompts his auditor to listen cautiously so as to discern the hidden story that he does not voluntarily disclose (Rea 1966, 57; Piacentino 1998, 153).

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The subsequent confession further exposes his guilt. Despite the innumerable injuries Fortunato has allegedly inflicted upon him, Montresor never behaves in a manner that causes Fortunato to suspect his benevolence: “I continued, as was my wont, to smile in his face, and he did not perceive that my smile now was the at the thought of his immolation” (Poe [1846] 2000, 202; original italics). Montresor manipulates his servants with similar trickery. Before he lures Fortunato to his palazzo, he takes measures to ensure that none of his servants will be there: “I had told them that I should not return until the morning, and had given them explicit orders not to stir from the house. These orders were sufficient, I well knew, to ensure their immediate disappearance, one and all, as soon as my back was turned” (203). The contradictions between what Montresor tells his servants and what he wishes them to do reveals his use of guile. Such behavior suggests that his confession might be in a similar mode and thus cannot be taken as a direct indicator of his guilt. Because of Montresor’s prevarication, his claims must be read in the manner that Britta Martens (2011) suggests dramatic monologues and detective fiction must be read: with attentive listening and meticulous investigation. Martens (2011) notes: “As in the dramatic monologue, where references to past events (such as betrayal of a sexual partner or the success of a rival) allow the reader to infer the motivation for the speaker’s utterance and present actions, the reader of detective fiction is stimulated to discover the causal links between the events and their results” (201). Such careful attention is equally stimulated by Poe’s tale and is necessary to decipher Montresor’s confession. Cryptic in disclosure and circuitous in progression, his confession tells a whole story yet concludes without convincingly revealing a full picture. The serpentine nature of his revelation conceals what it seems to disclose excessively, and at the same time betrays what it seeks to guard vigilantly, the villainous victimhood of the narrator. CONCLUSION Revenge, at once the cause and the aim of the tale, initiates and seals Montresor’s confession. Vengeance is declared in the beginning of the confession and is completed near the end of it. The account of revenge is almost immediately followed by the conclusion of Montresor’s confession, which he seals with “In pace requiescat!” (Poe [1846] 2000, 207). This benediction echoes the lines in the opening paragraph that “[a] wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong” (202). In this light, the wrong of which Montresor accuses Fortunato is not righted, at least not rightly amended. Montresor has never made it clear to Fortunato what wrong he has done to deserve

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his punishment, nor does the revenge appease Montresor himself. He lucidity and meticulousness with which Montresor recounts the murder he committed half a century earlier indicates that, even in death, Fortunato still affronts him, and Montresor, despite his own imminent death, continues to haunt his long-deceased rival. The benediction at the end seals Montresor’s confession but leaves disconcerting reverberations of revenge. Though Montresor uses the trappings of revenge and confession to mitigate the evil of his deeds, it remains unclear whether the murder, maliciously planned and cunningly executed, is indeed a victim’s retaliation. It is equally uncertain where Montresor’s revelation, artfully structured and circuitously delivered, is confession, a ritual of penance, or complacency, a parade of self-satisfaction. Revenge challenges the dichotomous nature of good and evil, as one perpetrates evil deeds for the sake of (divine) justice. Montresor defends his malicious behavior as a sacred duty to right a wrong; however, the injuries he claims to have suffered are never specified and the justice he seeks is personal and rhetorically constructed. His aggression thus exceeds its aim for justice to expose his persistent hatred, and his revelation surpasses its purpose for repentance to betray his treachery. In retaliation, villainy recoils upon victimhood, just as the Ouroboros consumes itself for self-perpetuation. Montresor, the self-proclaimed victim of Fortunato, is a villain masquerading an avenger, showing how revenge disguises evil as divine justice, perpetuating a vicious cycle of unresolvable animosity. NOTE 1. Poe’s story relies on Catholic interpretations, but similar stories to the Catholic version of Genesis appear elsewhere in Western culture, highlighting its archetypal resonances. For instance, an equivalent story in Greek mythologies appears in Prometheus’s defiance of Zeus’s order that no one should give fire to human beings. To punish Prometheus, Zeus imprisons him in the Caucasus, where eagles come daily to tear his body apart and feast on his liver. Zeus executes his version of justice with aggression and cruelty. Like Genesis, the story of Prometheus illustrates that divine justice is maliciously executed through the agency of the animal. These parallels complicate Montresor’s attempts to distinguish the bestial from the divine.

REFERENCES Adler, Jacob H. 1954. “Are There Flaws in ‘The Cask of Amontillado?’” Notes and Queries 199: 32–34. Ammary, Silvia. 2010. “Poe’s ‘Theory of Omission’ and Hemingway’s ‘Unity of Effect.’” The Edgar Allan Poe Review 11(2): 53–63. Bennett, Zachary Z. E. 2011. “Killing the Aristocrats: The Mask, the Cask, and Poe’s Ethics of S & M.” The Edgar Allan Poe Review 12(1): 12–58.

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Benton, Richard. 1997. “Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’: Its Cultural and Historical Backgrounds.” Poe Studies 30(1–2): 19–27. Burns, Shannon. 1974. “‘The Cask of Amontillado’: Montresor’s Revenge.” Poe Studies 7(1): 22–25. Cooney, James F. 1974. “‘The Cask of Amontillado’: Some Further Ironies.” Studies in Short Fiction 11(2): 195–96. Delaney, Bill. 2005. “Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado.” The Explicator 64(1): 39–41. Dern, John A. 2001. “Poe’s Public Speakers.” The Edgar Allan Poe Review 2(2): 53–70. Felheim, Marvin, Sam Moon, and Donald Pearce. 1954. “‘The Cask of Amontillado.’” Notes and Queries 1(10): 447–49. Gans, Eric. 1997. Signs of Paradox: Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gruesser, John. 1998. “Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado.” The Explicator 56(3): 129–33. Kishel, Joseph. 1982. “Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado.” The Explicator 41(1): 30. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. The Powers of Horro. New York: Columbia University Press. Martens, Britta. 2011. “Dramatic Monologue, Detective Fiction, and the Search for Meaning.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 66(2): 195–218. Moldenhauer, Joseph J. 1968. “Murder as a Fine Art.” PMLA 83(2): 284–97. Paulson, Ronald. 2007. Sin and Evil: Moral Values in Literature. New Haven, CT: Yale Univeresity Press. Phelan, James. 2013. “Implausibilities, Crossovers, and Impossibilities: A Rhetorical Approach to Breaks in the Code of Mimetic Character Narration.” In A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative, edited by Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson, 167–84. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Piacentino, Ed. 1998. “Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ as Psychobiography: Some Reflections on the Narratological Dynamics.” Studies in Short Fiction 35(2): 153–67. Poe, Edgar Allan. (1846) 2000. “The Cask of Amontillado.” In Tales of Mystery and Imagination, introduced by John S. Whitley, 202–7. Reprint. London: Wordsworth Editions. Pribek, Thomas. 1987. “The Serpent and the Heel.” Poe Studies 20(1): 22–23. Rea, J. 1966. “Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado.’” Studies in Short Fiction 4(1): 57–69. Rocks, James E. 1972. “Conflicts and Motive in ‘The Cask of Amontillado.” Poe Studies 5(2): 50–51. Rodríguez, Julián. 1985. “Parody and Language in ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ by E. A. Poe.” Atlantis 7(1–2): 37–47. Stepp, Walter. 1976. “The Ironic Double in Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado.’” Studies in Short Fiction 13(4): 447–53. Stott, Graham St. John. 2004. “Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado.” The Explicator 62(2): 85–88. White, Patrick. 1989. “‘The Cask of Amontillado:’ A Case for the Defense.” Studies in Short Fiction 26(4): 550–55.

TWO The Winter’s Tale Art and Redemption from Evil Olivia Coulomb

Shakespeare’s plays often define evil as an absolute and unchanging condition, as those characters who begin plays as villains, such as Richard III in the eponymous play and Iago in Othello (1603) begin and end the play with the same attitude. One of Shakespeare’s later plays, The Winter’s Tale (1611), offers an alternative narrative of evil, one in which penance and redemption is possible. The play’s plot indicates that the possibility of redemption is contingent on the nature of evil. Defining Leontes, King of Sicily’s, evil tyranny as the result of the excess passion of uncontrolled jealousy, the source of his evil is human rather than divine. As a human condition, Leontes has the opportunity for spiritual penance and growth, allowing him to end the play in virtue even though he begins the play in vice. He is rewarded for this growth by having his wife returned to him from a petrified state; Queen Hermione ceases to exist as a statue and returns to life. While the notion of redemption is inspiring, the nature of Leontes’s redemption is complicated for an early modern Protestant England. Statues and statue adoration was considered the purview of feared Catholicism, so Shakespeare’s redemptive model problematizes his contemporaries’ relationships with statues and other forms of art banned because of their Catholic resonances. Thus, The Winter’s Tale questions the absolute stance of Protestantism toward art by highlighting the affective power of art as redemptive rather than corrosive. By redefining evil as human, The Winter’s Tale creates space for art to be a means of human 23

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expression of the divine without necessarily limiting itself to Protestant versions of it serving as human usurpation of the divine. EVIL AND SINS HUMAN, SO REDEEMABLE In the Renaissance, the biblical sense of the term evil is intimately linked with jealousy and wrath. Both these emotions refer to God’s fierce vengeance, on the one hand, and, on the other, to the capital vices of human beings. Despite its popular correlations to the Devil, evil is closely linked with human vices, as evil deeds arise out of human passions, such as lust, anger, aggression, and—the passion that dominates The Winter’s Tale— jealousy. Thomas Wilson (1553), in The Arte of Rhetorique, illustrates the role that sin plays in tying evil and humanity together: Man (in whom is poured the breath of life) was made at his first being an ever-living creature, unto the likeness of God, endued with reason, and appointed Lorde ouer all other thinges liuing. But after the fall of our first Father, sinne so crept in [that] out knowledge was much darkened, and by corruption of this out flesh means reason and entendement were both overwhelmed.

Wilson here claims that sin has been within man since the fall of Adam and Eve. As a result, though evil is understood to be unacceptable, it alludes to a sapid and, quite often, ungoverned feeling, since it is rooted in any human, leading to the attractiveness of temptation. While all people have these seeds of evil, each person has the choice whether or not to let the evil within flourish. LEONTES’S JEALOUSY Embroiled in this struggle, Leontes, King of Sicily, represents the traditional archetype of the Christian soul ensnared by sin, but who learns to overcome it through suffering and the resulting self-knowledge. Leontes may superficially appear as simply a wrathful tryant, resembling more one-sided Shakespearean villains. 1 Yet, The Winter’s Tale clearly explains the source of Leontes’s evil behavior in his uncontrollable anger that stems from his jealous fear of losing his wife Hermoine’s fidelity, especially to his friend Polixenes. Such insecurity leads the king to his tyrannical behavior that publically exhibits his villainy. These extreme results indicate why, in Renaissance terms, jealousy is a form of the deadly sin of envy, as it emerges from the perversion of love by fear and anger (Campbell 1930, 3). Steven Wagschal (2006) supports this claim, noting that “through a process of conceptual contamination all forms of jealousy take on the characteristics of an evil force capable of destrying that which makes life most worth living” (188). Chris Hassel, Jr.

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(2005) applies this notion directly to Shakespeare’s plays, observing that wrath is often admired and understood either as an impressive feature of military valor or as an effective device of intimidation (400–2). Leontes operates from Hassel, Jr.’s second kind of wrath, as he uses intimidation and threats to control his kingdom. His perception is distorted by jealousy, which leads him to commit awful and irrevocable actions. Leontes’s villainy stems from his anxieties about his wife Hermoine’s fidelity (Nordlund 2007, 186–88). While the play makes it clear that Hermoine should be above reproach, social anxieties stemming from the patriarchal structure of Renaissance England validate the king’s fears. Stephen Orgel (1996) has already underlined how patriarchal structures undergird early modern England and its relations to male fears about female chastity: “[t]he fear of losing control of women’s chastity, a very valuable possession that guaranteed the legitimacy of one’s heirs, and especially valuable for fathers as a piece of disposable property, is a logical consequence of a patriarchal structure” (36). As a result, more often than not, the idea of women’s infidelity would goad men into wrath, jealousy, villainy, and evil deeds (Charney 2012, 137–38). In this social context, while Leontes’s uncontrolled passions might lead him to evil behavior, the instigation for these passions would be understood as socially acceptable to a contemporary audience. This acceptance allows for Leontes, unlike other Shakespearean villains, to have the potential for redemption. The play explicitly demonstrates that Leontes’s descent into evil stems from these socially—if not individually—legitimate concerns about his wife’s fidelity. These (unfounded) fears manifest in the language he uses to accuse Hermione, stating that “[m]y wife is a hobby-horse, deserves a name / As rank as any flax-wench that puts to / Before her troth-plight” (Shakespeare [1988] 1998g, 1.2.278–80) The comparison to a hobby-horse, or rocking, suggests that she has been ridden by many men. As Eric Partridge makes explicit: “horse, because it is ridden . . . ; the ‘rocking’ element refers to female movement in coitu” (Partridge 1947, 127; original italics). The queen thus becomes a “wench,” a term whose application to prostitutes implies that Hermione is not as pure and modest as she appears to be. In particular, Leontes compares her to a “flax-wench,” or a flax-worker who combed and spun the plant for linen and thrashed it for linseed. This appellation turns the queen into a low, sluttish girl, especially as women of this class and profession were said to have sex before their formal marriage vows (Jackson 1819, 134). By applying this term to his wife, Leontes hints that Hermione was not a virgin when she married the king. Leontes’s villainy appears more forcefully because he discloses such personal information about his queen’s behavior prior to their union. While the social sources for concerns about female fidelity might be acceptable, Leontes displaces his fears about power and control in gener-

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al onto his wife’s sexuality. This can be seen in that he attributes sexual favors as the key to Hermione’s greater success at diplomatic persuasion. Hermione has been asked to intercede on her husband’s behalf in his exchanges with Polixenes, and she remedies the situation by critiquing the king’s approach: You, sir, Charge him too coldly. Tell him you are sure All in Bohemia’s well. This satisfaction They bygone day proclaimed. (Shakespeare [1988] 1998g, 1.2.29–32)

Hermione here blames her husband for acting inappropriately with his old friend, an exceptional disapproval because, normally, the queen complies with her husband. When Hermione successfully persuades Polixenes to stay, she has succeeded where Leontes’s has failed. Leontes then seems to be offended by her success and jealous of her influence on his old friend: “At my request he would not” (1.2.89). From this point onward, Leontes becomes concerned about Hermione’s sexual propriety, attributing sexual—rather than diplomatic—prowess to his wife’s successful negotiation with Polixenes. These jealous fears lead Leontes not just to doubt his wife’s present sexual conduct but also her past behavior and thus the legitimacy of his heirs. He asks his child: “Mamillius, / Art thou my boy?” (1.2.121–22). Leontes does not accept the Prince’s positive answer, questioning further: “How now, you wanton calf, / Art thou my calf?” (1.2.128–29). In searching for comfort through his own likeness in his son, the king focuses on the animalistic, as the image of the calf conveys his son’s latent sexuality, seeing his younger self with swelling horns. Fearing his son’s sexuality, Leontes’s jealousy appears sexually based. Such uncontrolled sexual jealousy causes the king to imagine evidence and accept unsubstantiated information. He notes his acceptance of rumor, when he tells Camillo “For, to a vision so apparent, rumour / Cannot be mute” (1.2.272–73). Hermione cannot defend herself against rumors, especially as the king has convinced himself that he has observed Hermione and Polixenes “meeting noses” (1.2.287), “kissing with inside lip” (1.2.288), “horsing foot on foot” (1.2.290), and “skulking in corners” (1.2.291). Though the list of offenses becomes more obscure and less damning, Leontes uses the king’s power and authority to legitimate his fears to the exclusion of his wife’s and Camillo’s defenses. Trapped in his jealous fears, the king cannot control his jealous rage, leading to tyrannical behavior that destroys his whole family. The queen supposedly dies, his daughter Perdita is abandoned on an unknown shore, and Mamillius—separated from his mother (2.1.61)—passes away, showing the full destructive force of unbridled passions.

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THE QUEEN’S DEFENSE In response to her husband’s increasingly uncontrolled jealousy and rage, Hermione confronts her husband with increasing self-control, particularly through silence. The queen begins her solidification into the statue that she ultimately becomes when she begins simply to follow the king’s orders. Her predictable reactions or silent stillness mirrors an automaton (Kolb 2011, 46), which E. R. Truitt (2015) sees as a mechanical object on the border between life and death. He explains that “they [automata] identify and patrol the boundaries of many different kinds: between courtly and churlish behaviour, between good and evil, living and dead” (9). Hermione’s resemblance of an automaton calls attention to the Renaissance anxieties over statuary and other artificial forms that mimic divine creation. While some thought these mechanized humans were beautiful and magical, others feared them as evil creations derived from trying to equal God’s skill. Hermione’s devolution from person to statue progresses through the position of pseudo-creation, no longer the human creation of God, but rather the automatized creation of Leontes’s evil jealousy. As Leontes’s jealousy escalates, Hermione’s silence correspondingly builds up to resist her husband’s tyrannical behavior. Hermione’s lack of spontaneity is increasingly coupled with silence, often defined as a feminine virtue in Jacobean England (Snyder 2002, 197). Her silence echoes the mute nature of stone and statuary, so Hermione’s slow petrification— a form of death—turns her into a patient statue in the face of her husband’s tyranny. In her statuesque performance, the queen joins a host of Shakespearean heroines who wait patiently and silently for their exoneration and redemption. In Twelfth Night (1601–1602), Olivia sits “like patience on a monument” (Shakespeare [1988] 1998f, 2.4.114), and Octavia in Julius Caesar (1599) is described as a statue: “Her motion and her station are as one / She shows a body rather than a life, / A statue than a breather” (Shakespeare [1988] 1998b, 3.3.19–21). These three examples indicate that, in Shakespearean drama, women often turn to silence and stillness to preserve themselves in the face of tyrannical husbands. Silence and immobility thus become a Shakespearean defense against evil. If Leontes’s extreme sexual jealousy stems from the patriarchal structures of Renaissance society, Hermione’s sixteen years of silence highlights women’s available response to patriarchal tyranny. Keith M. Botelho (2009) pinpoints this practice: “Many of Shakespeare’s women authorize silence for their own sake, resisting the patriarchal system that sought to silence them as part of a template of obedience” (83). As a retaliatory measure, Hermione’s stillness silences any arguments that the king may have made against his wife. By being silent and immobile, she undermines patriarchal authority in a fashion that sparks Leontes’s return to reality. The ultimate silence is coupled with Mamillius’s death, as the

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queen’s death is announced after her son’s. As the queen’s maid Paulina exclaims: “This news is mortal to the Queen” (Shakespeare [1988] 1998g, 3.2.147–48). Death is thus identified as the ultimate form of petrification. STATUE AS REDEMPTIVE DEVICE However, Hermione’s status as a statue allows her a means to return at the end of the play, providing an opportunity for Leontes to see the rewards of his penance and clear signs of his redemption. Once he acknowledges that he has been “transported by [his] jealousy” (3.2.157), he can then see how his judgment has been affected. To facilitate this redemption, Paulina shelters Hermione from Leontes’s tyrannical behavior by preserving her in her state as a statue. Thus, the statue in particular, and art in general, becomes the means of returning Leontes’s balanced humanity. Statues do not appear in Shakespeare’s main source for The Winter’s Tale, Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588), and they are an especially startling tool for redemption in the context of early modern Protestant England. In Shakespeare’s time, statues were strictly controlled and often hidden from view. Considered against the Scriptures, any kind of images were destroyed, and the term image applied to sculptures as well as to paintings, as can be seen in John Florio’s (1598) definition: “[s]tátua, a statue, an image or similitude, or representation of mettall, iuorie, or stone.” Even images of Jesus were destroyed, as in the case of the the High Cross and the Bread Cross. These roods were fixed in the town center of Banbury but were removed from their pedestals and destroyed around 1600 (Eales and Durston 1996, 98). Moreover, the destruction of these icons highlights a particularly Protestant fear of statuary related to its differentiation from Catholicism, which was associated with the use of statues and icons as vehicles for worship. Complementing the religious decree against images, Shakespeare’s contemporaries feared the inanimate images becoming animated. At the time, the fear of images came from common stories of statues which started crying, bleeding, or following people with their eyes (De Voragine 1493, 37–40). Sculptures were viewed as dangerous, since they were thought to be able to pervert humans’ minds by acting as human beings (Tassi 2005, 24). This understanding led Shakespeare’s contemporaries to break, burn, hang, and deface statues and other images to keep them from living. This fear of the power of images also kept them from being publically displayed in early modern England. Thus, Shakespeare takes a surprising stand by using a statue, as he makes Hermione into a misleading “thing,” which is neither wholly good nor wholly evil, but is highly upsetting to early modern Protestant sensibilities.

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Since these fears of statues are imbedded in Protestant fears of Catholicism, the attitude toward statues is closely related to the attitude toward the Catholic Church. Additionally, Italian culture was viewed as negative because of its close ties to Catholicism. Indeed, the common English conviction was that contact with things Italian would result in moral and religious corruption. This belief developed in concert with English fascination with Italy, so, at the same time as models of high art were primarily Italian, early modern England was suspicious of Italy, Italians, Italian texts, and Italian religion. Consequently, all kinds of images were thoroughly scrutinized and controlled by royal decrees to promote Protestantism and curb Catholicism. For instance, in his royal injunctions of 1547, Edward VI (1537–1553) admonished his subjects to hide images of all sorts because of their pernicious power. Drawings, paintings, and sculptures had to be taken down in churches and chapels, and any images had to be destroyed or covered (Frere and Kennedy 1910, 38, 42). This makes Hermione’s existence as an Italian-Catholic statue doubly troubling to an early modern English audience. In 1558, Elizabeth I reminded her people of the importance of not owning any images which had not been defaced, as these images could spawn idolatry. The decree states precisely that no one may keep in their houses any images, tables, pictures, paintings, or other monuments of feigned and false miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry and superstition if these items were not defaced. They were not allowed to be used in worship, or adored, even in churches, chapels or oratories, and these prohibitions remained in place during her entire reign (6). In this environment, since Shakespeare uses sculpture as the means to redemption in The Winter’s Tale, he makes a noticeably audacious and unexpected move. This is emphatically the case since the statue in the play is compared to a “rare Italian master Giulio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape” (Shakespeare [1988] 1998g, 5.2.96–100). In the play, the gentleman from the court praises this Catholic artist, which, as Stephen Orgel (2013) notes, “is the only allusion in Shakespeare to a modern artist and, indeed, one of the earliest references to Giulio in England” (240). This singular allusion is strange because Romano, in Shakespeare’s time, was not famous for his sculptures but for his paintings and because the artist was well-known for sixteen erotic paintings dating back to 1524 and strongly associated with pornography, as they accompanied pornographic sonnets commissioned for Federico II Gonzaga’s new Palazzo Te in Mantua (Elam 2014, 128). Despite his subject’s Catholicism and involvement with pornographic works of art, the courtier describes the Italian painter as a genius, coming close to God. This means that, from a Protestant point of view, his art comes close to

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evil. With these ties, the transgressive statue of Hermione can be understood to represent a malicious effigy. 2 The likeness between the queen and the picture is of paramount importance, as it implies that a representation can be so life-like that it deceives people, but this deception leads to redemption. Paulina presents a kind of life-in-death statue, elaborated through a blend of white and black magic: “Prepare/ To see the life as lively mocked as ever / Still sleep mocked death” (Shakespeare [1988] 1998g, 5.3.18–20). The life-like power of Hermione’s statue goes further since it does not imitate the queen as she was when she supposedly died. Leontes exclaims: “Hermione was not so much wrinkled” (5.3.28), which makes him recognize the time that has passed in his perception of the art. Indeed, it is quite surprising for a statue to have lines on its face, as ancient statues, like those that collectors gathered in the seventeenth century, generally had smooth and youthful faces. Queen Elizabeth I demanded to be represented without wrinkles. These visible signs of time on Hermione’s face imbue power to Leontes’s trouble: the statue looks more real than Hermione. The statue appears as a visual reminder of the king’s pointless excess of passion. Ashamed, Leontes now has no other choice but to face Hermione’s statue, reinforcing Hermione’s state of ethical resistance to the king’s tyranny. Faced with her statue, Leontes regrets his past tyranny. Whereas Leontes feels shame and remorse when confronting Hermione’s statue as an icon, Perdita finds comfort from it. She kneels in front of the statue, kept in a “chapel” (5.3.86), and implores its blessing as a Catholic believer would do. Kept behind a curtain, the display of the statue conforms to early modern Protestant regulations to cover up art that might be perceived to be used for worship. The presence of the curtain can thus be understood in two ways, either it covers an incomplete piece of art or it hides a religious sculpture. In early modern England, a piece of art was commonly stored in a gallery where connoisseurs gathered their masterpieces, but the curtain shows that the statue is enshrined (Nova 1994, 177–78). The statue is thus a funeral monument as well as a work of art. This image is dangerously transgressive in early modern England, as the statue-chapel-curtain icon entwines art, religion, and theater, inherently signaling some kind of deception. This deception, while harmful by Protestant standards, is acceptable by Catholic ones. The beauty and likeness of Hermione’s statue are so mesmerizing that they are soothing and benevolent: “O, she’s warm! / If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating” (Shakespeare [1988] 1998g, 5.3.109–11). Leontes is so fascinated that he exclaims: “Her natural posture / Chide me, dear stone, that I may indeed / Thou art Hermione” (5.3.23–25). By apostrophizing the statue, the king starts acting as a fervent believer. This instant adoration invokes pagan (and Catholic) image veneration. Despite being transformed as an idol—a proscribed image—

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in the king’s eye, this seeming sculpture becomes a means for Leontes’s redemption from his jealous and tyrannical behavior. That the statue is of Hermione directly relates to its uses as a tool to redeem Leontes’s from being a tyrant. The word herm or herma pertain to freedom from tyranny, as they enter the English language through Thomas North’s (1597) translation of Plutarch’s Lives (1579–1580). The OED defines herma as: “[a] statue composed of a head, usually that of the god Hermes, placed on the top of a quadrangular pillar, of the proportions of the human body: such statues were exceedingly numerous in ancient Athens, where they were used as boundary-marks, mile-stones, signposts, pillars, pilasters, etc” (533). By the seventeenth century, herma signified not only busts but also statues of saints within a church, such as those used to enclose relics. Thus Hermione becomes not just a statue, but a statue of a saint (Bollandus 1658, 773). This highlights how the means of achieving redemption—by reconciling and reinstating the queen in the court—arrives through a Catholic process in the play. THE KING’S REDEMPTION To highlight the power of a statue on people, the story of Leontes’ jealousy and its outcome is told in a manner that calls the listeners’ attention to the metamorphosis from stone to being: ”Who was most marble there changed colour” (Shakespeare [1988] 1998g 5.2.89). Once again here, the association of a material (the stone) to a human creature is reiterated, and such an association calls to mind the Ovidian myth of Pygmalion (Ovid [2001] 2002, 10.302–4), which explores the disturbing likenesses between living and inanimate beings, through fantasy, dream, and art (Iselin 2011, para 14). At this point in the play, despite Protestant fears, the audience, alongside the characters, is waiting for Hermione’s statue to move. However, the queen’s revival may takes place only when Leontes repents of his previous villainy. By the time the statue is presented, the play has made clear that Leontes has been repenting since his wife’s reported death. Paulina has been slowly but surely bringing the king to rue his former irrational passionate jealousy for sixteen years. As Paulina announces the queen’s death in a long speech like a sermon, Leontes admits almost instantly his evil error and acquiesces to her harsh lecture: “Go on, go on / Thou canst not speak too much; I have deserved / All tongues to talk their bitterest” (3.2.213–15). He complies with everything Paulina says, declaring: “Once a day I’ll visit / The chapel where they lie, and tears shed there / Shall be my recreation” (3.3.236–39). Paulina lets Leontes punish himself as penance. For the death of Mamillius and Antigonus, he is chastised by God, kept waiting for years—a long time he uses to “perform[e] / A saint-like sorrow,” to ponder, to “redeem[ed]” his sins, to forgive himself (5.1.2–6)

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and to renew, in a way, its kingdom. The playwright clearly makes Leontes Paulina’s puppet. When the servant asks him: “Will you swear / Never to marry but by my free leave?” (5.1.69–70), he agrees to be patient. Similarly, when Paulina declares she will choose the “new” queen for him, the former tyrannous villain just gives in right away. In Leontes case, repentance can only be achieved by searching deep within himself, and he manages to do so when after sixteen years of reflection and remorse, he openly declares: “I have done sin” (5.1.171) and Leontes confesses that “[his] evils [is] conjured to remembrance” (5.3.40). As soon as the bygone tyrannical king speaks out his mistakes, defining himself as a sinner, he is on the path of redemption. As evidence by the king’s almost immediate repentance and straightforward persuasion upon seeing the sculpture, Paulina has succeeded. Leontes’s repentance—which attests of his personal growth—completes the sculpture to bring Hermione back to the realm of the living. As Leontes’s response to the statue enacts his redemption at the end of the play, The Winter’s Tale highlights how art affects human experience. The play emphasizes artifice as therapeutic illusion. Shakespeare, here, differs from what Canterbury exposed in Henry V, that one had to believe in the powers of Nature rather than God’s power (Shakespeare [1988] 1998a, 1.2.183–89); validating the value of art instead. In the Tale, the statue embodies a resurrection through art, but not from God. Maurice Hunt (1984) observes that: [i]t is in contrast to the statue that Leontes vividly recreates the true Hermione. Shakespeare implies that art helps its beholder to understand life but only through its radical difference—not through any compelling and enlightening identity. Art supplies an attractive context which engages the beholder, causing him or her to value life and reflect upon it. (31)

This is particularly the case in The Winter’s Tale, as Hermione’s recovery is not a real resurrection but the villainous Leontes believes it, and this is what matters to reach redemption. Nevertheless, when Hermione rejoins the living, Paulina reminds the audience that “[h]er actions shall be holy” (5.3.104) like a saint back from the dead. Even Polixenes seems to be mesmerized by the resurrection of the statue to a living person, exclaiming: “Ay, and make it manifest where she has lived, / Or how stol’n from the dead” (5.3.115–16). With this holy language of resurrection, the play seems to defend the claim that art, even if it is deceptive and false may, in some circumstances, play a redemptive role comparable to God’s actions. Manifested through the redemptive power of art, Hermione’s statue felicitous reversals hint at higher spiritual forces at work in the play. It seems that Shakespeare brings to mind the actions of God and God himself, as if to say that “gods preside over our human lives and fortunes,

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[that] they communicate with us by visions, by oracles, through the elemental powers of nature” (MacCoy 2013, 114). In other words, the similarity between Hermione’s false sculpture and the living queen offers Leontes a chance for redemption from the evil generated by his uncontrolled passions. In the pseudo-transformation of the statue into the real Hermione, the real miracle is that the tyrannical king is successfully redeemed, earning the right to love, a family, time, fidelity, wisdom and faith which were unknown to him sixteen years before, when he was an incarnation of a villain. CONCLUSION Paulina’s statue-based redemption therapy can work because Leontes embodies a form of human evil at the beginning of the play. Barbara Adams Mowat (1969) rightly remarks that “jealousy stemming from sincere love or passion might be excused” (Mowat, 40), so Leontes, the overpassionate villain, can be forgiven. His sixteen years of rehabilitation underlines that tyranny can be challenged and defeated through flawless moral conduct, as defined as balanced control of the passions. Leontes fights his evil jealousy by learning humility and patience, acquiring a wisdom he lacks at the start of the play. However, because the women— Hermione, Perdita, and Paulina—possess this wisdom, the queen’s statue is a benevolent scultpure with curative powers, despite its close resemblance to Catholic icons considered malicious by early modern England. In particular, the statue’s revelation allows Leontes to regain his powers, as he resumes his power over Paulina once he has reunited with the living Hermione (Shakespeare [1988] 1998g, 5.3.137–39). The redemptive role of the statue in The Winter’s Tale rethinks the relation between images and evil postulated by Protestant belief systems. This innovative thought becomes clearer when considered in light of shifts in English art monuments erected durng the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These new statues included shapes that were influenced by Catholic Europe, as is reflected in the Catholic elements of Hermione’s statue in The Winter’s Tale. The play thus creates an avenue for understanding the redemptive value of Catholic art, even in the midst of Protestant England. NOTES 1. Richard in Richard III (1592) is sardonic, evil-looking, and determined to prove a villain (Shakespeare [1988] 1998e, 1.1.30); Iago is jealous of Othello and Cassio (Shakespeare [1988] 1998d, 1.3.378); and Cornwall, in King Lear (1606), is simply greedy and exceptionally cruel (Shakespeare [1988] 1998d, 3.7.65–69).

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2. Despite these correlations, Romano’s statue fascinates as did two other statues that appeared about the time of The Winter’s Tale: the lifelike effigy of Prince Henry and the voodoo-like wax figurine that was found in a vacant lot and taken for a magical charm against Queen Elizabeth (Thomas 1971, 513).

REFERENCES Bolladus, Jean. 1658. Acta Sanctorum: February. Vol. 1. Antwerp. Botelho, Keith M. 2009. Renaissance Earwitnesses: Rumor and Early Modern Masculinity. London: Macmillan. Campbell, Lily B. 1930. Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Charney, Maurice. 2012. Shakespeare’s Villains. Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. De Voragine, Jacobus. 1493. The Golden Legend. Westminster: Wynkyn de Worde. Eales, Jacqueline, and Christopher Durston. 1996. The Culture of English Puritanism 1560–1700. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Elam, Keir. “‘Wanton Pictures:’ The Baffling of Christopher Sly and the Visual-Verbal Intercourse of Early Modern Erotic Arts.” In Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance, edited by Michele Marrapodi, 123–36. Farnham: Ashgate. Florio, John. 1598. A Worlde of Wordes, or Most Copious, and Exact Dictionarie in Italian and English. London: Arnold Hatfield for Edward Blount. Frere, W. H., and W. P. M. Kennedy. Visitation Articles and Injunctions. Vol. 3. London: Longmans Green Company. Greene, Robert. 1588. Pandosto the Triumph of Time. London: Thomas Orwin. Hassel, Chris, Jr. 2005. Shakespeare’s Religious Language: A Dictionary. London: Thoemmes Continuum. Hunt, Maurice. 1984. “‘Standing in Rich Place:’ The Importance of Context in ‘The Winter’s Tale.’” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 38(1–2): 13–33. Iselin, Pierre. “‘As We Are Mocked with Art’ (5.3.68): The Winter’s Tale Comme Anatomie de la Reception.” Sillages Critiques 13. Accessed 12 Feb. 2014. URL: http:// sillagescritiques.revues.org/2393. Jackson, Zachariah. 1819. Shakespeare’s Genius Justified: A Few Concise Examples of Restorations and Illustrations of Seven Hundred Passages in Shakespeare’s Plays. London: J. Johnson. Kolb, Justin. 2011. “‘To Me Comes a Creature:’ Recognition, Agency and the Properties of Character in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.” In The Automaton in Early Renaissance Literature, edited by Wendy Hyman, 45–60. Farnham: Ashgate. MacCoy, Richard. 2013. Faith in Shakespeare. Oxford. Oxford University Press. Mowat, Barbara Adams. 1969. “A Tale of Sprights and Goblins.” Shakespeare Quarterly 20(1): 37–46. Nordlund, Marcus. 2007. Shakespeare and the Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, Evolution. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. OED Online. 2016. S.v. “herma, n.” Accessed Sept 1. URL: http://www.oed.com.lama. univ-amu.fr/view/Entry/86240?redirectedFrom=herma. Orgel, Stephen. 1996. Impersonations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2013. Spectacular Performances. Essays on Theatre, Imagery, Books and Selves in Early Modern England. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ovid. (2001)2002. Metamorphoses. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Partridge, Eric. 1947. Shakespeare’s Bawdy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Shakespeare, William. Henry V (1988) 1998b. Julius Caesar. In The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 567–98. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. (1988) 1998b. Julius Caesar. In The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 628–54. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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———. (1988) 1998c. King Lear. In The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 1153–84. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. (1988) 1998d. Othello In The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 875–907. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. (1988) 1998e. Richard III. In The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 183–222. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. (1988) 1998f. The Twelfth Night. In The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 720–42. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. (1988) 1998g. The Winter’s Tale. In The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 1123–52. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Snyder, Susan. 2002. A Wayward Journey. London: Rosemont Publishing & Printing Company. Tassi, Marguerite A. 2005. The Scandals of Image: Iconoclasm, Eroticism, and Painting in Early Modern English Drama. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press. Thomas, Keith. 1971. Religion and the Decline of Magic. New York: Scribner’s. Truitt, E. R. 2015. Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Wagschal, Steven. 2006. The Literature of Jealousy in the Age of Cervantes. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Wilson, Thomas. 1553. The Arte of Rhetorique. London: George Wilson.

THREE Guilt, Evil, and Hell in Doctor Faustus and Macbeth Jamey Hecht

Today, the concept of evil is a heuristic one; it is useful for understanding a course of events. However, the term remains encumbered by its legacy of Christian medieval thought, wherein evil was a kind of magical infectious substance, or the name for a deliberate eternal project of the Devil and his allies, with the substance as the delivery system for the project. After Freud, evil is discussed with a psychological lexicon that resolves it into components like shame, rage, and splitting, or the inability to tolerate ambiguity or ambivalence. These components strip evil of its totalizing character and its causal force. Instead it becomes a descriptor for certain inner-and-outer states of affairs that combine unnecessarily harmful action, its underlying psychic pathology, and its results. This is particularly apparent in twentieth- and twenty-first century responses to plays, such as William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600) and Macbeth (1606) as well as Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1592). To read these Elizabethan and Jacobean dramas today is to observe imaginary human subjects (products of authorial imagination within a social field) causing harm by a process governed by psychic elements that don’t include evil (jealousy, envy, shame, sadism, spite, and so on). The harm resulting from these processes are best described as evil because of its partly deliberate, irreversibly damaging effects on others and on the self. Rather than suffer insufferable feelings like yearning and helplessness (which would lead to growth), the person we call evil makes others suffer.

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PARADOX VS. ABSURDITY These plays highlight a problem in Christian imaginative literature in general, perhaps particularly acute in the English tragic drama of the turn of the seventeenth century: Why would anyone have any difficulty in choosing between God and the Devil, if he really believed that such a devil existed? After all, the eventual consequence of joining the Devil’s party—whether through contract, murder, or both—is eternal damnation, which means unending torture without hope of respite or redemption. Once this premise is accepted, even a thoroughly amoral person, lacking gratitude to God and motivated by the purest self-interest, would be mad to choose such a course, since any temporary benefit it might yield must surely be utterly dwarfed by an eternity of pain. Yet Macbeth, Faustus, and Claudius all appear, at one time or another, to believe in Hell while freely choosing to brave its everlasting torments. Hamlet presents mere Purgatory as an ordeal so excruciating that its “lightest word would harrow up thy soul”; Doctor Faustus is torn apart the moment his damnation begins. Hell, then, is no mere mood but a domain of torture. Were the damned ever free to be saved? To be sure, sophisticated doubt regarding free will was a live issue in the ancient world, and again in the theology of John Calvin, who died in the year of Shakespeare’s birth. But without free will as a working assumption, Christian theodicy cannot get off the ground, as Saint Augustine (426/2004) recognized in The City of God: “If God foreknew my free will, it was not nothing that he foreknew” (5.10). We cannot glibly appeal to predestination for relief from this puzzle, since that doctrine makes the protagonist’s struggle simply futile, even as it makes God the sadistic tyrant who frightens so many readers of Paradise Lost. Alan Sinfield (1983) illuminates the Calvinist dimension of Faustus’ predicament, showing Marlowe’s activation of culturally pervasive anxieties about God’s goodness: “Faustus’ inability to repent must, like everything else, be God’s will” (117). 1 Marlowe seems to have dismissed the existence of all things supernatural, thinking both Heaven and Hell to be imaginary, as attested in contemporaneous reports such as the “Remembrances Against Richard Cholmeley,” probably written by Thomas Drury in 1593. It asserts of Cholmeley: “That he sayeth and verily believeth that one Marlowe is able to show more sound reasons for Atheism than any Devine in England is able to give to prove divinity, and that Marlowe told him that he hath read the Atheist lecture to Sir Walter Raleigh and others” (quoted in Nicholl 2006, p. 267). Also dated to May of 1593 is the similar report of one Richard Baines to the authorities, concerning Marlowe: These things, with many other shall by good and honest witness be approved to be his opinions and Common Speeches, and that this Mar-

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low doth not only hold them himself, but almost into every Company he Cometh he persuades men to Atheism willing them not to be afeard of bugbears and hobgoblins, and utterly scorning both God and his ministers as I, Richard Baines, will Justify. (http://www.rey.prestel.co. uk/baines1.htm)

Though the hero of Doctor Faustus is dismembered and damned for his sin at the drama’s end, a more suspicious reader could use the contradictions in Faustus’ speeches to argue that, whereas a recognizably Protestant morality of binary reward-or-punishment (Heaven or Hell) triumphs at the play’s rhetorical surface, Marlowe also wrote at an esoteric depth which only kindred spirits like Sir Walter Raleigh and Thomas Harriot could perceive. On this reading, although Doctor Faustus might appear to be little more than a particularly gorgeous working-up of traditional medieval materials from allegorical plays and pageants—the Seven Deadly Sins, the Good Angel and the Bad, various other devils of temptation, antagonism between pope and emperor, and so on—its subtext challenges the world picture those materials comprise, because the play’s absurd entailments make it difficult for the discerning intellect to leave the theater with rational belief intact. Only faith (belief despite reason) and atheism (unbelief) would remain to such an audience member—not coherent conviction (belief via reason). Consider the B-text’s version of Faustus’ lesson in modern cosmology: “Come Mephistopheles,” says Faustus, “let us dispute again, / And reason of divine Astrology”: Faust. But is there not Coelum igneum, and Christalinum? Meph. No Faustus, they be but Fables. (2.2)

Thus Marlowe establishes a category—the merely fabulous—for a cosmic truth that has since fallen into discredit. Once that category has been opened, it can begin to fill up: the crystal spheres first, eventually perhaps the Devil and Hell, and perhaps even God Himself. Similarly, Stephen Greenblatt (2001) has written in Hamlet in Purgatory: It would . . . be equally risky for Protestants to push too hard on the sceptical implications of a causal link between paganism and certain Christian doctrines: the scepticism may quickly begin to erode more than the targeted Catholic practices . . . [Purgatory’s] patent fictionality threatened to infect the whole Christian vision of the afterlife with an air of fable. (98–99; my emphasis)

A few lines earlier, when Faustus says, “I think Hell’s a fable,” Mephistopheles replies ominously, “Aye, think so still, till experience change thy mind.” (1.5.188). Hell and its devils represent a single complex of linked ideas; if Mephistopheles is real, so must Hell be.

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But the actual audience of the play knows that this is a theatrical performance, and not unmediated experience, which calls attention to the fiction of the story being performed. The audience has a vicarious experience of a theatrical Hell, as the spectators are not at immediate risk of the damnation and dismemberment that ends the protagonist at the play’s end. For all their possible piety, most audience members will know that an actor portrays the Mephistopheles before them. This knowledge hints at a dangerous inference: since the speaking subject “Mephistopheles” is not real, Hell might not be either. The institution of the theater tends to limit the reach of Mephistopheles’ dictum: “But Faustus, I am an instance to prove the contrary, / For I am damned, and am now in hell,” (2.1) because it unites religion with fictionality. Similarly, Faustus performs a Latin invocation of the Devil in front of the watchful eyes of an English audience—and of an omniscient and omnipresent God—in a manner so accurately representative of the way black magic was popularly imagined that it caused considerable anxiety in, and beyond, the theater (Marcus 1989, pp. 4–5). It even seems to have triggered a tightening of the censorship laws affecting theatrical performances. Yet somehow, despite all that meticulous conjuring, nobody died, the actor lived to perform another day, and the Earth did not gape to belch sulphurous hellfire. The same signifiers that terrify the faithful secretly affirm the sophisticates in their scepticism. “[J]ust as subversive as the atheistical sub-text of some Jacobean tragedies,” writes Jonathan Dollimore (1984), “is the way that others sceptically activate contradictions within Christianity” (86). This applies just as well to an Elizabethan play like Doctor Faustus, whose “atheistical sub-text” is constituted precisely by its power to “sceptically activate contradictions within Christianity.” The issue is explicit: Faust. Think’st thou that Faustus is so fond to imagine, That after this life there is any pain? No, these are trifles, and mere old wives’ tales. Meph. But I am an instance to prove the contrary: For I tell thee I am damn’d, and now in hell. Faust. Nay, and this be hell, I’ll willingly be damn’d. What sleeping, eating, walking and disputing? (2.1)

Faustus’ position here is incoherent, surely: one cannot simultaneously disbelieve in the existence of Hell and also sign a contract with the tenants of that very place.

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This contradiction is exquisitely obscured behind Hell’s change of venue from the physical center of the Earth (and of the larger Dantean cosmos concentric with the Earth) to a placeless place which cannot be expressed without a fall into that self-contradictory language which mystics call paradox and sceptics (e.g., Hobbes, in the first chapter of Leviathan) call absurdity, or “contradiction in terms.” Asked by Faustus to locate Hell, Mephistopheles famously replies: Within the bowels of these elements, Where we are tortured, and remain forever. Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place, but where we are is hell, And where hell is there must we ever be. And to be short, when all the world dissolves, And every creature shall be purified, All places shall be hell that is not heaven. (2.1)

There can still be “places” in a world that has already “dissolved,” only because by now the concretely spatial sense of words like place, where, and limit has been emptied out by a process of abstraction. We are invited to reconceptualize Hell; what used to be a fiery pit in the heart of Earth becomes a state of mind characterized by hopeless estrangement from God. Jonathan Dollimore comments thus on Mephistopheles’ Hell: “[A]lthough his sense of it as a state of being and consciousness can be seen as a powerful recuperation of hell at a time when its material existence as a place of future punishment was being questioned, it is also an arrogant appropriation of hell, an incorporating of it into the consciousness of the subject” (115). A striking parallel occurs in David Riggs’ account of the Copernican Revolution in Marlowe’s time: “Although the heliocentric model displaced humanity from the center of the universe, Copernicus recuperated man’s relationship to the cosmos on another level: the new astronomy re-centered the human subject as a reasonable being capable of grasping the structure of the universe through mathematical formulation” (Riggs 2004, 166). Lucifer fell “by aspiring pride and insolence,” but these changes in man’s cosmic position tend to disrupt and complicate the dichotomy between pride and its humble opposite. An immanent and geographical Hell would be, in Raymond Williams’ (1977) famous terms, “residual,” or on its way out, but still lingering from an earlier cultural formation now in crisis, while a transcendent and existential Hell would be “emergent,” or on its way in, but not yet fully established (pp. 121–27). These categories are apt because they suggest that both kinds of Hell can be found at the same cultural moment, alongside one another and even, to some degree, conflated. But the conflation is a matter of dangerous intellectual incoherence, not a stable theological synthesis. Shakespeare’s Hamlet discovered the primacy of mood over

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place, inner over outer: “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” (2.2). Similarly, for John Milton’s (1674) Satan, “The mind is its own place, and in it self / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” [PL I, 255]. But we also see a geographical Hell in Paradise Lost, and when Satan escapes to Earth, he is no longer located there. The Argument of Book One explains: “Hell, describ’d here, not in the Center (for Heaven and Earth may be suppos’d as yet not made, certainly not yet accurst) but in a place of utter darkness, fitliest call’d Chaos.” Milton’s “Chaos” is a “place,” not a state of mind. These literary changes to the concept of Hell, from an outer place to an inner condition, parallel Martin Luther’s epochal shift of the site of meaning into the person: [S]ince faith alone justifies, it is clear that the inner man cannot be justified, freed, or saved by any outer work or action at all, and that these works, whatever their character, have nothing to do with this inner man. On the other hand, only ungodliness and unbelief of heart, and no outer work, make him guilty and a damnable servant of sin. (56) . . . As the man is, whether believer or unbeliever, so also is his work—good if it was done in faith, wicked if it was done in unbelief. (70)

Luther here asserts a definition of evil based on belief rather than on harm, a definition that enables the slaughter of whole populations in the name of orthodoxy, without any worry that such deeds might be evil in themselves. Conversely, in Lutheran theology Heaven becomes available only to those who are talented at self-persuasion, whether or not they perform good works that might alleviate the suffering of other people. Since it is more or less impossible to believe something simply by willing oneself into belief, Calvin must finesse the problem by recourse to predestination, and the separation between ethics and eschatology is complete. Whereas Dante had put Hell “in the Center” of a central Earth because that spot was furthest from God, the legacy of Copernicus put Hell inside us all by erasing the cosmos’ geometrical evidence of God’s favor. By Marlowe’s time, there are two positions outside of God’s grace, not one: the demonic, and the secular. It was only Elizabethan propaganda that insisted on conflating the two, for politically convenient reasons of state. “The ‘salvation’ that Faustus desperately seeks in his last soliloquy,” writes Constance Brown Kuriyama, “is, in a sense, a new world view, a new mode of perceiving and defining himself that will free him from God and Lucifer.” In this, “Marlowe anticipates a central dilemma of modern consciousness” (Kuruyama, 1980, p. 131). Ironically, when the English state educated young recruits like Marlowe in the art of dialectic, it was corroding the very faith for which they were to fight. Dialectic fostered the capacity to tolerate complexity and

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ambiguity, a staple of the emerging craft of espionage as Elizabeth and her officers vied with their Catholic counterparts on the mainland. Each decade of her reign was fraught with plots and counterplots in which men like John Baines and Gilbert Gifford cultivated dual allegiances in their work as double agents, espousing both Catholic and Protestant doctrine by turns, each man “a divine in show.” With both sides necessarily engaging in chronic and complex deception, it would be increasingly difficult not to notice that the apparently religious strife between English monarchs and the Catholic League (comprising, in Marlowe’s time, Phillip II of Spain, Pope Gregory XIII, and the French Duke of Guise) was ultimately a dispute over power and resources, not (or not only) truth and doctrine, let alone Good and Evil. This secular explanation of international and domestic conflict is linked with the secularization of cosmology because both are breakdown products of a lost medieval consensus (Hecht, 1995). The first hundred lines of Doctor Faustus train us to revere the Doctor for his awesome contributions to the public good, as well as his amazing intelligence. This lasts until a moment later when he sells his soul for magic—an act that seems more foolish than it is evil, since it destroys nobody but Faustus himself. Concealed under Faustus’ blind spot, and the audience’s generic expectations, lies the writer’s perilous subterfuge: as Faustus sells his soul to a devil while denying that Hell exists, the crypto-atheist Marlowe sells his integrity—as he had sold it to the British Crown when he turned spy, a craft requiring continuous deception—by writing a Christian drama in which religion triumphs. Atheism, which holds that there is no Devil to fear and no God to propitiate, seems to have been Marlowe’s position, yet that position appears vacant in Doctor Faustus. As Dollimore puts it, “an authoritarian discourse is indicted through ironic allegiance” (106), not through triumphant disavowal. Since overt unbelief was a capital crime, an open defiance of religion was as dangerous for Marlowe in reality as the threat of Hell was for Faustus in the drama. As Keith Thomas shows in his magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), the medieval church could deploy its authority over supernatural phenomena by sorting them, controlling as best it could the administration of the divine and the suppression of the demonic. The Reformation, by contrast, opened a tremendous abyss of disenchantment that devoured Purgatory (Greenblatt, 2001), several sacraments, magic, conjuring, and much else, reducing much of it (with many important exceptions) to mere fiction. This secularizing process remained beyond the control of any one person or institution: that is the terrible potency hidden in the exquisitely simple little line, “No Faustus, they be but fables” (2.2).

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MOTIVES, SPIRITS, FLUIDS In Doctor Faustus (and particularly in the A-Text), the benefits of transgression remain grandiose and fantastic; in Hamlet, they are as tangible and pragmatic as possible. Whereas Hamlet strives to grow up, Faustus manages not to. In a retreat from the quotidian demands of maturity and at the cost of his soul, the Doctor purchases a new youth—twenty-four years of magical power—whose goals are so grandiose as to be achieved by magic. Claudius, by contrast, achieves kingship and a coveted wife by plain murder, a calculated, cynical crime that needs no Devil and fears no God. Claudius achieves everything Hamlet’s father had enjoyed (“Of life, of crown, of queen” [1.5.75]), desiderata which comprise young Hamlet’s ego ideal. In the past, Hamlet could anticipate the normal inheritance of those goods which would make him congruent with his own ideal, matching his condition to his father’s. The new king torments the disappointed prince with that contrast: Claudius as the consummate pragmatist and Hamlet as the ineffectual dreamer. Claudius’ behavior conceals, even as it deploys, the bitter truth that Hamlet is now only a dreamer because Claudius is now a successful machiavel. Since Claudius has made that impossible, Hamlet’s Herculean task is to replace his former ego ideal of inheritance with a new one, of revenge. Claudius’s moment of attempted repentance in the chapel is a brief interlude amid the larger pattern of his persistent villainy, the busy affairs of state, and the joys of the bedroom; it is acute guilt, not chronic despair. When he prays “Help, Angels!” (3.3.69) there seems to be no one there. Even the line most directly focused on the afterlife is about the exposure of guilt, not its punishment: “There is no shuffling, there the action lies / In his true nature, and we ourselves compelled, / Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults / To give in evidence” (3.3.61–64). If, as Nigel Alexander points out, Claudius “believes that it is possible to obtain pardon; that the grace of God can offer mercy even to those who have committed the crime of Cain and murdered their brothers” (21), why does he not repent? Because he cannot give up “those effects for which I did the murder” (3.3.54). Since rational calculation would value eternal bliss—together with avoidance of eternal torment—above “my crown, mine own ambition, and my Queen” (3.3.55), Claudius seems to share Hamlet’s utter bewilderment about the nature of the afterlife. Despite his mouthing of doctrine in the chapel, Claudius is simply using the terms and forms of prayer to cope with feelings of guilt that are strong enough to hurt him, but too weak to change his course. Once again, a hypothesis of subtle unbelief answers questions that must otherwise remain discretely ignored. Old King Hamlet’s Ghost haunts the filial survivor, not the brotherperpetrator. Free of such supernatural visitations, Claudius can maintain the outward illusion of innocence and legitimacy; his very last words are,

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“O, yet defend me, friends! I am but hurt” (5.2.276). Even in the final moments of Hamlet, Claudius loses his beloved queen rather than prevent her drinking from the goblet he has poisoned. By saving her life would, he would reveal his intended murder of the young prince, and that revelation would likely expose his earlier murder of King Hamlet the Elder. While Hamlet allows Claudius to hide his villainy from his subjects until the end of the play, in Macbeth (1606), by contrast, everyone seems to realize that their new king is a usurper who has butchered his way to the throne. In some ways, then, Macbeth begins in relative decency and therefore suffers the guilt and misery of a new murderer. But while Macbeth gradually declines into a state of remorseless depravity, he is burdened with enough normal empathy—the “milk of human kindness”—to be horrified by his own behavior, repeatedly stricken with fear at its terrible unnaturalness. Indeed, Macbeth arrives at a nihilism so deep that the crown is no longer worth having, his dead queen lies unmourned, and life itself has lost all value for him. The King Macbeth of Act V has been depleted of all fantasy and desire; though he contemns suicide at the opening of his final scene (5.10), he throws away his shield at the scene’s end, preferring to die on Macduff’s sword rather than his own. There remains to Macbeth only the amazingly potent violence of his nature, the same trait that earned him Scotland’s love as the loyal Thane of Glamis, and its hatred as the treasonous successor of his vanquished double, the previous Thane of Cawdor. Though its reversal of direction constitutes a national disaster, this prodigious capacity for violence is perhaps the only element of Macbeth that does not change. It remains for the audience to decide wherein lies the evil of Macbeth: in his deeds of harm (the slaughter of other people at home and abroad), or in his broken faith (the betrayal of his king and his friends). Just how does Macbeth’s moral collapse work? He seems to have discussed his ambitions with his wife even before he and Banquo encounter the Weird Sisters; their prophecies merely embolden his stalled desire so that, goaded onward by his wife’s seductive blend of praise and contempt, he crosses over into action and its consequences (Belsey 1979, 136). 2 Embodying the frailty of fallen human nature, he is dogged by the potency of his imagination. This imagination keeps showing him violent possibilities: “Present fears / Are less than horrible imaginings: / My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical” (1.3.136–37) and launching him beyond their border, into the aftermath of their irreversible accomplishment. Bearing in mind the root of the word “motive”—whatever moves a person to action, from within or without—the motives of Macbeth surely include his original desire for power; the promptings of the Witches; of Lady Macbeth; of the floating dagger; and later, the desperate need to reassert his own vitality after the sight of Banquo’s ghost. Alongside or perhaps beneath these is the protagonist’s possible envy of Malcolm and resentment of Duncan: “More is thy due than more than all can

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pay” (1.4.21), says the old king to Macbeth at the outset, while promising him further “signs of nobleness” (Muir 1951, p. xxxvii). 3 Yet in this same early scene he gives his greatest conferrable prize not to his greatest soldier, Macbeth, but to a far inferior one, his son Malcolm: We will establish our estate upon Our eldest, Malcolm, whom we name hereafter The Prince of Cumberland; which honour must Not unaccompanied invest him only, But signs of nobleness, like stars, shall shine On all deservers. From hence to Inverness, And bind us further to you. (Shakespeare 1606, 1.4.37–43)

Despite Duncan’s palliative figure of speech, only one man can be Prince of Cumberland at a time, and that title is understood (not unlike Prince of Wales in contemporary England) to precede eventual ascension to the throne. Whatever the nuances of medieval Scottish laws governing royal investiture, the Thaneship of Cawdor does not seem to have been enough for Macbeth, nor for his wife. This psychology of multiple but overlapping causes makes Macbeth an ideal text through which to raise timeless if unanswerable questions about the psychological workings of corruption. “For it is never possible,” writes Muir, “to determine the exact share of blame to be allotted after a crime in the real world to the three factors, heredity, environment, and personal weakness; and, in a play, between three comparable factors, fate, external evil, and the character of the hero” (p. xlviii). In Shakespeare’s Skepticism (1987), Graham Bradshaw has called attention to “the psychologically unhinging effect of prolonged savage combat” (Bradshaw, 1987, p. 227) as another factor in Macbeth’s actions (227). Readers of Sophocles’ Ajax, for example, will recall that often the most accomplished warriors are so transformed by combat as to become a danger to their superiors. The danger of such a naturalistic account of evil’s origins in experience is, of course, that it will cause the theological explanation to wither on the vine. If trauma is the root of evil, then we are both responsible moral agents and organic brains that change with history’s vicissitudes; that is the prevailing verdict of our historical moment. It seems to render nugatory the older vision of a cosmic war between an omni-benevolent God and an entirely hostile Devil who works by deceit and supernatural influence, beings between whom we mortals are pawns to be won over and accumulated. Why did Lucifer want Faustus’ soul? “To enlarge his kingdom.” Both might be true, but the naturalistic account perhaps leaves the theological one in a redundant position. Critics are divided as to whether Shakespeare knew the great History of Scotland by George Buchanan (1506–1582), published in the year of its author’s death. But it is very likely that King James I of England (who was also, of course, King James VI of Scotland) would have read the

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book, since Buchanan had been the tutor of the young James in 1570. Here, Buchanan recounts the legend of the Scottish monarch Kenneth II (who reigned circa 970–995 AD): The king having thus, by iniquity, secured, as he thought, the throne to his posterity, yet could not obtain for himself peace of mind . . . his soul, disturbed by a consciousness of his crime, permitted him to enjoy no solid or sincere pleasure; in retirement the thoughts of his unholy deed rushing upon his recollection, tormented him; and in sleep, visions full of horror, drove repose far from his pillow. At last, whether in truth an audible voice from heaven addressed him, as is reported, or whether it were the suggestion of his own guilty mind, as often happens to the wicked. (Buchanan 1733, 309–10, my emphasis)

The same disturbing ambiguity arises in the psyche’s guilty attrition following the crime, as in the seductive process of moral failure that precedes the crime and makes it possible. When Lady Macbeth speaks of the couple’s new direction in supernatural terms, the precise degree of metaphor in her language is by no means clear. “Hie thee hither,” she apostrophizes to her absent husband : That I may pour my spirits in thine ear And chastise with the valour of my tongue All that impedes thee from the golden round Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem To have thee crowned withal. (1.5.25–29)

The line resembles the pouring-in of Claudius’ poison (“With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial, / And in the porches of my ears did pour,” [1.5.62–63]) to the ears of Hamlet the Elder, which is itself a figure for the mendacious speech that infects the whole society in the wake of the assassination, beginning with the cover-up of the regicidal murder itself (“So the whole ear of Denmark / Is by a forged process of my death / Rankly abused” (1.5.36–38). Just fifteen lines after her first image of a transgressive supernatural spirit entering into a person-as-vessel, Lady Macbeth employs another (at 1.5.39–43): “Come, you spirits” That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood, Stop up th’access and passage to remorse.

This last imperative, apparently both a plea and a command to “make thick my blood, / Stop up th’access and passage to remorse” (1.5.41) extends the image of the mortal person as a sort of container, whose contents are a conflation of (a) material entities, especially “blood”; (b) semi-material, supernatural entities, especially “spirits”; and (c) non-material entities, namely, categories of feeling and behavior, such as “remorse” and its opposite, “direst cruelty.” So it is in this same scene that

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she says to Macbeth “thy nature . . . is too full o’ the milk of human kindness” and to the unsexing spirits, “take my milk for gall.” Later, when Malcolm is testing Macduff by pretending to be the worst candidate for the throne to which he has been appointed (even claiming to be worse than Macbeth), he uses a similar rhetorical figure: “Nay, had I power I should / Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell” (4.3.98–99). The corruption of bodily fluids thus seems crucial to becoming evil in Macbeth. When Lady Macbeth enjoins the spirits to “make thick my blood; / Stop up the access and passage to remorse” Shakespeare seems to be inverting the opposite blood-trouble which Marlowe’s Faustus experiences when his blood congeals as he attempts to sign his name (5.501–2). Both characters call upon the demonic for help in the task of pushing through the constraints of conscience toward a dangerous and ultimately disastrous freedom to pursue their desires, regardless of the costs (temporal and eternal) to themselves and to others. The help they each request is a change in the consistency of his or her own blood; whereas she asks for thicker blood that would prevent “remorse” from flowing, he needs his blood to become thinner so that as it flows out, he can use it as ink to sign away his soul. In each case, the demonic addressee grants the requested blood adjustment so that the corruption process can move forward. Faustus’ puzzlement at his body’s brief rebellion against his new evil (“my blood congeals / and I can write no more. . . . What might the staying of my blood portend? / Is it unwilling I should write this bill? / Why streams it not, that I may write afresh?”) resembles Macbeth’s puzzlement at a similar moment: “But wherefore could not I / pronounce ‘Amen’? / I had most need of blessing, and ‘Amen’ / Stuck in my throat” (2.229–31). It’s very well to point out that all this rhetoric of bodily fluids represents a Jacobean inheritance of the medieval language of medicine, loosely derived from Galen’s four bodily “humours.” It is also more than that, since in Shakespeare’s day the status of Galenic medicine was not unlike that of Ptolemaic astronomy: it was already a merely residual paradigm, but by no means driven from the field yet, since its successor was still emergent and inchoate. Shakespeare scholarship is a fertile field for this sort of necessary equivocation—the best our reason can do, since neither a strictly natural nor a strictly supernatural explanation can ever be exhaustive (the one fails to account for the experience of consciousness; the other, for the dominance of ordinary nature in our experience as articulated by, e.g., David Hume in his famous argument against miracles). So long as the text at hand precedes the Enlightenment, coming to grips with this question of whether or not devils and demons exist must be part of any serious effort to define evil and its sources. Kenneth Muir argues in his Arden edition of the play:

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[T]he starless night, the prodigies accompanying the murder, the voice that cried “Sleep no more,” and the sleep-walking can all be explained without bringing in the supernatural at all. This may reflect an ambiguity in Shakespeare’s mind which he cultivated for dramatic reasons. The audience could take it either way, though the supernatural was to most of Shakespeare’s original audience the more natural (Emphasis mine. Muir, lx). The fact that we no longer believe in demons, and that Shakespeare’s audience mostly did, does not diminish the dramatic effect for us; for with the fading of belief in the objective existence of devils, they and their operations can still symbolize the workings of evil in the hearts of men. It is not only the superstitious, but the guilty, to whom “sleep is a verie hell and a place of damned persons.” (Muir 1951, lxi)

Yet, as Garry Wills reminds us in Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1996), the 1606 Macbeth shares salient features with contemporary tracts condemning political witchcraft—such as the anti-Catholic polemic of Samuel Harsnett, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603), “which said the Jesuits’ notorious exorcisms of 1585–1586 were the acts of ‘devil-conjuring priests’” (37). King James’ own treatise on Daemonologie (1597) makes clear his confidence in the reality of the Devil himself and his myriad demons, along with a general plethora of (English) witches in his Satanic service. It also demonstrates his contempt for the Catholic Church and for the exorcisms performed by priestly members of the Society of Jesus. The trouble with this position is that, having retained the medieval belief in demons while dispensing with the medieval means of exorcising them, one must either put up with devils and their mischief, or round up all suspects for punishment. It was clearly expedient to collapse the two crimes into one, and regard the exorcist priests as invoking, rather than banishing, the devils. 4 EQUIVOCATION, PREDICTION, AND FREEDOM Christians are in a difficult position if they divide the supernatural into a pair of Manichean categories, the Divine and the demonic, hoping to define evil as the exclusive property of the latter. Any apparently supernatural phenomenon has three possibilities; it may be supernatural and divine, supernatural and demonic, or merely natural. Among the functions of the Church is precisely to help people make these discriminations, whereas Hamlet, who finds himself adrift in a cold new world, does the investigation himself. The Elder Hamlet’s royal Ghost is only the most vivid of Shakespeare’s many figures for the crisis of Reformation Europe. Legitimate but dispossessed, the Ghost can be seen as an emblem of the English Catholic Church itself, coming as he does from Purgatory to tell young Hamlet and the audience “I am thy father’s spirit” (1.5). 5 Alternatively, says Hamlet, “the spirit that I have seen may be the devil”

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(2.2). The third possibility is raised by his mother Gertrude, the Queen: “this is the very coinage of your brain” (3.4), which metrically resembles Lady Macbeth’s response “this is the very painting of your fear” (3.4) when Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost, while she does not. In each of the three plays here discussed, someone contravenes the sovereign values of order and obedience (values which define evil as their contrary), benefits from his own transgression, and then pays for it with his life. Yet each play also exploits the split between ethics and eschatology, the doctrine of right conduct and the corresponding mythology of postmortem reward-and-punishment. In Doctor Faustus, what triumphs is not really God so much as the enforcement of a contract. But no one in his right mind would sign such a contract with Mephistopheles, since any being with enough reality and potency to bestow twenty-four years of magical power must also be capable of administering unlimited years of infernal torment. Faustus’ conduct implies the unreason of the whole story. In the case of Hamlet, the Ghost haunts the honest young prince, not the guilty regicide whose religious anxiety is limited to one abortive moment in the chapel. Even there, Claudius seems untouched by real regret about the effects of his actions on other people. In Macbeth there are witches and ghosts to fear, but what most terrifies modern audiences is the bloody rule of sheer authoritarian force, and the failure of ambition to deliver anything lasting except misery. These plays thus expose an inherent logical problem in Christian literature, as it seems incredible that anyone who believed in damnation would embrace evil. To deal with this conundrum, the plays offer villains who don’t really believe in damnation. If Christianity’s values are to triumph, the protagonist must either be visibly damned at death (Faustus), reduced to despair by the shallowness of ill-gotten gains (Macbeth), or defeated by other people’s right conduct in this world (Claudius and Macbeth). It is as if literary tradition were trying to tell us something about which Christianity is deeply ambivalent: the motive to right conduct had better be the natural empathy which arises inside a web of meaningful relationships, because extrinsic motives like Heaven and Hell have two problems: first, they are so far fictional, and second, being extrinsic to human conduct, they make ethics impossible by pre-empting genuinely ethical motives like decency and adherence to principle, replacing them with the dead hand of reward-and-punishment (Kohlberg, 1981). The task of the dramatist seems to be to allow the values of his culture to triumph, but on his own terms, even when this entails subversion.

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NOTES 1. For a cogent argument that Faustus is indeed compelled—not by God, but by Marlowe’s own psychological predicament—see chapter 3 of Hammer or Anvil: Psychological Patterns in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays, by Constance Brown Kuriyama (1980). 2. In “The Case of Hamlet’s Conscience,” Catherine Belsey indicates the origins of this technique in medieval drama: “Lady Macbeth, using the technique of the morality vices, taunts the hero with cowardice” (136). 3. See Muir’s 1951 Arden Edition of the play: “Macbeth, according to Holinshed’s account [the medieval historian from whose work Shakespeare often drew material], has a genuine grievance against Duncan who, by proclaiming his son Prince of Cumberland, went against the laws of succession, and took away from Macbeth the prospect of the throne” (xxxvii). 4. Of course, this conflation of exorcism and conjuring requires a repression of the inconvenient fact that Jesus was, among other things, an itinerant exorcist, as the Gospels abundantly attest (e.g., Matthew 8:16). 5. “We need not forget that, like every Englishman of his generation, [Shakespeare] had Roman Catholic grandparents, or that his parents’ generation had watched Protestants and Catholics being burned for heresy in shockingly brief succession” (Levin 1976, 98).

REFERENCES Alexander, Nigel. 1971. Poison, Play, and Duel: A Study in Hamlet. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Augustine, 426 AD / 2004. City of God. New York: Penguin. Belsey, Catherine. 1979. “The Case of Hamlet’s Conscience.” Studies in Philology 76(2): 127–48. Bradshaw, Graham. 1987. Shakespeare’s Skepticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Buchanan, George 1733. History of Scotland. London, 3rd edition. Dollimore, John. 1984. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2001. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hecht, Jamey. 1995. “Limitations of Textuality in Thomas More’s Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer.” Sixteenth Century Journal, 26(4): 823–28. Kohlberg, Lawrence. 1958. “The Development of Modes of Thinking and Choices in Years 10 to 16.” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago. Kuruyama, Constance Brown. 1980. Hammer or Anvil: Psychological Patterns in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Levin, Harry. 1976. Shakespeare and the Revolution of the Times. New York: Oxford University Press. Luther, Martin. 1958. “The Freedom of a Christian.” In Martin Luther: Selections from His Writing, edited by John Dillenberger, 42–85. New York: Anchor Library of Religion. Marcus, Leah. 1989. “Textual Indeterminacy and Ideological Difference: The Case of Doctor Faustus.” In Renaissance Drama 20 edited by Mary Beth Rose. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Marlowe, Christopher. 1592. The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, A-text and B-text at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/. Milton, John. 1963. The Complete Poetry of John Milton, edited by John Shawcross. New York: Doubleday. Muir, Kenneth. 1951. The Arden Shakespeare’s Macbeth. New York: Arden.

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Nicholl, Charles. 2006. “By My Onely Meanes Sett Downe: The Texts of Marlowe’s Atheism,” in Kozuka, Takashi and Mulryne, J. R., eds. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson: New Directions in Biography. Burlington: Ashgate Press. Riggs, David. The World of Christopher Marlowe. New York: Henry Holt, 2004. Sinfield, Alan. 1983. Literature in Protestant England 1560–1660. Kent: Croom Helm Books. Thomas, Keith. 1971. Religion and the Decline of Magic. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Wells, Stanley et al., eds., 2005. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wills, Garry. 1995. Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

FOUR Seasonal Villainy Radical Evil, Relativity, and Redemptive Relationships Charity Fowler

Narrative functions as “the basic and essential genre for the characterization of human actions” (MacIntyre 1981, 194) a metacode through which we can transmit these meanings beyond our cultural context, touching on something universal in our shared human experience (194; White 1980, 6). The narrative structure of the hero’s journey, with its focus on the battle between good and evil, provides a cornerstone to this metacode across cultures and narrative forms (Burke 1990, 66). Beyond myths and universals, this narrative structure, along with its archetypal patterns, also underlies a majority of Western popular culture texts, including American prime time television. The pragmatic need for mass media, such as television, to appeal to the widest possible audience historically resulted in narratives which easily slotted their characters into dichotomous categories, most recognizably heroes and villains (Bokiniec 2011, 194). These heroes and villains correlated with strict moral positions that generally reflected the most conservative morality of the day: the audience could safely identify a character who engaged in traditionally immoral actions as the villain (Robichaud 2009, 61; Bokiniec 2011, 194). However, the lines between hero and villain are no longer so clear-cut and, in many cases, have disappeared altogether (Robichaud 2009, 61). The fracturing of the hero/villain binary calls the associated good/evil binary into question, as well. 53

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This chapter interrogates the usefulness of the anchoring terms, especially evil, after the binaries themselves disintegrate. It examines the interplay of moral relativity and redemption in several television hero/villain pairs where the line between the two designations grows ambiguous as the narrative progresses. Specifically, I analyze those villains who, defeated by the heroes at the end of one season or story arc, return to aid them against the new villain that arises in the next. These characters reveal that, rather than absolutely dichotomous concepts, good/evil and hero/ villain function as the outer limits of a complex and variable moral continuum. As such, the concept of evil remains not only useful but necessary because of the very relativity that seems to negate it. Without the polar boundaries, any analysis of the human and moral elements in both art and reality risks becoming meaningless. Evil must remain a subtext for the characters even as they shed their villainy to become heroes to validate their struggles. Their stories are thus necessarily narratives of redemption. Evil’s importance to a moral continuum appears clearly in relation to some key character pairs in recent television dramas when these characters are viewed through the lens of moral theory and the philosophical discourse surrounding human, as opposed to demonic, evil. Multiple narrative patterns and tropes link the characters to one another, allowing for intertextual analysis, as well as explicating the progression of various cultural discourses. Two prime examples that can serve as case studies are Sebastian Monroe and Miles Matheson from NBC’s Revolution and Klaus and Elijah Mikaelson from the CW’s The Vampire Diaries and its spin-off The Originals. By showing how both the heroes and the villains fall and rise along a complex moral spectrum, these television series highlight that, while good and evil clearly have a non-binary relationship, they cannot disappear as the endpoints of moral reasoning without sacrificing the opportunity for social and cultural redemption. HEEL-FACE TURN AND THE HERO Many of the heroes of Western popular culture narratives have become tarnished or reduced to one-dimensional caricatures, while the “most compelling supervillains exhibit a moral complexity more consistent with antiheroes than cackling arch-fiends” (Robichaud 2009, 61). Sometimes the difference between heroes and villains appears purely circumstantial, with protagonists and antagonists treading parallel paths and exhibiting the same motives, virtues, and even actions (Bokiniec 2011, 207). When characters grow and change over multiple seasons, this complexity and interchangeability can grow, as well. Characters who start out as pure often fall, and those who begin their narrative journeys seeming like sociopaths often end up saving the day.

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While some narrative franchises, most notably superhero stories, may have recurring villains, a more recent trend in serial television dramas has been the rise of the seasonal antagonist, sometimes referred to as the “Big Bad.” The usual structure of the narrative arc surrounding these Big Bads necessitates the hero defeating the villain at the end of the season or story arc, only to face a new, often more villainous, one the next season. While secondary and recurring villains might be morally nuanced, more often, early Big Bads were generally irredeemable. However, as more villains are made to grow complex and sympathetic within these narratives, the moral arc of the character becomes more fluid. This fluidity has led to a new trend: the defeated Big Bad returns the next season, not as a villain, but as an ally of the hero, working alongside him or her to defeat the new Big Bad. Redemption arcs are nothing new, of course, and neither are alliances between heroes and villains, which have often arisen via situations where “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” However, while pragmatism continues to have a place in these newer narratives, these former Big Bads do not disappear once the common enemy is defeated, but, instead, shift from antagonist to sidekicks or even double protagonists in many cases. They then struggle along the difficult path toward redemption within and through the ongoing narrative. TV Tropes calls these changes a “Heel-Face Turn,” and this shift in character alignment and structural position within the narrative explicitly questions the dichotomous nature of good and evil and heroes and villains, especially whether or not these binaries remain meaningful in narratives which include the Heel-Face Turn. Earlier redemption arcs—especially those which portend the exit of the character onto a path to redemption outside of the bounds of the narrative—might have any number of causes. In this new trend, however, these particular arcs rely upon a deepening relationship with one or more of the heroes. At the same time, and in counterpoint to the villains, many of the heroes involved in these relationships are the tarnished ones who have equally complicated our notion of “hero.” Some are antiheroes, but others were categorically villains themselves at one point. Most of the characters in each loosely-labeled category of “hero” and “villain” and the relationships between them parallel one another both intra- and intertextually. Not only do these patterns mirror one another, they also reflect back a realistic emotional picture of what both evil and redemption might look like in the real world. Highlighting a resulting need for redemption, evil as a semantic tool is generally used in Western society to define and to condemn an extreme, deliberate wrong that is “beyond the moral pale” (Packer and Pennington 2014, x) at “the outer limits of the bad” (Csordas 2013, 527) which provides a starting point to analyze characters that could be considered evil (Packer and Pennington 2014, x; Buchholz and Mandel 2000, 124; Csordas

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2013, 527). Though, as will be discussed later, complexities underlie defining the concept of evil, this initial definition works well to introduce the case-study characters. At first glance, most recent villains who undergo a Heel-Face Turn, and several of their (anti-)heroic counterparts, seem to fit this definition of evil. At the least, all of them make deliberate, conscious choices to cause the harm that they do. In the first season of Revolution, for instance, Sebastian “Bass” Monroe rules the Monroe Republic after an apocalyptic Blackout causes a restructuring of society. As a tyrannical despot who conscripts children into his army, Monroe executes anyone even suspected of disloyalty; gleefully tortures both random rebels and former friends; uses the mother of his child as a human shield; tries to burn everyone in his hometown to death; and after executing a would-be assassin, kills the assassin’s innocent wife and three children. Also a mass murderer—although in a very different form—the initial Big Bad of The Vampire Diaries and The Originals, Klaus Mikaelson, is a thousand-year-old vampire-werewolf hybrid. As such, Mikaelson is a monster who has killed countless thousands of people for food and fun. His evil deeds include his terrorizing and hunting of one girl for five hundred years, his repeatedly imprisoning his siblings for decades at a time, his engaging in ritual human sacrifice, the slaughter of his own followers, the murders of both of his parents, and his starting a war against the man he raised in order to insure his political power as a monarch. Unlike some protagonists, many of whom may be slightly tarnished, but still qualify as good guys, the heroes of these two shows, Miles Matheson and Elijah Mikaelson, respectively, might be more properly described as antiheroes, complicating the basic moral binary in their narrative premises. Revolution’s Miles, for instance, kills two men in cold blood shortly after the Blackout in a move that shocks a pre-Big Bad Bass. Miles not only forms the Republic in partnership with Bass, but evidence also suggests both the Republic, and some of its more brutal policies were originally his idea. Similarly, Elijah begins The Vampire Diaries as much as an antagonist as his brother (albeit more reasonably), and in terms of brutality, both brothers are equal in the amount of innocent blood they have on their hands. While Elijah conceives of himself as a moral character, his morality seems limited to restrictions against killing for sport or power. Unlike Klaus, he does most of his so-called evil in the name of duty and family, not out of malice or pride. Despite characters’ sense of the righteousness of their own behaviors, based on an objective view of their actions alone, both villains and heroes seem to deserve to be labeled evil. In a classic narrative of good and evil, such characters would be punished and disappear from the story, either to prison or the grave, most likely with the full approval of the audience. However, each of these characters is a fan favorite, and each of them wind up outside of any easily identifiable narrative category. The com-

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plexities woven into them, their paths, portrayal, and reception all map closely along concepts of moral theory and philosophical examinations of the root of evil, and that explication in popular culture texts offers a window through which to explore a larger cultural moment. MORAL CATEGORIES AND JUSTIFYING IDENTIFICATION According to Roland Barthes (1977), narrative “begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative” (79). Humanity’s stories situate us within a particular time and place, and those of a culture’s heroes and enemies operate to create and reinforce shared meaning, values, and knowledge within a community (Kelly and Zak 1999, 300). Thus, while narrative may be a universal way to make meaning out of human existence, it also serves as a social and cultural tool used to mediate how we function as moral individuals (M. B. Tappan 2006, 3). Indeed, the tools most often used to mediate moral functioning are narratives, “forms of discourse which profoundly shape moral thinking, feeling and acting” (M. B. Tappan 2006, 6). Shifts in narrative complexity and moral categorization, then, both mirror and influence shifts in community and individual ways of making meaning and functioning within the world. The patterns thus revealed provide both valuable insight into the values of a certain community or historical moment and a way to map those values’ changes. Such maps, in turn, facilitate deeper understanding of concepts such as evil as well as the human species, understanding the latter as members of specific communities and as individuals (Burke 1990, 66). The shift in North American popular culture toward morally ambiguous characters and narratives is evidenced by characters like Klaus Mikaelson, Sebastian Monroe, and their morally complex hero counterparts. This shift challenges traditional character categories and relationships, which reflects the ongoing social and cultural changes in the culture which has popularized this narrative feature. This circularity highlights the complexity in determining causal relations in cultural shifts. This complication of moral categories in narrative began during a time marked by unmitigated acts of atrocity which were further heightened by media saturation, ensuring people were fully and intimately exposed to the details of horrors, past and present. This overlap is not a coincidence. Social upheaval has shaped the past fifty years and continues to shake the balance of traditional power structures today. Expanded global interactions require navigating cultural differences more sensitively, complicating the instability of cultural and social values further. Combined, these changes eat away at the moral certainty which underlay the categories of heroes and villains in earlier narratives. Questions once seemingly settled

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by Judeo-Christian theology—namely, the nature of evil and the existence of moral absolutes—have become untethered in an increasingly secular society. Likewise, while moral relativism, in the form of moral skepticism has its roots in the ancient world, it only rose to prominence in the wake of these same cultural shifts (Gowans 2015). Thus, our cultural products reflect our cultural struggles and anxieties. Whether art is a mirror or a hammer in regards to life, the two are intricately woven together. Morally ambiguous characters who defy simple categorization may be gaining popularity precisely because they raise complex moral questions about how evil functions at both an individual and societal level, especially in relation to institutions of power and privilege. The narratives these villains and heroes populate encourage audiences to think critically about how people—real and fictional—make choices in the complex maze of their lives and world not by oversimplifying life, but instead by complicating its richness (Finley and Mannise 2014, 70). The moral universes in which the characters operate also reflect the ambiguity of the wider culture. The antihero’s popularity surged in the wake of 9/11, and notably, the worlds in which American television programs were set also darkened. NBC’s Revolution is set fifteen years after a worldwide, apocalyptic blackout. Miles Matheson and Sebastian Monroe are formerly career U.S. Marines—heroes by the cultural rhetoric surrounding American viewers—trying to reestablish some form of law and order. Imagining the chaos of such an event comes easy for viewers who can access content simultaneously on multiple devices, engage with the actors and producers on social media, and talk to each other from around the world. Confronted with these interactions, the audience can also imagine how such an event might shift their own perceptions of right and wrong. Similarly, supernatural dramas like The Vampire Diaries and The Originals allow both storytellers and viewers to examine how deeply rooted their moral frameworks are when their cultural constructs crumble. Thus, the moral universes of the narratives set the parameters for viewers’ engagement with the text and the characters: whose point of view they adopt, who they root for, how emotionally connected they feel (Donnelly 2012, 21; Bokiniec 2011, 195). For some viewers this can raise existential questions about their own moral certainty and perception (Bokiniec 2011, 194). Clear-cut, traditional dichotomies are reassuring; these new narratives are not. Given the intricate and intimate ways morality and evil are tied to one another, fallible heroes, relatable villains and viewer reactions to them, invite questions about the absolute or relative nature of morality itself. However, even in a morally relative universe, the narrative category in which a character is placed does not absolve him or her of moral culpability or make their actions automatically acceptable. In fact, often,

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wrong actions taken for understandable, or even right, reasons, lead someone down a path where the wrong actions become easier and the need for right reasons less compelling. Following this path, a formerly good character ultimately slides from hero to antihero to villain, and can even turn genuinely evil (Bokiniec 2011, 198). Social psychologist Phillip Zimbardo (2007) calls this the “Lucifer Effect,” which provides an extensive exploration of the atrocities committed by ordinary people. The Lucifer Effect itself is the psychological process that allows people to suspend moral rules in the service of a perceived higher good or authority, often compounded by finding themselves in an unfamiliar situation where their old habits and behaviors will not suffice (Zimbardo 2007, chap. 1). Evil, then, Zimbardo argues, is incremental, something people fall into step by step, thinking they are doing the right thing, justifying their actions by suspending morality, until they no longer care whether what they are doing is wrong or right. While Zimbardo analyzes real-life situations like the Stanford Prison Experiment and the abuses at Abu Ghraib, the Lucifer Effect also illuminates both Bass and Miles’ fall from being good guys, as well as many of Elijah’s evil acts. Miles and Sebastian’s actions in trying to restore order after the Blackout fall unquestionably into those of traditional villains. These characters have eradicated due process and imposed the death penalty for minor crimes. They back drug lords in return for a share of their profit, and they use torture freely against both friends and enemies. However, all they do is in the service of keeping people safe and getting the power back on. They have no mass communication, no infrastructure, and no way to effectively control outer areas of the territories. Justice has to be swift, as disobedience can lead to a breakdown of the fragile new social order. They need information on how to get the power back on, and when asking nicely didn’t work, they used torture. However, they can justify their behavior through utilitarian pragmatism: people were dying, so the ends justified the means. After Miles leaves, Bass is both emotionally more fragile while trying to uphold the civilization they reinstated. But, after years of killing indiscriminately, he’s lost his ability to value human life or tell right from wrong, which he demonstrates repeatedly. Similarly, Elijah’s evil acts all come in service to his family; they are his greater good, and if innocents have to die to keep them safe, so be it. Unlike Klaus and Bass, Elijah still feels guilt for his acts, occasionally. But their reasons and ends for their actions do not make them right. The implicit question in this realization resonates with and reflects back to cultural anxieties for a society deeply divided over the morality of drone strikes that kill civilians and deaths in police custody, and enemy combatants held and interrogated at Guantanamo Bay. As such issues in the real world obscure what constitutes evil and heroism in a morally difficult crisis, popular narrative fictions re-

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spond in kind with heroes who aren’t classically heroic and villains who commit justifiable evil. Some might use this emerging hero/villain dynamic to argue that moral relativism has completely supplanted moral objectivism, leading to an inability to say anything general or universal about evil. Moral objectivity, at first glance, seems incompatible with these new, morally complicated characters; however, that incompatibility may not be altogether accurate. From the standpoint of a moral objectivist, moral absolutes are not situationally or culturally relative; they are immutable facts. Moral objectivism falls out of favor because of the way in which it has been deployed as a weapon, used to impose one group’s theory about moral facts on another. However, this use of moral objectivism is not inherent within the theory itself. A person can believe absolutely that a right thing to do exists yet still be humble about his or her own ability to assess what that is and willing to acknowledge that he or she might be wrong (Robichaud 2009, 69–70). For example, it may be an absolute moral truth that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, leading to the conclusion that societies need a strong military and government to ensure the safety of the majority of people. In turn, this need for a strong military to protect the majority may morally excuse the torture or execution of the few who threaten it. In that case, Miles and Sebastian are heroes protecting the people from violent dissidents, not violent tyrants. From the standpoint of a moral objectivist, the two men are either heroes or villains, concretely; however, an ethical moral objectivist must admit that which category they occupy cannot be conclusively determined given the imperfect knowledge of moral laws humanity currently possesses. A right action exists; the conflict of the narrative comes from the characters’ attempt to find the right course of action in a complicated world. The conflict is popular because, essentially, it mirrors contemporary discussions of human rights nuanced by increasingly global lifestyles and increasing global awareness. Thus, morally ambiguous characters do not have to point toward moral relativism merely by their resistance to categorization. In fact, their position within a world of moral absolutes is more engaging and more challenging. Moral relativity, though it may seem to open up new possibilities, upon deeper inspection, actually shuts down inquiry into morality. If everyone is right, then there can be no fruitful inquiry or debate (Robichaud 2009, 67). The real complexity in moral reasoning is to accept that absolute moral facts exist and still admit that these facts may be difficult—even impossible—to discover absolutely. Instead of rejecting the possibility that moral absolutes exist, these complex narratives might instead “invit[e] us to acknowledge that objective moral truths are an extremely challenging thing to arrive at” (Robichaud 2009, 71). Acknowledging the inherent complexities allows us to

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engage in the same struggle that plagues heroes and villains, but it also further casts doubt on the absolute characterization of characters as such, and leaves us still without a clear way to distinguish one from the other. It is in this struggle with moral complexity, however, that the concept of evil retains its usefulness, even as it requires rethinking what makes a villain or a hero. EVIL IS NOT BORN BUT MADE In rethinking the definition of a villain, one aspect under consideration is the concept of the inherent nature of a character’s evil. Socrates declared that there were two kinds of evil people: those born evil and those who were once good, but become evil (Christodoulou 2010, 24). Perhaps some people are born evil, but characters who become morally ambiguous villains or antiheroes and those who engage in redemptive arcs are not. Instead, they fit the definition of evil where, for whatever reason, they gave in to the darkness inside every human heart and, like Lucifer, fell from goodness. As such, exploring a villain’s motives frequently eliminates the “without moral justification” prong of the definition of evil, returning to the questions surrounding ends and means that often provides the primary avenue for audience identification (Bokiniec 2011, 209). Viewers are better able to invest in the characters emotionally when they realize that these villains have the potential to be something more, morally, than they are. Even when they do morally reprehensible things; these emerging villains give viewers the necessary reasons to like them in spite of their actions (Shafer and Raney 2012, 1037). These reasons often come through a tragic backstory, a common device used to explain characters’ actions and add depth. These backstories often include psychological reasons for the villains being the way they are, the mitigating factors acting upon them. That the characters are all shown to be sensitive heightens the tragedy by positioning them to be wounded. Klaus, for instance, was abused as a child, turned into a monster against his will and betrayed by both parents and siblings. Bass suffered trauma in war, lost his parents and sisters in a car accident, had his wife die giving birth to his stillborn child, went through an apocalypse, and had his best friend try to kill him before abandoning him. Parental abuse, betrayal, and abandonment, as well as traumas like war and loss of loved ones permeate the backstories of similar other villains in popular culture, as well. The example of Klaus and Bass, the nature of their traumas and even the narrative function of the backstory in flashback, represents common motifs across contemporary American popular culture. To share these backstories, the narratives for all these morally complicated characters often provide flashbacks to share who the characters were before they became villains. These flashbacks give viewers mo-

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ments in which they witness the character acting in a different way, making their previous goodness feel more real. The Originals includes a significant number of flashbacks, allowing viewers to trace the lives of the Mikaelsons across their thousand years, beginning when they are small children. Through these, viewers see Klaus as a playful young man, a sensitive artist, who Elijah says, “wanted nothing more than to love and be loved” (“Always and Forever” 2014). Revolution’s flashbacks reveal that Bass, too, was a sensitive and emotional young man with a playful spirit, who began life as a loyal friend and a loving brother. For instance, he chose friendship over love and gave up his college scholarship to save his best friend and the girl he loved (“Home” 2013). These images of characters who are sensitive, kind, artistic, open emotionally and eager to love others are far removed from the characters viewers have come to know. The flashbacks thus ask viewers to reassess the characters. Flashbacks also reveal the path that led these characters to their fall and their descent down it, explicating a theory as to how good people can become evil. In her discussion of the repercussions of cruelty, Lynne Arnault argues that a tenet of survival of evil is often a narrative of picking up the pieces and arising from the ashes stronger than ever. However, cruelty and tragedy breaks down the basic structures of a person’s self, and survival requires rebuilding the self from the ground up. Unfortunately that rebuilt self may still be shattered or “have become infected with cruelty” (Arnault 2003, 166). Awareness of the backstory allows viewers to identify the sources of infection rather than assume the characters’ inherent evil. The effects of such tragic backstories offer two primary causes of evil in people: a lack of hope and a lack of connection with others. Philosopher Ioannis Christodoulou argues that, “[e]vil does not hope. That’s the reason people do evil deeds. They do not and cannot wait for the good to come” (Christodoulou 2010, 27). Especially when repeatedly subject to negative experiences, including disasters and consistent adversaries, people cease being able to see any good left in their lives. Bass and Klaus both arrive at the point where they expect only betrayal, often lashing out even at those loyal to them because, in the terms of Christodoulou, loyalty is not something they feel they can hope for. Bass, for instance, attempted suicide after the loss of his family. After the Blackout, he reacted to perceived threats with increasing violence until Miles tried to kill him—the ultimate betrayal by the only person he had left. With Miles gone, Bass lost all hope and descended into true villainy, losing all regard for those around him. He became, under Christodoulou’s definition, evil. Tragedy can then lead to isolation and the loss of human connection, further nurturing the seeds of evil. Like falls from innocence to evil, these characters’ complete isolation often develops in incremental steps. Once someone begins their first step down the road, insecurity and consequences lead them further (Rosslyn 2001, 13–16). This can be seen in how

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the would-be villain isolates himself, first losing his sense of self, and then starting to lose sense of others as real people. Klaus and Bass are both isolated by their own hands. Though their initial losses were not their faults, much of their evil begins as a way to control the world and the people around them. They act in ways that are evil so that they will not be alone any longer and so that no one else will leave or be taken from them. For instance, when Bass kills the family of the man who tries to assassinate him, his own injury is not the reason for his retaliation; he retaliates because the explosion almost killed Miles (“Children of Men” 2014). While Klaus’s behavior seems initially more selfish than Bass’s—he imprisons his siblings is to keep them from abandoning him the way their parents did (“The River in Reverse” 2014)—this behavior is a result of an initial trauma, namely, abandonment. As is often the case with morally complex behaviors, these actions, intended to keep them from being abandoned, are ultimately what drives their loved ones away. Once villains have lost their connections to others and begun their moral fall, they end up only perpetuating that loneliness, sinking further into misery. This misery turns into which becomes malevolence and villainy—intentionally committing actions that to make things go badly for others. However, Formosa (2007) proposes that “malevolent behavior is not only destructive, but often highly self-destructive. Indeed, when malevolence succeeds it usually only makes things worse for everybody, the perpetrator included” (71). Formosa’s condition reveals that a fundamental sacrifice, not just loss, of relationships is necessary for evil. Everything of significance breaks down and creates for the villain, “a world without meaningful connection, in which life is no more important than death” (Rosslyn 2001, 16). With this outlook, they enter into a self-destructive vicious cycle, constantly reinforcing their lack of hope, loneliness, and malevolence. REDEMPTIVE RELATIONSHIPS Yet, as much as lack of connection can breed evil, finding it once again— and allowing for it—holds the key to redemption. Such recognition often takes place by finding similarities with their moral opposites. The hero and the villain often fulfill the mythic trope of “unlike brothers”: one light, one dark; one good, one evil. As such, the heroes serve as doubles for the villains, who act as their shadows. When the villain serves as the hero’s shadow, the shadow can then represent “the inferior, all-too human side of us that we are so especially ready to project and then ‘spit at.’ The hero [however] feels sorry for [the villain] and takes upon himself the price of his guilt” (Meyer 2003, 520). In some cases, the hero’s empathetic response arises from the villain’s need for connection, and this reaction can have a positive effect on the bond between the two. Both

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Miles and Elijah actively work for their counterpart’s redemption, even when Miles struggles to know what that is. “We’re the good guys now,” he tells Bass near the end of season two. “It’s time we start acting like it” (“Tomorrowland” 2014). This recognition of the villain’s moral progress is paramount for the process of redemption. Ultimately, their own moral slippage provides Miles and Elijah insight into their doubles’ struggles. Elijah maintains hope for Klaus; indeed, Elijah’s main purpose seems to be to find Klaus’s redemption. When Elijah’s his sister asks when will he will give up on Klaus and move on, he tells her that he will only stop seeking Klaus’s redemption when he is “convinced there is none to be found” (“Always and Forever” 2014). At the time of writing, Elijah is still searching for that redemption, as The Originals is ongoing and Klaus notoriously backslides into his villainous ways. However, Elijah’s persistence has led Klaus to recognize just how much of his misery is his own fault. After a millennium of villainy, shifting position is challenging, but Klaus has shown evidence of unselfish caring and taken steps to amend for some of the harms he’s caused his siblings through the years. While his redemption is ongoing, he has grown exponentially more complex as a moral character. Though Miles does not remain as steadfastly supportive of Bass as Elijah does of Klaus, the Revolution narrative more successfully reveals the villain’s redemption. Miles and Bass’s friendship began in childhood, and losing Miles is what drives Bass to his greatest depths of villainy. His sharp downward spiral into deranged paranoia and rising body counts, only comes after Miles tells him that he means nothing to him. Conversely, Bass only begins to find his way back from the depths when Miles tells him he was lying, that they’ll always be brothers. He joins up with Miles the next season, giving all sorts of reasons, but it becomes clear that his main goal is reconciliation. While they spend much of the season fighting, Miles slowly accepts Bass back into his life, ultimately trusting him to carry out the plan needed to save the day, even though it goes against Bass’s own goals. Bass comes through for Miles, and the series ends with them firmly on the same side. While Bass may not be fully redeemed, he is arguably back to the moral status of an antihero rather than an outright villain. CONCLUSION As fictional characters descend and rise along a moral continuum, they offer greater insight into the function of moral systems and the necessity of evil as one endpoint. Characters such as Miles, Bass, Klaus, and Elijah raise not only questions of fictional ethics and morality, but also ask viewers to engage with these concerns in relation to their personal moral beliefs. Enjoying these televisions shows and rooting for antiheros or

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even villains, viewers are confronted with existential, and often uncomfortable, questions about their own moral status if an evil action can believably come across as the right thing to do (Bokiniec 2011, 194). In the absence of moral certainty, asking these questions becomes even more important to sustain ethical practice. Many of these characters have done things that may never be forgiven, but, notably, all of them started out as good people, the likely moral position where viewers would position themselves. Their stories show how people can slide along the continuum toward an unintended and undesired moral position, forcing viewers to witness, and thus to recognize, the ease of this descent. The concept of evil provides the measuring point, showing the viewers just how far the characters have fallen. However, by allowing the villains to return as the heroes’ sidekicks in subsequent seasons, the narrative shows these characters rise again. This rise offers both characters and viewer hope, the true antithesis of evil (Christodoulou 2010, 27). More than that—all of these terms hope, suffering, redemption, and morality—lose significant meaning without the concept of evil. What is good without it? How would one know? The questions remain essential for evaluating narratives like these--and by extension our own. Where is the power of the redemptive arc without something from which to be redeemed? And how can being “bad” encapsulate anything so dark as to need redemption from it? How can we appreciate the growth of a character without any guidance to judge that growth upon? These questions may not be easily answered even within current frameworks, but without the concept of evil, answering them would be impossible. The Big Bad redemptive narrative arc demonstrates that binary morality is far too simplistic to account for human experience. Rather than an absolute position, evil provides an outer boundary of a complex continuum. Rather than offering a functionally progressive model, a morally relativistic approach that abandons the concept of evil would leave us much poorer and more adrift than the cultural shifts that brought us to this point. Rather than simplifying our discussions and analyses, the concept of evil makes them richer and offers us a chance for greater insight into ourselves and our world. REFERENCES “Always and Forever.” 2014. DVD. The Originals: The Complete First Season. Directed by Chris Grismer. Written by Julie Plec. Warner Brothers. Arendt, Hannah. 1994. Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954, edited by Jerome Kohn. New York: Harcourt Brace. Arnault, Lynne S. 2003. “Cruelty, Horror, and the Will to Redemption.” Hypatia 18 (2): 155–88. Barber, Lucie W. 1981. “The Dichotomies of Thinking and Feeling.” Religious Education 76 (5): 497–504.

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Barthes, Roland. 1977. “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives.” In Image/Music/Text. Translated by Stephen Heath, 79–124. London: Fontana Press. Biss, Mavis. 2011. “Aristotle on Friendship and Self-Knowledge: The Friend beyond the Mirror.” History of Philosophy Quarter 28 (2): 125–40. Bokiniec, Monika. 2011. “Who Can Find a Virtuous CTU Agent? Jack Bauer as Modern Hero, Antihero and Tragic Villain.” In Villains and Villainy: Embodiments of Evil in Literature, Popular Culture and Media, edited by Anna Fahraeus and Dikmen Yakali Camoglu, 193–213. New York: Rodopi. Buchholz, Ester S., and Joshua K. Mandel. 2000. “Reaching for Virtue, Stumbling on Sin: Concepts of Good and Evil in a Postmodern Era.” Journal of Religion & Health 39 (2): 123. Burke, Ken. 1990. “Heroes and Villains in American Film.” International Journal of Instructional Media 17 (1): 63–72. Calder, Todd. 2015. “The Concept of Evil.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Fall. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concept-evil/. “Children of Men.” 2013. DVD. Revolution: The Complete First Season. Directed by Frederick E. O. Toye. Written by Erik Kripke. Universal Studios. Christodoulou, Ioannis S. 2010. “Hope and Its Incongruence with Evil.” At the Interface/Probing the Boundaries 67: 23–34. Cole, Phillip. 2006. The Myth of Evil. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. “Cosmic Engine: Early Models of the Universe.” 2016. Accessed June 1. http://www. atnf.csiro.au/outreach/education/senior/cosmicengine/classicalastronomy.html. Csordas, Thomas J. 2013. “Morality as a Cultural System.” Current Anthropology 54 (5): 523–46. Donnelly, Ashley M. 2012. “The New American Hero: Dexter, Serial Killer for the Masses.” The Journal of Popular Culture 45 (1): 15–26. Finley, Laura L., and Mannise Kelly C. 2014. “Potter versus Voldemort: Examining Evil, Power and Affective Responses in the Harry Potter Film Series.” In A History of Evil in Popular Culture: What Hannibal Lecter, Stephen King and Vampires Reveal about America, edited by Sharon Packer and Jody Pennington, 1: 59–72. Santa Barbara: Praeger. Formosa, Paul. 2007. “Understanding Evil Acts.” Human Studies 30 (2): 57–77. Gowans, Chris. 2015. “Moral Relativism.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2015. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/ entries/moral-relativism/. “Home.” 2013 Revolution: The Complete First Season. Directed by Jon Cassar. Written by Erik Kripke. Universal Studios. Ivakhiv, Adrian. 2008. “Social Nature: Collapsing Dichotomies without Unraveling the Fabric of Things.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 2 (2): 258–68. Kelly, Christine, and Michele Zak. 1999. “Narrativity and Professional Communication: Folktales and Community Meaning.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 13 (3): 297–317. Klein, Shawn E. 2012. “Harry Potter and Humanity: Choices, Love and Death.” Reason Papers 34 (1): 33–41. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame. Meyer, Michaela D.E. 2003. “Utilizing Mythic Criticism in Contemporary Narrative Culture: Examining the ‘Present-Absence’ of Shadow Archetypes in Spider-Man.” Communication Quarterly 51 (4): 518–29. Packer, Sharon, and Jody Pennington, eds. 2014. A History of Evil in Popular Culture: What Hannibal Lecter, Stephen King and Vampires Reveal about America. Vol. 1. 2 vols. Santa Barbara: Praeger. Poon, Jared. 2009. “What Magneto Cannot Choose.” In Supervillains and Philosophy: Sometimes, Evil Is Its Own Reward, edited by Ben Deyer, 52–60. Chicago: Carus Publishing Company.

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“River in Reverse, The.” 2014. DVD. The Originals: The Complete First Season. Directed by Jesse Warn. Written by Julie Plec. Warner Brothers. Robichaud, Christopher. 2009. “Bright Colors, Dark Times.” In Supervillains and Philosophy: Sometimes, Evil Is Its Own Reward, edited by Ben Deyer, 61–70. Chicago: Carus Publishing Company. Rosslyn, Felicity. 2001. “Villainy, Virtue and Projection.” The Cambridge Quarterly 30 (1): 1–17. Russell, Luke. 2006. “Evil-Revivalism versus Evil-Skepticism.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 40: 89–105. ———. 2010. “Evil, Monsters and Dualism.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 13 (1): 45–58. Shafer, Daniel M., and Arthur A. Raney. 2012. “Exploring How We Enjoy Antihero Narratives.” Journal of Communication 62: 1028–46. Tappan, Mark B. 2006. “Moral Functioning as Mediated Action.” Journal of Moral Education 35 (1): 1–18. doi:10.1080/03057240500495203. Tappan, Mark, and Lyn Mikel Brown. 1989. “Stories Told and Lessons Learned: Toward a Narrative Approach to Moral Development and Moral Education.” Harvard Educational Review 59 (2): 182–206. doi:10.17763/haer.59.2.d364up55vx875411. “Tomorrowland.” 2014. DVD. Revolution: The Complete Second Season. Directed by David Boyd. Written by Eric Kripke. Universal Studios. White, Hayden. 1980. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 7 (1): 5–27. Zimbardo, Philip. 2007. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House.

FIVE The Name-of-the-Monster Interpellation and the Construction of Evil Jim Casey

Evil is a designation for things which subvert the unspoken ideology of a society. A society’s relation to and reliance on evil can thus highlight how it constructs its ideological and social systems by calling or naming that which is subverts these structures as monstrous or evil. Louis Althusser (1971) articulates how the naming function maintains the power of dominant social structures when he notes that identity and belief are constructed when “ideology hails or interpellates individuals as subjects” (175). Interpellation, or hailing, is the process through which individuals are “called” by society, the state, or others through the systems that inherently reproduce dominant ideologies such as schools, churches, media outlets, or entertainment programs. This subtle recruitment through education and exposure rather that force and coercion gives the illusion of free will and individual choice, when in fact those actions and identities are predetermined by the existing real-world conditions. In this way, personal agency is limited and constrained by pre-existing systems of power and individual identity is constructed more powerfully by (largely unrecognized) forces outside the individual than by any internal choices or conscious acts. Within such systems, the concept of evil functions as a unifying and regulatory force. It performs a cartographic or orismological function, mapping out the boundaries of acceptable thought and behavior while warning of danger-zones for ideas or actions (“Here Be Dragons”). Those outside the boundaries are evil, and the figures that embody such subver69

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sion are monsters. What a society terms monstrous thus exposes the ideological limits (and limitations) of that society. When the concept of evil is recognized as a socio-ideological regulatory system, it ceases to be defined by a Judeo-Christian notion of sin. Instead, evil is defined through unspoken assumptions about required behaviors of individuals in a society, and the refutations of these assumptions defines monsters. The naming of a subject as monstrous defines it as subversive and exiles it from the normative community. Though Dante Alighieri ([1295] 1973) observes in the Vita Nuova, “names are the consequences of the things they name: Nomina sunt consequentia rerum” (22), 1 in the case of monsters, the inverse is frequently true: things become consequences of the names they receive. While in classical times, the monstrum was an aberration of natural order, a portent that represented a warning from the gods, often, the monster is declared an abomination, such as when Caliban is described as an “abominable monster” (Shakespeare 2011, 2.2.156) in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The word abomination comes from the Latin abominatus, meaning “to shun as an ill omen,” but this meaning has been confused (and indeed intensified) over time through a folk-etymological association with the Latin ab homine (“away from man”). Thus, the monstrous abomination has evolved from its classical roots as a warning from the gods into that entity which moves away from the category of humankind. This signals the shifting definition from that exclusively based on a religious morality to one defined socially. The boundaries of evil can be understood by carefully examining the power of names/naming and the function of such interpellative moves in the construction of evil across a variety of historical periods, particularly when juxtaposing different historical periods to highlight the similarities of the social function despite differences in definitions. This comparison will also clarify the unifying elements in the concept of evil as seen through transhistorical and transcultural markers of evil and monstrosity. MAPPING THE BOUNDARIES OF EVIL THROUGH RELIGION In the cartography of evil, monsters map out a forbidden, sacrilegious space that parallels the wild and haunted moors that they inhabit. Hailing an entity as a monster marks that individual as existing outside the realm of the good and demonstrates the powerful connection between naming and evil monstrosity. In the case of the monster, the very name promises an exemplum of evil Otherness, a demonstration of abnormality, an exhibition of not-me. As foils to the “good” Self, monsters present an “evil” counterpart that has been constructed by various cultures and ideologies in order that the Self might also be constructed. Despite being

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situated in very different cultural and historical moments, each of the monsters here introduced stress the opposition between the Otherness of evil and the goodness of the naming entity, showing the societal mapping of its boundaries. In discussions regarding evil, the Other presents a set of remarkably similar interpellations that figure evil as monstrous and non-human. Perhaps most striking in these descriptions and appellations of evil is the prevalence of religious and spiritually inflected language. Regardless of the period or culture, evil and monstrosity are most often positioned in opposition to prevailing concepts of godliness and spirituality. In Frankenstein, for example, Victor positions himself in opposition to his creature when he calls his creation “Devil,” “Abhorred monster,” and “fiend”; even the text refers to the creature as “the dæmon” (Shelley [1818] 2008, 99). This language, reminiscent of the epithets describing Grendel, clearly situates the creature outside the bounds of humanity. Specifically, in the Old English poem Beowulf, Grendel is frequently interpellated as a monster through religious language and allusion. For instance, he is “the Lord’s outcast” (Heaney 2000, l. 169), a “God-cursed brute” [Wiht unhǣlo, a creature of evil] (l. 121). Moreover, he is characterized specifically through the language of hell, as he is a “hell-serf” [helle hæfton] (l. 786), a “powerful demon” [ellen-gæst] (l. 86), a “fiend out of hell” [feond on helle] (l. 100), who has committed the sin/crime [fyrene fremman] of working “evil in the world” (l. 101) and who wants to return to the “devil’s litter” [deofla gedræg] (l. 755). 2 More particularly, he is a member of “Cain’s clan” [Caines cynne] (2000, 106)—who himself was exiled and declared “anathema” [hē hine feor forwræc, / Metod for þȳ māne, man-cynne fram] (l. 110). By excluding Grendel from the socio-religious community, his destruction eliminates his subversiveness maintaining the safety of the community(‘s ideological structures). However, these Judeo-Christian concepts were available neither linguistically nor conceptually to the Danes and Geats sung of in the poem. The pagan scop who originally sang of them also would have found the words and ideas unintelligible. For the Christian scribe who recorded the tale, however, the ideological reframing would have transformed the pagan tale of wyrd (fate) and wergild (the death-price paid as recompense for one who has been slain) into a Judeo-Christian story of providence and sacrifice. Within the context of such a revision, the positioning of Grendel as an evil monster outside the boundaries of God’s grace sanctions and legitimizes the violence committed against his body. Whereas the dismemberment of Aeschere the Dane by Grendel’s Mother is figured as an atrocity deserving of revenge, the dismemberment of Grendel the monster by Beowulf is depicted as an act licensed by God and deserving of praise. At the same time, Grendel is also supposedly descended from the human Cain, a genealogical tidbit that was probably added by the Chris-

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tian scribe to the original pagan story. Although he is painted as a “guiltfouled fiend” [āglǣca fyren-dǣdum fāg] (2000, l. 1000) who flees “in despair of his life” [aldres orwena] (l. 1001) following his fatal encounter with Beowulf, Grendel is also mortal, like humans. His impending death immediately prompts the narrator’s philosophical rumination on mortality: But death is not easily escaped from by anyone: all of us with souls, earth-dwellers and children of men, must make our way to a destination already ordained where the body, after the banqueting, sleeps on its deathbed. (ll. 1001–7)

Because this description immediately follows the image of Grendel retreating “in despair of his life” (1001) the monster seems to be included in the group of “all of us with souls” (1003). In Old English, the word sāwlberendra is used here, and might be translated as soul-bearer, but the word is a common kenning for human being. This seems to suggest not only that Grendel has a soul, but also that he must be included among the “children of men [niþða bearna]” (1004). In like manner, the novel Frankenstein repeatedly uses the term “creature,” rather than monster, which further complicates the monstrosity of the character, particularly within the spiritual backdrop of Paradise Lost, another tale of banishing subversive monsters. In the recurring creation story that the novel emphasizes, not only does Shelley’s preferred appellation reinforce the creature’s bond with his human creator, but it also allies him with other human entities who acknowledge themselves as created beings, such as in Margery Kempe’s medieval autobiography, where the Christian mystic repeatedly refers to herself as “this creature” (1994, 41e). Julia Lupton notes that the word creature derives from the future participle of the Latin verb creare, so that the creatura is figured as a “made or fashioned thing” that is “always in the process of undergoing creation.” In Judaism and Christianity especially, “creature marks the radical separation of creation and Creator” (l. 1). Despite this careful demarcation between creature and creator, the relationship between these words also underlines the inherent connection between the two entities. As the text relies on the unspoken understanding that Victor is himself created by God, and is thus also a “creature,” the novel blurs the distinction between creature and creator, monster and human. In this way, the carefully drawn territories of good and evil begin to bleed into one another, indicating that religious distinction is not sufficient to explain or define the monstrous. As exiled Cain-figures, these monsters literalize the destructive nature of human sin. For example, in the original Old English, Grendel is described as a “feond on helle” (l. 100). Heaney translates the line “a fiend out

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of hell,” but Malcolm Andrew (1981) points out that the words could literally mean “fiend in hell.” He connects this description to the theology of St. Augustine, suggesting that the depiction emphasizes the separation and discord of sin resulting in a “separation from the harmony of the divine order” and leading to “a vicious circle in which sin leads to more sin” until eventually “sin itself becomes the punishment of sin” (Andrew 1981, 404). The joyful celebration and harmony in Heorot, as exemplified by the creation song, becomes juxtaposed to the destructive envy and isolation of God-cursed Grendel. Exiled and declared anathema, the monstrous descendants of Cain are excluded from the joy and community of God’s people. In a society in which the clan and comitatus is everything, anathema would have been devastating, a hellish experience. And this is Andrew’s point; as Augustine implies, it is hell within whenever a person sins. This religious framing persists even in epochs and areas of diminished spiritual belief and influence, figuring evil as connected to the numinous even when the religious reference is deliberately eschewed. For example, the fiend that shakes or quivers aloft in Christ and Satan above recalls the “Vibroman” demon from Jacob’s Ladder (1990), a film that was fashioned as a conscious departure from traditional portrayals of evil and hell. Written by Bruce Joel Rubin and directed by Adrian Lyne, the film depicts the last moments in the life of Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins) and his descent into what he perceives to be a literal hell, with the frightening, infernal visions created by what Rubin describes as “the dissolution of a man who is dying.” 3 In the original script, Rubin utilized traditional imagery of heaven and hell, but Lyne rejected the “Bosche-like creatures” because “He felt that people are too familiar with the classical renderings of the demonic soul. [. . .] They are familiar to us and, therefore, not threatening. They are easy to dismiss, and therefore, not demonic” (Rubin 1990, 180–81). Lyne wanted a depiction of evil that the audience could neither dismiss nor hide from: demons that attacked from the inside and that had not been seen before but would be instantly recognizable as such. For Lyne, “Hell had been tamed by familiarity. He wanted something contemporary that would burn itself into the audience’s consciousness” (189). Originally, Rubin envisioned a hell aligned with the work of Gustave Doré and William Blake, but Lyne rejected these ideas, looking instead for a contemporary equivalent. Early in the process, Rubin and Lyne were influenced by the work of H. R. Giger, but eventually moved on to the blurred, disturbing images of Francis Bacon and Joel-Peter Witkin. The image of Witkin’s Leo, a photograph of a caged, legless veteran with a blurred and hooded head, in particular formed the basis for the Vibroman demon, who shakes his head violently and with inhuman quickness, representing the terrifying agitation of demonic forces. Seeing these “creatures” and “demons,” Jake tells his chiropractor, Louis (Danny Aiello), that he is “in Hell,” essentially carrying his hellfire within him-

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self. The “angelic” Louis responds by recounting to Jake the medieval theories of Meister Eckhart, explaining, “Eckhart saw Hell, too”: You know what he said? He said the only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won’t let go of your life; your memories, your attachments. They burn ‘em all away. But they’re not punishing you, he said. They’re freeing your soul. [. . .] So the way he sees it, if you’re frightened of dying and you’re holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. But if you’ve made your peace then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth. It’s just a matter of how you look at it, that’s all.

Immediately following this scene, Jake goes back to his apartment and sees a dim reflection of his dead son Gabe (Macaulay Culkin) in the mirror. When he moves the mirror slightly, he sees the Vibroman demon. As with the other monsters discussed above, fear and desire are reflections of the same entity, dependent primarily on one’s perspective. When these perspectives are ideologically subversive, they are designated as evil and monstrous, using religious tropes rather than religious concepts to explain the difference and create the exiled Other. BANISHING THE MONSTROUS As Jacques Lacan ([1966] 2008) notes, “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other,” by which he means to indicate “the beyond in which the recognition of desire is bound up with the desire of recognition” (205). Yet this double recognition, integral to the mortal-monster dialectic, becomes effaced by the naturalizing interpellation of the dominant discursive practices. Within his overall symbolic order, Lacan’s Name-of-theFather functions as a governing law that establishes boundaries (for law, gender, difference, etc.) yet still sustains the structures of desire in the very midst of prohibition. Turning this concept into the “Name-of-theMonster,” there appears an appropriate counterpart to the idea, a kind of Cain to the Name-of-the-Father’s Abel. Whereas the Name-of-the-Father creates a repressive structure that upholds patriarchal order, the Nameof-the-Monster dismantles those structures, subverting and liberating the assumptions of the dominant culture or society through the chaos and grotesquery of the monster-figure. So where the Name-of-the Father maintains the abhorrence of monstrosity, the Name-of-the-Monster expresses the other side, representing a yearning for—not a fear of—monsters, coupled with the inclination to transgress those boundaries established by the Name-of-the-Father. In this Name-sublation, the monster relocates unacceptable desire outside the self and into a monstrous Other that may be vanquished and exiled, like Cain. In Beowulf, Cain is made anathema by God, so that “out of the curse of his exile there sprang / ogres and elves and evil phantoms /

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and the giants too” [Þanon untȳdras ealle on wōcon, / eotenas ond ylfe ond orcnēas, / swylce gīgantas] (2000, ll. 111–13). For Andrew (1981), “The significance of Cain is that he is the originator among men of conscious, premeditated sin” (404). The language of untȳdras [evil offspring, misshapen birth] illustrates the not-human nature of these creatures’ monstrous births. Like Frankenstein’s creature or Cain-descended Grendel, the monsters always come back to their human progenitors. Like Victor Frankenstein, humanity fears the possibility that “a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror” (Shelley [1818] 2008, 165), but in fact, the monster is very human-like in its rejection of exile and desire for companionship. These humanlike qualities show how in naming and banishing the monster, society defines its boundaries through its ideologies rather than through innate differences. This notion of exclusion, particularly based on patriarchal notions of family or tribal constructions appears forcefully in the mapping of Grendel’s monstrosity. In Heaney’s (2000) translation, Grendel moves “beyond the pale” [wrǣc-lāstas træd], where he literally treads the path of exile (l. 1352). Pales/palings are stakes used to construct fences or barriers (as in the word impale), so something moving beyond that boundary is clearly located outside the border of civilization and the “good” of humanity. But just as the character moves with impunity between the outer wilderness and the inner halls of Heorot, the monster passes easily (terrifyingly) between the outer territory of the evil inhuman and the inner realm of the good human. Thus, metaphorically, the physical patrolling against the monster highlights the ideological patrolling against the culturally subversive. Grendel’s monstrosity is presented both in his physicality and in his origins. He is “bigger than any man” [weres wæstmum] (l. 1353), and he and his mother are described as clearly not descended from any human: “They are fatherless creatures, / and their whole ancestry is hidden in a past / of demons and ghosts” [nō hīe fæder cunnon, / hwæþer him ǣnig wæs ǣr ācenned / dyrnra gāsta] (ll. 1355–57). There is some disagreement over the meaning of this difficult Old English passage. Gwendolyn Morgan (1991) argues that these lines stress “the lack of a Grendel senior” and that “the absence of a husband-father suggests that the male principle cannot endure the suffocating embrace of the female, either as mate or offspring” (59). Gillian Overing (1995) suggests that this description transforms Grendel into a “doubtful male” because “the human community does not know who his father is” (223). Cohen (1999) asserts that “This inability to name a progenitor from which to trace descent condenses all the problems of origin the giant embodies” (26). For Barbara Creed and Dana Oswald, the focus is not even on Grendel himself, but on his mother. For Creed (1993), Grendel’s Mother “is the parthenogenetic mother, the mother as primordial abyss, the point of origin and of end”

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(17). For Oswald (2010), Grendel’s Mother is “neither woman nor man, but somehow, at least in terms of procreation, both” (83). But all these readings emphasize the unnaturalness of the Grendelkin and the nothuman category they inhabit. The unidentifiable father may indicate a demonic origin, as—except for Jesus’s virgin birth—so-called fatherless pregnancies were often said to be the result of a union with the devil. Regardless of the circumstances of his birth, however, Grendel is consistently described in terms emphasizing his non-human origins. While Beowulf works assiduously to exclude its monster as non-human, the Name-of-the-Monster calls attention to the fact that what is being exiled is in fact human desires that have been deemed socially unacceptable. Such seemingly human qualities can be seen in Frankenstein, where the creature recognizes his aloneness in the world: “Like Adam” he is “apparently united by no link to any other being in existence” and not “guarded by the especial care of his Creator,” but instead “wretched, helpless, and alone” (Shelley [1818] 2008, 129). When he demands of Victor, “You must create a female for me” (144), he is simultaneously expressing a desire to abrogate his exile and a yearning for the most human of actions. By establishing his Adam-like need for an Eve, the creature emphasizes his affinity to humankind. However, because he himself is “an abortion” (222), Victor must abort the creature’s own procreative desire and thus erase that potential connection to humanity. Similarly, in The Tempest, Prospero must obviate Caliban’s monstrous desire. Otherwise, the character would have “peopled else / This isle with Calibans” (Shakespeare 2011, 1.2.351–52). Yet, as Lupton (2008) observes, Caliban’s supposed rape-attempt does not exile the character from the category of men, but instead aligns him quite clearly with the first man: “Yet Caliban’s desire to have ‘peopled . . . / This isle with Calibans’ also evokes the Adamic dimensions of a more recuperative typological reading” (18). She argues that like Adam, after naming the animals and observing that he alone had no fellow of his name, “Caliban, unique in his ability to apprehend the island’s beauties, is not only at one with the island, a part of Creation, but also, like Adam, alone on the island, apart from Creation” (18). Lupton also calls attention to Caliban’s use of “peopling,” a term for reproduction that connects himself to the humanity that seeks to exclude him as a monster (18). This link reveals what is here being excluded in the Other is a desire banished by early modern English society, namely, the blurring of class and racial boundaries. Socially excluded desires appear distinctly in the monsters’ expression of their own loneliness. Yet the exclusionary category of Othered entity is clearest in the word “wretch,” one of the most common descriptors of the creature in Frankenstein. The words “wretch,” “wretched,” and “wretchedness” are used more than twenty-five times to refer to the creature. Victor himself uses the word “wretch” four times in his initial description of the “catastrophe” of his creation (Shelley [1818] 2008, 57–59). But

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“wretch” comes from the Old English word for misery and exile [wræc] and appears in various forms in Beowulf, where it is associated with Grendel, one “whom the Creator had outlawed / and condemned as outcasts” [þone cwealm gewræc / ece Drihten] (2000, 106–7). Like Grendel, the creature has been cast out by Victor and human society. At the same time, however, the novel continually juxtaposes the creature alongside specific human individuals: like Walton, he desires companionship, like Victor, he is (mis)educated through reading, like DeLacey, he lives in penury and hardship, like Adam, he is “united by no link to any other being in existence” (Shelley [1818] 2008, 129). Moreover, although the novel stresses the creature’s position as a “wretched outcast” (Shelley [1818] 2008, 131), the words wretch, wretched, and wretchedness also form an affinity with the humans in the narrative: they describe Victor more than fifteen times and other humans more than a dozen times. These forceful applications highlight the exclusionary social functions, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (1996) suggests, that entities such as Frankenstein’s creature reveal the permeable limits of specific categories and boundaries—social or physical—and it is this indeterminacy that makes monsters so frightening: “the monster is dangerous, a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions” (5). These dangers, privileged in the Name-of-theMonster, display that which the Name-of-the-Father seeks to repress. CROSSING BOUNDARIES The continuing need to exclude the Name-of-the-Monster thus exhibits the failure of the Name-of-the-Father to exert sustainable control. Monsters are the space of social subversion, the cracks in ideology that allow societies to see the act of interpellation at work. The problem with evil, of course, is that, as the Name-of-the-Monster indicates, there is always a capacity for evil that rises up from within the bounded community. Despite various attempts to draw the boundaries of evil and monstrosity outside the Self, the borderline is infinitely permeable. Good and evil, (pro)creation and destruction, heroism and monstrosity are all constructed from their opposites and thus contain their opposites within themselves. For instance, in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Mephostopheles asserts that he himself is damned in hell. Faustus asks him, “How comes it then that thou art out of hell?” (3.78) to which the devil replies, “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it” (Marlowe 1604 3.75–76). Later, Mephostopheles will claim, “Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed / In one self place, for where we are is hell, / And where hell is there must we ever be” (5.123–24), indicating that it is not a specific geographic location around which a clear geo-political border can be drawn. Similarly, in John Milton’s Paradise Lost ([1667] 2005, Satan’s horror and doubt stirs

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“The hell within him, for within him hell / He brings, and round about him: “Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell” (4.75). This “hot hell that always in [Satan] burns” (29.467) finds an analogue in Frankenstein’s creature—who admits, “Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition” (Shelley [1818] 2008, 129)—when he is driven away by the DeLaceys and laments the fact that he “like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within” himself (136). These comparisons all indicate the dangers of the subversive elements arising from within the individuals in the community, leading to behavior that seeks to preserve the social order by excluding them. However, the problem arises that these individuals begin as members of the community, so they inherently maintain their connection—and thus threat—to it. John Gardner makes this affiliation even more explicit in his reimagining of Beowulf from the monster’s perspective, Grendel (1971). When safe in his tree, watching the wars of men, the eponymous monster realizes that the humans “talked in something akin to [his] language, which meant that [they] were, incredibly, related” (Gardner 1971, 36). At various times in the novel, Grendel proclaims this kinship, both in ancestry and in attitude, as when he announces, “I’m a machine, like you. Like all of you. Blood-lust and rage are my character” (123). Furthermore, Grendel recognizes the role that he himself plays in the creation of Hrothgar’s identity. Commenting on the development of the king’s nobility and dignity, the monster observes that before Grendel, the king was “Nothing! A swollen-headed raider, full of boasts and stupid jokes and mead. [. . .] I made him what he is” (123). In fact, in the Libra chapter in which “Balance is everything” (91), the division between human and monster, attacker and defender, king and creature dissolves entirely as the two characters bleed into one another in Grendel’s song: “Pity poor Grengar, / Hrothdel’s foe!” (92). This moment perfectly captures the monster’s symbolic interdependence with human beings, where the “good” human defines/becomes the “evil” monster and the “evil” monster defines/becomes the “good” human. Hegel’s concept of aufheben or Aufhebung might best explain this relationship. Usually translated into English as “sublation” (from sublatus, the past participle of tollere—to take away, lift up), the word in its most straightforward meaning refers to the act of physically lifting something up. For Hegel, this basic connotation is combined with three more meanings: 1) the idea of raising something to a higher level, often in an abstract sense); 2) the sense of maintaining, storing, or preserving; and 3) the virtually opposite concept of negation or cancellation; thus, the Aufhebung the dialectic process, which has come to be defined as the movement from a thesis to its opposite position—the antithesis—to arrive at some sort of integrated conclusion, or synthesis. 4 In the situation of monsters and humans, there appears dialectic of symbolic sublation wherein, as

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discussed previously, the human encounters the monster and defines his/ her humanity in opposition to the antithetical monstrosity. But the collision between the two leaves neither entity stable or unchanged. The monster is lifted up as a model of difference and Otherness, with the orismological separation raised to a level well beyond that of physical distinction. The monster is negated as human, its potential humanity cancelled by its very definition as monster. Yet at the same time, there is a preservation of the qualia of monsterness in the act of negation and psychic distancing. No matter how diligently the good separates itself from the evil of the monster, there is an interdependence between Self and monster that is inseparable (even integral) to the construction of the good in the Self. This unsuccessful separation is perhaps most easily observed in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. According to Hegel ([1807] 1977), the synthesis both abolishes and preserves the thesis and antithesis. In the master-slave relationship, both the master entity and the slave are simultaneously abolished and preserved: “On approaching the other it has lost its own self, since it finds itself as another being; secondly, it has thereby sublated that other, for this primitive consciousness does not regard the other as essentially real but sees its own self in the other” (Hegel [1807] 1977, 111). Nonetheless, the master’s self-consciousness is dependent on the slave, with resolution achieved only when the difference between slave and the master is dissolved and both persons recognize that they are equal. Shakespeare’s The Tempest offers an opportunity to join this theoretical consideration to the concepts of interpellation and identity. As Tsuneo Masaki (1978) recognizes, Caliban’s sense of self emerges through the descriptors used by other characters in the play to portray him: An examination of the text will quickly reveal that Prospero never calls Caliban “monster.” The word, which occurs as many as forty times in the play, is used without exception by either Trinculo or Stephano. It will be noticed further that the word Prospero uses “most frequently” (seven times) is not “monster” but “slave.” [. . .] With Trinculo and Stephano, “monster” (forty times) seems to dominate their vocabulary of abuse, leaving “fish” (ten times) far behind. [. . .] It will be clear by now that there are two distinctive nomenclatures involving Caliban— Prospero’s and the clowns. (39)

Masaki’s observation reveals the parallel function of the appellations “slave” and “monster” in each of these characters’ identity maintenance and formation, although the latter designation offers a more active role in the dialectic’s oppositional annihilation. As Masaki notes, “‘Filth’ [1.1.347] and ‘Abhorred slave’ [1.1.352] promise no bright future for Caliban. But ‘O brave monster!’ [2.2.183] is another matter; it is an invitation to play a role in the destruction of the holy comedy directed by Prospero”

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(42). The confrontation of both sides indicates the complexity of the process of creating useful exclusionary boundaries when defining evil through ideological values. The sublation of master-slave here corresponds to an analogous process in what might be call the mortal-monster dialectic: the human/monster Aufhebung contains both the erasure and the retention of self/Other inherent in the gesture. This idea is hinted at when the creature tells Frankenstein, “you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us” (Shelley [1818] 2008, 99). When Frankenstein dies and ceases “to think and feel” (223) the creature likewise announces his intention to collect his “funeral pile, and consume to ashes [his own] miserable frame” (222), until he too is unable to think and feel: “I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt” (223). Yet this dissolution of difference only partially captures the sense of the continual re-emergence of the subversive elements within the community, despite social and narrative goals to eliminate the monstrous. The monster has traditionally been seen as an embodiment of our cultural fears and anxieties, but the monster also represents fear’s antithesis: desire. Monsters signify not only that which is feared, loathed, and abhorred; they also embody that which is secretly craved, coveted, and lusted after. Thus, Grendel reveals the Anglo-Saxon fervor for extreme violence and kin-killing, Caliban discovers the impetus to people the isle and murder the master, and Frankenstein’s monster uncovers the proclivity for both unmitigated destruction and unnatural (pro)creation. In each case, the monsters simultaneously negate and uplift the socio-culturally inappropriate desires of the period. Of course, these unacceptable hungers are suppressed, pushed into the unconscious and made invisible through ideological apparatuses. The inefficiencies in the ideological apparatuses appear in the hellfire within Grendel, as a fiend in hell parallels the representation of hell, sin, and monstrosity found in a variety of evils throughout myriad periods and cultures. These various moments of hell-within provide examples of human/monster sublation and the resulting conflation of human sin, human desire, the pain of exile, and the banished monster itself. As another example, the fallen angels in the Old English poem “Christ and Satan” also occupy a position of interpellated monsters who manifest the presence of hellfire: Now must this multitude here lie prostrate in sin, some shake aloft, flying over the earth, fire is all about within each one, although he be up above. [Sceal nu þeos menego her licgan on lehtrum, sume on lyft scacan,

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fleogan ofer foldan, fyr bið ymbutan on æghwylcum, þæh he uppe seo.] (1931, l. 261–64) 5

Like Grendel, the host of fiends dwells in exile, separated from God and humankind. Andrew (1981) suggests that the demons’ situation sounds “very close to a statement that the sinful creature bears hell within him” (410), and Rosemary Woolf (1953) rephrases the passage to highlight the correlation to Paradise Lost: “in other words, whichever way he flies, he carries hell-fire with him” (6). The problem, of course, is that no matter how far he is exiled, the monster remains within the mortal individual because the desire that engenders him also remains in the human, like the hellfire in the demon. The multifaceted element is characteristic of the monster. When Grendel is first described as an “ellen-gǣst” (2000, l. 86) in Beowulf, he reveals himself to be a bold or powerful demon, but the second part of the kenning is ambiguous, derived from gást, which could mean a variety of things, including ghost, spirit, and either angel or demon. The Danes and Geats in the poem clearly see Grendel only as a devil who seeks to tear their lives away, but there is always an aspect to the monster that promises more. If only humanity could make peace with it, then the monster could become an angel—like the evil demon of Jacob’s Ladder that transforms into Jake’s son at the conclusion of the film. And like that demonson, the monster-child of humanity always has the dual potential to both tear humans apart and/or free humanity from the earth and lead the way into heaven. Such distinctions complicate the issues of social inclusion and exclusion. CONCLUSION In the end, this is perhaps the most disturbing attribute of evil. Not only does evil signify a secret desire (or monster, or hell) within, but it also has the ability to shift into and out of the angelic form of its opposite shape. Culture, society, and various ideologies may draft maps with clearly marked boundaries, but just as with borders in the real world, those lines are easily crossed. Moreover, “evil” and monstrosity are paradoxes, containing at once the expression and the negation of their opposites. And because “evil” is a constituent part of the Self, it is necessary for the construction of “good.” The effort to control this constituent “Self” leads to the complex relationship between the Name-of-the-Father and the Name-of-the-Monster. The former, a system of social order created to provide collective safety also becomes an apparatus of ideological conformity and individual suppression. The latter, while at once a sign of transgression also becomes the locus of real—as opposed to perceived—free will and individual choice. Their co-relation underscores the role of evil as a social function

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looking to protect the boundaries by excluding that which is subversive, namely, (or by naming) the monsters. NOTES 1. Dante’s ([1302–1305] 1968) De Vulgari Eloquentia also has a preoccupation with naming, supposing that the first word spoken by mankind was the word for God: “For it is absurd and repugnant to reason that anything could have been named by man before God, by whom and for whom he had been created” (50). Dante asserts that, for Adam, the forma locutionis pointed back to God and was thus closer to the thing signified. As human language progressed, however, Adam’s descendants wanted a name (fame) for themselves, rather than for God, and moved away from the sacratum ydioma, the sacred language, to the “Confusion” of the Tower of Babel (52–54). 2. Although Heaney’s description of Grendel as “the Lord’s outcast” at line 169 does not provide an accurate literal translation of the notoriously difficult passage, the sense of Grendel as exiled by God is supported at various moments elsewhere in the text. 3. Quotes from Rubin without page numbers come from the documentary on the DVD, while quotes including page references are from the published screenplay. 4. Hegel did not use the now-common terms thesis, antithesis, synthesis (Williams 1992, 46n), preferring instead the terms abstract, negative, concrete or sometimes immediate, mediate, concrete” (Hegel [1807] 1977). 5. This translation is mine. I have used the word “within” to help clarify Andrew’s point but it is possible that the language here places the fire “around” or even “on” the fallen angels (although both Andrew and Woolf see the hell-fire as “within” and this translation seems perfectly reasonable).

REFERENCES Alighieri, Dante. (1295) 1973. Dante’s Vita Nuova. Translated by Mark Musa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (1302–1305) 1968. De Vulgari Eloquentia. Edited by Pier V. Mengaldo. Padua: Antenore. Althusser, Louis. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press. Andrew, Malcolm. 1981. “Grendel in Hell.” English Studies 62.5: 401–10. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. 2000. Translated by Seamus Heaney. Bilingual Edition. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1996. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1999. Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages. Medieval Cultures 19. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Christ and Satan: The Junius Manuscript. 1931. In The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. Vol. 1, edited by George P. Krapp. London: Columbia University Press. Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Gardner, John. 1971. Grendel. New York: Vintage. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. (1807) 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jacob’s Ladder. (1990) 1998. Dir. Adrian Lyne. Wri. Bruce Joel Rubin. Perf. Tim Robbins, Elizabeth Peña, and Danny Aiello. Carolco Pictures. DVD. Artisan Entertainment. Kempe, Margery. 1994. The Book of Margery Kempe. Translated by B. A. Windeatt. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin.

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Lacan, Jacques. (1966) 2008. “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious.” In Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Edited by David Lodge and Nigel Wood, 186–209. 3rd ed. New York: Pearson Longman. Lupton, Julia Reinhard. 2000. “Creature Caliban.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51.1: 1–23. Marlowe, Christopher. 2013. “Doctor Faustus (1604 Text)” Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays. Edited by Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey, 340–89. London: Penguin Books. Masaki, Tsuneo. 1978. “The Tempest: A Shakespearean Approach to a Cultural Clash.” In Shakespeare Studies. Vol. 14. Edited by Jiro Ozu, 31–46. Tokyo: The Shakespeare Society of Japan. Milton, John. (1667) 2005. Paradise Lost. Ed. David Scott Kastan. Indianapolis: Hackett Press. Morgan, Gwendolyn A. 1991. “Mothers, Monsters, Maturation: Female Evil in Beowulf.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 4.1: 54–68. Oswald, Dana. 2010. Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature. Gender in the Middle Ages 5. Rochester, NY: Brewer. Overing, Gillian. 1995. “The Women of Beowulf: A Context for Interpretation.” In Beowulf: Basic Readings. Ed. Peter S. Baker, 219–60. New York: Garland. Rubin, Bruce Joel. 1990. Jacob’s Ladder. The Applause Screenplay Series. New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers. Shakespeare. William. 2011. The Tempest. Edited by. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. 3rd ed. Arden Shakespeare. New York: Bloomsbury. Shelley, Mary. (1818) 2008. Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus. Ed. M. K. Joseph. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Singer, Marcus .G. 2004. “The Concept of Evil.” Philosophy 79(2): 185–214. Williams, Robert R. 1992. Recognition: Fitche and Hegel on the Other. Albany: State University of New York Press. Woolf, Rosemary E. 1953. “The Devil in Old English Poetry.” RES 4(13): 1–12.

SIX The Communicative Force of Evil The Case of Stephen King Jessica Folio

In his 2001 introduction to The Shining, the mainstream American author Stephen King writes: “[m]onsters are real [and ghosts are real too.] Sometimes they live inside us and sometimes they win” (xiii). The use of the term “monster” in this quotation has the readers and the writer situate themselves in accordance with an established norm and consider the deviance as regards that norm. The process of corporeal and psychological monstrosization is indeed one of the red threads used by King to weave the arachnean cloth of his work. By asserting the reality of monsters and locating them in the individual, King raises questions about the origin of evil and whether or not it is an innate condition or an internal psychological battle between the Id and the Superego. Regardless of their origin, King’s notion of winning and losing presents evil as being an evaluable action. King’s work ceaselessly revolves around evil and sin. The term sin holds a more biblical connotation and is viewed as a transgression of the divine law, whereas evil is perceived in the line of a rupture of established norms. Augustus’s theodicy, which considers evil as a consequence of the original sin, connects both notions. King’s texts are suffused not only with manifold subversive religious references, but also with a pattern of rupture highlighted by the ambivalence of King’s characters or by the disruption within society itself. The force of evil is presented as necessary for certain characters when the confrontation with their dark halves allows the reassertion of ideological norms. This vision 85

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of evil as necessary and constructive force echoes French philosopher Georges Bataille’s ([1954] 1988) views on transgression in link with sacrifice and crucifixion, especially as King’s texts are pregnant with the theme of sacrifice and also seem to present the oxymoronic necessity of evil concomitant with the author’s reworking of the common dichotomy between good and evil. As such, the path of evil is as an auxiliary of communication, for even in their darkest paths and intricate recesses, King’s texts offer a kaleidoscopic view on commonly admitted values and on the widespread tendency to deviate from the established rules. His explorations thus lead readers to question their own connection with evil. Evil, in King’s popular works, can be defined by a conflict between ego and superego that forces people to commit actions deemed monstrous. This personal conflict is set, however, against the backdrop of traditional views of evil in order to elucidate that, even in the presence of familiar Christian motifs and the power of “evil places,” the real evil is generated by the character’s personal struggles, and not from without, as is the case with cosmic evil. Religious themes appear on the surface of King’s works, particularly in Carrie (1974), “Children of the Corn” (1978a), The Stand (1978b), and Pet Sematary (1983). It is easy to demonstrate these religious overtones, but close psychoanalytic attention shows, instead, that King’s texts suggest the real struggles as psychological in nature. While King does not wholly eliminate the notion of evil as supernatural, relying on supernatural events to drive his plots, he suggests that, at its base, all evil is generated by human decisions and human failings, when the monsters inside win. BATAILLE Benjamin Noys (2000) claims Georges Bataille believes that it is through a violent breaking of limitations that freedom can be attained, so his analysis of evil in relation is paired with the sacred. Bataille redefines the traditional conception of the sacred by connecting it with a tearing apart of the self that leads to experience the unknown. He redefines the common dichotomy between good and evil with his vision of Jesus’ crucifixion as the greatest evil and the greatest good. This act of ultimate evil paradoxically allows communication with God. Evil is an auxiliary of the sacred and is hammered out as necessary, corresponding for Bataille to a mystic attitude; it is contrasted with a non-mystic attitude Bataille assimilates to what is commonly qualified as moral. Thus, Bataille redefines the common dichotomy between moral and immoral: “He searches for examples of this violence in acts of sacrifice, in auto-mutilation and in violent criminality” (Noys 2000, 10). In the process of developing his ideas on sacrifice, Bataille was hypnotized by the

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photograph of a Chinese torture victim contained in The Tears of Eros (1961) which shows a man undergoing death through a hundred cuts: “the Chinese executioner of my photo haunts me: there he is busily cutting off the victim’s left at the knee. The victim is bound to a stake, eyes turned up, head thrown back, and through a grimacing mouth you see teeth” (Bataille [1961] 1989, 38–39). Bataille sees in the victim’s face a signal of ecstasy in the etymological sense of exstare, to be expelled out of oneself. This evil sacrifice instills a communion with the victim through the experience of death, the shattering of the isolating prison of the self and a melting into the Other. The photograph of the victim also highlights the extreme tearing apart of the body and the oxymoronic hypnotic revulsion felt facing this suffering. This mode of confrontation and destruction suggests that the only way to understand evil is through direct encounters that show one the line by transgressing it. ROAMING THE PATH OF PARODIC CHRISTIAN IMAGES Because King uses a variety of obvious Christian motifs in his work, on a surface level, the tales’ horror seems to come from the inversion of a symbol of good into a vehicle of evil. For instance, King’s narratives are permeated with biblical references but they are affected by the process of subversion. These changes operate on an overt level that easily allow readers to recognize the battles of good and evil within the texts. They also propose, as Bataille noted, that evil is a necessary component for religious practice founded on the notion of original sin. King’s use of Christian tropes calls attention to the inherently double-sided nature of salvation based on sacrifice. Resurrection is one of the major Christian motifs with which King plays in his works. This motif easily exists in the liminal space of good and evil. Resurrection, as a cure to human mortality, offers a positive manifestation of God’s love. However, when thought of in terms of reanimation of the dead, resurrection closely correlates to pagan products, such as zombies, which are imbued with horror both because they violate the natural order and derive from non-Christian magic. King plays with the two sides of resurrection in Pet Sematary. Pet Sematary is a story of loss and mourning, in which Louis Creed, unable to cope with the death of his son and wife uses an old Micmac burying ground situated beyond a Pet Sematary to bring the dead back to life. The problem is that the process of resurrection transforms the reanimated into are zombified creatures, aiming at the destruction of the former loved ones. Pet Sematary thus presents a monstrous reimagining of Lazarus’s resurrection, punishing Louis for thinking he can stand in for Jesus.

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In addition to calling into question the goodness of resurrection, King’s texts employ themes of sacrifice and crucifixion in manners that expose both the Christian positive side and the humanist negative element of the acts themselves. Inverting a religious context in which crucifixion provides the ultimate gift of redemption and salvation, the use of these motifs reveal the violence and cruelty that underlie the methods of salvation. From a secularized, human perspective, these elements horrify rather than beatify. Crucifixion dominates Carrie, an eponymous narrative stages the lonely and misunderstood life of a telekinetically gifted teenager driven to submission by her religiously fanatical mother, Margaret White. White stabs her with a butcher’s knife—paralleling Jesus being nailed to the cross (King, Carrie 55). The giant plaster crucifix of Jesus in the living room highlights the horrific aspect of crucifixion, especially as the description dwells on the victim’s human suffering: The room was actually dominated by a huge plaster crucifix on the far wall, fully four feet high. Momma had mail-ordered it special from St Louis. The Jesus impaled upon it was frozen in a grotesque, musclestraining rictus of pain, mouth drawn down in a greaning curve. His crown of thorns bled scarlet streams down temples and forehead. (King 1974, 40)

This image of crucifixion forces the reader to focus on the torturous process the Romans had devised to execute its political enemies, rather than on the altruistic self-sacrifice the Son of God made to redeem the souls of the Son of (wo)Man. This horror is further reinforced in Carrie’s nightmares dominated by the Christ from the crucifix. A zombified Jesus, the Christ figure is associated with classic blasphemous images, as he takes the role of the villain monk or patriarch pursuing the heroine in the labyrinthine Gothic castle or abbey: This corpus had also given Carrie endless nightmares in which the mutilated Christ chased her through dream corridors, holding a mallet and nails, begging her to take up her cross and follow Him. Just lately these dreams had evolved into something less understandable, but more sinister. The object did not seem to be murder but something even more awful. (King 1974, 40)

This image intermingles various parodic elements, inverting the quintessential benevolent nature of Christ. Carrie is doomed to be crucified like Christ and accepts the trials she goes through. This is reinforced in the moments when her path mirrors the stages of the Cross. Whereas Jesus is struck on the head with a staff or suffers being split (“[Mark 15:19 Authorized King James Version]”), Carrie’s classmates bombard her with tampons and sanitary towels by her classmates. Christ’s suffering at the hands of his compatriots is also mirrored when the girls mock Carrie in

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the showers at school when she has her period for the first time and has no understanding of why she bleeds. Just as Jesus is berated, so too is Carrie. In addition to Carrie, “Children of the Corn” offers corrupted images of crucifixion. The short story describes how, in the abandoned town of Gatlin, the children killed the adults and worship a devouring God of the Corn, “He who walks behind the rows” (King 1978a, 336). As in Carrie, parodic images of crucifixion abound, especially as this deity demands human sacrifice, calling attention to the human sacrifice the Christian God demands for the Christians’ salvation. One character, Burt, is stabbed in the arm with a knife, echoing Carrie’s stabbing and its relation to crucifixion. The previous police chief, minister, and Burt’s wife are all tied to a cross, and Burt’s wife is described in detail: “like a hideous trophy, her arms held at the wrists, and her legs at the ankles with twists of common barbed wire [. . .] Her eyes had been ripped out. The sockets were filled with the moonflax of cornsilk. Her jaws were wrenched open in a silent scream, her mouth filled with cornhusks” (King 1978a, 350). While these scarecrow crucifixes remain highly symbolic and imagistic, King makes the connection between these scarecrow crucifixes and the Cross explicit. In the church, Jesus’s hair has been replaced by corn and new parables are created: “make no music except with human tongue saith the Lord God” (King, 1978a, 339). Gatlin is thus a total locus of desacralization: the anagrams of the town even contains the term anti-GL (anti-god, anti-lord). God’s beneficence is inverted, for the children’s God is the monstrous entity that demands constant human sacrifice. Moving this practice from a religious to a secular environment calls attention to the human horror encapsulated in this type of worship. Satan’s Lot also uses crucifixion as a dominant motif, from the sacrificed vampiric creatures to a scene showing a character impaled on knives when falling from a staircase. In the first case, crucifixion aims at restoring the purity of the human body and in the second case, it seems to punish man’s overconfidence. The scene of the confrontation between Barlow and Callahan calls attention to the cross as a token rather than as an infallible signal of goodness. Callahan is tricked into throwing his cross aside under the pretext of fighting on equal terms. This religious symbol loses its power and is reduced to mere pieces of plaster once broken by Barlow. The religious power of the Crucifix is thus challenged by its human construction. This dualistic relationship between good and evil appears in the significance of King’s settings. This dichotomist vision of spaces parallels Leo Marx’s description of the duality of the American landscape: “in a sense, America was both Eden and a howling desert [. . .] The infinite resources of the virgin land really did make credible [. . .] the ancient dream of an abundant and harmonious life for all. Yet, at the same time, the savages, the limitless space and the violent climate of the country did

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threaten to engulf the new civilization” (Leo Marx, The Machine 22). Set in an American landscape, so perhaps commenting on a particularly American form of evil, there seems to be little good in the sedentary small towns King writes about. They have no redeeming God but rather a crushing, naturalistic dominion of death. For instance, in Pet Sematary the sanctified space of the Native American burying ground is violated, leading to the evil creatures that provide the plot-level horror. When Louis steps over a deadfall opening onto the path leading to the burying ground, he loses his innocence of his edenic family life in favor of a “feeling of contentment” at being introduced to “the pervasive, undeniable, magnetic presence of some secret. Some dark secret” (King 1983 134). The ground uses Louis and his grief to suck out his life and energy like a vampire, as the pagan god of the burying ground is a god of omnipresent evil lost in a haunted wilderness; this wilderness that essentially echoes the human potential to fall into moral darkness with the negation of any rationality and established boundaries: “the barrier was not made to be broken” (King 1983, 135; original italics). This power does not only control Louis, showing the effective affect of the deadfall to all who encounter it. This is clarified by Steve Masterton at the end of the narrative: “in spite of his surprise, in spite of his horror, he did want to give Louis a hand. Somehow, up here in the woods, it seemed very right, very . . . very natural” (King 1983, 462). The fascinating, hypnotizing grasp of the burying ground subverts the Christian pastoral idea of virgin land, signaling its human conversion into evil. The connection between sin and a specific locus and the shattered frontier between good and evil equally prevail in Carrie. The outer world is a locus of sin for the mother and the sanctified house is considered as a place of salvation. She frequently punishes her daughter by locking her in a Gothic-like closet to pray for God’s forgiveness so as to “avoid the flaming agonies of the Eternal Pit” (King 1974, 55). This place of prayer is rather a place of terror for Carrie: “to the right was the worst place of all, the home of terror, the cave where all hope, all resistance to God’s will— and Momma’s was extinguished” (King 1974, 53–54). The closet Carrie is enclosed in is likened to a symbolic womb. In this confined locus, Carrie symbolically dies after being confronted with the trials of loneliness and fainting, then is reborn and supposedly has access to the sacred dimension following her communion with God. Her trials correspond to the stages of initiation described by Mircea Eliade in Rites and Symbols of Initiation (1958), when the neophyte is ushered into the secrets of the sacred after being separated from the community, confronted to trials, then to a symbolic death and rebirth. Nevertheless, King parodies Eliade’s (1965) vision of initiation, since Carrie is not awoken to her better self but to the dark power of telekinesis. She is also under recurrent trials and is submitted to many symbolical deaths holding biblical undertones. Margaret and Carrie’s opposing

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views of the same space highlights how the methods of sanctification take on the grotesque when applied in human contexts. EVIL THROUGH FRAGMENTATION AND DISINTEGRATION King’s exploration of multiple resonances of Christian imagery, seen in the abundance of images of sacrifices and crucifixions in King’s texts, become one way of introducing horror. While the inversion of Christian symbolism offers one level of horror, King also relies on bodily fragmentation to convey horror through physical destruction as well as spiritual. King’s texts attempt at unveiling the fragmentation, dehumanization, or annihilation of the body, thus rendering physical the psychological tearing apart that Bataille thinks is important for a human understanding of the limits and extremes of good and evil. Such fragmentation can be seen in the feared dismemberment when Louis digs up his son’s body before burying it in the Micmac burying ground in Pet Sematary. Louis first thinks Gage’s head is gone because of the damp moss on the skin: Looking at his son was like looking at a badly made doll. . . . The body lolled bonelessly from side to side, and a sudden, awful certainty came over him: when he lofted Gage, Gage’s body would break part and he would be left with the pieces . . . Gage’s head lolled all the way to the middle of his back. Louis saw the grinning circlet of stitches which held Gage’s head onto his shoulders. (King 1983, 387–88)

The description highlights the complete embracing by the father of his son’s dismembered body, working desperately to reconfigure a disintegrating body. Faced with the physical consequences of death, the father and his readers share the horror of their own disintegration that accompanies the physical return from souled subject to soulless object. In this moment, the question remains, which is more evil, losing bodily integrity or disturbing the natural disintegration of the dead? While Pet Sematary forces a confrontation with the fragmentation caused by natural decay, the crucified bodies in “Children of the Corn” bear evidence of cruelty; the legs are not the cut-out part of the body but the eyes are ripped out and the sockets filled with cornsilk. Disintegration similarly stems from human violence in “Apt Pupil,” which takes pleasure in its gory descriptions of murder: The wino turned over, blinking. He saw Todd’s wide, sunny grin and began to grin back. A moment later the butcher knife descended, all whicker-snicker and chrome-white, slicker-slicing through his stubby right cheek. Blood sprayed. Todd could see the blade in the wino’s opening mouth . . . and then its tip caught for a moment in the left corner of the wino’s lips, pulling his mouth into an insanely cockeyed

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The body’s deformation is described through cuts, recalling Bataille’s catalyst for thinking about horror and torture (Bataille [1961] 1989). The emphasis set on the precise number of cuts reveals Todd’s absence of guilt, enabling him to feel “oddly new and refreshed” (King 1982, 272), a sign of his sadistic pleasure at murdering the vagrant. The body is a place of rupture, of indeterminacy; making open wounds makes it an open wound which shatters the readers’ landmarks but which equally constitutes a bonding experience facing the threat of death. Such images of fragmenting sacrifices seem to parallel Bataille’s perception of sacrifice as an act of communication leading the spectators to identify with the victim and, through this process, to experience their own (horrific) death. Because King’s texts are replete with sacrificed bodies, and readers face an outlet of putrescent bodily fluids, oozing orifices, punctured, stabbed or cut out limbs, readers are also presented with many experiences of nausea and repugnance. For instance, the crucified body and the witnesses to the body crucified by Flagg in The Stand echo the hypnotic revulsion equally visible among the witnesses of lingchi or the death by a hundred cuts in Bataille’s photographs (King 1978c, 774; Bataille [1961] 1989, 206). The body is made a locus of an ambiguous co-existing feeling of attraction and repulsion, paralleling Bataille’s perception of the sacred as a fascinating and repulsive space of a necessary unleashing of violence. In a process of empathy and sympathy, King’s readers seem to reject the characters’ bodies and, project and abject their repressed fears of seeing their own body monstrosized. Confronted with their own pleasures in reading the horrors—putting them in parallel positions to character’s like Todd from “The Apt Pupil”—readers are led to question their own limits between morality and immorality, to question their very own response to the death of a child, their reaction to the possession of ultimate power, to the ability to do their own justice or to a larger extent to the decision of transgressing limits. This transgression remains open even in King’s endings, leaving readers to ponder the ongoing and perennial consequences of evil acts. For instance, in Thinner, the wandering Billy Halleck decides, after seeing his daughter has eaten a part of the strawberry pie bearing the curse, to condemn his body once more to a descent into inferno. The total erasure of his body by the evil curse has to be completed by the readers themselves, as they imagine—rather than read about—his final destruction. Readers also imagine continuing horror in the ending of Pet Sematary, as the reader is left with the hand of the evil wife: “‘Darling,’ it said” (King 1983, 465). The hand itself is left undescribed, but successfully plunges the narrative and the readers into a void. In The Stand, the evil supernatu-

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ral force endlessly resuscitates though with a different name: “life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again” (King 1978c, 1421). The evil god of the corn awakes at each sacrifice in “Children of the Corn,” and Carrie ends with the mentioning of another child gifted with telekinetic powers. In King’s endings, the evil force stands in a continuum which always offers a final reshaping of established landmarks. Even in the narratives delivering an apparent ultimate resolution, evil leaves its stain in the symbolic world: “A Good Marriage,” “Apt Pupil,” The Shining, Under the Dome share the destruction of the family nucleus. The Shining sequel, Doctor Sleep (2013), shows how Danny struggles with the stains his evil past physically and psychologically leaves on his post-Overlook life. Such endings constitute a loop of non-closure, of endless evil. ON THE PATH OF “INSIDE EVIL” Despite the wealth of ready-made biblical allusions present in King’s work and the horror of physical bodily disintegration, the author seems more prone to tackle personal evil rather than cosmic or natural evil. King repeatedly expresses the intricacies of evil and the fascination it engenders. His reference to internal monsters in the introduction to The Shining reveals that the omnipresence of evil is related to the ambiguity of Man’s nature itself (King 2001, xiii). The characters depicted in The Shining (1977), “Apt Pupil” (1982), Pet Sematary (1983), Thinner (1984), Under the Dome (2009), or “A Good Marriage” (2010) epitomize what Heidi Strengell (2003) calls “inside evil,” or the conscious will to do evil. Dominated by characters who willingly appear to reject the path of righteousness and choose the vicious, immoral one, King’s texts propose that the origin of evil is a remarkably human one. As in the case of King’s use of biblical tropes, the human behaviors described often are perversion of behaviors that are otherwise perceived as socially acceptable or desirable. While Carrie is the quintessential text of perverse mothering, King often uses images of fatherhood to explore the corrosive effects of choosing to honor one’s own desires without considering the needs of others. As in the case of religious imagery, a significant element of the horror comes from inverting a role—fatherhood— meant to be a social good to a powerful, corruptive force of individual self-interest. One such example appears in Pet Sematary, in which Louis, the father, appears to be unable to resist the entrancing spell of the Micmac burying ground. Despite the fact that he comes close to his former rational self when he realizes he has to kill the deformed and murderous creature his son has turned into; he is nevertheless convinced of the good he does

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when he chooses to resurrect his wife. He believes he can master the process of resurrection. He is paradoxically described as being sane when he primarily considers burying his son: By the time Louis had finished three beers, he felt that he had some sort of equilibrium for the first time that day [. . .] The thought came so naturally that it surely must have been there all along, simply waiting its time to come forward from the back of his mind: When are you going to do it? When are you going to bury Gage in the annex to the Pet Sematary? [. . .] The idea had a deadly attraction. It made a balance of logic which was impossible to deny. (King 1983, 282)

Louis perfectly rationalizes his decision: “he began to collate the data, to sort through it, to compress it—he proceeded in exactly the same way he had once readied himself for big exams” (284). Because of the narrative references to logic and data, Louis is in control of his thoughts and decision taking. However, this logic is better perceived as hubristic self-interest, as is confirmed by his neighbor’s characterization of Louis’s logic: “You make up reasons . . . they seem like good reasons but mostly you do it because you want to. Or because you have to” (284; original italics). Louis is aware of the mingling of rationality and madness in his plan: “madness. Madness all around, close, hunting him. He walked the balance beam of rationality; he studied his plan” (347), yet he consciously chooses to pursue his quest because he is unable to cope with his grief. Focusing on his personal loss, Louis surrendering to the evil of the burying ground is simpler and appears as being more logical. The question he asks himself—“could I stop? Could I stop even if I wanted to?” (364; original italics)—is left unanswered, calling attention to Louis’s desire to continue, regardless of consequences. This same question applies to the actions of Jack Torrence, the father figure in The Shining. In this narrative, the evil spirit haunting the Overlook Hotel uses Jack’s alcoholism and abusive temper to accelerate his regression to his primal instincts, reproducing his own father’s destructive decline. The text highlights both the cruelty and affection of the father-figure as well as the co-dependent spirals of love and violence. The cursed hotel, the site of another homicidal-suicidal father, is a refuge for people indulging in all forms of vice; and the cursed place seems to exacerbate Jack’s already inherent vices. Tony Magistrale (1998) suggests that the evils in the hotel “see him as the ideal candidate to manipulate because of his traumatic childhood experiences, his substance abuse, and his feelings of inadequacy as a patriarchal figure” (86). Failed fatherhood, both the cause and the result of abuse, highlights the internal nature of evil, especially as the supernatural phenomenon is presented as the result of another failed father.

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Unlike Louis, some fathers delude themselves about their own corruptive nature, including the whole community in their process of deterioration. For instance, in Thinner, Billy wants to convince himself he is “one of the good guys” (King 1984, 16), but his community has already perverted the notion of “goodness” in relation to the reader. For instance, the policeman Hopley enjoys expulsing “the Undesirables” (48), Dr. Houston openly inhales heroin in front of Billy (56), and Billy gargantuesquely cultivates his obesity and hardly hides his incestuous thoughts for his daughter, Linda (11). These externalized evils show community tolerance for this behavior, but Billy’s internal evil develops to proportions that even this community shuns him. Once Billy’s clothes no longer hide the repulsing aspect of his skinniness and he turns into a “Human Skeleton” (160), he symbolizes evil for the community, a non-body cast aside both by the gypsies and the white community. The gypsy exacts his own supernatural justice, and Billy invents the “curse of white men from town” (203). The curse doubles as a cure, since a gypsy incantation (and a parodic scene of crucifixion in a park) keep Billy from being infected again when someone else eats a strawberry pie. The strawberry pie represents Billy’s sin being eaten by his wife and daughter at the end of the narrative. The sin of the father—the sexual pleasure that led to a gypsy’s death—is literally eaten by his offspring and, in a horrifying ultimate moment, by Billy himself when he chooses he cannot live without his daughter. The vertiginous repetitive pattern goes hand in hand with a striking normalization of his primary evil intention to sacrifice his wife to the gypsy curse. Once she eats the pie, he envisions a simple and happy life with his daughter. The final stage of the transformation—the self-erasure of his body—turns the body of the text into a gap, an utter fissure the readers have to complete by themselves. This final blank is exemplified in the final sentence: “Billy [. . .] cut himself a piece of Gypsy pie” (318). It establishes the evil curse as the ultimate winner and the only possibility of reaching closure is through death. Failed fatherhood also appears as the driving force behind the evil in Under the Dome. In this novel, extraterrestrial entities confine the town of Chester’s Mill in a dome, forcing its inhabitants to face the deadly consequences of its inhabitants’ hubris in Under the Dome. In this story, Junior’s father, selectman Big Jim, is presented as a heartless villain, who takes advantage of the death of the only respectable law officer to quench his thirst for dominion and fame. His hubris is stronger than his love for his son. He hires thugs and rapists to increase the power of the police force; he runs a meth lab near a Christian radio station. Finally, his hunger for power leads him to set up a totalitarian regime and kill three people. With this self-serving, hubristic father, the son’s psychopathy becomes a natural consequence rather than a supernatural phenomenon.

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Not even given his own name, Junior Rennie internalizes his father’s corrosive behavior, characterized by his violent temper that leads him to kill his girlfriend Angie and her best friend. He feels no remorse during or after his acts and no intentions whatsoever to stop the cruel murders (King 2009, 22). His actions become self-serving, as preserving the corpses in his pantry seems to cure his migraines: “Junior sat in the dark with his girlfriends. It was strange, even he thought so, but it was also soothing” (244). Yet, the text does not allow this supernatural explanation for Junior’s behavior to dominate the text, as the story ultimately discloses that his migraines and delusional state result from a brain tumor. While in Junior’s case, naturalizing evil suggests that internal causes are biological rather than psychological or sociological, the corruptive nature of the father-son dynamic hides the biological explanation, leading to the acts of depravity. While familial depravity and trauma seems to be at the heart of the evils in the King oeuvre, as in the case of the religious readings, space becomes a manifestation of the “evil inside,” offering an outward expression of inward perversions. Whether it is set in nature, in a common town (Thinner, It [1986], Bag of Bones [1998]), or in the home itself (Misery [1987], Rose Madder [1995], King’s work is the master of pathetic fallacy, allowing the place to echo the characters’ nature, as King says, “evil places call evil men” (King 1975, 113). The emphasis here, however, is on man’s, rather than supernatural, evil. These evil places have hypnotizing force, but the narratives here presented connect the characters’ decision of transgressing the limits of morality with inner rather than external choices. In Salem’s Lot, “evil places” applies to the abandoned Marsten House that preserved the evil of the original owner, murderer Hubie Marsten and symbolizes the corruption of the town (King 1975, 81, 357). In The Shining, the Overlook Hotel caretakers, Delbert Grady and Jack Torrence, perpetuate the evil of the place, and in Under the Dome the dome magnifies the evil latent in certain characters. The evil of these places cannot function without man’s flaws: “evil places in King’s work exert power of their own and on their own, but it is of crucial importance to notice that this power is rarely exercised without human assistance” (Strengell 2003, 64). In Pet Sematary, the shamanic Jud Crandall feels he activated the evil of the burying ground that seemed to lie dormant until he takes Louis there to resurrect the family cat. In King’s works, evil places need the presence of man or evil is viewed as an infection that only awaits to be exploited when it ensues from confrontations. In addition to places representing the borders between good and evil, mirrors confirm the shattered border between good and evil. They are analeptic doors to a doubly monstrous side reality but also a path to oneness. Multiple examples of mirrors enthrall the characters and the readers and establish a schema of questioning due to a constant oscilla-

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tion between life and death or morality and immorality. Some of these include the sacrifice of Darcy’s husband’s body and the split in her perception of her body (2010, 307), Billy’s final sacrifice in Thinner (1984, 318), the sacrifice of vagrants’ bodies in “Apt Pupil” (1982, 266, 270–71), the bodies offered in sacrifice to the Micmac burying ground in Pet Sematary (1983, 145, 288, 290), the vampires’ bodies sacrificed in Salem’s Lot (1975, 367), and the sacrificed bodies of the victims in the Overlook Hotel (1977, 12–13, 326, 641, 654). The use of mirrors in King’s work leaves a Bataillian project and enters more solidly into the realm of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Jacques Lacan makes that stage correspond to the moment the child establishes the connection between his body and his own image in a mirror. It is the process of identification where the child transforms itself into the image as it appears to the child (or imago) and assumes the identity of the imago. This anchors the child in the symbolic stage. Corruption of this stage often highlights the “inside evil” that creates King’s monsters who sometimes win. The mirror motif emphasizes this connection. During her childhood, the identification process was submitted to distortion for Darcy since the mirror gave a diverted image of reality. As a child, she was convinced that mirrors opened the door to another world and a diverted image of reality. As an adult, the bathroom mirror becomes the door to her hidden self: “she shifted her gaze back to the wildhaired woman with the bloodshot, frightened eyes: the Darker Wife, in all her raddled glory [. . .] The Darker Wife was Mrs Brian Delahanty” (King 2010, 307). In her imagination, Darcy steps, like Alice, though the looking-glass and finds a distorted, subverted world in which her husband turns into the ogre from classic fairy tales, biting his victims sometimes down to the bone. The mirror does not show her reflection but her evil self. The identification is not made with her own self but with her darker self: Darcy embraces her identity as “the monster’s wife” (307). The regression to her repressed urge for darkness is presented as necessary for a reconciliation between her body and her imago, for a resolute attainment of the Symbolic stage. Killing her husband is vital to find her place back on the right side of the mirror and to unify the double perceived reality; death is the condition for her renewal. At the end of the narrative, the mirror reflects a single reality: “she felt younger, lighter. She went to the mirror in the hall. In it she saw nothing but her own reflection, and that was good” (336). Even the elderly detective Holt Ramsey, who questioned Bob for one of the murders, allows her to liberate herself from her guilt by “giving her a pass” (334) to freedom. Self-liberation through mirroring is also epitomized in the novella “Apt Pupil.” In this story, King deals with the idea of malevolence in a thirteen-year-old boy, Todd Bowden, who becomes fascinated by and willingly turns into the diabolic mirror image of his neighbor, a former

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Nazi general in the concentration camp during World War II, Kurt Dussander. The awakening of Kurt’s buried evil nature mirrors the growth of Todd’s dark side, allowing the recognition of the self in the other to develop their sadistic personalities. Beginning with animal cruelty, Todd and Kurt (re)develop sadistic personalities (King 1982, 228–29). Their cruelty reaches its apex when the two murder other people: “He and the boy were loathsome, he supposed, feeding off each other . . . eating each other” (King 1982, 188). Both characters feed from each other’s evil, vicious nature and feel alive by performing outrageous acts. The more the attraction and repulsion they feel for each other builds up, the more dangerous the game of exerting evil becomes. In this twisted paternalfilial bond, the crushing, conscious evil consumes the ruptured frontier between good and evil and cast a light on the nature of relationships between families or communities themselves. The valuation of the individual desire over the community relationship reiterates that evil comes from the internal psychological yearnings rather than from supernatural forces. CONCLUSION To a larger scale, King’s narratives unveil the fate of characters who are guilty of immoral acts, characters who are led to face their dark halves and transgress their limits. These characters highlight the indeterminate irresolution of evil permeating King’s texts, leaving a fissure so readers remain in a place of ambiguity about the nature of good and evil. King thus descends toward multiple depths of evil, so as to try to understand its origin, indissociably linked with the ambiguity and weakness of human existence, while ceaselessly pointing to its focus of multi-faceted personalities. While religious motifs complicate King’s focus on the person, the parody of Christian figures and the perception of Christianity work as a fertile ground for evil. They allow King to fracture conventional notions of good and evil, especially as he is willing to shatter common landmarks such as the blissful benevolence traditionally attributed to biblical figures. The Christian dichotomy between good and evil is no longer valid, as evil can originate from our own weaknesses or hubristic desires. In some sense, the characters must embrace these desires and cross over the line between good and evil so that they can recognize where that line is.. The motif of parodic crucifixion and the ruptured border between good and evil place King in a Bataillian vein, as these transgressive acts open a privileged space for the process of identification with the victim and for a questioning the role of the sense of being expelled out of oneself and melting into the Other. A feeling of mutuality arises at each iteration of evil acts.

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Evil still lingers at the end of certain narratives or leaves its mark through the disrupted symbolic world. The curtain is never really brought down on the endless dance of the shattered conventional hiatus between good and evil. The indecipherability of evil concomitant with the reworking of Christian figures indicates an absence of a clear answer concerning the status of good and evil, morality and immorality. This blurred status stands in the vein of the reworking of established oppositions and questions the surrounding world and the ways to respond to evil. Evil does not simply lurk in dark places; it is actually most often present in full view, sometimes possessing mind or/ and spirit, yet always strongly seducing and always present. REFERENCES Bataille, Georges. (1944) 1988. Guilty. Translated by Bruce Boone. Venice, CA The Lapis Press. ———. (1954) 1988. Inner Experience. Translated by Leslie Anne Boldt-Iron. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. (1961) 1989. The Tears of Eros. Translated by Peter Connor. San Francisco: City Lights Books. ———. 2010. Discussion sur le péché. Paris: Nouvelles éditions lignes. Connor, Peter Tracey. 2000. Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Davis, Stephen T. 2001. Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Eliade, Mircea. 1965. Rites and Symbols of Initiation. New York: Harper & Row. Jorgensen, Darren. “The Impossible Thought of Lingchi in George Bataille’s ‘The Tears of Eros.’” In An International and Interdisciplinary Journal of Postmodern Cultural Sound, Text and Image 5 (2008). Accessed February 12, 2014. URL: http://intertheory. org/jorgensen.htm. King, Stephen. 1974. Carrie. New York: Doubleday. ———. 1975. Salem’s Lot. New York: Doubleday. ———. 1977. The Shining. New York: Doubleday. ———. 1978a. “Children of the Corn.” In Night Shift. New York: Doubleday. ———. 1978b. “Jerusalem’s Lot.” In Night Shift. New York: Doubleday. ———. 1978c. The Stand. New York: Doubleday. ———. 1982. “Apt Pupil.” In Different Seasons. New York: Viking Press. ———. 1983. Pet Sematary. New York: Doubleday. ———. 1984. Thinner. New York: Signet. ———. 1985. “Survivor Type.” In Skeleton Crew. New York: Putnam’s Sons. ———. 2009. Under the Dome. New York: Scribner. ———. 2010. “A Good Marriage.” In Full Dark, No Stars. New York: Scribner. Magistrale, Tony. 1998. Discovering Stephen King’s “The Shining”: Essays on the Bestselling Novel by America’s Premier Horror Writer. San Bernadino, CA: Borgo Press. Marx, Leo. 1964. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford University Press. Noys, Benjamin. 2000. Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction. Sterling: Pluto Press. Strengell, Heidi. 2005. Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 2003. “Frankenstein’s Monster: Hubris and Death in Stephen King’s Oeuvre.” In Postgraduate English: A Journal and Forum for Postgraduates in English 7. Accessed February 15, 2014. URL: http://community.dur.ac.uk/postgraduate.english/ojs/ index.php/pgenglish/article/view25/24.

SEVEN When Real Life Isn’t Evil Enough for Fiction French Postwar Literature and the Relationship between Evil and Sexuality Marion Duval

Nearly seventy years after the death of Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany remains synonymous with the concepts of evil and villainy. Today, a seemingly endless number of studies analyze subjects as diverse as the role of women in SS actions in the Occupied Territories, the questioning of whether Hollywood acquiesced to the Führer on issues of cinematic content, or the implications of the architecture of Hitler’s homes. Little time passes without something or someone being compared to Hitler’s Germany, from Bashar-al-Assad and the Islamic State to the frequent, trivializing analogies that are drawn in American political and public discourse. Nazism has become the paradigm through which all modern evils are judged. Interestingly, as the historical actions of the Nazis have become the measuring stick against which all others are compared, when fictionalized, these same horrific acts are frequently explained via sadistic backstories, which are just as often sexual in nature. It would seem from this transference of Nazism onto sexuality that the so-called real life motives for the Nazi atrocities are not evil enough for fiction. Confronted with the impossibility of understanding the inner workings of actual perpetrators, fiction allows writers to artificially enter the minds of their main characters, working their limbs and moving their mouths as if they were puppets on a string. It allows them to intuit their 101

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psychology and ascribe to them whatever sexual identity is needed to explain their real world crimes. This fictionalization may, for instance, highlight specific sexual desires and practices and make them seem a part of the perversity and abnormality that motivates violent and genocidal acts. With fictional characters based on historical figures, representation also allows writers to wipe away historical ambiguity and to give clear, albeit fictional, answers to historically difficult questions. In the case of Nazis, this tendency in fiction parallels a practice in nonfictional materials that explain the Nazis through analysis of their sexual practices. The link between abnormal sexual practices and Nazi evil is, for instance, common throughout the fields of sociology, psychology, and history. This trend is unsettling as it deemphasizes evil as evil and demotes it to a symptom of sexuality. Historian Ron Rosenbaum (1998) writes that the act of assigning so-called perverse sexual practices arises from a refusal to self-identify with the perpetrators of violence and genocide. There is comfort in viewing Hitler as monstrously perverted because “[t]hen his public crimes can be explained away as arising from private pathology, from his unnaturalness, from a psyche that isn’t in any way ‘normal,’ that isn’t in any way akin to ours, one whose darkness we don’t have to acknowledge as any way related to ours” (104). In this way, it would be far more disturbing to see Hitler as “normal” because it would intimate that there was something he shared with all of us. For many, equating the Nazis with a degenerative sexuality holds great appeal because the difference provides absolution. Their evil, stemming from a distinctly different sexuality, is not akin to what we think of as our evil. The separation between the evil of the Nazis and our own failings, as a function of sexuality has ultimately been reinforced in the writings of many experts on Nazi Germany, Hitler, and the Holocaust. Many historians, for instance, have attempted to explain various aspects of the Nazi dictator’s life, in particular his virulent hatred of Jews, as the fault of an outlandish sexuality. For instance, Krueger (1950) argues that Jews were “the scapegoats for his own psychosexual frustrations” (xi). Hans Peter Bleuel (1974) claims that “Hitler, with his singular lack of sexual experience, unloaded all his sexual envy, abnormal attitudes and resentments on the Jewish ‘counterpart’ and made it the target of his unbridled fury” (57–58). An examination of speculative explanations for Hitler’s evil acts reveal, also, an avalanche of lurid, fetishistic sexual fantasies. In addition to being suspected of being uncomfortable around the opposite sex, not being able to satisfy a woman, or even being impotent, Hitler has been saddled with having had a castration complex: “Exponents of the psychoanalytical school have diagnosed a ‘castration complex,’ a pathological fear of losing his virility” (Heiden 1944, 383). Syphilis, a recurring topic in Mein Kampf, is associated with “a fear of genital injury during childhood [that is] so overpowering that the child abandoned his genital sexuality

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entirely and regressed to earlier stages of libidinal development” (Langer 1972, 185). There have been accusations that Hitler was effeminate in “his gait, his hands, his mannerisms, and his ways of thinking” (194), or that he was a homosexual (Krueger 1950, 41). It has been suggested that he was a male prostitute in both Vienna and Munich (Lively and Abrams 1996, 84). Additionally, Hitler has been accused of having an incestuous relationship with his niece, Geli Raubal (Hayman 1997), and even an Oedipal relationship with his mother, albeit in fantasy (Krueger 1950, xiii) because “as a child he must have discovered his parents during intercourse” (Langer 1972, 193). He has been reproached for being dominant (Kershaw 1999; 284), passive (Langer 1972, 193), and received multiple accusations of sadomasochism: “He had made use of the bayonetknife to cut a bleeding swastika between the breasts of a female cultist, and then, in a moment or erotic madness, he had made a homicidal attack upon the young blonde girl” (Krueger 1950, 41). In this play, Langer (1972) claims, “Hitler plays the passive role. His behavior is masochistic in the extreme inasmuch as he derives sexual pleasure from punishment inflicted on his own body” (193). Most outlandishly, he has been slandered with claims of scatology and “coprophiliac fantasies” (Hayman 1997, 142). Langer (1972) states that “We may [. . .] regard Hitler’s perversion as a compromise between psychotic tendencies to eat feces and drink urine on the one hand and to live a normal, socially adjusted life on the other” (191). Notably, whatever extremes experts in the field have tended to explain the evil of Hitler in terms of his sexuality, the hypothesis are all the result of speculation. Hitler’s sexuality, whatever its extremes, is described mostly through guesses and designed to fit a particular hypothesis, the function of which is always to mark the difference between Hitler and everyday normal people. Rosenbaum (1998) argues, “Over the years, it has satisfied a kind of need among explainers, the need for some hidden variable, often a sexual secret, some dark matter that could help illuminate the otherwise inexplicable enigma of Hitler’s psyche” (134). Although studies on Hitler’s sexual practices, as well as those of other Nazis, are often based on little more than conjecture, there is no denying the temptation to seek answers within their pages. In particular, the temptation is to see the Nazis as a particularly abnormal type of evil as evidenced by their abnormal type of sexual preferences. Knowing little of the private life of Adolf Hitler, the mystery of the Führer remains intact: “All his personal traits still did not add up to a real person. The reports and recollections we have from members of his entourage do not make him tangibly vivid as a man” (Fest 1974, 531). Studies of Hitler’s sexual practices do not revolve around concrete facts: “Much has been written, on the flimsiest of evidence, about Hitler’s sex life [. . .] In such a matter speculation and inspired guessing, especially by laymen, are misleading” (Bullock 1958, 173). But this lack of evidence has

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made Nazi dignitaries like Hitler, rank-and-file soldiers, German citizens, and their various collaborators fertile subjects for fiction. As historians and psychologists employed a model of the Nazis’ evil rooted in sexuality, they legitimized this model for fiction writers who employed as a tool of psychologically realistic, though fictional, depictions of historical Nazi characters. This has been particularly true of French literature in the aftermath of the Second World War. The range of books, many written by prominent and influential writers, reveals an archetype of the sexualized Nazi. Jean Genet’s (1947) Funeral Rites depicts Adolf Hitler as a homoerotic figure. Patrick Modiano’s (1968) La Place de l’étoile has as its main character an improbably antiSemitic Jewish collaborator who becomes Eva Braun’s lover, a brutal rapist, and the biggest pimp of the Third Reich. Michel Tournier’s (1970) ErlKing, also known as the Ogre, follows Abel Tiffauges’ kidnapping of young boys for induction into the Hitler Youth. While this character never commits any sexual acts against his victims, he uses pedophilic language to discuss the innocent, inviting bodies of those he recruits. Moreover, Tiffauges is not only monstrous as the eponymous Ogre, but also for his micro-morphism, his abnormally small penis. Whereas these texts focus on sexualized behavior, Eric Emmanuel Schmitt’s (2001) La Part de l’autre (which I translate literally as The Other Side), focuses on Hitler’s lack of sexuality and his mounting frustration at being an aging, asexual virgin. In this uchronia, which posits what would have happened if the Vienna School of Fine Arts had accepted the application of a young artist, Adolf H., the double who never becomes a dictator or mass murderer, experiences love and a fulfilling sex life. At the same time, Schmitt’s novel underlines the life of a parallel character, named Hitler. Hitler, who becomes increasingly frustrated by his lack of sexual encounters, understands that he is lacking something and that this is seemingly abnormal. As a more contemporary and controversial example, The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell (2006), provides perhaps the most sensational example of sexualizing Nazi evil. Although Maximilien Aue, the narrator and main character of the novel, repeatedly begs his reader to identify with him and to believe that they are so similar the reader, given the same circumstances, would also have become a collaborator, the extravagance of Aue’s sexual practices act as a formidable impediment to such identification. Far from being as ordinary as he claims, Aue embodies many of the sexual proclivities that have been ascribed to Hitler by historians and psychologists. Raped by Catholic priests as a child and then by fellow students at boarding school, Aue proceeds to have a flurry of atypical sexual encounters involving, to name a few, homosexuality, autoerotic asphyxiation, incest with his twin, fantasies of incest with his mother, sadomasochism, and scatology. The reviewer for the New York Times wittily asked, “Do I have the time and emotional resources to invest in a

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1,000-page book on the Holocaust that sounds like a transcription of Pasolini’s ‘120 Days of Sodom’?” (Rich 2009) This statement alludes to the postwar trend of Nazi sexploitation and demonstrates that in the beginning of the twenty-first century, the fantasies surrounding Nazi sexuality have not evolved far from their historical models. 1 Ultimately, these novels reveal their author’s incapacity to decide if the perpetrators of wartime atrocities were ordinary or it they were something else. It also demonstrates an inability to define what it means to be evil without falling back on a sexual model in which evil is rooted in sexual deviance. But as extensive and current as this list of French novels is, there is a much older work that deserves more in-depth analysis for its correlation between sexuality and evil given its role in proliferating the sexual model for Nazi evil in French fiction. In 1952 and for the first time in France, Robert Merle narrated the brutality of the Holocaust from the point of view of a perpetrator. His novel, Death Is My Trade, is a fictionalized biography of Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of the extermination camp at Auschwitz, where he served from May 1940 to November 1943. Merle named Hoess’s literary double Rudolf Lang, playing on the real-life commandant’s fake identity, Franz Lang, which the commandant used after the war in his attempt to evade Allied investigators (Renzetti 2003). This comparative aspect with Hoess’s memoirs makes Merle’s novel unique. In the foreword to his novel, Merle explains that he was inspired both by Hoess’s testimonies, written while he was in jail and recorded by the court, as well as his American psychologist’s report compiled during the Nuremberg Trials. 2 Although Death Is My Trade was published prior to the first edition of Hoess’s memoirs in 1956, it is evident that Merle’s work closely follows the writings of the historical figure who inspired him, both in text structure and biographical details. Why, then, did Merle feel the urge to write a fictionalized biographical novel of the commandant of Auschwitz when the real-life Nazi was doing the same? A comparison of the two texts reveals that the novelist’s rewriting of history is done to better suit his own psychoanalytical interpretation of the criminal mind, one in which there is a more concrete explanation for genocidal acts: sexual deviance. Merle attempts to define the notion of evil, to seize it, and to make it work to his specifications. The memoirs of the Commandant of Auschwitz do not allow for recasting. Yet, one potential danger of fictional recasting of historical figures is that it can also alter the way in which their real-life counterparts are remembered. In some instances, these changes can make someone appear both more evil and paradoxically less culpable for their crimes by way of historical distortion. Through his fiction, Merle walks a distorted path in his quest to define evil at the same time as he seeks to establish what it means to be human, by attempting to reconcile heinous and genocidal acts with the concept of God as an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnibe-

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nevolent creator. Much of Merle’s definition of evil was understandable, given the time and the attempts in nonfiction to psychoanalyze Nazis in abstention. In the aftermath of the Second World War, much was made of trying to define what it meant to be human. The dropping of the atomic bomb, coupled with the revelations of the Holocaust, raised awareness of the fragility of man. In particular, the atrocities of the extermination camps called for reflection on the dehumanization of victims, as well as the inhumanity of their captors. Some of the earliest examples of this reflection, published starting in 1947, included survival testimonies by Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man) and Robert Antelme, L’Espèce humaine (The Human Race). 3 In both of these memoirs, it is important to note their titles; in recounting their experiences in the Nazi camps, each man was grappling with the definition of what it meant to be human. To address the humanity of the commandant of Auschwitz, Merle’s novel focuses on Hoess’s passage from ordinary man to mass murderer and the relationship between evil deeds and character. In his foreword, Merle writes that Rudolf Hoess was not a sadist and that there were hundreds, if not thousands of men like him under Nazism. Merle saw morality in their immoral acts. He believed that what Hoess had done was not out of malice, but rather because he was following orders, acting out of loyalty and respect for his leader and state. He committed evil acts because he was a “man of duty” (Merle 1972, ii; italics in original French). Further, Merle addresses Hannah Arendt’s ([1963] 1985) Eichmann in Jerusalem; A Report on the Banality of Evil, in which Arendt, a journalist and political theorist, followed the Nazi official’s 1961 trial. She wrote that, beyond all expectations, “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal” (253). Evil deeds were not the result of evil motives. On the contrary, Arendt claimed that “It was sheer thoughtlessness— something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed [Eichmann] to become one of the greatest criminals of that period” (287–88). To many scholars, Death Is My Trade is thought to closely correlate to Arendt’s theory of “the banality of evil” because of what was written in the preface of the French edition. This is a mistake. The preface was written in 1972, twenty years after the novel’s initial publication in France. After reading Hoess’s memoirs, Merle made the conscious decision to identify Lang not with the Auschwitz commandant’s actual history, but to instead depict his fictional double as having a deviant atypical sexuality. Merle’s first instinct was the opposite of Arendt’s; he used sex to emphasize the abnormality of Nazi Evil. Arendt’s writings on the nature of evil are entwined with her attempt to come to grips with the horrors of the Nazi and Stalinist camp systems. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), she uses the term “radical evil” to

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denote a new form of wrongdoing, one which cannot be covered by other moral concepts (437–59). Philosopher Todd Calder ([2013] 2015) points out that radical evil, as defined by Arendt, “involves making human beings superfluous” which is “accomplished when human beings are made into living corpses who lack any spontaneity of freedom.” Merle suggests that his main character became a perpetrator of genocide because of an unfortunate set of circumstances, not because he was inherently evil. In this way, Lang conforms to Arendt’s analysis of evil in Origins of Totalitarianism, seeing violent or otherwise despicable deeds as a consequence of a totalitarian regimes’ organizational structure. This does not imply that Eichmann, the commandant of Auschwitz, and countless other Nazis weren’t culpable for their acts, only that this particular kind of evil became possible through totalitarian systems for Arendt, Calder, and Hoess’s fictional counterpart, Lang. Lang often seems caught up in situations beyond his control and regularly appears unable to understand the full impact of his decisions and actions. When talking with his wife regarding his decision to take an administrative post at Dachau, she asks him if “they ill-treat the prisoners in concentration camps. [Lang replies] ‘Certainly not. In the NationalSocialist state, that sort of things is no longer possible’ [and then adds that] ‘the aim of the concentration camp is educative’” (Merle 1954, 188). In this regard, Lang conforms to the views of his historical counterpart. In his memoirs, Hoess repeatedly insists that he had no idea what the camps were for or what they would later become: “The war came and with it a significant turning point in my life in the concentration camp. But at that time who could imagine the horrible tasks that would be assigned to the concentration camps during the course of the war?” (Hoess 1996, 98). In another link between the totalitarian political philosophy and the evil of Nazism, when Lang volunteers to fight on the Russian Front, his offer is refused by Himmler who deems the commandant’s presence at Auschwitz indispensable. He is made to stay in Auschwitz because of the authority of the Nazi political structure. During this conversation, Himmler tells Lang about the Final Solution, informing him that his camp has been chosen as the primary site of extermination. Lang’s emotional response, full of anger, disbelief, and even fear, make him appear particularly human, someone not capable of committing heinous, genocidal acts. His participation in the Holocaust is made to seem, by Merle, beyond his control, and a function of living under a totalitarian dictator. Both Hoess and his fictional double are presented, however, as ambitious Nazis who approached the extermination of the Jews as a logistical problem, one in need of solving, more of a mathematical issue than mass murder. Obsessed with material issues, specifically manpower and train schedules, they each lose sight of the gruesome task they have been assigned. In his memoirs, Hoess declared that he was completely absorbed by the assignment he had been given at Auschwitz. Every new problem

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he encountered intensified his work. He refused to be defeated, stating that his ambition wouldn’t allow for it. Moreover, he contended that he was so busy with his administrative responsibilities that “I had little time for the prison camp or the prisoners” (Hoess 1996, 122). Hoess’s insistent, hyperbolic statements are meant to portray him as anything but evil, that he was named the Commandant of Auschwitz because of his organizational skills. Similarly, Lang was chosen by Himmler for his “gift for organization” and his “outstanding conscientiousness” (Merle 1954, 197). Initially believing that implementing the Final Solution on the scale demanded was “technically impossible” (203), Lang is thrilled to find the means to overcome his challenges: “And so, little by little, the idea of a gigantic industrial installation took form in my mind with intoxication precision” (220). It isn’t that Lang is ecstatic about the prospect of exterminating the Jewish population per se, but rather that he is proud of his project’s grandeur and efficiency. Hoess, in particular among notable Nazis, managed to convince many of his readers, Merle included, that his testimony was truthful. By claiming a measure of ignorance and naiveté regarding the extermination camp of which he was in charge, Hoess hoped to be seen as an innocent. If he had been unwilling or uninformed—a simple cog in the Nazi death machine—then he should not be held accountable for his crimes against humanity: his deeds were evil but his character wouldn’t be. This defense was popular among Nazi dignitaries when they were tried at the war’s end, and Hoess argued it successfully. In the introduction and foreword to the American version of Hoess’s (1966) memoirs, Steven Paskuly talks about a “candid, detailed and essentially honest depiction of the plan of mass annihilation” (2–4), while Primo Levi writes of a “substantially truthful” testimony (11). Merle, like Paskuly and Levi, seems to have taken Hoess at his word. In Death Is My Trade, Rudolf Lang is depicted as an ordinary civil servant unable to keep from being pulled into a spiral of violence. In this way, Merle contributes to the debate on the banality of evil alongside prominent psychologists and historians. 4 But Merle’s acceptance of Hoess’s innocence, and by extension Lang’s, only went so far. Crimes against humanity were committed, and millions of lives were lost during the Holocaust. In order, then, for Lang to fit a more socially acceptable form of the mass murderer, in order for him to be sufficiently evil for the novel’s purposes, Merle looked for personal characteristics to embellish. Unsurprisingly, he turned his attention to the subject of the commandant’s sexuality. The focus on Lang’s sexuality can be explained by the writer’s desire to enter the mind of his character, to further elucidate on the transformation from good to evil, to demonstrate how someone becomes capable of committing the most heinous acts. In this way, sex, or

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the lack thereof, becomes a catalyst that eventually leads to committing crimes against humanity. Lang deviates significantly from his historical counterpart, in order to offer a reason, beyond Arendt’s banality, for Nazi evil. By doing so, Merle attempts to make the evil of his fictional character more exotic than that of his factual counterpart. In his memoirs, Hoess hardly addresses the subject of his sexual practices, but Merle focuses on them as a means of explaining the commandant’s actions. Hoess offers only the merest mention of his wife, giving the impression of a positive, almost idyllic relationship: “We knew from the very first moment that we belonged together. [. . .] We completed each other in every respect. I had found the woman I had dreamed of during the long years of my solitude” (Hoess 1996, 79). The fictional Lang’s married life was significantly different. In the novel, the arranged union with his wife, Elsie, was made over Lang’s numerous protests. His wife regularly complains about how he rejects her sexual advances. One of Lang’s only friends accuses him of not being attracted to women, which he considers a form of abnormal sexuality. His superior officer, Herr Oberst, a horse breeder, cannot understand why Lang didn’t want to marry “an impeccable filly, docile and willing, who’d do the work of two men for [him]!” (Merle, 167). Oberst’s constant questioning shows that he finds Lang’s lack of interest in women suspicious: “You are not ill by any chance, are you?” “You are normal, aren’t you?” “You are not a gelding, I hope?” “You are entire, aren’t you?” (163). Oberst’s metaphoric comparison of Lang to an animal is particularly notable as an attack on Lang’s humanity. By comparing him to a gelding, Oberst insinuates that he is not a virile man. The image of castration also connects to the term monster, which can also be defined as an individual whose morphology is abnormal, either by an excess or lack of an organ, different, or an other. Oberst mocks Lang’s lack of libido through the use of another comparison to a horse: “When you’re married I shan’t keep count of the number of times you sire your wife, will I?” Confronted with such colleagues, Lang is constantly forced to justify himself. Hoess’s self-representation does not mirror Lang’s sexuality. In his memoirs, Hoess writes about his first sexual relationship with a young German nurse at the end of the First World War, allowing for a comparison with his fictional counterpart. Hoess’s narration is memorable for its tenderness, which is particularly striking when compared to the cold, indifferent tone of the rest of his testimony. This first sexual experience was decisive in establishing his association of the physical act with emotional feelings: “I had never been in love with a woman until then. [. . .] This love was for me a miraculous experience. She led me through all the steps of love making, including intercourse. I would not have had the courage to do this. This first experience of love, with all its tenderness

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and affection, became the guideline for the rest of my life” (Hoess 1996, 58). In this passage, Hoess portrays himself as passive, which may have reinforced Merle’s belief that the Nazi commandant was asexual or, at the least, not sexually active. In contrast to Hoess’s actual life, Merle chose to transform this tender experience into an unmemorable dalliance: “And now the die was cast, there was no helping now I couldn’t discover whether I felt glad or not.” (Merle 1954, 72). This change becomes more pronounced when Merle links the loss of Lang’s virginity to the death of his mother. When Lang reads in a letter that she has passed away, he doesn’t comment on the news. Abruptly, at the end of the paragraph, and seemingly out of the blue, the narrator announces that he has had sex: “Night came and I slept with Vera” (73). The sentence is short and devoid of feeling, something that is simply done, regardless of the circumstances, even after the death of a loved one. The verb to sleep indicates that the act was purely physical in nature, and makes Lang seem like a dispassionate, perhaps even emotionally detached, lover. In this way, Merle appears to have been inspired by G. M. Gilbert, one of Hoess’s psychologists, who reported that: “Sex never played a great part in Hoess’s life. He could take it or leave it—never felt the urge to have or continue a love affair, although he had momentary affairs now and then. Married life also rarely showed any passion. Claims he never even felt the desire to masturbate and never did” (Gilbert: 1947, 259). 5 While the psychologist does not use this observation as a possible explanation for his subject’s horrific actions, the novelist has no such reticence. Questioning Lang’s manhood and sexual appetite, Merle reinforces these concerns by inquiring about his heterosexuality. His attraction to men is pure fiction; neither Hoess nor his psychologists ever alluded to it. What matters is its inclusion in the novel. The very introduction of the subject further muddies the waters, providing another potential explanation, a so-called abnormality that eventually results in Lang’s participation in genocide. Merle writes that Lang’s interest in men first manifested as a teenager when he succeeds in sneaking into a military convoy headed toward the Franco-Prussian front, and that he is struck by its homoerotic atmosphere: “The soldiers began to sing, and their loud, powerful singing went to my heart like an arrow. Night fell, they unbuckled their belts, opened their collars and stretched their legs in front of them. In the damp obscurity of the compartment I eagerly breathed in the smell of leather and sweat that emanated from them” (Merle 1954, 49). The text of the original French version is even more sexually charged: the soldier’s “manhood” (virilité), which is characterized by their singing, takes the form of an arrow, a phallic symbol, which “penetrates” (pénétrer) Lang. His eyes focus on the men as they unbuckle their belts, relaxing at the end of the day. Further, the teenager expresses an attraction to

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his captain, who “never had [. . .] seemed more handsome” than when he turned “his powerful body” toward him (56). Although Lang never consummates a physical, sexual relationship with a man, he is nevertheless more attracted to men than women, never noticing a female body or remarking on their attractiveness. When his friend, Schrader, discovers his lack of desire for the opposite sex, he burst out laughing and exclaims: “What a queer young fish you are, Rudolf!” (113). An infuriated Lang cries and begs him to shut up, but that only makes Schrader laugh harder: “Well, you are a queer, Rudolf! [. . .] If you ask me Rudolf, I wonder if you wouldn’t have done better to have been a priest after all!” (113). While the original French version insists on the word queer as in connoting an oddity, the English translation plays on the double-entendre of the word, reinforcing the suggestion of Lang’s homosexuality. This nuance, given that the novel was translated in the 1950s as well as the time in which Hoess lived, would be considered a significant abnormality, one which could culminate in the perpetuation of evil. 6 In addition to homosexuality, Merle has Lang explore dominance. In an erotic dream in which Lang massacres French troops, a fantasy is revealed: “I made them take their clothes off [. . .], I sat there [. . .] with a glittering machine gun between my legs. [. . .] They crawled towards me on their soft bellies and begged me to be forgiven, but I stamped on their faces with my boots till they were shapeless masses” (48). The scene is erotic, filled with sexual imagery, including the phallic symbol of the machine gun. In his fantasy, Lang reaffirms his masculinity, his standing among his fellow men and German soldiers, through the domination of the enemy via his sexual superiority. This association of sexuality with violence—first observed in the eroticization of soldiers and war, then through the brutal fantasies of domination—culminates in Lang’s rape of his landlady: “I flung myself on her, gave her a sound thrashing, and took her” (120). This act more than suggests an unstable and evil personality lurking shallowly beneath the surface, offering a peek at his destined role as the commandant of Auschwitz. Merle’s aim in writing such a fabricated scene is to attribute a preexisting psychological issue to his fictional character which, by turn, muddies the record of his historical counterpart, Hoess. Lang’s heinous and unforgivable acts no longer seem to be the result of his participation in a brutal war or that he was simply caught in an unstoppable chain of events or just following orders. Rather, there was something lying dormant inside him, a sort of perversion waiting for its release. This perversion means Lang is inherently evil. Moreover, the inclusion of rape is meant as a necessary supplement to genocide to make Merle’s fictional version of Hoess evil enough, or, more precisely, more evil than Lang’s historic counterpart. All of Merle’s embellishments and fabrications have resulted in a far different historical accounting of Hoess than if Death Is My Trade had

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never been published. The book represents a dangerous position in that Nazis—real Nazis—aren’t bad enough; their evil needs to be supplemented, especially through sexual deviance. This danger is exacerbated by the tendency to teach Merle’s novel in French schools as a work of historical record, not fiction. Death Is My Trade often replaces Hoess’s memoirs in the classroom due to the perception of easier accessibility. One of the reasons for this is undoubtedly due to the fact that Merle is a renowned novelist, the winner of France’s most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt, for his first novel, Week-end in Zuydcoote (1949). His prose is dynamic and fluid, and Merle avoids using the intricate technical details of the Nazi death machine that could upset or otherwise impede students and casual readers from continuing. Though the fictional biography is more accessible than the nonfictional memoirs, it is problematic as a text to teach as history because, in addition to rewriting history, it presents homosexuality as the cause of the main character’s violent sexuality and an explanation for his evil acts. Hoess’s self-serving memoir, which attempted to whitewash away his own culpability, is bad enough. Merle’s novel, a literary wolf-in-sheep’sclothing is, in many regards, worse. To perpetuate the belief that a marginalized sex life can play an important, even crucial role in someone committing abhorrent, violent acts is a severe error in judgment. There is an urgent need to stop using Merle’s novel as a primary document, as a replacement for a more inaccessible original, in French schools. Too much trust has been placed in this author. Because of a lack of critical thinking, the text becomes a dangerous substitute. The fact remains that the Nazis were evil because of their beliefs, because of the genocide they perpetrated, not because of their sexuality. One was not the cause of the other, no matter how titillating that possibility might be. The actions of the commandant of Auschwitz and Nazis like him are despicable enough. The last thing Hoess—or any other perpetrators, including Hitler—need is fictional embellishment. Their evil is real enough. NOTES 1. Gestaporn and similar types of entertainment often referred to as Nazisploitation, which depict Nazis engaging in sex crimes, usually in a camp setting. Most depict women suffering degradation and violence in a prison, concentration camp, or brothel. One of the most famous examples is Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1974), which was successful enough to spawn sequels. 2. The English translation of La Mort est mon métier, titled Death Is My Trade, does not contain the original foreword. Merle’s novel was translated in 1954 but the author’s preface was only added to the French version in 1972, when the novel was republished. The memoir cited is Rudolf Hoess’s autobiography, Meine Psyche: Werden, Leben und Erleben, written from January to February 1947, while in a Polish prison. References to Hoess’s memoirs are from the American translation compiled by Steven Paskuly, titled Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant of Auschwitz (1996).

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Though this foreword claims to have used the records of Leon Goldensohn, an American psychiatrist who also spent considerable time with the defendants and witnesses, Merle actually relied on Gustave Gilbert’s (1947) observations of high-ranking Nazi leaders as recorded in Nuremberg Diary in order to create his fictional commandant of Auschwitz. Gilbert was appointed as prison psychologist for German prisoners waiting to be judged by the International Military Tribunal. Although Merle likely never had access to Goldensohn’s reports, the American psychiatrist’s conversations, as related in The Nuremberg Interviews (2004), are utilized in this study as another means of comparison between Hoess and his fictional double, Lang. More nonfiction source material for Merle’s novel can be found in the transcripts of the interrogation of Rudolf Hoess which offer descriptions of the procedures at Auschwitz. These transcripts can be found in Richard Overy’s Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 (2001). As a window into the personality of the commandant, however, they are limited, as they are primarily concerned with the logistical aspect of genocide. 3. As a victim of National Socialism’s racist ideology, Robert Antelme was careful to avoid the use of the word race in his original French title, choosing instead to use species. It was changed for the English translation. 4. The concept of the banality of evil as promulgated by Hannah Arendt, while controversial, has been influential in understanding Nazi perpetrators and in more broadly conceptualizing the meaning of evil, in particular that given extraordinary circumstances, human beings are capable of committing evil deeds. Social psychologists such as Stanley Milgram (1963; 1974) and Philip Zimbardo (1973) famously conducted experiments in order to prove Arendt’s theory. Milgram is best known for conducting an experiment which found that many people are willing to comply with the orders of an authority figure even if they understand that they are causing serious injury to others. Zimbardo conducted his Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, a simulation in which participants were assigned roles as either guards or prisoners. As in Milgram’s experiment, Zimbardo found that the power of authority was strong enough to cause otherwise ordinary people to psychologically torture their peers. Zimbardo pointed out that the situation, rather than any innate evilness, caused participants to act as they did. As for historians, the most notable study was conducted by Christopher Browning (1992), in which he concludes that the massacres and roundups of Jews for deportation to the Nazi death camps, conducted by the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, who were not ardent Nazis, was done not out of hatred or malevolence, but due to obedience to authority and peer pressure. 5. For further reading by G. M. Gilbert regarding his conversations with and impressions of Rudolf Hoess while he awaited judgment by the International Military Tribunal, consult G. M. Gilbert’s (1950), The Psychology of Dictatorship; Based on an Examination of the Leaders of Nazi Germany. Leon Goldensohn does not corroborate Gilbert’s report of Hoess’s lack of interest in sex. The American psychiatrist carried out formal and extended interviews with the commandant of Auschwitz. During their conversations, Hoess told him that he had only known his wife three months before they were married. When asked whether he had ever experienced any sexual difficulties, Hoess responded: “None. Such things were always very good. As a young man they were always very good, too. When I was seventeen I had my first sexual experience with a nurse in a hospital in Damascus. She was in her twenties, slightly older than myself. Everything went fine.” Hoess’s conversations with Goldensohn run counter-current to the interpretation of the Nazi as asexual, frustrated, or a practitioner of so-called abnormal sexual acts (Goldensohn 2005, 313). 6. Historian Stephan Micheler (2002) underlines that “Although the Nationalist regime, defeated in war, came to an end in 1945, its legal code and police and court apparatus were taken over by the Federal Republic, along with the medical theories on the genesis of homosexuality that the Nazis had developed and articulated so effectively” (130). Simply said, homophobic stereotypes did not end in Germany with the fall of the Third Reich, and in France with the subsequent fall of the Vichy Regime. To

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that effect, historian Elizabeth D. Heineman (2002) evokes the “homophobic postwar environment that discouraged those who had been persecuted from coming forward: their crime under the Nazis was still a crime” (2002, 34; emphasis added). In this passage, she refers to colleague Robert G. Moeller’s research (1994).

REFERENCES Antelme, Robert. 1992. The Human Race: Preceded by an homage to Robert Antelme by Edgar Morin. Translated by Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler. Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press. Originally published as L’Espèce humaine (Paris: Edition de la Cité Universelle, 1947). Arendt, Hannah. (1951) 1985. The Origins of Totalitarianism, San Diego: A Harvest Book, Harcourt, Inc. ———. (1963) 1994. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Books. Bleuel, Hans Peter. 1974. Sex and Society in Nazi Germany. New York: Bantam Books. Browning, Christopher. 1992. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins. Bullock, Alan. 1958. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. New York: Bantam Books. Calder, Todd. (2013) 2015. “The Concept of Evil” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall Edition), Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Accessed February 15, 2016. http:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/concept-evil/. Camus, Albert. 1989. The Stranger. Translated by Matthew Ward. New York: Vintage International. Originally published as L’Etranger (Paris: Gallimard, 1942). Crettiez, Xavier. 2008. Les Formes de la violence. Paris: La Découverte, Collection Repères Sociologie. Crochet, Anne. 2012. La Mort est mon métier: Fiche de lecture. Brussels: Collection Le Petit Littéraire Primento Digital. Kindle edition. Edmonds, Don. (1974) 2000. Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. Troy: Anchor Bay Entertainment. Fest, Joachim C. 1974. Hitler. New York: Harcourt Brace. Genet, Jean. 1969. Funeral Rites. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Grove Press. Originally published in French as Pompes funèbres (Paris: Bikini, 1947). Gilbert, Gustave M. 1947. Nuremberg Diary. New York: Farrar Straus. ———. 1950. The Psychology of Dictatorship; Based on an Examination of the Leaders of Nazi Germany. New York: Ronald Press. Goldensohn, Leon. (2004) 2005. The Nuremberg Interviews: An American Psychiatrist’s Conversations with the Defendants and Witnesses. Edited and Introduced by Robert Gellately. New York: Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Hayman, Ronald. 1997. Hitler and Geli. New York: Bloomsbury. Heiden, Konrad. 1944. Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Heineman, Elizabeth D. 2002. “Sexuality and Nazism: The Doubly Unspeakable?” in The Journal of the History of Sexuality 11 (½), Special issue: Sexuality and German Fascism (January–April) 22–66. Hoess, Rudolf. 1996. Death Dealer. The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz. Edited by Steven Paskuly. Translated by Andrew Pollinger. Foreword by Primo Levi. New York: Da Capo Press. ———. 2000. Commandant of Auschwitz. The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess. Translated by Constantine FitzGibbon, Foreword by Primo Levi. London: Phoenix Press. Kershaw, Ian. 1999. Hitler. 1889–1936. New York: W. W. Norton. Krueger, Kurt. 1950. I Was Hitler’s Doctor. New York: Boar’s Head. Langer, Walter C. 1972. The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report. New York: Basic Books. Levi, Primo. 1987. If This Is a Man; and, The Truce. London: Abacus. Originally published as Se questo è un uomo (Turin: De Silva, 1947).

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Littell, Jonathan. 2009. The Kindly Ones. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Harper. Originally published as Les Bienveillantes (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). Lively, Scott, and Kevin Abrams. (1995) 1996. The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party. Keizer, OR: Founders Publishing Corporation. Lower, Wendy. 2013. Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Merle, Robert. 1954. Death Is My Trade. London: Derek Verschoyle. Originally published as La Mort est mon métier (Paris: Gallimard, [1952] 1972). Micheler, Stephan and Patricia Szobar. 2002. “Homophobic Propaganda and the Denunciation of Same-Sex-Desiring Men under National Socialism” in The Journal of the History of Sexuality 11 (½), Special Issue: Sexuality and German Fascism (January–April), 95–130. Milgram, Stanley. 1963. “Behavioral Study of Obedience” in The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67(4), 371–78. ———. 1974. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Harper and Row. Moeller, Robert G. 1994. “The Homosexual Man Is a “Man,” the Homosexual Woman Is a “Woman”: Sex, Society, and the Law in Postwar West Germany” in The Journal of the History of Sexuality 4(3), 395–429. Mosse, George L. 1985. Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe. New York: Howard Fertig. Overy, Richard. 2001. Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945. New York: Vicking. Renzetti, Elizabeth. 2013. “Nazi Hunter: Exploring the Power of Secrecy and Silence.” The Globe and Mail. November 7. Accessed February 15, 2016.http://www. theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/nazi-hunter-exploring-the power-ofsecrecy-and-silence/article15311820/. Rich, Motoko. 2009. “Publisher’s Big Gamble on Decisive French Novel.” New York Times. March 3. Accessed February 15, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/ books/04litt.html?_r=0. Rosenbaum, Ron. 1998. Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. New York: Random House. Schmitt, Éric-Emmanuel. 2001. La Part de l’autre. Paris: Albin Michel. Stratigakos, Despina. 2015. Hitler at Home. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Urwand, Ben. 2013. The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Zimbardo, Philip G. 2007. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House.

EIGHT Poison and Antidote Evil and the Hero-Villain Binary in Deon Meyer’s Post-Apartheid Crime Thriller, Devil’s Peak Sam Naidu and Karlien van der Wielen

In crime fiction, the theme of good and evil is traditionally concomitant with, but secondary to, notions of law and order. Charles Rzepka (2010) suggests that fictional criminals are not threatened by any moral code or idea of hell, but rather attempt to convey their business while evading the code of law and prison (1). This is no different in South African crime fiction, in which good and evil are closely related to notions of order and chaos, often harking back to the country’s colonial and apartheid history. 1 South African crime fiction in general inherits the ideologies, concerns, and form of its Anglo-American generic predecessors, but these are combined with local, contemporary responses to crime that focus particularly on the exploration of endemic, socio-historical meaning of evil in South Africa. 2 Firmly rooted in the South African historical context, this preoccupation with notions of evil links the atrocities of the colonial period and of apartheid, with the resultant inequalities and social injustice that extend into post-1994, democratic South Africa. Despite this preoccupation, the genre’s use of evil in this context is a difficult concept to pin down. Historical crimes—such as land appropriation, slavery, institutional racism, and wide-scale human rights abuses—still haunt post-apartheid society and continue to color the characterizations of both heroes and villains. 117

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Because of the country’s morally suspect authority, the heroes and villains in South African crime fiction are rarely portrayed as simply good or evil. Notions of good and evil are accordingly strongly associated with historical processes, and contemporary crime and classifications of evil are complicated by reference to the legacy of apartheid. Consequently, a criminal may be presented as a sympathetic victim who is understandably burdened, and thus motivated, by the social injustices of apartheid. These notions and complications are illustrated in Deon Meyer’s Devil’s Peak (2007), a South African crime thriller whose quick pace and continually rising arch of action create a sense of urgency around questions of justice, retribution, order, and evil. Particularly, the notion of evil is explored and problematized through the representation of the hero-villain binary. This binary is collapsed in the character of Thobela Mpayipheli, whose morality is rooted in South Africa’s history of social injustice. Structuralists such as Jonathan Culler (1975) have argued that “the novel serves as the model by which society conceives of itself, the discourse in and through which it articulates the world” (189). Considering crime fiction’s increasing aspirations toward verisimilitude as well as its popularity, it can be a valuable gauge of society’s conception of itself. Moreover, it is a good indication of what a society wants itself to be in moral and ethical terms. In its convention of providing a satisfying resolution to the crime in the form of justice, crime fiction has a prescriptive inclination that is not only concerned with what is, but also what should be. As Mike Alsford (2007) suggests, “[w]hat a culture considers heroic and what it considers villainous says a lot about the culture’s underlying attitudes” (2). Following this axiom, South African crime fiction, as a genre, takes pains to represent carefully nuanced articulations of heroes and villains that reflect complex socio-historical, political, and cultural developments in a country with a particularly violent and fraught past. The legacy of apartheid, therefore, is inescapable in all South African crime fiction—indeed, all South African literature. What emerges is a new form of political novel which highlights how the injustices of the past have spawned an unequal society that is left in disarray as it attempts to recover from a corrupt and evil social system. Despite this trend in the literature, the question of evil in South African crime fiction has hitherto not been addressed. In fact, until recently, the main question regarding South African crime fiction was whether or not it is a genre worthy of study at all (Naidu 2013, 727). Like its British and American forebears, South African crime fiction has suffered from the simple classification as popular fiction, a designation that often results in quick dismissals or limited engagement in the literary field. Although inroads have since been made that recognize its worth and value its study in a more formal, academic context, lines of inquiry have extended little beyond such recognition. Few studies have branched

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into the peculiarities of South African crime fiction and how it employs common crime fiction tropes in a specifically South African context. What scholars of South African crime fiction have established, however, is that this genre transcends its initial classifications as popular or lowbrow fiction through its focus on socio-political issues, its potential for literary expression, and its complex representations of a socio-historical context fraught with past evils and present dangers. In this context, the works’ merit is related not only to aesthetics but also to its potential for socio-political commentary. The question thus shifts from the discussion of South African crime fiction’s legitimacy as a literary genre to “how this genre, and its subgenres, manage to entertain and simultaneously perform a much-needed hermeneutic function” (729). One of the ways in which South African crime fiction simultaneously entertains and performs its hermeneutic function is through its representation of good and evil. It is still very much a formulaic genre that employs crime fiction tropes and conventions to affect its socio-political analysis. Particularly, the crime fiction formula calls for a detective and a criminal, characters that assume the role of the more basic convention of hero and villain. The hero-villain binary derives from the basic formula of crime fiction, in which the villain commits a crime that disrupts the equilibrium of law and order, and this crime must be solved by the detective-hero responsible for maintaining law and order. Yet, in Devil’s Peak this hero-villain binary is deliberately and dramatically collapsed in the figure of the novel’s villain Mpayipheli, who commits his crimes in ways that are excusable even by some members of the law enforcement community. As such, Mpayipheli signifies a distinctly contextual notion of evil. The collapse of the binary in Devil’s Peak is of singular significance because the binary oppositions established between detective and criminal, hero and villain, and good and evil correspond to various associated binaries that can be traced back to alignment with order and chaos rather than ethics and morality. South African crime fiction shows, according to Christopher Warnes (2012), a return to “the figure of the detective as an antidote to disorder, violence, and uncertainty” (981). Transversely, the villain or criminal represents the poison that occasions the antidote, as he or she disrupts the social order and certainty of law by committing a crime. South African crime fiction’s ability to entertain rests on its representation of how the detective solves that crime, but its hermeneutic function can be identified, amongst other means, in how it imbricates the representations of the detective and criminal. Deon Meyer, “the undisputed king” of South African crime fiction, 3 displays these literary strategies in his crime thriller novels, which are mostly set in South Africa and tackle pertinent socio-political issues through their use of setting and characterization. Warnes writes that “[Meyer’s] work touches on a variety of themes—from apartheid-era cor-

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ruption to the challenges of transformation” (986–87). In particular, Meyer has concentrated on the representation of white Afrikaans men, who he attempts to redeem by characterizing them as detective heroes struggling to contribute positively to a country that has been marred by white Afrikaner nationalism. Warnes points out, though, that these detectives are themselves damaged and in need of rescue, and thus they “find rehabilitation through the process of detection and protecting vulnerable others” (986). More than that, they find redemption in upholding a code of law and a sense of order that is identified as the only viable antidotes to the poison of crime. This theme is exemplified in Meyer’s fourth novel, Devil’s Peak, which features two hero-villain binaries. The first is constructed between the official detective of the crime thriller, Benny Griessel, a white Afrikaner, and the primary criminal, Thobela Mpayipheli, a former KGB hitman and anti-apartheid struggle hero who has turned into a vigilante avenger of crimes against children. This first binary is subverted and problematized in the novel to the extent that the hero and villain form an alliance to effect the denouement. Mpayipheli is not merely a villain and criminal, but acts heroically throughout the text, pursues a noble cause, and ends by pairing up with Griessel to save the detective’s young daughter from the ravages of a Colombian drug cartel. Therefore, Mpayipheli, a single character, constitutes the second hero-villain binary in Devil’s Peak, and it is in this second binary that Meyer’s text reveals its complex grappling with the concept of evil. THE HERO-VILLAIN BINARY Mpayipheli presents a complicated character who is both detective and criminal, hero and villain. Avid readers of Meyer will recognize Mpayipheli as the erstwhile hero from Heart of the Hunter (2003), in which Mpayipheli uses his skills to find a kidnapped friend. In Devil’s Peak, after Mpayipheli’s adopted son, Pakamile, is murdered during a petrol station robbery, Mpayipheli embarks on a personal mission to exterminate those who the media has identified as abusers, killers, or rapists of children. He becomes a vigilante—dubbed Artemis by the press—and seeks out criminals so that he may dispense the justice that the South African legal system cannot. Even police officers support his vigilantism, claiming that “this guy is doing what we should have done a long time ago. And that is to take these evil fuckers who do things to children and hang them by the neck” (Meyer 2007, 232). South Africa’s history of colonial and apartheid crimes are writ large in the character of Mpayipheli, as he is shown to act within a self-constructed code of honor. Mpayipheli’s sense of right and wrong draws heavily on his cultural background as a member of the ama-Xhosa, an ethnic group who fought nine frontier wars against Brit-

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ish settlers in the nineteenth century and as an anti-apartheid struggle hero who was forced into exile in the Communist bloc. These factors contribute to his personal moral code, which ultimately guides him to determine good and evil. Mpayipheli thus represents both hero and villain in different ways throughout the text. Most importantly, he is the villain who initially disrupts the equilibrium when he commits an act of vigilantism that requires Detective Bennie Griessel to restore the authority of the South Africa Police Service (SAPS). However, Meyer takes pains to nuance the vigilante character and to mitigate the reader’s reaction to his killings. In fact, for a significant portion of the novel, Mpayipheli appears as an adequate and righteous solution for the social problem of crimes against children. He effectively exterminates baby rapists, child killers, and abusers. Mpayipheli also seems justified in his campaign by Meyer’s verisimilar depiction of the South African legal system’s failures. The morally murky landscape of institutional policing is successfully depicted, and the country’s well-documented struggle with corruption seems to justify Mpayipheli’s resort to vigilantism. Several instances of corruption are highlighted in Devil’s Peak, including the corruption amongst the SAPS. For instance, one of Griessel’s subordinates, Bushy Bezuidenhout, hands his boss’s daughter to a Colombian drug cartel for a stack of cash. Mpayipheli’s vigilantism exposes the Senior Superintendent “Boef” Beukes involvement with the same cartel. In this portrayal of police corruption and the failure of the judicial system, Meyer illustrates some of the sociohistorical evils that have infected post-apartheid South Africa, but which have their roots in a past era. The novel implies that the re-shuffling of power and social hierarchies, post-1994, have caused deep-seated personal grievances amongst the SAPS and also dysfunctionality in the judicial system. Devil’s Peak thus depicts a country which is constitutionally democratic and equitable but which, in practical terms, is rife with injustice, disorder, and crime. This discrepancy makes the evil difficult to locate in the black and white definitions of the law. The novel thus generates a sense of frustration and despair in the account of Mpayipheli’s initial attempts to obtain justice through the legal system. Meyer stresses Mpayipheli’s impotence in the face of a dysfunctional system; it is only after his son’s killers have escaped that Mpayipheli concludes that institutional justice has failed him. When he identifies the killers in a line-up, they stand with “their mouths stretched in the same ‘so-what’ smirks, their eyes staring a challenge at the window” (10). While he immediately feels the urge to take revenge on the killers, he restrains himself and waits for justice to run its course. The legal system is, however, depicted as almost indifferent, overburdened with too many cases, leading to its inefficiency. The public prosecutor has a “vague absence, as if her attention was divided between

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the countless documents, as if the responsibility of her work was sometimes too heavy to bear” (12). Mpayipheli experiences the fallibility of the system directly, and after he is discredited in court, the killers escape. He decides that he cannot “allow the injustice of [Pakamile’s] murder to go unpunished [. . .] in a country where the System had failed them, it was now the last resort [. . .]. Somebody had to take a stand” (54). Despite Mpayipheli’s noble intentions and provisional occupation of the position of hero, at this point he also becomes the villain of Devil’s Peak. The villain’s structural role in literature was first codified by Vladimir Propp ([1958] 1968) as to “disturb the peace of a happy family, to cause some form of misfortune, damage, or harm” (27). M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Harpham (2009) extend Propp’s structural analysis to take on moral functions, arguing that the antagonist must necessarily be a villain “if the antagonist is evil, or capable of cruel and criminal actions” (265). This suggests that the criminals are villainous based on structural role, regardless of moral intentions. In a crime fiction context, since the antagonist is created through criminal actions, villainy is defined by a character’s relation to law and order. While crime fiction has recently paid greater attention to the villain, the binary has generally been heavily weighted in favor of the detective, to the point where villains became suppressed by the narrative despite being the “one free agent, the one person not circumscribed by the necessity of having to catch someone” (O’Faolain 1935, 10). Devil’s Peak presents this freedom of the villain, as well as the disturbance to equilibrium (however dubious that equilibrium may be) because Mpayipheli has the autonomy to act when police do not and cannot. Yet, this freedom also allows him to act beyond the acceptable norms of society, and which leads him to kill innocent people, resulting in further chaos and disorder. In this sense, then, Mpayipheli, despite not wishing to being cruel or evil, and despite his impetus for justice, clearly fulfills the role of villain, both structurally and morally. Simultaneously and paradoxically, his code of honor and desire for justice interpolate him as a heroic figure. He is then the villain, though he is not evil and though he is, ultimately, heroic. THOBELA MPAYIPHELI AND THE “ARTEMIS FACTOR” The collapse of the hero-villain binary in the character of Mpayipheli signifies a collective national desire for law and order, but it also points to the consequences this desire can have if it transgresses the systems already in place for the maintenance of order. Although Devil’s Peak contains several villainous characters who exhibit more cruelty and malice than Mpayipheli, he is the figure who poses the greatest threat to order, even amongst drug lords, baby rapists, and serial killers. In John Scaggs’s

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(2005) discussion of Elizabethan revenge tragedies, he suggests that, “[b]y taking the law into their own hands, the revengers disrupt the very social order that they are trying to restore, and the response of the sovereign representative of order and authority [. . .] is swift and final” (13). As Scaggs explains, this is a necessary step to recovering the sovereign’s authority as order. In the modern context, the police must act quickly to contain Mpayipheli’s threat to their authority. The SAPS, with its reputation for corruption and incompetence, cannot afford to have a vigilante succeeding where they seemingly fail. Moreover, this conception of vigilante justice is relative to the individual, and can easily become a façade for personal revenge—a theme Meyer has already explored in his third Benny Griessel novel, 7 Days (2012). As Griessel muses: “Chaos, Prof. If we allow bush justice. It’s just the first step to chaos” (Meyer 2007, 202). 4 Griessel’s view is reflected in the narrative as a whole. As Warnes explains, Mpayipheli points to “the essential liberal justification for a functioning criminal justice system and a society based on the rule of law” (Warnes 2012, 991). Meyer is careful to articulate eventually that he does not symbolize an ideal of vigilante justice. In the early chapters of Devil’s Peak, however, Mpayipheli’s actions are portrayed as reasonable and even noble. In contrast, the police are portrayed ambiguously and suspiciously. Wherever Mpayipheli seeks justice, he is faced with a police service that is corrupt, incompetent, and ineffective. After his son’s killers escape, Mpayipheli successfully bribes a policeman for information about the killers’ possible whereabouts. This particular policeman’s office wreaks of despair, and the entire interaction is characterized by a sense of decay (Meyer 2007, 26–27). Mpayipheli sees vengeance as the only viable solution, especially when he runs into Enver Davids, a child rapist who is acquitted due to police incompetence (69). He broadens his resolution to include all serious crimes against children, and decides to make Davids’s death his first act of retribution. Afterwards, Mpayipheli feels unease, but he convinces himself that he has acted justly (81). He is not the only one who is convinced that his criminal actions are justifiable. Christine van Rooyen, the novel’s femme fatale-figure, admires him for doing what law-abiding citizens might want to see happen but would never do themselves (19). Cape Town’s chief pathologist, Professor Phil Pagel suggests to Griessel that Mapayipheli’s alter ego, Artemis addresses a failure of the current legal justice system and is successfully scaring people off mistreating children (202). The name “Artemis,” given to Mpayipheli by the media, refers to the Greek goddess of the hunt who also was considered a protector of children. While Mpayipheli is uneasy with the persona signified by the name Artemis, it becomes a symbol for a protector of the weak who succeeds where the police fail. Artemis is depicted as a figure of pathos, boldly rising to address the rampant acts of evil against children that are tearing

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South Africa apart. For the greater part of the novel, then, the figure of Artemis, rather than being an evil villain, seems like an adequate solution for the raging disorder depicted in Devil’s Peak: an antidote to the injustice that poisons society. The “Artemis Factor” is discussed by the press throughout the novel (141). Media liaison officer Cloete explains the impact of the figure: “[E]veryone has an opinion now. Even the politicians. The DP says the ANC is to blame, the Death Penalty Party say it’s the voice of the people and the Sunday Times ran an opinion poll and seventy-five per cent of the nation say the assegai man is a hero” (224). As a result of Artemis’s vigilante justice, increasing pressure is placed on the police, as they come under fire for incompetence and corruption. Before long, the “Artemis Factor” takes on mythic proportions quite apart from its association with ancient Greek legends. An abused young woman briefly claims the identity of Artemis to wreak revenge on her father. When Griessel interviews her, she claims to have seen a news report on Artemis, and says “I saw it on TV. Then I knew. It’s me” (256). This incident illustrates the threat to social order posed by Artemis. Griessel realizes this threat when he says: “there are politics involved with the assegai thing. Between you and me, the girl in there was partly inspired by our murderer, if you know what I mean. But if you tell the media that, the commissioner will have a stroke, because he’s under pressure from above” (258). Furthermore, it is the figure of Artemis that Van Rooyen draws inspiration from to plot her escape from Carlos Sangrenegra, a Colombian drug lord she hopes Artemis will execute after she frames him for abducting her daughter. As Mpayipheli’s campaign escalates, the “Artemis Factor” evolves through the press into an entity increasingly out of his control. Mpayipheli himself provides a stark contrast to the police who come across as incompetent and hamstrung by legal red tape. From the outset, he is depicted as a heroic warrior, trained during the anti-apartheid struggle era, and he is willing to do everything he can to protect the weak and the vulnerable. Mpayipheli thus exhibits the qualities of a hero who has the capacity to restore order. He is uninhibited by the bureaucratic constraints a police officer must overcome. Before killing them, he gives his victims a trial-by-combat, which in his mind constitutes a purer determination of justice than that which can be achieved through the legal trial system. His choice of weapon in these trials—the traditional assegai or spear—reflects the ritualistic nature of his campaign and suggests the notions of honor and duty he associates with his actions. As Captain Ilse Brody, an investigative psychologist consulting on the case, suggests, the assegai invokes values of law and justice that precede the contemporary state power in South Africa (269). Mpayipheli thus sees himself as an executioner, a role traditionally sanctioned by the higher power of a state

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or sovereignty. For a while, he is effective in his cause and arguably succeeds in achieving a form of justice for the children who had been abused by his victims. Moreover, he shows some moral apprehension and remorse for his actions. This hero, although not a detective but a vigilante, is intelligent, street smart, and, above all, honorable. Unexpectedly, however, his vigilantism inspires other crimes and sets off a chain reaction of criminality. Once Mpayipheli’s campaign spirals out of control, it wreaks more damage than it achieves good, in as it results in the death of innocent persons, a murder performed by a copycat, and finally, the brutal gang rape of Carla Griessel. The fallibility of Artemis is proved when Van Rooyen tricks Mpayipheli into eliminating Carlos Sangrenegra, who, despite committing various crimes, is innocent of the kidnapping and molesting of Van Rooyen’s infant daughter, the crime for which he is murdered. 5 When Artemis successfully kills Carlos, the Sangrenegra family swears revenge on Artemis, Van Rooyen, and Griessel. Sadly, instead of bringing a greater measure of order and stability to South African society, Mpayipheli’s heroic vigilantism breeds more chaos and an increase of classically defined evil acts. THE EVIL OF ARTEMIS In Devil’s Peak, Meyer is careful to ultimately advocate that vigilante justice is a dangerous business that will inevitably lead to the injury of innocent parties. Even though Mpayipheli is validated to an extent, the disruption of order occasioned by Mpayipheli’s vigilantism must be redressed. Mpayipheli successfully redeems himself when he helps Griessel to save his daughter, but the crime fiction formula dictates that a villain must be brought to account if order is to be restored. Meyer achieves this by transforming the avenging Artemis-figure into a villain itself. Accordingly, Mpayipheli and Artemis constitute a second binary, and, respectively, fulfill the roles of hero and villain. The internal opposition created between Mpayipheli and his alter ego, Artemis, is more closely tied to a sense of good and evil than that found in the first hero-villain binary of the novel—the opposition between Griessel and Mpayipheli. Heather Worthington (2011) suggests that “crime fiction expresses not only the fear of the criminal and his/her act but the social anxieties aroused by deviance from the norm” (9), although the norm in South Africa is not equilibrium, peace or order. More than anything Artemis causes anxiety because he is outside of control. It is his freedom to act, rather than his actions themselves, that makes him a threat to the social order, however flimsy or provisional that social order may be. It is also this freedom that renders him potentially evil. Warnes (2012) suggests that: “the post-apartheid crime thriller should be read as negotiating [. . .] the threat and uncertainty that many feel to be part of

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South African life, creating fantasies of control, restoration and maintenance, and reflecting on the circumstances that gave rise to this unease” (991). While promising that ideal of social order, Artemis gives rise to such unease. He acts out the fantasy of being able to control violence and brutality—a vigilante fantasy shown to be shared by various other characters—but ultimately he fails. The red tape is shown to have a purpose without which innocents die, and so it is Artemis rather than Mpayepheli who represents evil in Devil’s Peak. Meyer thus reflects complex understandings of evil in his portrayal of Artemis. Traditionally, evil was determined morally and theologically, and relied on the distinctions between good behavior and bad behavior as they relate to conceived higher powers of either good or evil (Cole 2006). In Devil’s Peak, and more generally in South African crime fiction, evil becomes a much more complex question of the transgression of precarious societal norms and systems of order established in the wake of a history of widespread, heinous social and political crimes. The fervent desire for order that characterizes contemporary South African crime fiction is powerfully informed by the enormous need to redress the crimes of an evil past and a consequently corrupt present, and consequently order is ever only partially achieved in this literature. Crimes in South African crime fiction are thus not attributed to any sort of ontological or metaphysical evil, but are rather very insistently associated with the socio-political and historical consequences of South Africa’s past. Meyer often references the legacy of apartheid as well as South Africa’s current struggles with greed and corruption in such a way as to complicate simple notions of good and evil, hero and villain, detective and criminal. The attribution of evil to a human subject living with the legacy of apartheid is thus rendered problematic. Within the framework of the novel, Artemis, a legendary figure determined by mythos and public opinion, becomes the only apt site of evil. Through this characterization, Artemis as villain becomes a symbol for flawed attempts to redress the ills of the past. The complication of the hero-villain binary is also in line with the aspiration toward greater verisimilitude found in modern crime fiction. A sense of good and evil are clearly suggested through the demise of Artemis and the partial triumph of the heroes at the end of the novel. 6 Simultaneously, the neat binary of good and evil is shown to be oversimplistic. Therefore, the fantasy represented by Artemis as a figure is shown to be untenable. Only Mpayipheli remains—the man and erstwhile hero—who engages in vigilantism. To wit, Griessel is forced to reflect on the narrow line between hero and villain in terms of the opposites “of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ two opposites, two separate groups on either side of the law, sure in his belief that there was a definite difference, a dividing line” (Meyer 2007, 203–4). He is forced to conclude that the capacity for criminality is inside of everyone simultaneously.

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This realization leads to Griessel’s defense of the “collective line” (204): “There had to be a system. Order, not chaos. You couldn’t trust an individual to determine justice and apply it. No one was pure, no one was objective, no one was immune” (204). With Griessel functioning as the novel’s main focus, it is understood that the final comment on the issue is that the binary does not suggest integral ontological differences, but rather rests on the figures’ positions in relation to law and society. This difference is made clear in terms of the primary hero-villain binary between Griessel and Mpayipheli, in which the only thing that separates the latter from the former is Griessel’s status as police officer. The power invested in Griessel by his badge and position allows him to get away with murder and assist in Mpayipheli’s escape. What separates Artemis as a figure from Mpayipheli, then, is the fact that the public valorizes Artemis. It is this support and valorization of a figure of disorder that poses a threat to institutional forces and projected social order, thus rendering Artemis a force of evil. Artemis, the false hero and villain must die, while Mpayipheli, the redeemed hero is allowed to live on condition of anonymity. The figure of Artemis, then, is a clear form of poison that engenders further chaos and evil. Warnes (2012) asserts that “Meyer’s novels reject outright the reductionist linking of revenge with justice” (989). While this does not take Griessel’s summary execution of his daughter’s rapists into account, the novel does show the need to eliminate the “Artemis Factor” (141). Artemis’s freedom from the paperwork and procedure required of the police is shown to be a dangerous and misleading liberty. It does not matter that Artemis’s intentions are good. He is undeniably a criminal; regardless of any ethical code, his actions defy the codes of law and social order. As Artemis, Mpayipheli poses a significant threat to the “the human face of state power”—the police (Messent 2010, 180). Artemis is not merely evil because of his transgression of the law, but by his very public transgression of the code of law. 7 His actions, as heroic as they first appear, threaten to delegitimize the forces of order and thereby disrupt the already fragile equilibrium of post-apartheid society. CONCLUSION From the straightforward villains of traditional crime fiction, the criminal in South African crime fiction has evolved into a slippery, sometimes contradictory figure, and this requires a counterforce of equal complexity. What Devil’s Peak demonstrates is that the poles on each side of the hero-villain binary are idealized categories that cannot be realized in any form of fiction that strives toward realism. Pure good and pure evil are not categories suitable to the exploration of so-called real good and real evil as they are widely understood in the South African context. There are

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no perfect heroes and no perfect villains because the turbulent history of South Africa precludes facile formulations of good and evil. Rather, the heroes and villains encountered in South African crime fiction can be placed on this continuum in relation to both the idealized poles and to each other. In Devil’s Peak, the first hero-villain binary may be placed in the center of the continuum, as Mpayipheli and Griessel are divided by a thin line of legality. While Mpayipheli contains the potential to be both poison and antidote, his lack of authority renders his attempts at justice without proper sanction just another form of poison. Mpayipheli only becomes worthy of the title hero when he acts with Griessel under the aegis of Griessel’s authority as a police officer. Therefore, the second binary comes closer to the idealized poles of hero and villain, good and evil. Mpayipheli ultimately and overall proves himself to be a force of good, while the evil perpetrated in publicly transgressing the law is abjected onto the figure of Artemis, who represents misguided attempts to deal with socio-historical evil manifesting of South Africa’s current rampant level of crime. Arguably, in Devil’s Peak, Deon Meyer engages with the notion of evil in a suitably variegated and entangled manner. Meyer’s binaries are drawn from a palimpsest of socio-historical conditions to furnish a meaningful level of verisimilitude that allows for cogent socio-political analysis. The hero is just as troubled by the past as the villain, the detective is just as subject to corruption as the criminal, and the good are just as liable to act criminally as the evil. Paradoxically, this novel depicts the flaws of the system, but still insists on its legitimacy. Consequently, the character, Mpayipheli, is a rich site for the exploration of tensions between good and evil, hero and villain, and in his function as both poison and antidote. The novel takes pains to sensitively depict a common South African fantasy of control, order, and justice by eschewing the traditional methods of portraying evil merely as the person that commits crimes. Hence, the hero-villain binaries in Devil’s Peak, particularly the one situated in the character of Thobela Mpayipheli, contribute significantly toward understanding multifaceted and contextualized incarnations of evil. NOTES 1. South Africa was colonized by the Dutch and then by the British from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. During this period, thousands of indigenous peoples were dispossessed, enslaved, or slaughtered. In the twentieth century, a white minority government led by the National Party instituted an iniquitous and oppressive system of racial segregation known as apartheid. After decades of struggle or civil war, the country had its first democratic elections in 1994 when Nelson Mandela, the most famous anti-apartheid struggle hero, became its first black president.

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2. For more on South African crime fiction’s capacity for social analysis, see Naidu Sam and Beth Le Roux, “South African Crime Fiction: Sleuthing the State Post-1994,” African Identities 12. 3–4 (2014): 283–94. 3. Meyer is an Afrikaans-language crime fiction author who has gained international acclaim. His works, which are indisputably postcolonial and post-apartheid, have been translated into twenty-seven languages and have won numerous national and international awards such as the ATKV Prize for Best Suspense Fiction in South Africa, the Barry Award for Best Thriller in the USA, the Martin Beck Award from the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers, Le Prix Mystère De La Critique in France, and the Deutsche Krimi Preis in Germany. 4. “Bush justice” is common South African parlance for punishment without trial, due process, or any form of legal system, which includes vigilantism. 5. Figures such as Carlos, as well as the corrupt policeman, “Boef” Beukes, are arguably more morally dubious than Mpayipheli, and can be adequately described as villainous characters. However, they perform auxiliary roles that complicate rather than spark the action, and thus they do not qualify as the primary villains of the text. 6. As will be discussed, Artemis as a figure is defeated even though Mpayipheli is set free by Griessel. The demise of this figure, which comes to signify the flawed and dangerous vigilante fantasy, is necessary to the restoration of the semblance of order. 7. In Devil’s Peak, Griessel himself flagrantly transgresses the same law. However, he is able to act under the aegis of police authority, and he successfully covers up his actions. Thus the defining difference is that Griessel’s transgression remains within the bounds of order due to the sanction afforded by his position, but also due to the relative anonymity of his act.

REFERENCES Abrams, M. H., and Geoffrey Harpham. 2009. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. Alsford, Mike. 2007. Heroes and Villains. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Cole, Philip. 2006. The Myth of Evil: Demonizing the Enemy. Westport, CT: Praeger. Culler, Jonathan. 1975. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge. Messent, Peter. 2010. “The Police Novel.” In A Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Charles Rzepka and Lee Horsley, 175–86. Chichester, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Meyer, Deon. 2007. Devil’s Peak. Translated by K L Seegers. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Meyer, Deon. 2012. 7 Days. Translated by K L Seegers. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Naidu, Sam. 2013. “Review Article: Fears and Desires in South African Crime Fiction.” Journal of South African Studies 39 (3): 727–38. Naidu, Sam and Beth Le Roux. 2014. “South African Crime Fiction: Sleuthing the State Post- 1994.” African Identities 12 (3–4): 283–94. O’Faolain, Sean. 1935 “Give Us Back Bill Sikes.” The Spectator. 15 February. Accessed 25 Sept 2016. http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/15th-february-1935/11/give-usback-bill-sikes-by-sean-ofaolain-c-alvinis. Propp, Vladimir. (1958) 1968. Morphology of the Folktale. Translated by Laurence Scott. Austin: University of Texas Press. Rzepka, Charles. 2010. Introduction to A Companion to Crime Fiction. Edited by Charles Rzepka and Lee Horsley, 1–10. Chichester, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Scaggs, John. 2005. Crime Fiction. London: Routledge. Warnes, Christopher. 2012. “Writing Crime in the New South Africa: Negotiating Threat in the Novels of Deon Meyer and Margie Orford.” Journal of Southern African Studies, 38 (4): 981–91. Worthington, Heather. 2011. Key Concepts in Crime Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

NINE Ghosts of the Old South The Evils of Slavery and the Haunted House in Royal Street Brian Johnson

In the ghost story, the ghost presents an irrefutable witness to evil. A ghost is somebody (or something) who not only experienced the event but also, through the mystery of spectral geography and temporality, seems to be continually experiencing it. Unfortunately, such veracity is generally confirmed (or always confirmed, depending on one’s belief), not by the ghost, but by its secondary witness: the ghost story. While a ghost story is no more or less an account than any other narrative, it attempts to point not only to real events (insofar as the ghost story suggests that it is true), but to an irrefutable historical and moral witness with a present and verifiable existence: if the ghost is real, then this story and its moral are ordained as true. In the ghost story, the ghost is real because people can encounter it still—unlike the historical event which can no longer be encountered. The ghost story’s popularity comes from how it parallels the assumptions about good and evil within the culture of the story’s teller and his or her audience. In line with historical authority, the ghost carries with it a kind of moral authority, as ghosts are born, according to common features of ghost stories, through gross moral objections. Jan Harold Brunvand (1981) suggests that this moral function is predominantly social in nature: ghost stories, like urban legends, reflect the accepted social mores of their audience as well as the person telling the story. Brunvand’s critical framework nicely addresses the role of myths within modern society, 131

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especially those that include supernatural components; it does not inherently suggest a reason why some narratives are haunted, whereas others are, by comparison, fairly mundane. Avery Gordon (2008) suggests that narratives become haunted precisely because there exists an important, and otherwise ignored, alternative to the historical narrative as it has become canonized. Thus, the ghost story emerges when a social definition of evil needs reinforcement through mythic narrative and this need is enforceable only through a marginalized historical account. Not surprisingly, then, the American South is replete with stories of slave ghosts that describe the way of life of the Antebellum South in order to proclaim the evils of the American slave system. They appear to tell it like it was: a goal that has and has had both political and personal implications. They offer a firsthand account of a historic period filled with ugly details. Moreover, they can be very specific in their condemnation about what it was, exactly, about chattel slavery that made it morally transgressive against a Divine Law. Canonical history, on the other hand, tends to describe the system of slavery in general terms, condemning it in broad strokes. Finally, the ghost stories are verified in their account of both history and morality by the actual ghosts, which the stories assure their audience, can still be encountered. Nevertheless, the stories of the ghosts suggest a means of exonerating the general enterprise of slavery by calling attention to the particular sins that generate ghosts. After all, not every dead slave becomes a ghost. The narratives, then, offer a kind of description of when slavery in the Old South crossed the line to transgress Divine Law. The ghost story is a description of which parts of slavery, which acts committed against slaves, might be considered evil. However, in doing so, these narratives also suggest that slavery itself was not evil enough, on its own, to generate ghosts. HAUNTING HISTORY A ghost is not someone who had experienced and now (perhaps fallibly) remembers an event. The ghostly soldier that rushes across the battlefield as he once did in life takes the same footfalls in his course as he did the moment he died. If walls now impede, he passes through them, following the historical course. This perpetual re-enactment witnesses in a primary mode not accessible through other forms; after all, a soldier’s story of what happened at the Battle of Antietam is not the Battle of Antietam itself. Such accounts are approached as secondary sources because they are subject to caprices of memory and the caprices of trauma. Even now, when cameras allow for a narrative constructed during an event, still we recognize enough influences—technological and rhetorical—for the audience to keep from calling what they see the undeniable truth of the event.

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However, once the position of a ghost is accepted—a necessary prerequisite of the ghost story—it is impossible to look at such a specter and consider it a mere interpretation of the events. The performance of the specter is the event happening in perpetuity, or at least until its ghostly routine fades away according to some unknown logic of the netherworld. In this capacity, as evidence, a ghost story presents a rhetorical shift toward historical veracity. The story’s ghost has a special rhetorical function in its existence authenticates the history that engendered it. This is not to say that ghosts are real, only that this is their rhetorical function. The ghost repeats history, or from its point of view, is a thing that does not (or cannot) differentiate between the past and the present, and because of this inability, has a rhetoric that is ahistorical: a position which, if taken seriously, is particularly unique. The ghost’s a-historicity is part of a narrative that acts as a kind of missive. This missive is a story of not only how it was but also a suggestion of what evil really is, and it utilizes the ghost to verify this moral edict. This is specifically because of the selective process by which specters are chosen. Not everyone who dies gets a ghost, or at least a ghost story. When victim or witness to events which transcend the moral law of a deity, the ghost should move on to a different spiritual plane according to Divine Law about death, 1 but it doesn’t because the evil that produces it cannot be accounted for in a divine order. Thus, a creature is born, the ghost, which also exists outside of divine order, as evidence of that evil and as a commemoration of an event representing the vast folly of human beings. Ghosts, if they exist, exist as an irrefutable witness to an evil great enough to disturb the divinely ordained morality of the universe. The legends, or ghost stories, help promote moral virtues in the story, as in the story of the vanishing hitchhiker, from which Brunvand’s work, The Vanishing Hitchhiker (1981) takes its name. This theme of ghost story centers on the repercussions of reckless behavior by teenagers. The ghost is always the result, in this legend, of some particularly deadly act that results in a spirit who must forever flag down drivers for a ride home to its parents. Commonly, the story suggests the dangers of drinking and driving on prom night. Its moral concerns a social evil (drunk driving), and the ghost manifests because the loss of young life seems to lurk outside of divine moral law. While Brunvand’s work offers a theory of socially dominant ideology and its relationship to divine order, this critical framework does not offer a clear model for engaging with the ghost story as historical artifact. Gordon’s (2008) strategies account for this historical function. She posits that historical narrative is generally produced by removing mention of details which would prove overly complicated. Thus, these narratives, still factual and discoverable, remain on the fringes of the accepted historical account and haunting them. Taken together, these theoretical per-

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spectives identify the larger role of the ghost story in defining evil for a given society, and especially for the Antebellum South. THE CASE OF MADAME LALAURIE There are potentially thousands of ghost stories throughout the American South that could demonstrate the rhetorical nature of the ghost story as it pertains to the evil of slavery, both those popular at the time and those that have continued to be popular since. For the sake of space, one particular ghost story will do: perhaps one of the most famous ghost stories of the American canon—the story of Madame Delphine LaLaurie and her haunted house at 1140 Royal Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana. The story achieved notoriety outside the city through its account by Harriet Martineau (1838) in her travel narrative of the Old South, the second volume in her three-volume account titled Retrospect of Western Travel. It was later described and made famous by George Washington Cable (1889) in his short story “The ‘Haunted House’ in Royal Street,” which was included in his collection of short stories, Strange True Stories of Louisiana. Since the 1834 incidents that originally inspired the legend, the haunted house on Royal Street has been a staple of local legends and haunted tours of the city. In modern times, the house has appeared on numerous ghost hunter reality television shows, while Madame Delphine LaLaurie herself, the story’s villain, was included as a character, played by actress Kathy Bates, in the third season of American Horror Story (2013). As these few examples highlight, the tale has had numerous retellings in a variety of different settings. Unsurprisingly, as cultural values toward slavery have evolved, variations in the story are notable. Moreover, the story has been told from multiple views, both outside and inside the culture of New Orleans. Martineau was a French travel writer; her account is unsympathetic to the system of slavery in general. Cable was a Southerner, and his account commented upon the trials of Reconstruction. Finally, the story of the house has a somewhat objective existence in that the discovery of the horrors in Madame Delphine’s home were cataloged by all the major New Orleans newspapers in publication at that time. The haunted house on Royal Street acts as a narrative repository for the values and attitudes which define slavery and what each culture saw as the evils of the slavery system. While these various versions offer differences in the narrative, commonalities exist between all of them. In each of the stories, Madame Delphine LaLaurie is a twice-widowed French Creole woman who, along with her daughters, lives with her third husband, a dentist, in a mansion on the corner of Royal and Canal Street in New Orleans. In all accounts, Madame Delphine aroused her neighbors’ suspicions when she was wit-

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nessed chasing one of her young female slaves across the rooftop of her mansion, a pursuit that ended in the slave falling three stories to her death. Because of this mistreatment, the civil authority intervened and took the rest of Madame Delphine’s slaves away. Using her family to repurchase the slaves, Madame LaLaurie then secreted them away in her attic where they went, more or less, unseen. During this period, the slaves were subject to daily torture, the extent of which varies by account. Eventually the house’s cook, who spent her life chained to the stove, decided to burn the house down during a dinner party in order to escape her torment. The guests, realizing the disaster, set about rescuing the slaves, against the remonstrations of LaLaurie herself. Busting down the door to the attic, they discovered LaLaurie’s cavalcade of horrors: slaves who had been starved and beaten. They were rescued from the attic, and Madame LaLaurie’s crimes were brought to light. As news of the crime spread, a crowd began to gather around the house on Royal Street. Seeking justice, the citizens of New Orleans threatened to turn violent against Madame LaLaurie for her crimes. At the last possible moment, Delphine made her escape by coach along the old canal road to parts unknown, and almost all of the stories speculate about Madame LaLaurie’s fate. Incensed by this flagrant injustice, the crowd took to the flame damaged house, destroying what remained of the LaLaurie’s property, and demolishing the house. In every version of the story, Madame LaLaurie’s introduction, prior to the rooftop chase, suggests a strange relation to her slaves. Martineau and Cable, for instance, both point out that Madame LaLaurie had a healthy slave as her coachman. At dinner parties, she was famous for giving the last of her wine to a waiter for his health. The depiction is meant to indicate hypocrisy. In front of others, LaLaurie behaves humanely to her slaves. It is only behind doors and the prying eyes of her neighbors, that her attitude becomes sadistic. This event allows for both authors to introduce their tale of Madame Delphine LaLaurie with an explanation that, while LaLaurie isn’t meant to be representative of every slave holder, she is a good example of the kind of excesses that are allowed to occur because of slavery. Cable’s narrative account of Madame Delphine LaLaurie, her sadism, her chamber of horrors, and the rescue of her slaves follows Martineau’s closely, even as both ignore certain features of the narrative that were generated by the newspaper. These similarities suggest that either Cable used Martineau as his source material or, more likely, the local legend that had shaped Martineau’s account was also shaped by it. In any case, Cable includes enough elements that are likely fictional within his narrative to suggest that his source includes more than just the journalistic reporting of the day.

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Nevertheless, three revelatory differences exist between Martineau and Cable’s version of Madame LaLaurie and her infamous house, and these highlight the differences in their accounts of the evils of slavery. The first is that Martineau imbeds her account among her own eyewitness testimony regarding the everyday treatment of slaves. Cable’s story, too, shares its narrative space, but in the case of his narrative, the short story is composed of two complementary narratives: the story of the house before the end of slavery and an event in the house’s history from the era of Reconstruction. The second primary difference between the two accounts is their description of the composition of the mob that destroys the LaLaurie mansion after it has already been gutted by fire. Martineau’s story is not a ghost story, whereas Cable begins his tale with a ghostly introduction of doors opening by themselves and the sound of footfalls moving up and down the staircase to the attic. And the greatest difference is that, in Martineau’s story, the crowd is composed primarily of white gentlemen. In Cable’s story, that same crowd is composed of citizens from all social ranks, including Europeans and Africans, free and slave. CAVEAT LECTOR Martineau begins her description of the house with a disclaimer. She locates in her description not her own compunction, but the discomfort of her source, a coachman who tells her the story. Martineau writes of her hearing the tale, “I was requested on the spot not to publish it as exhibiting a fair specimen of slave-holding in New Orleans and no one could suppose it to be so: but it is a revelation of what may happen in a slaveholding country, and can happen nowhere else.” Beginning the disclaimer with “I was requested” (Martineau 1838, 136), Martineau calls attention that the coachman who relates the tale—and not she—is distressed by correlating LaLaurie’s behavior with all slaveholders. She is, ultimately, opposed to the system of legal slavery. Martineau’s caveats against passing judgment on the slave system by way of LaLaurie as an example is complex and not entirely endorsed by her narrative. Martineau was told the tale shortly after the actual incident. The major New Orleans newspaper printed stories of the LaLaurie slaves and their torture in 1834, and Martineau wrote down the story in 1838 during her travels in New Orleans. At that time, while the events of 1140 Royal Street hadn’t yet become history, they seem to have already passed into the realm of urban legend, based on the discrepancies between the 1834 journalistic and the 1838 oral account. The coachman’s caution is thus contemporaneous with the slave system. This raconteur wants it plainly known that LaLaurie is not indicative of how all slaveholders are, not how all slaveholders were. By stressing the nature of

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present slave owners, his caveat seeks to redeem the institution from LaLaurie’s evil. Martineau condemns the institution of slavery when she displaces any discomfort with LaLaurie as iconic slaveholder onto the southern citizen. In fact, Martineau’s willingness is important to understanding the rest of the account of New Orleans, which depends upon her critique of, and contempt for, its slave-owning culture. For instance, when describing the religious indoctrination of slaves, she explains: I could not but think that if the undisguised story of Jesus were presented to these last, as it was to the fishermen of Galilee, and the peasants on the reedy banks of Jordan, they would embrace a Christianity, in comparison with which their present religion is an unintelligible and ineffectual mythology. But such a primitive Christianity they, as slaves, never will and never can have as its whole spirit is destructive of slavery. (Martineau 1838, 130)

Regarding the violence of sexual assault on slaves, she writes, “none but a virtuous mistress can fully protect a female slave, and that too seldom” (Martineau 1838, 147). In other words, Martineau’s description of New Orleans, even without its mention of Madame LaLaurie is already a rather scathing indictment of the slave system. Though the story of LaLaurie and her torture of her slaves is presented as exceptional, its horror is only a slight exaggeration of the immorality that surrounds Martineau throughout the description of her time in New Orleans. In this way, Martineau’s caveat differs significantly from Cable’s, who published his account in 1889. For Cable, it was not a question of contemporaneous judgment, but rather the hindsight of history looking back on an event more than fifty years old, as well as the slavery system that had ended when the Emancipation Proclamation was enforced in 1865. In his version, Cable ([1889] 2012) definitively differentiates Madame LaLaurie from other slaveholders: “Madame LaLaurie, let it be plainly understood, was only another possibility, not a type. The two stories teach the same truth: that a public practice is answerable for whatever can happen easier with it than without it, no matter whether it must, or only may, happen” (187). In both cases, then, Martineau’s and Cable’s, some effort is made to present Madame LaLaurie as being a breed apart from other slaveholders. The effect is to suggest that the system allows for the kind of torture performed by LaLaurie and to suggest that this horror was, itself, severe enough to stand out as the evil of slavery (as opposed to slavery itself being evil enough to merit its own horror story without the introduction of Madame Delphine LaLaurie). In the case of Cable, and in accounts following his, the evil is enough to explain the ghosts of slaves in the house. To be fair to Cable, the part of the story that had become suppressed was not the violence of slavery in particular. While Cable’s story clearly

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indicates that Madame Delphine LaLaurie should be taken as an exceptionally sadistic slaveholder, other stories of the violence of slavery had and have since been brought forward for public consumption. The culture of Cable, and of America thereafter, includes the horror stories of slavery as part of its canonical historical narratives. In fact, the book that includes “The ‘Haunted House’ in Royal Street” is a collection of horror stories written by Cable concerning slavery and slave-owning culture. His conjecture—which he delivers as the story’s principal narrator, rather than as secondhand telling like Martineau does—is to be taken without irony. Madame Delphine LaLaurie, for Cable, is not representative of all slave owners, and the evil she committed upon her slave, while made possible by the slave system, is different than the evils of the slave system itself. A GHOST STORY? The evil of Madame Delphine LaLaurie, then, had no reason to be retold as a ghost story during the period of the Antebellum South. There was no reason to establish historical verity, for instance. When Martineau recounted the story, it had only been four years since its occurrence. She claims to have met people who were there and who saw the events as they happened; she even claims to have met the lawyer who witnessed the rooftop chase and who made the complaint that initially cost Madame LaLaurie her slaves. 2 The house, when Martineau visits it, still stands in ruins as proof of the place’s immoral history. Moreover, the denizens of New Orleans had no need to establish Madame LaLaurie’s crimes as existing outside of divine justice. Quite the contrary, the whole point of the story in 1838 was to establish the ability of New Orleans’s citizenry to establish justice by rising up against the evil of slave mistreatment. The gentlemen of New Orleans, Martineau recounts, “organized themselves into a patrol, to watch the city, night and day, till the commotion should have subsided. They sent circulars to all proprietors suspected of cruelty, warning them that the eyes of the city were upon them” (Martineau 1838, 143). The wronged slaves did not need to return from the graves in their thirst for justice. Their plight, as described to Martineau, had been avenged: the evil inflicted upon slaves, as committed by the sadistic Madame Delphine LaLaurie, would no longer be tolerated. The evil of slavery could be dealt with by the city’s morally upright slave owners. The lack of ghosts in Martineau’s tale is worth noting in that it is exceptional: almost all non-journalistic depictions of the house revel in its haunting. Yet, this lack is, however, hardly difficult to explain. Assuming the prerequisites for haunting as described by Gordon, what is first required for a narrative to become haunted is that it represents a subverted

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and alternative form to accepted history. For Martineau, the narrative isn’t subverted, but rather the opposite. The coachman is happy to tell Martineau the story of Madame Delphine LaLaurie because, for him, it is a description of New Orleans’s ability to police the evils spawned by its own excesses. He is happy to recount the tale to an outsider because it is not about the evils of slavery. The story that Martineau is told is about the evils of a woman, Madame LaLaurie, and the ability of slave owners to rise up and do what is necessary to prevent someone within their own ranks from exploiting the system to sadistic ends. The subverted narrative for Martineau is, instead, the total absence of stories about slaves, slavery, and the abuses caused by the slave system within the municipal voice of the city: its newspapers. She writes: I could never get out of the way of the horrors of slavery in this region. Under one form or another, they met me in every house, in every street; everywhere but in the intelligence pages of newspapers, where I might read on in perfect security of exemption from the subject. In the advertising columns, there were offers of reward for runaways, restored dead or alive; and notices of the capture of a fugitive with so many brands on his limbs and shoulders, and so many scars on his back. But from the other half of the newspaper, the existence of slavery could be discovered only by inference. What I saw elsewhere was, however, dreadful enough. (Martineau 1838, 143)

For Martineau, the evil of slavery is, first and foremost, slavery itself. Second, its evil is the degree to which discussion of the immorality of slavery is missing from daily conversation. The story of Madame LaLaurie is mentioned because it indicates the lack of recognition for the implications that the slaveholding society has for its own activity: what Madame LaLaurie did to her slaves was evil; what everyone else does to their slaves, by comparison, isn’t. The story’s social function, then, to the coachman who tells it to Martineau is different than what Martineau believes the story reveals about the evils of slavery. For the coachman, the horrors discovered in the LaLaurie attic were only tangentially related to slavery. Moreover, the system of slavery saves the mistreated slaves and, having discovered the potential, stands vigilant against further abuse. For Martineau, the evils of the slave system are not open for discussion except when they spill out into the excessive cruelty of Madame Delphine LaLaurie. Martineau does not consider LaLaurie to be an exception. Instead she writes: In reply to inquiries, I was told that it was very possible that cruelties like those of Madame LaLaurie might be incessantly in course of perpetration. It may be doubted whether any more such people exist: but if they do, there is nothing to prevent their following her example with impunity, as long as they can manage to preserve that secrecy which was put an end to by accident in her case. (Martineau 1838, 143)

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Her indication is that the narratives of other LaLauries flourish within the silence of the slave system. The story, for her, proves haunting because it is an unaddressed inevitability; countless other LaLauries must exist who haven’t yet been revealed by some house fire. The evil of Madame Delphine LaLaurie isn’t, for Martineau, particularly exceptional—except that it alone is a point of public discussion about the evils of slavery. Whereas the evil of Madame LaLaurie proves haunting to Martineau, for Cable the house itself is haunted. Again, the critical theories of Brunvand and Gordon provide a cogent explanation for the presence of the ghosts. Between Martineau and Cable’s account, America had gone through radical changes in its political climate. By 1889, the bygone period of legal slavery was beginning to be understood as a stain on the country’s history. The story of the moral slave-owning populace became, at that point, the subverted narrative, though a narrative particularly precious to the people of New Orleans, a city whose history and economic prosperity had been built through slave labor. The story of Madame Delphine LaLaurie and the evils she committed in her attic were beginning to be seen as a narrative of slavery that was becoming increasingly taboo. For Cable, what is clearly evil in his narrative is the loss of the social order introduced by the slave system. That order, though it produced Madame Delphine LaLaurie, was preferable to a lack of order which would, in effect, turn the entire South into a violent racist mob. The suppressed narrative, at least as far as Cable is concerned, is the exact narrative that the coachman relates to Martineau: that the good people of the South could police the evils of the system, or more precisely, that slavery kept the men and women of New Orleans morally upright. This narrative, or perhaps myth, so fell out of favor that it became a kind of suppressed version of the South, a history that became impolitic to discuss. Certainly Martineau did not believe it. Cable, on the other hand, attempted to reinforce it by comparing the morality of the South, in general, during the era before and after the end of slavery. He thereby created a demonstrable means of judging the morality of the slave system that ran counter to (and continues to run counter to) common assumptions about the slave system. This is not to suggest that the system of chattel slavery was moral, but rather that any narrative which attempted to speak of morality within the slave system was, necessarily, suppressed and forced to exist at the margins of accepted history. It fell into the kinds of narrative that Gordon (2008) suggests haunt us, and as a result, the house became haunted. The ghosts in Cable’s narrative serve to reinforce his version of both history and morality. That the horrors of 1140 Royal Street actually happened is not in question, though there may be some speculation as to their particulars. 3 The ghosts are not there, then, to verify that there really were ten slaves either murdered or tortured by Madame Delphine La-

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Laurie. That much is part of the historical record and can be verified through newspapers. What is verified by the ghosts is the uniqueness of Madame LaLaurie’s crimes—that she was exceptional and not a repercussion of the system at large. Martineau suggests the torture of slaves was everywhere only a degree short of that conducted in the privacy of the LaLaurie attic, or countless LaLauries lurked throughout New Orleans, or even the American South. If she is correct, the spectral logic runs, there should be comparable hauntings. The LaLaurie house, the Shame of the City as it is called by tour guides on New Orleans’s infamous haunted tours, should be one haunted house among countless others, if such aberrant evils were truly endemic to the institution of Antebellum slavery. The ghosts support the idea that the evil of Madame Delphine LaLaurie was unique. Her tale is yet another discussion of human sadism; its relation to the evils of slavery only tangential. If Cable is to be believed, only the city’s need for justice can be held as the product of the slave system on social morals. If it were otherwise, why is it only 1140 Royal Street that is haunted in this manner? Note, this does not suggest that ghosts actually exist. Though to be fair, if interaction with ghosts is any indication, the sheer number of reported encounters with ghosts in or near the haunted house on Royal Street makes the location rightly considered one of the most haunted places in America. Regardless of one’s beliefs in ghosts, though, in the ghost story, a narrative of morality exists alongside a narrative of condemnation. The slave system has been condemned as a historic evil. Slave owners have likewise been condemned along with it. Any narrative which attempts to invoke the virtue of that society must, necessarily, exist on the margins, and, as Gordon points out, historical narratives that exist on the margins become ghost stories. Moreover, these particular ghosts act as evidence of a white supremacist vision of the history of New Orleans. They return from the grave because their treatment was beyond divine justice. Thus, the thousands of slaves who died from their condition and did not return from the grave remain inside of the divine order of the universe because their treatment wasn’t evil enough to merit their return as apparitions. If one imagines Madame Delphine LaLaurie as a violent slave owner, the story seems to suggest that slavery is wrong, but only if she is like other slave owners (as with the account of Martineau). When the story becomes, instead, about the civic responsibility of slave owners to police their actions (as in Cable’s version), when LaLaurie is made to seem exceptional, the story becomes a testament to the Antebellum South’s sense of justice. The presence of the ghosts indicate that LaLaurie is exceptional. In Cable’s version, in particular, the existence of the racist crowd, the White League, offsets the virtue of the slave-owning crowd from 1834 who are willing to look past race in order that justice prevail.

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MOB MENTALITY Despite the importance of these two differences, the major narrative deviation between Cable’s tale and Martineau’s relates to the demographics of the crowd that surround the house after the slaves have been revealed. For Martineau, the crowd consists of “yelling Gentlemen” (Martineau 1838, 141), mostly French Creoles. Madame Delphine LaLaurie was herself a French Creole. Martineau makes a point that the French Creoles tended to band together against American law. In fact, part of what protected LaLaurie from the Americans was the social rule of French Creole society. Thus, they were particularly enraged when they discovered that they had, all along, been protecting a sadist. In this commentary, Martineau seems to endorse the exceptionalism of LaLaurie, creating a complex counterpoint to her reliance on the coachman in the introduction to the story. Despite similarly relying on social exceptionalism, Cable’s report of the crowd that destroys the LaLaurie mansion identifies a very different, culturally significant demographic and reinforces the point through reference to journalism contemporary with the event: The human tempest fell upon it, and “in a few minutes,” says “The Courier,” “the doors and windows were broken open, the crowd rushed in, and the work of destruction began.” “Those who rush in are of all classes and colors” continues “The Courier” of next day; but “No, no!” says a survivor of to-day who was there and took part; “we wouldn’t have allowed that!” (Cable [1889] 2012, 216)

Cable calls attention to the discrepancy between the crowds in these two accounts, whether or not the crowd could have been mixed. Cable’s attention to this confusion indicates that LaLaurie’s evil was so transgressive that it superseded the social order of New Orleans, including the order that separated slaves from slaveholders. All colors and classes in New Orleans, according to Cable, were united in their condemnation of Madame LaLaurie’s sadism. The slaves who had lived through the daily evil of slavery as described by Martineau saw the particular evil on Royal Street as exceptional. Thus, like the coachman who tells Martineau the story initially, Cable’s narrative is an attempt to show that, when faced with real evil, the people of New Orleans were able to self-police. Moreover, this vigilance belonged not only to the slaveholders but to their slaves, as well. The story ultimately vindicates the slave system. Though it does not suggest that it is free of evil, it does suggest that such evil is rare because it is noteworthy. Moreover, it suggests that when such evil is discovered, all of the slaveholding culture would unify together against it. Finally, it suggests that the evil is exceptional because it produces ghosts.

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To further illustrate this point, Cable includes another chapter in the house’s history and another mob against which he can contrast the attitudes toward evil of the Antebellum and Reconstruction eras. Concerning the effect of Reconstruction on the moral fiber of white southerners, he writes: [T]he masters, trained for generations in the conviction that public safety and private purity were possible only by the subjection of the black race under the white, loathed civil equality as but another name for private companionship, and spurned, as dishonor and destruction in one, the restoration of their sovereignty at the price of political copartnership with the groveling race they had bought and sold and subjected easily to the leash and lash. (Cable [1889] 2012, 219)

The selection taken from the story is demonstrative of a general antipathy toward the former slaves, but of special note is the Cable’s commentary about public safety and private purity. This section comes, after all, on the coattails of a narrative about an individual whose own private purity was otherwise allowed to be nonexistent because of the slave system and whose acts of evil became so excessive that they threatened public safety, and then transgressive of Divine Laws enough to generate ghosts. The suggestion here is that a similar attitude, though less conspicuously sadistic, was beginning to take hold as a norm for Southern society in general. This next chapter of the house’s history concentrates on an attempt by the provisional and corrupt government to integrate the school systems of the South in 1874. The result is that the house at 1140 Royal Street is turned into a private academy for girls living in New Orleans. Moreover, it is integrated by girls of all races. When, according to Cable, the provisional government falters by its own internal corruption, it gives rise to citizen groups who oppose integration and who are otherwise inclined toward issues of racial superiority. The second part of the story recounts another mob, the White League as they are called, coming to the house and demanding that the school surrender students of African or Native descent. In relation to the earlier part of the story, the chapters which describe Madame Delphine LaLaurie, there is almost no connection except that both stories take place in the same house. In a more general way, both parts of the story seem to center loosely on issues of race, though in such a way that the connections between the two stories seem tenuous at best. The story of the integrated school is not really an afterword to the LaLaurie story (and the LaLaurie story doesn’t particularly function well as a prologue). The two narratives, quite frankly, do not seem to belong together. If there is any connection between the two parts of the story, it is the mob, especially in that the mob, between the two eras, changes its mo-

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tives entirely. The mob that destroys the LaLaurie mansion in the first part of the story does so because the sadism of Madame Delphine LaLaurie is unique. Antebellum New Orleans society has engendered the members of the mob with a sense of justice which countermands even the need for racial segregation. While Cable cautions his reader that a social institution is responsible for the evils that are made more permissible under its control, the attitude and constituency of the mob suggest that the culture of slave ownership produced only one LaLaurie, as well an entire society to rally against her. Condemnation of LaLaurie, under the umbrella of slave-owning culture, is universal because Madame Delphine LaLaurie’s crimes transgress Divine Law. By comparison, Reconstruction creates an entire race of white men who, rather than stand guard against the excesses of racial violence and brutality, actively surround schools for adolescent girls, hold students in judgment, and then haul young girls of African descent away amid sobs and cries of terror. For Cable, Reconstruction produces the amoral society that is permissive of evil attitudes across its social order: the mixed race mob is replaced, because of Reconstruction, with a mob of racial supremacists, all of whom threaten the same kind of transgression against Divine Law as LaLaurie. Cable posits a romantic version of slave-owning society in which racial stratification resulted in social morality, and the dystopic repercussions of the Reconstruction era in which social orders having suffered upheaval resulted in a generally condoned sense of public immorality. He is not suggesting that violence against adolescent girls is tolerable, but he is suggesting that in the Antebellum South, such violence was the result of a lone psychopath, and in the era of Reconstruction, the kinds of attitudes that prompted such violence were common and publicly condoned. If the audience misses the connection, Cable’s ([1889] 2012) reminder is sufficient: There, in the rooms that had once resounded with the screams of Madame LaLaurie’s little slave fleeing to her death, and with the hootings and maledictions of the enraged mob, was being tried the experiment of a common enjoyment of public benefits by the daughters of two widely divergent races, without the enforcement of private social companionship. (220)

The calm that Cable describes, though occasionally reinforced by a reminder of LaLaurie and the house’s terrible past (through doors that open by themselves and the sound of disembodied footfalls), turns out to be short-lived. Once at the door, the White League begins the school’s forced segregation.

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THE MOST HAUNTED HOUSE IN AMERICA Interestingly enough, the tale has not simply disappeared, despite the importune nature of its message. The house is still considered haunted. In fact, it is one of the most notoriously haunted spots in New Orleans. The ghosts still apparate, now and again, to reinforce the racist history of Antebellum justice and the virtues associated with slave ownership. The changes in the narrative since the telling of Cable are too many and various to catalog here. They all have, however, the same function. Where Cable emphasized the Reconstruction mob to contrast the Antebellum mob, new versions of the LaLaurie story do not so much concern themselves with the house’s history as an integrated school. This is perhaps because the house has since garnered more torrid and infamous moments in its history to mention, or perhaps it’s because the history and horrors of Reconstruction are simply no longer fresh enough to make proper fodder for a good horror story. Instead, the stories have, without exception, concentrated on the violence inflicted upon the slaves. According to newspaper reports concerning the condition of the slaves upon their rescue, all eight were starved and whipped. One had scars from head to toe that were infested with worms, and one women had a hole in her head. Of the eight, one had to be carried to the street. The others made it down two flights of stairs with the help of their rescuers. Once on the street, two died because of hasty attempts to bring them nourishment. The other six made it to court and bore witness against their mistress. Two more slaves are not mentioned in the newspaper. One, the little girl who ran across the roof, is not part of public record. The other, the cook who first started the fire, appears to have been killed by it. The majority of their injuries were the result of starvation and heavy whipping, not the fire. This cavalcade of horrors has been augmented in modern retellings. The coterie now often includes a number of additional characters, including a man whose face was cut up top-to-bottom, and side-to-side and then stitched shut, a woman whose every joint was broken so that she could easily be kept in a locked box (a.k.a. the Spider), a woman whose limbs had been amputated and who crawled around by pulling herself with her chin (a.k.a. the caterpillar) (Smith 1998, 19). During the third season of American Horror Story, Madame Delphine LaLaurie was included as a character and the list of tortures was expanded upon even more. At one point, she sows a bull’s head onto a man turning him into a living Minotaur (“Bitchcraft” 2013). When the third season of the show ended, and the fourth season began (set in a carnival), the tours of the house on Royal Street began to include new details concerning the spider: her box was stamped so that it could be mailed to a local sideshow.

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While these grotesque details have probably been added to make the story ever more horrific, and therefore, ever more valuable to the tour guide who makes a living telling them, they nonetheless continue to reinforce the myth as it stands. Instead of introducing a Reconstructionist white supremacist mob to verify a change in the moral universe of New Orleans before and after the end of slavery, these violent scenes serve to make Madame Delphine LaLaurie’s evil exceptional and in no way part of the practices of the slave system as a whole. Interestingly enough, it is still the public outcry of a mob that signals a social definition of evil. However, in New Orleans now that mob is composed of tourists. They accept the history of the house because it is haunted; the presence of the ghosts testifies to that history. Being ghosts, they also testify to the moral definition of evil that the house offers, as problematic as that history may be. They accept that Madame Delphine LaLaurie was exceptional. They accept that this exception defines evil, that the ghosts return because of the evil, and that, as there are ghosts, the whole thing must be true. The new mob, however, has the other history of slavery to deal with as they attempt to incorporate the narrative of Delphine LaLaurie, and this makes the tale all the more complicated. It is no longer possible to point at Delphine LaLaurie as the thing that was wrong with slavery, since so many other evils are now a matter of public record. As a result, the narrator of her horror seeks out ever more exceptional descriptions. It changes from tragic to sadistic, and from sadistic to grotesque. The ghosts appear to verify whatever tale is told about them. Ultimately, though, the tale continues to reinforce a white supremacist version of history. As with Martineau, the crowds that gather for the ghost tours of New Orleans are told the story of Madame Delphine LaLaurie second hand, but unlike Martineau, they cannot wonder at whether what happened at 1140 Royal Street was common elsewhere—no other such places are part of the ghost tour. They must accept that LaLaurie’s crimes alone transgressed Divine Law, that it alone was evil, that the rest of the slave system (however bad it was) was not evil in this way, and that, finally, the good people of New Orleans, during a time when slavery was legal, came out to rescue LaLaurie’s poor slaves and to tear down the house where violence against slaves had become common. Though they might disagree with the tour guide, as Martineau once did, they cannot argue with the ghosts. As their subjects appear in the margins of spiritual planes, the ghosts’ stories identify the social positioning of evil. NOTES 1. Divine Law, as it used here and throughout, has agnostic implications. If ghosts exist, one must presume a spiritual order. As the term is used here, whatever ordains that order is divine. Thus, whether ghosts are creations of a Christian cosmology or a

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Hoodoo cosmology, the difference is immaterial, except that the ghost is evidence of the real spiritual order of the universe. The rules of that spiritual order are that the spirits of the dead should move on. A haunting happens when that spirit does not. 2. While some accept this as factual, James Casky (2013) refutes this event. 3. See Caskey.

REFERENCES “Bitchcraft.” 2013. DVD. American Horror Story. Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. Written by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk. 20th Century Fox. Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1981. The Vanishing Hitchhiker. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Cable, George Washington. (1889) 2012. Strange True Stories of Louisiana. Ulan Press. Caskey, James. 2013. The Haunted History of New Orleans: Ghosts of the French Quarter. Savannah: Subtext Publishing. Gordon, Avery. 2008. Ghostly Matter: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Martineau, Harriet. 1838. Retrospect of Western Travel in Three Vols. Vol. 2. London: Saunders and Otley. Accessed 29 October 2016. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1700. Smith, Kalila Katherina. 1998. Haunted History Tours Presents . . . Journey into Darkness: Ghosts & Vampires of New Orleans. New Orleans: De Simonin Publications.

TEN Ace in the Hole and Its Public Evil and the News Spectacle Julie Michot

Director Billy Wilder is well versed in the moral failings of human beings. In his film, Ace in the Hole (1951), for instance, Wilder depicts the actions of an ambitious reporter, Charles Tatum (Kirk Douglas), as he attempts to use the tragic story of Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) to renew his dying career in journalism. As Tatum creates greater sensation around the plight of Minosa, a crowd forms, ostensibly to show support for Minosa, but ultimately to see the conclusion of the events that follow—whether triumph or tragedy. Wilder’s film was popular enough to amass a real crowd of spectators, who paralleled the fictional crowd within the film, as the moviegoers also seek to be entertained by Minosa’s tragedy. As a result, Wilder’s film creates three separate groups who can be judged as the moral standard: the American press as represented by Tatum, the story world spectators as camped at the site of the catastrophe, and the real world theater audience. Ultimately, the interplay of these three different cases reveals that it is the third case, the spectators in the real world sitting in the theater, who are most indicted by Wilder’s accusation of callousness and opportunism. In the surface narrative, Ace in the Hole tells the story of Charles Tatum and his manipulation of the catastrophe that surrounds Minosa Minosa after Minosa is trapped under a cave-in in a nearby hill within the desert reaches of New Mexico. Tatum plays the hero, organizing the increasingly complex rescue operation, but he is, in fact, betraying the confidence of Minosa and prolonging the rescue operation so as to keep the news sto149

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ry—his so-called scoop—going. Eventually, Tatum’s interference causes the rescue operation to fail. Tatum’s deceptions, motivated by his opportunism and his desire to scoop the story, have resulted in the death of the innocent man Minosa. Tatum, a reporter, is one of Wilder’s classic morally inept characters. By making his character morally inept, Wilder pushes against the typical structure of 1950s films, as that era is often defined by the black and white morality of its films. Unlike his contemporaries, Wilder’s protagonist is thoroughly unscrupulous. He only values his personal ambition and his ability to make money, making him willing to “make things happen” to get a scoop. Tatum’s moral depravity might be understandable—even obvious and unsurprising—if he is considered as a film noir character. Yet, Wilder further confronts traditional filmic moral binaries, ending the film by redeeming Tatum, who essentially dies for the sins he has committed after confessing to the world his guilt over the Associated Press (AP) wire. Wilder thus prevents his character from being a static representation of either good or evil. With the protagonist’s redemption, Wilder makes clear that the truly irredeemable “character” in the film is the crowd that gathers at the foot of the mountain. While the crowd ostensibly is there to support the rescue effort, before long, they erect a carnival inside their camp and proceed to have a festival as Minosa lies dying inside the nearby mountain, selling tickets to participate in the experience of the man dying. Though ruthless and unethical during most of the narrative, Tatum finally moves to the other end of the moral spectrum by admitting his responsibility in Minosa’s death. By film’s end, he has died for his guilt and seems, arguably, redeemed. Conversely, the crowd is never redeemed, but instead become increasingly ghoulish throughout the narrative. At film’s end, there is no realization of culpability for the gawkers; they feel only disappointment that the spectacle has come to an end. Because of this lack of introspection, the onlookers are made, by Wilder, to seem worse than Tatum. Because of the directly parallel behavior, the film offers a metatextual commentary on its own audience. When the film was first released, the American viewers quickly realized the culpability of the film’s onlookers in Minosa’s death, and they easily recognized the parallel between their own role as spectators of the film and the huge crowd of Wilder’s “ordinary monsters” gathered at the foot of the mountain. After all, they, too, have bought tickets to the event. Ultimately, the film’s audience resented their implication in the portrayal of gawkers craving sensation and rejoicing in somebody else’s personal tragedy. This resentment stems from the fact that both the fictional public body—the characters of the gawkers in the film—and real one—the actual audiences of Ace in the Hole—lose their share of humanity as they watch the spectacle. As a consequence, this

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film creates a bitter image for both the spectators in the film and Billy Wilder’s audience in the theater. The hero is the villain who transgresses standard morality by putting innocents in harm’s way and profits off of the suffering of others. The audience of the film and the audience of its fictional world come off as villains. Moreover, the audience’s redemption, which is central to understanding evil as an escapable condition, is never addressed by Wilder. For these reasons, the film initially was poorly received. Yet, sixty years since its release, the opinion of critics and audiences on Ace in the Hole has changed completely from reactions contemporaneous with the film’s release. Later audiences, at a historical distance that allows them to separate themselves from the contemporay audience, can appreciate that Wilder’s aim with this film is not to provide his public with innocent entertainment. Rather the point of the film is for the audience to learn unpleasant things about the main character and the crowd, using the film audience’s identification with these characters to teach them about themselves. The surface level of the film narrative shows that what appears to be a natural evil—a cave-in—is in fact a moral evil— Tatum’s scheme that leads to Minosa’s death—and that the opportunity for this moral evil is generated by the crowd’s desire to be entertained by real-life tragedy. With its metatextual implications of the audience in the theater as well as the spectators on the screen, Ace in the Hole argues that the exploitation of tragedy is the generative point that shows evil in the contemporary age is not divine but intrinsically man-made. ACE IN THE HOLE After a year at the Sun Bulletin, Tatum becomes embittered that his chance will never come to him in New Mexico. Nothing of note ever happens for him to report, and thus, his chances of leaving this remote corner of America dwindle rapidly. The narrative turns to the driving plotline when Tatum is sent to cover a rattlesnake hunt. On the way, he tells young Herbie, a recent journalism school graduate, that he (Tatum) personally learned the job in the field and probably knows more than his trained colleague does. In particular, Tatum claims to know what makes a big story: “Bad news sells best, ‘cause good news is no news,” mocking the comforting adage. Tatum, who has never formally studied the ethics of journalism, is proud of operating according to his own ignorance and ambition. As with any other rotten film noir journalist, he is gloomy when he learns he has to cover a simple rattlesnake hunt, but becomes excited at the prospect of writing about tragedy. Stopping at Escudero, he discovers that a man has been caught in a cave-in and is now buried deep under the mountain. The trading post proprietor, Minosa Minosa, went that morning into centuries-old

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American Indian dwellings to find funeral urns when he became trapped. Tatum immediately realizes the tragic potential of such a story and gives up the snakes to focus on the fate of this man. Tatum is the first person to enter the gallery where Minosa is trapped. As he makes his way to the spot where Minosa is, the audience realizes that Tatum is not there to help; Tatum wants his scoop. Instead of wondering if Minosa can survive, Tatum thinks about how he can use the cave-in to make himself famous. To spice up his report, the journalist evokes the vengeance of angry spirits for the desecration of their graves. By scooping Minosa’s story, Tatum insures his own success, but only insofar as he can control the story and keep it going. He must, for instance, keep his colleagues out of the mountain. He must, likewise, insure that Minosa rescue is lengthy to prolong his story and the fame that comes with it. As the movie continues, Tatum goes to greater and greater lengths to prevent Minosa’s immediate rescue, and it is these acts of ambition that, ultimately, damn Tatum until the film’s denouement. Tatum’s fall is mirrored by moral degradation of the crowd that gathers at the base of the mountain. At first, they come to offer their support for the dying man. Soon, however, the rest stop is overrun by people who heard the story and had to come. They construct a camp to be there for Leo in his plight, but as Tatum’s story gains momentum, the group ceases to gather for support. The camp of onlookers becomes a carnival. THE PRESS Ace in the Hole achieved box-office success in Europe, but not in the United States. Kirk Douglas believed that the tepid American response was owed to the movie’s depiction of the American written press: “The unfavorable reviews of this movie about an unscrupulous newspaper reporter [. . .] were written by newspaper reporters. Critics love to criticize, but they don’t like being criticized” (Douglas 1988, 178). Indeed, on its release, the film triggered such an uproar that the studio was forced to send press agents to all newspapers across the country to convince their editors that the movie was not meant to attack the whole profession but just “its bad apples” (Armstrong [2000] 2004, 57). Wilder intended in this film to reveal the press’s dark side. “Something new in Ace in the Hole was to kind of show the newspaperman racket,” he explained (Crowe 1999, 206). Indeed, in American film noir or melodramas of the 1940s and 1950s, journalists are most often courageous and honest; “Wilder did not accept this shining image of the brave reporter and superimposed his own darker vision of Charles Tatum,” making him “an ambitious cheat” (Simsolo 2011, 37). According to Wilder, Tatum was “a hungry guy who bites off more than he can swallow” (Scheuer 16). He based the character on his experiences in his first job,

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which was in the journalism industry. Wilder thus had intimate knowledge of Tatum’s profession from the inside, which significantly affected the film (Simsolo 2011, 37). He remembered the “dirty work” he sometimes had to do: “My job would be for instance to go to the parents of somebody who was a murderer [. . .] to ask for a photograph, or to somebody whose family had died in a fire [. . .]. Very, very embarrassing thing for me” (Portrait of a “60% Perfect” Man: Billy Wilder 1980). One of Wilder’s co-screenwriters on Ace in the Hole, Lesser Samuels, was also a former reporter, which further enhanced the realistic representation of Tatum’s behaviors and attitudes as a journalist (Armstrong [2000] 2004, 54). Moreover, five professional journalists, four men and one woman, were hired by Wilder as consultants (Phillips 2010, 353). One of Wilder’s primary concerns was making the story real, something that might actually happen, both in terms of Tatum’s opportunism and the audience’s voyeurism. Wilder reveals his realist credentials in the film by referring to historical incidents. When explaining his enthusiasm to Herbie, Tatum explains that a journalist won the Pulitzer Prize by covering the accident of Floyd Collins, a cave explorer who remained stuck underground for eighteen days in Kentucky in 1925. Wilder here introduces real world events into his story world. The screenwriters of Ace in the Hole drew their inspiration from this tragic event that ended with Collins’ death (Hopp 2003, 75). The writers might also have been inspired by an incident that took place in California in April 1949. Kathy Fiscus, a three-year-old girl, fell into a dry well, and rescue operations, which had lasted for days, attracted thousands of gawkers. Eventually, the child died before she could be rescued (Sikov 1998, 312–13). As these historical events show, Wilder’s portrayal of an American public, eager to witness tragedy, was well documented in the journalism of the time. Tatum’s character calls attention to journalist exploitation of the sensationalism of tragedy. To convey his sentiments about the press, Wilder introduces Tatum as overconfident and arrogant with a bad reputation among his fellow journalists. Having been dismissed from a famous New York daily, Tatum Tatum only applies for the job in a small paper in New Mexico to wait for better opportunities. Even though Tatum, himself, is unemployed and looking for work at the Bulletin, he looks down on the staff and editor-inchief of the Albuquerque Sun Bulletin for being a local rural paper. Just before meeting his future boss, Tatum overtly laughs at a framed tapestry hanging on the wall of the newsroom and advocating “TELL THE TRUTH.” A similar tapestry can be found in the office of the editor; his secretary is proud to have embroidered both herself. Tatum’s scornful reaction reveals his character: he scorns the truth, generally, because he is not an honest man. Instead of seeking out the truth, he tells whatever story will gain him the most success as a journalist, even if it means

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inventing a story and passing it off as the truth. This initial warning alerts the audience to the protagonist’s position as villain rather than hero. Wilder’s depiction of Tatum as a bad kind of journalist is, however, problematized by the lack of any moral—meaning honest—example of a successful journalist. Tatum’s colleagues and rivals, headquartered in a tent at the foot of the mountain, rush for their telephones as soon as they learn Minosa’s death. They lack compassion and seem happy at news of the tragedy. Minosa’s tragedy is set at the fictional “Mountain of the Seven Vultures,” a name steeped in irony given how the rapacious reporters make good use of the story of a man buried by those same rocks. It is only because the journalists sense a sensational story that they are willing to brave life in a tent while writing about Minosa’s accident. All the reporters are like Tatum; he’s just beaten them to the scoop. Tatum’s goal is to make the spectacle last as long as possible so that he, as a journalist, can get what he thinks he most deserves: fame and money. When he sees how Minosa is trapped, he takes advantage of the trapped man’s naiveté in order to put himself in charge of the story. Minosa is glad to have Tatum publish his photograph in the paper, unaware that the reporter is only motivated by self-interest, suggesting that even Minosa craves some of the fame that drives Tatum. To secure his source, Tatum tells his victim: “I’m your pal,” a few minutes after they meet. While this might be considered a supportive declaration, the film editing reveals Tatum’s lie here. Wilder switches to a voice-off and reverse shot showing Tatum when Minosa starts telling the story of his life. Concentrating the camera on Tatum’s face, the film shows the audience that Tatum knows Minosa’s story will be front page news, and that is his primary interest in his “pal.” Tatum believes that one week will be enough to make him a famous journalist. Herbie, who is an honest, upright (as yet unsuccessful) reporter, is shocked to hear that Minosa’s rescue could be deliberately delayed; but Tatum does not believe he has anything to feel guilty about. He declares forcefully in the film, “I’m not wishing for anything. I don’t make things happen. All I do is write about them.” Tatum assures Herbie that everything he does is for Minosa’s good. He also manages to win the confidence of Minosa’s father, who is, in turn, so grateful that he refuses to charge the two journalists for having filled their tank. He even gives Tatum his own bedroom to use for the length of the rescue operation. If Tatum’s journalistic endeavors are exceptional above his peers, as press agents suggested to real newspapers at the release of the film, it is only because of his unique capacity to control the story. He does not simply exploit the situation; he breaks from his position as a reporter by staging events, which in turn allow him to make up the story he wants to publish in his paper. To achieve his goal, he forms an alliance with a corrupt sheriff and uses Minosa’s wife’s greed, as well. For instance, he

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talks Minosa’s wife Lorraine into remaining in Escudero the day after the cave-in because, he explains, she has everything to gain from it. Tatum orders her to play the tearful wife and go to church. He gives very strict instructions to his assistant Herbie too: the latter should take pictures of Lorraine with her beads; and if she does not have any, the young journalist should provide her with some. Lorraine, who was set to leave Minosa, must continue to appear to be a loyal wife because it makes for a better story. If the film is a fierce criticism of a certain kind of journalism, its director also denounces the exploitation of tragic situations by opportunists of all types—from storekeepers to politicians—(McNally 3), and he does not fail to attack the readers of the gutter press who, whether consciously or not, support the methods used by their reporters. Billy Wilder declared that Ace in the Hole was “an indictment against cheesy tabloids and the people who are buying them who need ‘em for breakfast” (Scheuer 16). As Tatum rightly puts it, “bad news sells best,” so the journalist considers he is just doing his job and giving the masses what they are asking for. There is no sign, however, that the masses ever feel ashamed of their need for sensational tragedy, either on screen or off. Having settled in with Minosa’s family, Tatum has enough control over the tragedy to turn Minosa’s ordeal into a real show, “a circus,” a term used by Tatum at the end of the film, when he tells people that Minosa has died and one that Wilder himself used to characterize the scene (Crowe 1999, 142). This concept also resonates in the studio’s alternate suggestion for the film’s title. Wilder stated that: “One day Mr. Y. Frank Freeman, the head of Paramount [. . .] decided that the title was bad, Ace in the Hole. So he gave it a new title, The Big Carnival. Idiot” (quoted in Crowe 1999, 83). This alternate title, although less subtle in its social critique, is also misleading if one does not know the subject of the film. It certainly highlights the way a tragic event can be distorted and become a source of entertainment for the masses rather than an opportunity for a single cheating player. The original title of the film chosen by its director is indicative of the director’s cynicism. The phrase “ace in the hole,” borrowed from stud poker, has a double meaning in the film. In poker it means that one of the players has a trump card which he holds in reserve. In the film, Minosa, Tatum’s ace, is actually hidden in a hole, quite literally, and Tatum is the “ace” reporter who is going to make the most of the situation. In this manner, Wilder’s title maintains focus on Tatum, whereas the studio’s implicates the crowd.

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THE CROWD This critique is not, however, limited to journalism. After all, it is the public that buys the papers, reads the stories, and craves the tragedy. Yet, perhaps what was most shocking for the film’s audience was that Tatum’s articles lead to the rise of a community of gawkers at the foot of the mountain. Thousands of people flock there in just a few days, some of them from neighboring states. Wilder shows eager onlookers pouring from a special train, out the doors even before it stops. A Ferris wheel is brought in to occupy whole families, who can eat ice cream while enjoying the efforts of rescue workers. Whereas the entrance to the site was free before the accident, a fee is soon introduced and it increases as the crowd swells: from 25 cents to 50 cents, and finally to one dollar. A catchy song is composed—as was the case with the Floyd Collins tragedy (Hopp 2003, 75). The camera pans over the band, whose musicians and singer look disinterested, to end up on a woman who is selling copies of the sheet music to the delighted mob. It is obvious that the song, whose lyrics are supposed to keep Minosa’s spirits up, is in fact played and sung only for the tourists, since Minosa cannot hear it. While the scale of the fanfare that erupts in the film might appear excessive, especially in the number of onlookers present on the spot, Wilder intended realism regarding the subject of sensationalism (Armstrong [2000] 2004, 60). The bystanders, who set up camp in Escudero and amuse themselves with carnival delights as Minosa is passing away, are both passive and active in relation to the tragedy. They are passive insofar as their presence will neither help Minosa nor the workers who are trying to save his life. They are active in that they are ravenous, both literally and figuratively, “feeding off [Minosa’s] misery” (Silver and Ward [1979] 1992, 25). Finally, it is their presence that encourages Tatum to finish what he started. Noël Simsolo (2011) argues: “The aim of the film is to give [Tatum] force, while also giving him enough humanity to avoid turning him into an over-simplified Manichaean caricature. The same process is at work in the portrayal of the other characters and of the crowd that gathers outside the mausoleum of a stranger made famous through the perversity of an ambitious journalist” (40). The thousands of people who assemble in front of the mountain are voyeurs above all else—although there is nothing to see really. The man who dies is, after all, inside the mountain. The film slowly builds the crowd. The first to respond to Tatum’s story, just one day after the accident, are the Federbers and their two children. They are an average American family who detour from their holiday route after they read Tatum’s article. While they intended to have their breakfast there and stay no more than half an hour, they finally park their trailer at the foot of the mountain, the way they would in a campground, and will not leave until the “party” is over. They will soon be

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imitated by hundreds of other people who collectively make up Tatum’s immediate audience and the reason that the sensationalism continues. Later, talking at the microphone of a radio journalist, the Federbers will claim to have been the first to arrive on the spot—a point they will seem much more concerned about than Minosa’s slow death (Armstrong 55). This seems to be no more than a childish attitude; and yet, beyond the couple’s stupidity, their moral ineptitude is obvious. By boasting about their early arrival, they show how self-centered they are and how callous they are to the subject of suffering, which has, ostensibly, attracted them to the mountain. Showing the complete disconnect between the victim of the tragedy and the crowd participating in its pathos, Minosa, himself, expresses confusion as to why 3,000 men, women and children have gathered at the foot of the mountain: “Who are they? What do they want?” asks Minosa as he loses hope of ever seeing the daylight again. “They’re your friends,” Tatum answers. At this point in the story, Minosa’s state of health has worsened critically. He will soon die, and it seems that Tatum, foreseeing the end of Minosa’s tragedy, has begun to believe in his own lies, that the people below are a form of support or that their prayers will save the trapped man. But this redemptive moment of sympathy is short-lived. A few hours later, Minosa dies because his chances of being rescued were sabotaged by Tatum, who will, himself, offer the public announcement of Minosa’s death to the masses below, to the audience of his readership, and to the viewers of the film. The mob reacts to the news of Minosa’s death in ways that reveal their complex relationship to the story as well. They leave as quickly as they came—but only after Tatum yells at them, chastising them for their behavior and telling them to go back home. When they first learn the news, men take off their hats and women kneel down and pray in deathly silence. The solemnity acts in obvious contrast with the bustle of what was still a busy fairground a few seconds before. Mrs. Federber, who took such pride in having been the first there with her family, bursts into tears in her husband’s arms. The onlookers are not immediately recognizable as callous or amoral, but seem, instead, deeply sympathetic to the tragedy. If the audience accepts such expressions of grief as more real than their spectatorial concern for the victim, then it might seem overly cynical of Simsolo (2011) to claim that “[those] people . . . [had] flocked to the site of the story hoping to see the poor man’s rescue or, more secretly, his death” (37). These reactions, when taken at face value suggest that Minosa’s death is the last thing in the world Mrs. Federber wished for. But the behavior of the mob at that precise moment neither needs to be interpreted naively as honest grief for the loss of Minosa nor cynically as the secret wish of the spectator. In her analysis of Hannah Arendt’s theories on the banality of evil, María Pía Lara (2007) writes that “[t]he ability to understand something as tragic is the result of the ability to

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recognize that things could have happened differently [. . .] Only when a story can provide this kind of understanding can it trigger sound judgment in the audience” (49). Although the onlookers are not fully aware of what really happened, the brutal announcement of Minosa’s death actually leads them to realize that things have gone too far and that an irredeemable act has been committed. Praying could well be a new recognition of their behavior and the need to be absolved for it. At this point, however, praying seems a hypocritical means of trying to be absolved, as none of the tourists had ever prayed for Minosa’s rescue while he was still alive. Moreover, the collective prayer of the characters is a very short one. The Americans who gathered for several days in Escudero and who have just attended a real-life tragedy scatter as soon as the entertainment has stopped, there being nothing more to see or to expect. Those who were supposed to be Minosa’s friends return home with chilling rapidity, leaving the victim’s parents to their despair. The gawkers won’t acknowledge the part their voyeurism has played in prolonging Minosa’s agony, and ultimately, in his death. Emphasizing their distance from the actual victims, a poignant long shot shows Papa Minosa, tormented and vulnerable, wandering about the bleak and deserted site with the tourists’ litter whirling around him. A big sign reads “Proceeds go to Minosa Minosa Rescue Fund,” looking pathetic now. This shot emphasizes how completely the crowd’s purported humanitarian purpose has been a complete farce. Nothing has been gained. No one has been saved, except for perhaps Tatum. THE AUDIENCE A parallel can be established between the thousands of curious onlookers in the film and the audiences of Ace in the Hole (Armstrong [2000] 2004, 55). The tourists’ cars, lined up in rows with their fronts facing the mountain, are inevitably reminiscent of a drive-in theater. There is a mise en abyme here since Wilder’s spectators are watching the crowd in the film who themselves are watching the mountain beneath which a man is buried alive. At a time when television had not yet found its place in all American homes—the event is mainly covered by newspapers and radios—the onlookers have come to Escudero for a thrill—the same reason that the moviegoers go the theater. In fact, Wilder intentionally uses the mountain image to implicate Paramount Studios in his critique of the exploitation of tragedy. This mountain brings to mind the famous logo of the studio, which was to the great displeasure of its heads in 1951 (55). As Nancy Steffen-Fluhr (2011) notes, “Wilder had wanted [the film] to open with a shot of a rattlesnake crawling onto a Paramount logo. [Not surprisingly] Paramount killed

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that snake” (190). This shows that the studio was definitely uncomfortable with the subject of the film and its subversion. One year before the release of Ace in the Hole, Wilder had shot Sunset Boulevard, also at Paramount; it was a violent criticism of the Hollywood dream factory, its evil nature, and the harm the studios actually inflicted to some old stars. The snake on the logo, thus, would also have been reminiscent of Wilder’s previous movie. Audience familiarity with Wilder’s oeuvre would have helped drive home his claims about integrity in Ace in the Hole. These issues of integrity and complicity in the exploitative apparatus are reinforced in the audience’s early awareness that Minosa could have been saved in a matter of hours. Sharing Tatum’s viewpoint, the audience realizes the extended rescue plan, and Minosa’s protracted suffering, is entirely fabricated by the journalist. From the moment the film’s audience learns that Tatum is planning to delay Minosa’s rescue for his own personal advantage to “rescue his career” (Armstrong [2000] 2004, 53), the audiences are fully aware of the hero’s intellectual dishonesty and his attempt to control an audience. They become the tabloid readers who Wilder criticizes. Lance Duerfahrd insists on the moral implication of Wilder’s spectators by pointing out that they can never remain neutral; and in Ace in the Hole, more than merely identifying with Tatum, the public truly collaborates with him (16–17). It is their excess, their excessive desire for tragedy as well as their ability to use tragedy to motivate their excessive behavior, that turns Tatum’s, and in turn Wilder’s, story into spectacle. By choosing to watch the film through to the end, they become his partners in crime. Just as the fictional spectators at the mountain are complicit in Minosa’s death because their desire for the spectacle inspires Tatum to produce it, the spectators sitting comfortably in the film theater would like to witness a stunning rescue sequence that would choke them with emotion, which explains how disappointed they are by the film’s ending. The audiences of the film may shed a tear in the theater and then, as soon as the closing credits begin, stand up, forget about the movie and return to their own business. Most likely, they do not regret Minosa’s death so much as the failure and downfall of the hero with whom they’re expectations were aligned. Their sympathies are with Tatum. By seeing Minosa die, Tatum is punished by the ramifications of his actions. The audience bears witness as well and is, likewise, punished. When Tatum, with whom they have related, dies, they are left with a bitter aftertaste. With this tragic dénouement, Wilder proves that those who saw the movie and the onlookers in the story are as guilty as Tatum, and he insists on the temptation of evil that lies within all human beings.

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THE WORST OF THE WORST? To implicate fully all aspects of the three tiers of culpability, Wilder makes Tatum not just an unethical journalist, but also a thoroughly despicable individual. By casting Kirk Douglas as Tatum, Billy Wilder signals that he deliberately depicts the protagonist/hero of Ace in the Hole as thoroughly unpleasant. Although Douglas was accustomed to playing such roles (Simsolo 2011, 40), he thought his character in Ace in the Hole was “too rough,” yet Wilder refused to allow Douglas to “come on a little softer, a little more charming” (Douglas 1988, 178). Douglas, who often played wicked characters, was a very popular actor; his charisma may be explained by the cathartic power of the protagonists he routinely embodied. Cameron Crowe (1999) notes that this film “is one of the few times [Wilder] didn’t help [him]self out by casting a sympathetic actor to play a louse. [. . .] Kirk Douglas is much more serious than many of [his] leading men” (83). Typically labeling Douglas “the typical villain” and watching his evil deeds on the screen could have been an unconscious way for moveigoers to forget about their own bad actions or to minimize them. In this case, seeing a story as extreme as Ace in the Hole was, more or less, redeeming them from their everyday sins. However, in the case of Tatum, Wilder used Douglas to couple an actor with sympathetic star quality with a villain character of great complexity. Indeed, Billy Wilder declared: “I did not make him sympathetic, but I made him, I hope, interesting. I made him kind of riveting, as close to riveting as I could. So that you’re just in the laboratory of a potential killer, which he turns out to be. But he does not have to be sympathetic” (quoted in Crowe 1999, 84). Riveting the audience, Wilder limits the capacity of his character to inspire catharsis by forcing the audience members to identify with the villain rather than distance themselves from them. Though he tells Herbie that his position as a journalist assures his objectivity, Tatum also clearly bamboozles Herbie when he assures him that everything he does is for Minosa’s good. Yet, from the start, Tatum’s motives are clearly exploitative. He knows that such a story would arouse America’s interest and that his readers would be keen to know everything about Minosa: “A tragedy is not a thousand Chinese drowned in a flood, but one person stuck down in a hole in the ground,” he says. For this goal, he also manages to win the confidence of Minosa’s father, who is, in turn, so grateful that he refuses to charge the two journalists for having filled their tank. He even gives Tatum his own bedroom to use for the length of the rescue operation. Making these connections, Tatum is able, shortly after the accident, to borrow a family photo album so that his readers can become acquainted with Minosa’s life. Tatum needs the recognition of the public, and so he becomes the hero of the story by orchestrating and relating its details. It is Tatum who is the hero of the story he tells, not Minosa, who no one ever sees and who will

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eventually die out of sight amid general indifference (Armstrong [2000] 2004, 55–56). Tatum gives the news of Minosa’s death through a microphone from the top of the cliff. Once more, Tatum projects a double image of himself. Glenn Hopp notes that when he is in such position, “issues orders to the construction crew from atop the mountain and surveys the spread of cars and onlookers below,” he looks like “a monarch above his kingdom” (75). And yet, as he gets to the summit for the last time, this hero in the mythological sense of the word, who had taken himself for a demigod and had thought he could control everything, suddenly looks as vulnerable as he did when the foreman told him, shortly before, that all was lost. Tatum is no longer the king of his story, but a man worn down by the guilt of his ambition. Paradoxically, he announces the poor man’s death through loudspeakers and thus addresses, at the same time, both total strangers and Minosa’s own parents for whom the shock must be even greater. Their equal access to the news makes them equivalent participants in the tragedy. Here, the complex nature of Tatum’s character is revealed, his humanity and inhumanity put in conflict as the journalist is achieving some kind of ethical realization. He knows that this is his fault, and he knows that he must confess. Tatum’s rehabilitation is most obvious during the scene, after Minosa’s death, first in his confrontation with Minosa’s wife, which leaves him mortally wounded, and then with his public confession to the world over the AP wire. After sending the crowd away, Tatum seeks out Lorraine and finds her packing up her things to seek a better life far from Escudero. During their encounter, a small fur piece is positioned at the exact center of the scene: a stole given to her by Minosa for their fifth wedding anniversary, which happened to fall on the day when Minosa was trapped. In a desperate state, Minosa asked Tatum to give Lorraine the present. The journalist does not hesitate to comply, as he feels guilty for arranging the death of someone whose wife he has been sleeping with. When she is given the gift, Lorraine scornfully throws it on the floor, an act which infuriates the guilt-ridden Tatum. He, then, forces her to wear the stole and, in his fury, nearly asphyxiates her with it. The reporter indeed is “enraged at how badly [Lorraine is] treating her husband. [But he’s actually] really mad at [himself], because [he’s] treating him worse,” Kirk Douglas (1988) explained (178). Lorraine stabs him to defend herself and ultimately deals a mortal blow. Having been stabbed by Lorraine, Tatum bleeding to death, has only one solution left: to go and confess to the editor of the Sun Bulletin, a reliable journalist who stands up for integrity. Tatum’s repentance could seem to be sincere, yet, instead of asking forgiveness or justifying his behavior, he introduces himself to Mr. Boot in a manner that parallels the mens’ first encounter. Initially, Tatum told Boot, “I’m a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-week newspaperman. I can

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be had for fifty.” When he returns at the end of the film, Tatum proclaims, “How’d you like to make yourself a thousand dollars a day, Mr. Boot? I’m a thousand-dollar-a-day newspaperman. You can have me for nothing.” To emphasize Tatum’s utter collapse, immediately after this proclamation, the journalist drops dead in front of the editor. For this final shot, the camera had been placed in a special hole in the floor. Wilder explained: “I wanted something powerful, and that was one of the few times I went for a bold shot like that. [. . .] It was logical there. Instead of—he falls down in a long shot, then we cut to the close-up. No. I didn’t want to do that” (Crowe 1999, 205). The story thus ends with a close shot on Tatum who collapses full front camera in low angle, his eyes wide open. The reporter pays for his faults but Wilder sends out ultimate mixed signals. Tatum has dominated the frame throughout the film, which he still does here (Armstrong [2000] 2004, 61) and even has the last word. In fact, the director simply refuses to characterize Tatum radically. The journalist in Ace in the Hole, just like the diabolical lovers of Double Indemnity, has his shadowy side and reveals that Wilder “believe[d] in the ebb and flow of good and bad in people” (Armstrong [2000] 2004, 60). CONCLUSION As E. G. Hubbard once wrote, “Men are not punished for their sins, but by them” (quoted by Auden 1971, 180). Tatum becomes his own victim after Lorraine stabs him. He has no outlet for his guilt except to confess. Unlike Tatum, the onlookers don’t feel guilt. They came to the site of a tragedy in order to have fun. They dance on a grave, so to speak. By comparison, Tatum’s final act of morality makes him more ethical than the onlookers who have no moment of redemption, only egress. They are not driven from the site by guilt, but by the tragedy having reached its fruition. Tatum’s attitude in the last part of the film is typical of the dualism of Wilder’s bad guys (McNally 3): “Wilder’s strength is to portray villains, idiots, impostors, cowards and murderers and to turn them into human beings” (Simsolo 2011, 30). And indeed, Tatum eventually becomes more human but also more pathetic. The self-awareness he achieves comes too late. In the end, he hates himself more than the public hates him. Thus, by an interesting reversal of the situation, Tatum has to be honest with himself after having lied to the whole of America. Sending the revelers away does not redeem him. He has murdered Minosa and he must confess to the crime. Wilder’s films are not unnecessarily caustic: the director refused to be hypocritical and his movies “simply tell the truth about unpleasant areas of human behavior” (Gemünden 3). He was a moralist who never hesitated to lash out at his contemporaries for their stupidity,

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Wilder used Tatum, a reformed villain by the end of the story, to build his plot and to introduce the gawkers who are genuinely bad and are meant to paint a very bleak picture of the audiences of the film, which, once again, illustrates the depth of his pessimism and disenchantment regarding human nature. Wilder thus outlines that evil arises from social behavior devoid of a proper sense of the personal impact of tragedy. With Ace in the Hole, the villains are thus to be found on the screen but first and foremost in front of the screen since the spectators sitting in theaters are the reporter’s accomplices and, unlike the sensation seekers in the film, know full well that Tatum is definitely a manipulator and a fraud. This message remains topical to viewing audiences. Jean Tulard ([1990] 2002) notes that in the 1980s, a little South American girl fell down a well “much to the delight of the international media,” which proves that nothing really changes (1318; my translation of: “pour la plus grande joie des médias internationaux”). We could also mention—and this is of course a non-exhaustive list—the mediatized rescue of Chilean miners in 2010 which was followed worldwide like a TV series. Nothing drives home Wilder’s message more than the anecdote he shared about an event he witnessed on the day the film was released. Wilder reported: The same day that we previewed the picture, I was on Wilshire Boulevard and there was an accident. There was a woman, I think, she did not see the light, and she was thrown from the car. They took her out. Suddenly I saw a cameraman and he was taking pictures, and I said, “Somebody go and find a telephone, call the police, call an ambulance.” And the cameraman says, “Not me, I’ve got to get the picture!” This is cynical. (Crowe 1999, 142–43)

REFERENCES Ace in the Hole / The Big Carnival. 1951. Produced by Billy Wilder. Directed by Billy Wilder. Production Company Location: Paramount Pictures. DVD. Arendt, Hannah. (1963) 1984. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Revised & Enlarged Edition. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984. Armstrong, Richard. (2000) 2004. Billy Wilder, American Film Realist. Jefferson: McFarland. Auden, W. H. 1971. A Certain World: A Commonplace Book. London: Faber and Faber, Borde, Raymond, and Etienne Chaumeton. (1955) 1988. Panorama du film noir américain (1941–1953). Paris: Flammarion. Crowe, Cameron. 1999. Conversations with Wilder. New York: Alfred A. Knopf/Random House. Double Indemnity. 1944. Produced by Joseph Sistrom. Directed by Billy Wilder. Production Company Location: Paramount Pictures. DVD. Douglas, Kirk. 1988. The Ragman’s Son: An Autobiography. New York: Simon & Schuster. Duerfahrd, Lance. 2011. “What Exposure Is the World? The Desert Noir of Ace in the Hole.” Billy Wilder, Movie-Maker: Critical Essays on the Films. Edited by Karen McNally, 11–25. Jefferson: McFarland, 2011.

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Fortune Cookie, The. 1966. Produced by Billy Wilder. Directed by Billy Wilder. Production Company Location: Phalanx Productions and Jalem Productions. DVD. Gemünden, Gerd. 2008. A Foreign Affair: Billy Wilder’s American Films. New York: Berghahn Books. Hopp, Glenn. 2003. Billy Wilder: The Complete Films, The Cinema of Wit 1906–2002. Köln: Taschen. Lara, María Pía. 2007. Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment. New York: Columbia University Press. Mack, Michael. 2010. “Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of Plurality: Thinking and Understanding and Eichmann in Jerusalem.” In Power, Judgment and Political Evil: In Conversation with Hannah Arendt. Edited by Andrew Schaap, Danielle Celermajer, and Vrasidas Karalis, 13–26. Farnham: Ashgate. McNally, Karen. 2011. Introduction. Billy Wilder, Movie-Maker: Critical Essays on the Films. Edited by Karen McNally, 1–10. Jefferson: McFarland. Peña Fernández, Simón. 2014. El Reportero Billie Wilder: El Retrato Á cido y Nostálgico del Periodismo en El Gran Carnaval y Primera Plana. Salamanca: Comunicación Social. Phillips, Gene D. 2010. Some Like it Wilder: The Life and Controversial Films of Billy Wilder. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Portrait of a “60% Perfect” Man: Billy Wilder. 1980. Directed by Annie Tresgot. Production Company Location: Action Films. DVD. Postman Always Rings Twice, The. 1946. Produced by Carey Wilson. Directed by Tay Garnett. Production Company Location: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. DVD. Psycho. 1960. Produced by Alfred Hitchcock. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Production Company Location: Shamley Productions. DVD. Scheuer, Philip K. 2001. “Wilder Seeks Films ‘With Bite’ to Satisfy ‘Nation of Hecklers’.” In Billy Wilder: Interviews. Edited by Robert Horton, 15–17. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Shivas, Mark. 2001. “Wilder—‘Yes, We Have No Naked Girls.’” In Billy Wilder: Interviews. Edited by Robert Horton. 60–63. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Sikov, Ed. 1998. On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder. New York: Hyperion. Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth Ward, eds. (1979) 1992. Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style. Revised & Expanded Edition. Woodstock: The Overlook Press. Simsolo, Noël. 2011. Billy Wilder. Translated by Trista Selous. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma. Steffen-Fluhr, Nancy. 2011. “Palimpsest: The Double Vision of Exile.” In Billy Wilder, Movie-Maker: Critical Essays on the Films. Edited by Karen McNally. 178–92. Jefferson: McFarland. Sunset Boulevard. 1950. Produced by Charles Brackett. Directed by Billy Wilder. Production Company Location: Paramount Pictures. DVD. Tulard, Jean. (1990) 2002. Guide des films. Tome 2. 1990. Paris: Robert Laffont/Bouquins.

ELEVEN The Evil Foreigner Marvel Villains and the American National Identity from World War II to the War on Terror Joanna Nowotny and Bettina Jossen

One primary marker of evil in American comic books is an ethnic or a national one, with the two categories often intertwined through the comic book’s discourse. Thus, evil in superhero comics is often seen as a nationally and ethnically foreign element in opposition to an image of United States (U.S.) patriotism, which is framed as a force for good. When clear subversions of this trope appear in widely received comics, they tend to appear quite late in the history of the medium. This shift reflects a change in the U.S.-American national identity through the decades and in the strategies that have been used to consciously or unconsciously cement that change within popular culture. Initially, these comic narratives are dominated by a clear-cut image of the U.S. as savior and as a moral compass confronted with evil characters depicted as nationally foreign, especially during World War II. This domination starts to waver noticeably during the Vietnam War, when massive protest movements expressed an unsettledness for the values America represented. A similar change occurred after September 11, 2001 (9/11), as both America’s military interventions and its domestic policies have become increasingly dubious, leading to more open criticism. This leads to the evil foreigner losing some traction within mainstream comics; he or she is no longer the main antagonist that indirectly illustrates what being American means. Instead, other notions of evil emerge, usually with a problematized position to conventional morality. This complicated image 165

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of evil is used in later comics to question American identity itself. However, throughout all of those changes, the context of nationalism, specifically the definition of American values, continues within superhero comics in those cases where the dichotomy of good and evil is concerned. This consistent rhetorical trend is clearly illustrated through attention to three historical epochs and discursive fields. The Golden Age of Comic Books, especially those comics focused on World War II, illustrate the place of nationalism in the images of the enemy and, by contrast, the implications for what is understood as American. The transition to the next historical phase demonstrates fluidity. During the Cold War, some villains were recycled and others changed allegiances. For example, Nazi villains became associated with the Soviet Union, as communists became the prime antagonists throughout many series. Early twenty-first century comics illustrate another shift, corresponding to the watershed moment in contemporary American history, 9/11. Following 9/11, the enemy that was geographically distant from the U.S. turns into an enemy within the state, a so-called fifth column. The image of the heroes opposing those enemies changes in step with discourses concerning the (so-called for contrast) real-life heroes of the World Trade Center attacks. Because the corpus of superhero comics is very extensive, to illustrate these historical shfits, this paper focuses on the depiction of evil in Marvel comics (previously Timely Publications, Atlas Comics). We use Marvel for two reasons of increasing importance. First, next to DC (Detective Comics, Inc.), Marvel is the biggest company operating in the market for U.S.-American comic books. Second, Marvel produces one character who is especially interesting with regards to the formation of a U.S.-American identity, Captain America. Named after the country he represents, Captain America becomes a complicated anthropomorphosis of U.S. nationalist values. When using a character-analysis approach, any study of comic books must acknowledge two complications inherent in the (mixed) medium. The depiction of characters is inherently highly unstable, as the rights to the characters lie with the publishing houses and not the artists. A multitude of creators, most notably writers and artists, have handled the characters through the decades and produced their own versions of each hero and villain. This fragmented textual existence means that any statement about a character most frequently only applies to a certain iteration. However, if certain features appear consistently or in a great number of iterations, it can be concluded that they are part of the core identity of a character (Drennig 2010, 128) or, in case of the villains, of a prevalent discourse of evil in comics. Thirdly, a survey of how America’s national enemy has been defined over time is highly dependent on historical context. Portrayals that are currently considered highly problematic and racist were the norm in superhero comics of the 1940s. Over time, portrayals have become less

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racist, as social values changed and as comics tried to appeal to more diverse audiences. Taking into account general knowledge about representations of foreigners in popular culture of the time, it comes as no great surprise that comics in the 1940s are full of unapologetic hatred for the racially distinct (Brooker 2001, 91). Instead of criticizing 1940s productions through the lens of twenty-first century values, the comics’ discourse will be analyzed as a reflection of wider contexts in which such portrayals take place. As such, this exploration can ask how these subtle attributions of evil shed light on the wider cultural discourse of nationalism and evil that persists even in the early twenty-first century. EARLY SUPERHERO COMICS, U.S.-AMERICAN VALUES, AND THE FOREIGN FOE Sociology and phenomenology hold that exclusion is necessary in order to constitute identity; therefore, every self-concept is constructed upon otherness in the most general sense (Bauman 1991, 1–17). In that context, the other can gain very specific, negative attributes, as for example postcolonial discourse has shown (for those negative dimensions of othering, see the Oxford Companion to Philosophy 1995, 637). Tying the dichotomy of good and evil back to the construction of identity, it can be seen as an expression of the I vs. the not-I: The I is set as the default, which in moral terms implies that it is good or at least neutral, while all other shades of morality are seen as somewhat deviant. In a fashion, the I therefore becomes “the absence of evil, ‘non-evil,’” while everything different is seen as “a corruption of good” (Sencindiver et al. 2011, 32; Badiou 2002). If the self is framed in positive terms, with its various attributes such as a certain moral standing and national, racial, or sexual markers, the villain becomes the other not conforming to those markers—evil is othered. While other heroes have names that indicate their powers, Captain America’s name shows him as a nexus between military intervention abroad and the U.S.-American identity. Essentially, he personifies America itself. Captain America debuted in the middle of World War II (1941), during an era that marked the highest distribution of comic magazines in America. According to one of Captain America’s creators, Joe Simon, “Captain America was very much a reflection of his times. He was patriotic when the country was patriotic. [. . .] We saw him as a political statement fleshed out to be an active force” (quoted in Schweizer 1992, 46). Like a modernized Uncle Sam, Captain America invited his readers to join the Sentinels of Liberty, a Captain America fan club (“Captain America wants you to be a Sentinel of Liberty!”). Marvel created Captain America (Cap) following the success of other comics that depicted superheroes fighting the Nazis, such as the early Superman and Wonder Woman for DC or the Sub-Mariner for Marvel (Misiroglu and Eury 2006, 141).

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In fact, the cover of Captain America 1 1 features the Captain punching Hitler on the jaw. This cover became propaganda for an American military intervention in Germany and was later distributed amongst American soldiers. Despite the cover art, Cap does not fight Hitler in the issue itself (cf. Scott 2007, 328−329). Cap’s first adventures led him into battle against Japanese soldiers. As the protagonist says, “Our slogan for Japs: Keep’em Dying!” (quoted in Schweizer 1992, 47). Not long afterwards he was fighting the Nazis, as well, and the Nazis would become Captain America’s most frequent opponents. Regarding the depiction of those evil foreigners, it is notable that in those earliest comics, a distinction is made between so-called white and non-white enemies, with the latter being denied a certain measure of humanity still accorded to the Germans as foes not adhering to the color paradigm. The Japanese opponents of the handsome American blonde were drawn with stereotypical features and attributes. The Japanese became a faceless collective that resembled animals rather than humans, whereas the German soldiers weren’t painted as an inhuman horde of foreigners. In this manner, the Germans’ physiognomy rather resembled the way criminals were drawn in pre-war-comics (Lee 1943, 1.22; Simon 1941b, 1.7; cf. Schweizer 1992, 53). Both the criminal and villain figuring seems to stem from the notion that, in most Western societies like the U.S., the average citizen is understood as an adult, white, able, heterosexual male, regardless of the actual demographic structure of these societies. The protagonists in diverse media often conform to that idea of the default person, above all if they are positive characters the audience is supposed to identify with. The villains, on the other hand, are depicted as anything other than that average citizen. Older superhero comics are particularly clear in their narration: if the villains happen to be white males like the heroes—if they were, therefore, not singled out racially—their physiognomy had to indicate that they were excluded from the norm in other ways. Most criminals were, for example drawn, with grotesque faces that made them look more like beasts than men, thereby implying they weren’t part of human civilization or without so-called rational faculties of mind. In Captain America 1.4, 1941 for instance, (white) homeless men, beggars, and thieves work for the Nazis; they are drawn in a monstrous fashion. Of course, early comics often drew characters with caricatured features, in general, probably stemming from the comic-strips and the classical tradition of cartoons, which tended to overemphasize facial markers. 2 As Europeans, the Germans had no fixed racial markers, but bore costume markings like the swastika, jackboots, and, eventually, monocles, the latter having first become associated with Germany at the end of the nineteenth century because of their popularity amongst the German upper classes. Especially from World War I to World War II, monocles were also stereotypical accessories of German military officers;

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famous wearers of monocles include Erich Ludendorff or Walter von Reichenau (Scott 2007, 327). Being a symbol of the good American spirit, Cap needed an equally symbolic evil antagonist instead of a number of faceless “Japs” (quoted in Schweizer 1992. 47) or Nazis or a real-life political figure like Hitler that was still in power when the comics came out. 3 This led to the creation of Captain America’s arch-enemy the Red Skull, aka Johann Shmidt (first appearance in Captain America Comics [1941], 1.7), the first of Marvel’s super-Nazis. In early appearances, the Red Skull tended to play or whistle Chopin’s funeral march when disposing of his victims (cf. Misiroglu and Eury 2006, 293), which adds to his European aura, making him seem more foreign. Typically, not only was Shmidt’s name spelled incorrectly (the correct German form would be Schmidt)—any German utterances were equally mangled (“Shaffe Chaos im Fein des Land” [Binder 1942, 1.15] instead of Schaffe Chaos im Feindesland, presumably; “Swinehunds” [Binder 1942, 1.15], instead of Schweinehunde.) While Cap wore the American flag on his chest, the Skull wore a swastika during his first appearance in the comic. The Nazi emblem made it plain to everyone that, like Steve Rogers, the Red Skull represented a country and its government (Schweizer 1992, 52). The backstory of the Skull is convoluted from having been changed multiple times over the years. The incarnation of Skull as a Nazi, as it is known today, is itself a post-Golden Age example of retroactive continuity (retcon), a device often employed in comic narratives to actualize story elements and draw a line between canonical and non-canonical content (short retcon). When he appears in the seventh issue of the series, the Red Skull’s secret identity is that of George Maxon, a clandestine German sympathizer and owner of the Maxon Aircraft Company that manufactures airplanes for the U.S. armed forces. Unlike Shmidt, Maxon wears a mask to create the look of the Red Skull. He is not deformed like his German counterpart, who being foreign, is depicted with a physical grotesquerie. Maxon, the American Skull, is not a supervillain in the strict sense of the word, since he relies on technical devices to achieve his goals. Like his more famous German successor, Maxon’s ultimate goal is the overthrow of the U.S. government, which he hopes to achieve by robbing banks. The retcon of the Red Skull occurred in several steps; first, the Skull turned out to be an entity separate from George Maxon, who was revealed to be but a pawn posing as the Skull (Simon 1941b, 1.7). The real Skull, the Nazi Shmidt, resurfaced in the 1960s during the so-called Silver Age of Comic Books (Lee 1965, 1.65); he was established as a contemporary villain in issue 79 (Lee 1966). Even after the war with Nazi Germany, the German supervillain remains iconic; his foreign status remains an important contrast to Cap’s American nationalism. As with the postwar history of Captain America, the Skull is retconned to have been held in suspended animation since

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World War II. Even during the 2007–2008 series, when Marvel staged the Death of Captain America, the Skull remained Cap’s most iconic opponent—it is his scheme that leads to the apparent demise of Steve Rogers. 4 To bring his plot to fruition, the Skull partners with another foreign-born villain Johann Fennhoff, aka Dr. Faustus, a psychiatrist from Vienna (first appearance in Lee 1968 1.107). Dr. Faustus, possessing no super power other than a Ph.D. in psychiatry, has proven capable of manipulating other super powered characters throughout his appearances in the comics. He, for instance, manipulates Spider-Man (Wein 1977, 1.170) as well as Captain America (Lee 1968, 1.107) and Cap’s girlfriend, Agent Sharon Carter. The villain plays into the trope of the evil psychologist or psychiatrist that is quite common in superhero comics: powers of psychological manipulation are coded as uncanny (cf. Moonstone, aka Dr. Karla Sofen). Dr. Faustus is clearly modeled after Sigmund Freud, the famous psychiatrist from Vienna. With his beard and his love for tobacco, he is reminiscent of the famous portraits of the father of psychoanalysis. In addition, his monocle signifies him as a stereotypical evil and foreign German (or German speaker). Fitting with the tropes of his depiction, Fennhoff collaborates with Nazis and seems to partially support their values. His coding as a comic version of Freud makes that allegiance seem very curious because of Freud’s Jewish connotations. Part of his backstory is, for example, that he fled Vienna for London after the rise of the Nazi party, like Freud (DeMatteis 1983, 1.133). This portrayal of a so-called Nazi Jew, a figure originally meant to elicit sympathy because of a history of persecution, but then becoming the persecutor himself, shows that superhero comics can be quite contradictory and allegiances change quickly with regards to the depiction of evil. What remains constant, throughout the Silver Age, is that the foreign is villainous. Moreover, the villainy of foreignness remains, even when the ideological motives lose political impetus in the real world. Though Nazis are amongst the most persistent opponents in the superhero genre, most iconic Nazi villains such as Baron Heinrich Zemo (first appearance as a main character Lee 1964a, 1.6), Doctor Faustus, or Baron Wolfgang von Strucker (first appearance in Lee 1964b, 1.5) were invented in the 1960s, not in the 1940s. Like their counterparts from the 1940s, Zemo, Faustus, and von Strucker are presented as typical Nazi opponents of Captain America even during the Cold War. This anachronism testifies to the fact that Nazis had (and have) increasingly become a personification of evil itself. 5 These ahistorical portrayals were unproblematic to the consumers of popular culture. Even in twenty-first century U.S.-American popular culture, while other villains are often presented as having moral complexities, Nazi are singular in their evil and Nazism is presented as an intolerable ideology. Always referring back to World

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War II, Nazi villains reference what is often been viewed as the last fully just war the United States has been involved in. Captain America’s inability to cope with the complicated moral codes of non-Nazi villains is reflected in the comics themselves and in the country that Captain America symbolically represents. He continued to fight villains whose ideology was clearly un-American and whose morality was clearly evil, during an era when other heroes were moving on to fight more nuanced antagonists (for example, Spider-Man vs. Vulture). After being thawed decades after World War II, Cap is depicted as a man out of time. Much like a comic Rip van Winkle he is unable to understand the modern world and struggles with his old-fashioned political views. For example, in the early 1970s, he exclaims: This is the day of the anti-hero—the age of the rebel—and the dissenter! It isn’t hip—to defend the establishment! Only to tear it down! And, in a world rife with injustice, greed, and endless war—who’s to say the rebels are wrong? But I’ve never learned to play by today’s new rules! I’ve spent a lifetime defending the flag—and the law! Perhaps—I should have battled less—and questioned more! (quoted in Schweizer 1992, 207)

This moment of clarity paves the way for Cap’s redefinition as a character who, in the name of the old-fashioned, truly American values he represents, can take a stand against his government when it betrays those values. Having Captain America become critical of the U.S. itself is symptomatic of a shift in the take on evil in superhero comics. Suddenly, it becomes possible for evil to fully be located within America, even within American politics and government itself, instead of being associated with foreign powers. In the 1970s, Steve Roger’s criticism of his government brings him to the point of giving up the identity of Captain America altogether and becoming the superhero Nomad, literally a homeless hero not representing a specific country. It is heavily implied that Rogers’ disillusionment with the American government is related to Richard Nixon’s presidency, shaken as it was by the Watergate scandal. In the storyline in question, Rogers discovers that a high-ranking government official, obviously meant to be Nixon, is the leader of a terrorist organization (Englehart 1974, 1.175), and subsequently gives up his mantle as Captain America: “The people who had custody of the American dream had abused both it and us! There was no way I could keep calling myself ‘Captain America,’ because the others who acted in America’s name were every bit as bad . . . as . . . the . . . Red . . . Skull . . . !” (Englehart 1975, 1.183; emphasis in original). However, despite the claim that the comic version of Nixon and the people working with and for him are just as bad as the Red Skull, the politician in question is portrayed as thoroughly human throughout the story. This presentation differs from the Skull, who already in the Silver

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Age resembles a deformed monster. Apparently, it was not (yet) possible to show American enemies as dehumanized in the manner used for decades with foreign enemies. Evil may have taken an American form, but it remains a human form. While American villains retain their human form, ethnically other villains are presented as inhuman. For instance, in a comic from 1941, Cap encounters Native Americans who are used by Japanese spies to attack the white men, a rather absurd plot mixing together various enemy images (Simon 1941a, 1.14). Africans and African Americans, on the other hand, only had minor roles as servants and so-called noble savages, hardly to be taken seriously by the heroes and by extension, the readers (cf. Simon 1941a, 1.14; Lee 1942b, 1.19). The moral coding of different ethnicities is quite clear: the real nemeses hail from different corners of the world, and if they are not German, they tend to be from Asia, or “the Orient” as Marvel refers to it into the 1960s (Lee 1964c, 1.50). A notable example from the Silver Age of Comics is the Mandarin, a villain from the Iron Man comics and “the most feared Oriental of all time,” his tagline on the cover Tales of Suspense (1964c, 1.50) On his father’s side a descendant of the Mongolian conqueror Genghis Khan (Lee 1964c, 1.50), who in Western depictions is of course almost a personification of the evil Oriental trope, he is also the son of one of the wealthiest men in pre-revolutionary China. The Mongolian and the Chinese are blended together in that stereotypical Oriental, despite the fact that the historical Khan was China’s enemy. The dangerously Oriental nature of the Mandarin is emphasized in earlier comics, both on the verbal as well as on the pictorial level through stereotypically Asian features, clothing, and the ornamental throne he sits on (Lee 1964c, 1.50). The comic narratives that add to his Oriental characterization is the fact that he’s a “Karate master” (Lee 1964c, 1.50), even though Karate is not Chinese martial arts in the strict sense. Lastly, the Mandarin is already a typical Cold War foe: his Orientalism is connected to Communist China, or, as a commentary in Tales of Suspense 50 says: he comes from “seething, smoldering, secretive Red China” (Lee 1964c, 1.50). Even if he is shown to have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the Communist government (Lee 1964c, 1.50), he still fits into the category of “America’s [usually communist] enemies” that Iron Man mostly fights against at the beginning of his publication history (Lee and Bernstein 1963, 1.41). Conflating Asian cultures without attention to their historical relations, these comics clearly show disinterest in clearer distinctions than us and them. On top of the mingled Asian heritage, the Mandarin’s mother was an English noblewoman. This fact speaks both to the cliché of the English as evil often found in American popular culture as a particular form of the evil European and to the resentment toward the class-based English social structure with its resulting social immobility (Drenning 2010, 135−137). 6 As heir to old European money, this quintessential “oriental

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menace” (Lee 1964c, 1.50) is diametrically opposed to the American selfmade millionaire family of the Starks. THE COLD WAR, COMMIES, SCIENTISTS, AND SLEEPER AGENTS During the Cold War, when America’s ideological enemy changed, a new group of villains came to the forefront in superhero comics: the communists (Scott 2007, 335). Even Cap, with his fixation on Nazi opponents, changed his focus for a short while, when Marvel tried to boost the low sales of his comic in the 1950s. To match contemporary national interests, the Red Skull became an evil communist (Chapman 1953, 1.24; Englehart 1972, 1.155), and Captain America became a “commie smasher” (Lee 1954, 1.75–77). Typical groups of antagonists in the era are comprised of Soviet spies and saboteurs. However, those attempts to re-popularize Captain America failed; the readership was at the time witness to McCarthy’s anti-Communist agitation and editor and writer Stan Lee later hypothesized that “the public had simply tired of a patriotic-type hero” (Lee 1979, 21). The un-nuanced Nazi villain could not simply be replaced with an un-nuanced Communist stand-in. Instead, comics dealing with the Cold War in other, more contemporary manners became popular, such as by addressing the arms race. 7 For instance, in an issue of the Silver Surfer, a Doomsday robot developed by the U.S. almost destroys the whole world (Lee 1970, 13). Similarly, The Avengers address the topic of Cold War paranoia and fear of secret infiltration by the enemy from 1971 to 1972. The Avengers are a patriotically American super-team, often led by Captain America himself. In this particular early 1970s storyline, the heroes avert an alien invasion (Schweizer 1992, 238). In the aftermath of their battle, the U.S. is gripped by the fear that there could still be alien sleeper agents hiding in the American society. 8 An “Alien Activities Commission” receives the assignment to keep suspicious humans under surveillance, blatantly paralleling the House Un-American Activities Committee. Evil suddenly seems omnipresent within American society itself, even if it is still shown as an element foreign and opposed to American democracy. Unlike the depictions of Nazi villains, evil now had the capacity to look like the us. As the discourse on villainy began to escape its ethnic and nationalist definitions, other groups began to be singled out as evil in superhero comics. The profession of scientists, for instance, began to signify what had once been indicated by race. Intelligence, academic achievement, and, above all, the possession of one or numerous academic titles began to code to superhuman villainy. The Supervillain Book, a compendium on supervillains in comics and movies, lists over a dozen villains whose monikers begin with the title “Dr.” (cf. Misiroglu and Eury 2006). Fur-

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thermore, multiple villains have names that emphasize their brain power or their cranium, such as the original Brainiac, the Mad Thinker—one of the members of the evil organization Intelligencia—or Brain Storm. In Marvel, in particular, this anti-intellectualism is maintained through xenophobic fear of the foreign. Marvel’s primary case for this is Doctor Doom, aka Victor von Doom. Doom is the ruler of the vaguely Eastern European state of Latveria. Moving in perfect synch with changing political discourse, the location of Latveria changes from the Bavarian Alps to Hungary, Romania, and Serbia, exemplifying different images of the political enemy. Doom’s parents are gypsies (Brubaker 2005, 1), and his mother is versed in the arcane arts. After the tragic death of his parents in a Latverian village, Doom gets a scholarship to study science in the U.S. Which science he studies is never made clear, as comic book geniuses tend to be masters of all the disciplines and their creators recognize that many readers would not ask them to differentiate between scientific fields. Doom subsequently combines science and magic, blending the domestic with the foreign. His use of science is associated with his education in the United States, where, as an Eastern European Roma, he is unable to fit in. His use of magic is passed down via his Roma mother, in a rather stereotypical representation of the irrational as foreign and the unAmerican because it is not supported by the American default person. Furthermore, Doom’s face gets disfigured in an explosion when attempting to bring his mother back from the dead. His disfiguration prompts him to wear a mask for most of his publication history, adding him to the long line of deformed foreign villains in Marvel comics. Despite Dr. Doom’s Eastern European ties, in the Cold War era, unlike during World War II, ideology alone no longer identifies Marvel villains as evil. Nationality, however, still plays a significant role in their villainy. The European magicians and doctors are countered by American scientists who use their brains for good. The European Dr. Doom is, for instance, the arch nemesis of Reed Richards, aka Mr. Fantastic, the first of the so-called science heroes created during the Cold War. The Red Scare motivated a new, intellectual significance after the Soviets launched their first satellite in 1957. For the first time, the American public felt that the U.S. had fallen behind the Soviet Union in terms of scientific progress. The so-called Sputnik crisis caused the U.S. government to put into motion “Programs of Accelerated Learning” that were intended to make sure that a new generation of scientists would secure the U.S.-American supremacy in space travel and other scientific areas (Schweizer 1992, 79; cf. 121). Marvel comics reacted to the Sputnik crisis by creating a squad of super-scientists, like Richards, Hank Pym, aka Antman, or Tony Stark, aka Iron Man. The first issue of the Fantastic Four has Richards explicitly wanting to undertake the first manned space flight in order to beat the Commies to it. One of his team’s first enemies is a Russian scientist, Ivan Kragoff, the

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Red Ghost, who trains apes to assist him in his quest for space conquest. These are less-than-subtle allegories used by the comic writers: the apes “are like the communist masses, innocently enslaved by their evil leaders!” (Schweizer 1992, 88) Additionally, the intelligent Soviet supporters are variously brainwashed or otherwise coerced into following orders because it is inconceivable that intelligent people would choose to support the evil Soviet system. The American heroes win often not because they are physically or even intellectually superior to their opponents, but because the Soviet agents wake up from their induced hypnosis and realize that the American way of life is simply superior to the Soviet system. Some readers were bothered by the general depiction of communists as villains in the Cold War era and wrote letters to Marvel. These letters were published in the section with letters to the editors of the comics, features which at that point were only included in the Fantastic FourComic, though they were dedicated to all the comics Marvel published. The majority of the reader’s letters were anti-communist, expressing sentiments such as “Communism is like a cancer infecting the body and mind of the West and it must be fought in all ways possible” (Schweizer 1992, 186). Yet. a rather heated debate ensued in the section about Marvel “encourag[ing] World War III” (Schweizer 1992, 184). The topic changed from communism to the war in Vietnam and the editorial staff responded until 1967, when writer and editor-in-chief Stan Lee wrote: “Many Keepers of the Faith have demanded that we take a more definite stand on current problems such as Viet Nam, civil rights, and the increase of crime, to name a few . . . we’ve long believed that our first duty is to entertain, rather than editorialize” (Schweizer 1992, 187). Of course, such a claim ignores that entertainment necessarily participates in a wider political and social discourse, thereby becoming somewhat “editorializ[ing],” regardless of intent. The changing depictions of villainy in the comics bore witness to changing attitudes toward villainy among their readership. Perhaps due to this constant discussion with their readers, or maybe because of the peaceful co-existence established between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, Soviet communists ceased to be the archetypical enemies in Marvel comics in the late 1960s. Former Soviet villains became independent and didn’t serve sinister powers located in the Kremlin anymore, but served, instead, themselves (Schweizer 1992, 189–90). POST-9/11, REAL-LIFE HEROISM, AND THE THREAT FROM WITHIN Despite comic narratives’ approval of communist betrayal, not only are other nationalities depicted as morally dubious in comics, but the lack of nationalism, too, is presented as just as disconcerting. Supranational evil

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organizations abound in comics from the end of the 1970s until today. While the Avengers are, for example, supposed to be an international organization, the reader hardly sees them work in a truly international manner. For instance, in a story featuring other versions of the superheroes, the Fantastic Four and the U.S.-army track down Doom in Denmark when the Danish army turns up and reminds them that their actions on Danish grounds aren’t authorized. The leader of the American forces however isn’t impressed: “Listen, son. We are the United States Army, and this is a police action. This is a terrorist, and we are bringing him in” (Ellis 2004, 1.12). On the evil side, truly international organizations emerged in the comic storylines. The Advanced Idea Mechanics (A.I.M.) is a prime example. The A.I.M. are stateless “science-terrorists” (Gischler 2009/2010) who seek the “overthrow of all governments in favor of technology and science” (Bendis 2012, 2.20). The organization bears resemblance to a beehive; its members have expunged their individuality by wearing yellow suits with helmets which make them look like beekeepers. Though they begin as stateless, A.I.M. establishes their own sovereign nation and becomes a public organization (Hickman 2012, 1.610). Instead of simply being opponents of the superheroes, A.I.M. as an independent nation becomes a potential co-operator, which shows that the organization’s evil is intimately related to their supranational program because it is neutralized once the program becomes national instead. The Ultimates, a darker, more sexual and provocative version of the Avengers who first appear in 2002, are likewise repeatedly confronted with evil stateless or multinational organizations. In a storyline titled Grand Theft America (2006), they are, for example, attacked by a team of anti-American multi-nationals called the Liberators, an “international collective [of] international terrorists” (Millar 2006b, 2.9) from countries like Iranian Azerbaijan, China, North Korea, Russia, Syria, and France. The explicit goal of the Liberators is “containing [the] “overly ambitious foreign policy” of the U.S. (Millar 2006c, 2.10; emphasis in original). Specifically, the Liberators combat the tendency of its superheroes to invade other countries as part of the War on Terror with the resultant invalidation of existing legal systems: “We told you to stop making super people, America. We told you not to interfere with cultures you can never understand” (Millar 2006c, 2.10; emphasis in the original) The agenda of the Liberators is clearly anti-imperialist, with its Chinese member declaring that they attacked the U.S. “to stop more preemptive [sic] strikes. Similar complaints are raised by the Russians, the Arabs and all the North Koreans” (Millar 2006b, 2.9). With the aid of the Russian spy Black Widow, who is a traitor in the ultimate universe, the “foreign terrorists” (Millar 2007b, 2.13), a new Axis of Evil, 9 take over the United States and capture the Ultimates.

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The superheroes manage to escape, though, and vanquish the Liberators in an issue patriotically called Independence Day. One key moment in the comic comes when Captain America kills Abdul Al-Rahman, an Azerbaijani teenager who, like Steve Rogers himself, underwent medical treatment to gain superhuman abilities. As the Colonel, Al-Rahman joined the Liberators in order to “wake [America’s] people up” (Millar 2006d, 2.12). When his hands get cut off, the image alludes to the emasculation or castration of Al-Rahman at the hands of the hypermasculine Captain America. At this point, Al-Rahman resigns and asks Captain America whether he even appreciates what the Liberators fought for. Instead of an answer, the Captain impales Abul with his own weapon. Of course, that storyline could be read as a cynical take on the American foreign policy after 9/11; however, it is just as possible to read it as a straight-forward triumph of the Ultimates as heroes and therefore the icons of good. As the Ultimates are the team that gets the most space in the narrative and therefore invites identification on the side of the reader, they can be understood as good compared to evil multinationals and multinationalism generally. Aside from the shift in enemy from foreign national to foreign supranational, after 9/11, the depiction of antagonists and the evil they represent seems to change in step with a corresponding shift in the everyday understanding of what makes someone a hero. This shift was precipitated by the so-called real-life American heroism that was celebrated across the media after the attacks on the World Trade Center. Both Marvel and DC produced comic books celebrating the heroes of 9/11, for example, showing the Avengers standing alongside the firefighters and other rescue workers that were on duty on Ground Zero (Scott 2007 336−337). Marvel published two comic books in immediate reaction to the attack; both were benefit products for charity and both were financially very successful. The first Marvel book was called Heroes. Published in December 2001, its subtitle promised “The world’s greatest superhero creators honor the world’s greatest heroes” (Busiek et al., 2001). A similar acknowledgment of 9/11’s heroes followed in February 2002. Titled A Moment of Silence, the comic focused on images rather than textual narrative. The first volume especially featured contributions from a myriad of creators, some of whom were known to be rebellious and take an ironic stance toward comic books, such as graphic novelist Alan Moore. Other artists were not even primarily associated with Marvel before, such as Neal Adams. Because these creators laid aside rivalries and artistic agendas to create these comic memorials, the collection of their work bears testimony to the unifying quality the events of 9/11 had in the public consciousness. Because of his capacity to represent the U.S. like no other Marvel character, Captain America is a prominent figure in Heroes. The rescue personnel of the New York Police Department and Fire Department ap-

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pear alongside the superheroes. In a pivotal moment of the book, a policeman and a fireman are even shown to give comfort to Captain America when he is overwhelmed. As this scene shows, Heroes, like A Moment of Silence, try to establish that heroes akin to—or even superior to—the superheroes exist in the real world. This notion is made explicit in the introduction to A Moment of Silence (2002), written by Rudolph Giuliani, mayor of New York on 9/11: “I think we all now realize that we do not have to read fiction to find examples of heroism. The real heroes in American life have been with us all along. Our firefighters, police officers and other rescue workers put their lives on the line every day to protect the rest of us from danger.” Despite the important national sentiment evoked in this passage, Guiliani’s point seems rather out of place in a comic about superheroes because it demotes their protagonists. Marvel’s 9/11 comics seem paradoxically to advocate the superfluousness of fictional heroes all while selling them a comic featuring those very fictional heroes. However, the real-life heroism that is celebrated both in A Moment of Silence and in Heroes is not that different from what is advocated in many superhero comics. These narratives advocate a heroism of the immediate deed, of action in the face of calamity, and in the name of a community that gets attacked by foreigners. In A Moment of Silence, this notion is put into practice through the almost complete absence of text, which is remarkable in a medium that, almost by definition, is said to combine the visual and the verbal. Action takes precedence to speech, which is framed as escapist and “meaningless”: When hell hit the World Trade Center, most of us stood around talking—making phone calls, writing e-mails and, generally, filling in that hole in our bellies with meaningless chatter. But in the face of extreme danger, thousands of New York firefighters, police officers and rescue workers burst onto the scene. These men and women saved thousands of lives and many sacrificed their own. “Judge people by what they do, not by what they say.” That’s what I learned from my mother and my father; that is what I teach my children, but I did not truly know what that meant until this past September. (Bendis and Morse 2001)

The book thereby becomes a manifesto against the inaction of the person who is more concerned with medially spreading his experiences than with actively taking part in them. The 9/11 books dealt with a new kind of American heroism and focused on an inner-American solidarity across ethnicities and religions. In stark contrast to the treatment of groups of foreigners in World War II, the characters in those political comics “often called for tolerance of ethnic groups that lived in the United States, especially Arab-Americans” (Scott 2007, 336). Yet, a more xenophobic attitude was equally present in the post 9/11 superhero comics. The War on Terror slipped into superhe-

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ro stories almost as soon as it was declared. 10 A prime example of this engagement appears in Civil War, the seven issue comic event Marvel put out in 2006–2007. 11 Civil War follows the typical structure of newer Marvel event-books, which consists of a main series written by one writer, tie-ins into other series of the Marvelverse and some one-shots or miniseries only being published as part of the event. All in all, it consists of more than 100 comic books, and it implicitly deals with the political situation in the U.S. post-9/11 and specifically with the PATRIOT Act that aimed to remove legal impediments to identifying suspicious activities indicative of potential acts of terrorism. 12 As a comic dealing with an inner-American dispute, Civil War lacks the clear assignation of good and evil that is typical of many other superhero comics. Instead, it testifies to the struggles revolving around what comprises American identity after 9/11. The Marvel event enacts a story clearly inspired by 9/11 and poses some fundamental political and philosophical questions by making the issue personal for its two protagonists, Captain America and Iron Man. A superhero registration act gets approved by Congress after a catastrophe caused by a young, untrained superhero claims the life of many innocents, mainly children. Tony Stark/Iron Man decides to support the act, obliging the costumed heroes to expose their identities to the government. This decision in favor of accountability pits him against Captain America, who insists on the freedom of the individual and criticizes the infringement of privacy. As in the older story arc from the 1970s, a gulf opens up between the so-called real American values Rogers holds and potentially corrupt American institutions betraying them. After a clash with some government officials, the Captain goes underground and proceeds to fight the act. As both are known and respected figures in the superhero community, Stark and Rogers quickly gather a number of followers. The split in the superhero community becomes bigger as both fractions resort to increasingly desperate and morally dubious—even evil—methods in order to ensure their victory. For example, both sides enlist known villains to fight in their ranks, a decision that proves to be disastrous. When the fight escalates into a full-blown war in the middle of New York, Rogers gets the opportunity to deliver a killing blow to a defeated Stark, who asks his friend-turned-enemy to “finish it” (Civil War 2007a, 7; emphasis in original). However, a group of civilians holds him back, which prompts Rogers to question his actions: “We’re not fighting for the people anymore. . . . We’re just fighting” (Civil War 2007a, 7; emphasis in original). In stark contrast to rescue workers comforting Captain America in Heroes, the panels from Civil War feature a policeman and a fireman holding Cap back. 13 The rescue workers are thus again arguably shown to represent a higher brand of heroism in the comic explicitly dealing with 9/11. Their real life heroism acts as an alternative to the pugilism of Iron

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Man and Captain America which becomes, if not evil, then at the very least dangerous. The conflict in Civil War, while political, is also elevated to a more general philosophical level. Formulated in such a way, two outlooks on life and ethical behavior clash. Captain America’s deontology insists on the intrinsic moral value of certain acts, while Iron Man’s utilitarianism holds that, in a climate of fear and distrust of superheroes, the people have a right to expect accountability. This philosophical underpinning somewhat dilutes the political virulence of the series, as it masks a concrete political issue in general terms where no right or wrong can be determined. In fact, this is the tag used for the event all along, “Whose side are you on?” (Millar 2006a, 4), implying that there is no correct side to choose. Alternatively, in the terms of this analysis, there is no simple evil to identify and fight against. Befitting the emotional tone of the advertisements and the story itself, the event was hotly debated and prompted some highly emotional reactions among readers, reviewers, and, apparently, the creators themselves. 14 Perhaps because of this conflict, the narrative is structured so that even basic tenets such as what the superhero registration act precisely entails aren’t consistently depicted. In fact, not even the name of the act remains the same. 15 In some comics, the act requires the heroes to give up their identities to the government and undergo frequent testing or training of their superpowers, while in others it is implied that they actually have to make their identities public. In some comics, the refusal to sign the act would lead to legal persecution, while in others the heroes in question would be locked away without a trial or any regular legal procedure until they agree to sign. Such inconsistencies lead to a different image of each side depending on what parts of the event one has read (Davidson 2015, 11–25). Some of the readership as well as some of the creators seem to have responded very negatively to Iron Man’s side in the conflict. Such readings see the pro-registration side as the evil that needs to be vanquished in the series and are, to put it in extreme terms, by extension qualifying the actions of the American government after 9/ 11 as villainous. This reading seems to be supported by Marvel’s attempts to redeem Tony Stark in the years after the event, finally having him wipe the memories of his actions during Civil War from his mind to start anew. However, Veloso and Bateman (2013) have analyzed the main series Civil War— the seven issues written by Mark Millar and drawn by Steve McNiven— and come to a very different conclusion, ultimately concluding that the victory belongs to Stark’s faction. They argue that the comic avoids a clear-cut image of right and wrong at the beginning because of the potential economic success of the book: presenting both points of view keeps Marvel from immediately driving away readers subscribing to one or the other position. Furthermore, in Veloso’s and Bateman’s eyes, this set-up

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allows the writers to potentially change people’s minds by the end of the story (Veloso and Bateman 2013, 434). According to the researchers, this end is entirely positive: Captain America has given up and Tony Stark is shown at sunset, looking directly at the reader, a smile quirking his lips as he says “the best is yet to come” (Civil War 2007a, 7). While Veloso and Bateman’s analysis of the multimodal construction of meaning in the Civil War series is very thorough and also impressive in its attention to the formal aspects of the comic, their sense of the conclusion is questionable, and not only because the promise of “the best being yet to come” sounds rather sinister in the context of the events that happened before, events partly prompted by Stark himself. Veloso and Bateman deliberately only focus on the seven issues of the main series, leaving out both the tie-ins and one-shots linked to the event and the wider macro-narrative at play in the Marvel universe. The serial storytelling in Marvel comics has for over a decade been characterized by a very developed macro structure, where events tie together and have consequences for the world state. Taking into account both the tie-ins, in which Iron Man’s side is at times presented in exceedingly negative terms, and that Marvel ultimately has done away with the notion that Stark winning the Civil War is in any way good, even the concept of evil becomes less clearcut. At the end of Civil War, Stark becomes head of the global peacekeeping organization S.H.I.E.L.D., which led Veloso and Bateman to conclude that all is well in government, despite S.H.I.E.L.D.’s dubious legal status (Millar 2006a, 1). However, the next few events Marvel has done radically destroy this notion of the good political leaders. First, the events in World War Hulk, which are partly caused by Stark and other pro-registration advocates like Reed Richards, wreak destruction in New York. This catastrophe is followed by Secret Invasion (2008). If Civil War depicts an inner enemy, as opposed to a foreign one, then, Secret Invasion dealt with this topic even more explicitly. The inner enemy in Secret Invasion is, however, again thoroughly alien; in that sense, the comic taps into the old tendency of othering the villains. The story takes up elements already seen in certain Cold War stories, with a plot that revolves around a shape-shifting race of aliens, the Skrulls, who have infiltrated all positions of power in the world in order to prepare an invasion. Cleverly playing with the insecurity of both the reader and the characters with regards to anyone’s so-called authentic identity, the event again pits the heroes against one another. Naturally, humanity manages to prevail, but at a high price, ushering in a reign of terror known as Dark Reign in the Marvelverse that lasts for several years both within the Marvelverse and in the real world of publishing comics, forcing most of the known heroes into hiding. In the macro-narrative, the government—apparently established as the good savior at the end of Civil War—turns out to be highly problematic, unstable, and corrupt. The Skrulls are able to play humanity because

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the government only cared about an act that was ultimately useless, if not dangerous to the safety of the Marvelverse. Stark’s policy of accountability for the heroes failed, the wounds in the superhero community have not healed, and wide segments of the super-powered population are still underground and unable to work together to properly defend the U.S. This weakened state is further aggravated through the Skrulls’ pervasive use of Stark technology, which they have managed to hack, effectively crippling communication amongst humans. This weak government with its panic-mongering didn’t manage to foresee the actual threat; it gets replaced by downright criminals exploiting the paranoia of the public after the attempted invasion, which is made very clear in the last issue of Secret Invasion 1.8, 2009. In the end, the foreign enemy emerges as a result of the morally ambivalent conflict between two patriotic superheroes. With the return to the foreign enemy, the genre seems to return to its roots in the twentieth century, even though, as the variations since the 1940s demonstrate, the construction of evil in Marvel comics is highly dependent on discourses that are historically variable. In the Golden Age, the villains were usually political enemies like the Nazis or the Japanese, beginning the equation of foreign with evil. The Cold War saw the rise of the Communist antagonists, while also dealing with unrest in the U.S.American society itself whether through foreign saboteurs or domestic ideological upheaval. While the latter was usually attributed to destructive external influences, newer comics, especially comics since 9/11, also deal with enemies within America that didn’t have to be differentiated in national or racial terms. Those comics simultaneously posit a new, realworld kind of hero: the rescue workers at Ground Zero. Despite the evolution of the superheroes and their villains, the U.S.-American superhero genre is clear about one aspect of evil: evil is the counterpoint to the stakes of U.S.-American national identity. NOTES 1. The numbering of Marvel comics is more than confusing, as the counting of issues regularly gets restarted and even the distinction between volumes isn’t clear. The authors have chosen to designate comics as clearly as possible. Usually, this requires indicating a title or a volume, an issue number and a year. As pages are usually not numbered in comics, the indication of the issues in question has to suffice. 2. The protagonists, however, were hardly ever drawn in this fashion, instead they looked like Greek statues with a perfect physique and handsome features. 3. Hitler was a dominant figure in DC’s take on World War II. Munson (2012) provides a detailed analysis of Superman’s depiction during World War II, debunking a well-known cliché that holds that the superheroes were not involved in Realpolitik and dismantling the racist structures inherent in war-time comics. 4. Of course, true heroes never die in comics: a few years later, it is revealed that Cap is still alive and he triumphantly returns in Captain America: Reborn. 5. Nazis have become mostly disjointed from their historical reality and goals: in the twenty-first century, they often figure as a ridiculous, over-the-top evil in movies

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and other media. An example of a European movie that takes this to an extreme is Iron Sky (2012), where Nazis live on the moon and are plotting to take over the world. Until today, the Nazis figure as the epitome of evilness in various films, comics, or books. Germany is still most clearly associated with them in media like Cartoons (see BöhmeDürr 1994; Gast 1989; Keil 1990). 6. Another example of an evil Englishman within superhero media is Emil Blonsky, featured in the Hulk film from 2008 as a British soldier (curiously clad in an American military uniform), but originally a Russian spy in the comics. Blonsky is played by the British actor Tim Roth, who is heard using an American accent in other roles, for example Hoodlum (1993) and Everyone Says I Love You (1996). 7. For a general account of Marvel Comics during the Cold War and some ideological contexts such as the discourse of the nuclear family, the crisis of masculinity, or the weapons industry, see Robert Genter (2007). 8. This idea of aliens living unidentifiably among so-called normal Americans had taken a strong hold on the American imagination in the decades of the Cold War; for example, various episodes of the popular TV show The Twilight Zone deal with the topic, amongst them “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” 9. The title Axis of Evil (Millar 2006c, 2.10) is a military term coined by former U.S.President George W. Bush, describing governments that he accused of helping terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction. 10. Hassler-Forest (2010) addresses this approach in the superhero movies Batman Begins and V for Vendetta as implicitly participating in a post 9/11-discourse. 11. Kevin Scott’s (2015) Marvel Comics’ Civil War and the Age of Terror, a collection dedicated to dealing with the event from a critical perspective, has just been published. 12. For a reading employing discourse analysis to dismantle the ideological thrust of the comic in the debate around the PATRIOT Act, see Veloso and Bateman (2013). 13. This choice of personnel is explicitly noted in the script to the series; see the Civil War: Script Book 7, 19 (“rescue workers [medics, firefighters, cops, etc] all grabbing Cap and pulling him back off Tony”). 14. For example, several quotes by Millar and others in the Civil War: Script Book insinuate such conflicts. See, for example editor Tom Brevoort’s quote about the depiction of Stark in tie-in issues (4, 6) or Millar’s quote where he says that the writers of the tie-in books “demonized” some characters (6, 11). 15. It is the “Superhero Registration Act” in New Avengers: Illuminati 0; the “Superhuman Registration Act” in New Avengers 1.22. As both written by the same writer, Brian Michael Bendis, this discrepancy cannot be attributed to traditional production issues (Davidson 2015, 12–13).

REFERENCES Badiou, Alain. 2002. Ethics. An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Peter Hallward. London and New York: Verso. Bagley, Mark, et al. 2002. A Moment of Silence 1 (1). Bauman, Zygmunt. 1991. Modernity and Ambivalence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bendis, Brian Michael. 2008. Secret Invasion Limited Series (1–8). ———. 2012. Avengers. 2 (20). Bendis, Brian Michael, and Scott Morse. 2001. “Moment of Silence: A True Story.” Heroes, The World’s Greatest Super Hero Creators Honor the World’s Greatest Heroes 1 (1). Bering, Dietz. 2011. Die Epoche der Intellektuellen. 1898–2001. Geburt. Begriff. Grabmal. Berlin: Berlin University Press. Binder, Otto. 1942. Captain America. 1 (15).

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Böhme-Dürr, Karin. 1994. “Deutschland im amerikanischen Cartoon.” In Medienlust und Mediennutz. Edited by Louis Bosshart and Wolfgang Hoffmann-Riem, 435–46. München: Ölschläger. Brooker, Will. 2001. Batman Unmasked. Analyzing a Cultural Icon. London: Continuum. Brubaker, Ed. 2005. Fantastic Four: Books of Doom Limited Series (1). ———. 2007/2008. ”Death of Captain America.” Captain America. 5 (25–42). ———. 2009/2010. “Captain America: Reborn” Limited Series (1–6). Busiek et al. 2001. Heroes. The World’s Greatest Super Hero Creators Honor the World’s Greatest Heroes 9-11-2001. 1 (1). Chapman, Hank. 1953. Young Men. 1 (24). Davidson, Ryan M. 2015. “The Superhuman Registration Act, the Constitution, and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” In Marvel Comics’ Civil War and the Age of Terror. Critical Essays on the Comic Saga. Edited by Kevin M. Scott, 11−25. Jefferson: McFarland. DeMatteis, J. M. 1983. Marvel Team-up. 1 (133). Drennig, Georg. 2010. “Otherness and the European as Villain and Antihero in American Comics.” In Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives. Edited by Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke and Gideon Haberkorn, 127–39. Jefferson: McFarland. Duncan, Randy, and Matthew J. Smith. 2009. The Power of Comic: History, Form, and Culture. New York: Continuum. Ellis, Warren. 2004. Ultimate Fantastic Four. 1 (12). Englehart, Steve. Englehart, Steve. 1972. Captain America. 1 (155). ———. 1974. Captain America. 1 (175). ———. 1975. Captain America. 1 (183). Gast, Wolfgang. 1989. “Das Bild der Deutschen im amerikanischen Fernsehen.” In Völker und Nationen im Spiegel der Medien. Edited by Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. 43–53. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. Genter, Robert. 2007. “‘With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility’: Cold War Culture and the Birth of Marvel Comics.” The Journal of Popular Culture 40 (6): 953–78. Gischler, Victor. 2009/2010. Deadpool: Merc With A Mouth. 1. Hassler-Forest, Dan A. 2010. “From Trauma Victim to Terrorist: Redefining Superheroes in Post-9/11 Hollywood.” In Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives. Edited by Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke, and Gideon Haberkorn, 33–44. Jefferson: McFarland. Hickman, Jonathan. 2012. Fantastic Four. 1 (610). Honderich, Ted (ed.). 1995. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Keil, Hartmut. 1990. “The Presentation of Germany in American Television News.” In Germany and German Thought in American Literature and Cultural Criticism. Edited by Peter Freese. 26–50. Essen: Die Blaue Eule. Lee, Stan. 1942a. Captain America. 1 (14). ———. 1942b. Captain America. 1 (19). ———. 1943. Captain America. 1 (22). ———. (ed.). 1954. Captain America. 1 (75–77). ———. 1964a. Avengers. 1 (6). ———. 1964b. Sgt Fury and his Howling Commandos. 1 (5). ———. 1964c. Tales of Suspense. 1 (50). ———. 1965. Tales of Suspense. 1 (65). ———. 1966. Tales of Suspense. 1 (79). ———. 1968. Captain America. 1 (107). ———. 1970. Silver Surfer. 1 (13). ———. 1979. Captain America. Sentinel of Liberty. New York: Fireside. Lee, Stan, and Robert Bernstein. 1963. Tales of Suspense. 1 (41).

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Mac an Ghaill, Màirtín. 2000. “The Irish in Britain: The Invisibility of Ethnicity and Anti-Irish Racism.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 26 (1): 137–47. Meskin, Aaron. 2007. “Defining Comics?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (4): 369–79. Millar, Mark. 2006a. Civil War 1 (1–6). ———. 2006b. The Ultimates. 2 (9). ———. 2006c. The Ultimates. 2 (10). ———. 2006d. The Ultimates. 2 (12). ———. 2007a. Civil War 7. ———. 2007b. The Ultimates. 2 (13). Misiroglu, Gina, and Michael Eury. 2006. The Supervillain Book: The Evil Side of Comics and Hollywood. Canton: Visible Ink Press. “Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, The.” 1960. Directed by Ron Winston. Written by Rod Serling. Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer Studios. Munson, Todd S. 2012. “‘Superman Says You Can Slap a Jap!’ The Man of Steel and Race Hatred in World War II.” In The Ages of Superman: Essays on the Man of Steel in Changing Times. Edited by Joseph Darowski, 5–15. Jefferson: McFarland. Park, Greg. 2007. World War Hulk. Limited Series (1–5). Scott, Cord. 2007. “Written in Red, White, and Blue: A Comparison of Comic Book Propaganda from World War II and September 11.” The Journal of Popular Culture 40 (2): 325–43. Schweizer, Reinhard. 1992. Ideologie und Propaganda in den Marvel-Superheldencomics. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Sencindiver, Susan Yi et al., eds. 2011. Otherness. A Multilateral Perspective. Frankfurt am Main.: Lang. Simon, Joe. 1941a. Captain America. 1 (4). ———. 1941b. Captain America. Volume 1 (7). Veloso, Francisco, and John Bateman. 2013. “The Multimodal Construction of Acceptability: Marvel’s Civil War Comic Books and the PATRIOT Act.” Critical Discourse Studies 10(4): 427–43. Wein, Len. 1977. Amazing Spider-Man. 1 (170). Wertham, Fredric. 2004. Seduction of the Innocent [Revised edition]. Laurel: Main Road Books. White, Mark D. 2015. “Teaching Ethics when Hero Battles Hero.” In Marvel Comics’ Civil War and the Age of Terror: Critical Essays on the Comic Saga. Edited by Kevin M. Scott, 189–99. Jefferson: McFarland.

TWELVE Tribalism and the Use of Evil in Modern Politics Riven Barton

The use of the term evil in political rhetoric has experienced a renaissance over the past few decades, especially since Geoge W. Bush’s (2002) reference to “an axis of evil” in his State of the Union address following the events of September 11, 2001 (9/11). According to international relations expert Renee Jeffery, George W. Bush used the term evil in over 800 of his speeches to the nation and the world during his presidency (2008). This term, once rooted exclusively in the realm of religion and ethics, has found its way into the secular, political culture: and not by accident. Evil, as a term, has been used historically to denote something that is fundamentally and inherently malevolent, so tainted that it is beyond the realm of normal human behavior. It is supranatural, lending itself to the image of a divine battle with both religious and militaristic implications. By creating this image, tribal cultures were able to use the concept of evil to justify the exclusion of those with whom the tribe competed for scarce resources. Though we no longer think of scarcity as a driving force in the West, the use of “evil” in political rhetoric offers a political, secular solution to an archetypal, theological dilemma. By evoking this religious terminology in a lay or political context, the speaker implies a sense of righteousness and moral superiority. For example, in George Bush’s “War against Terror” speech, the specific use of the word evil, was effective in that it established an unconscious fear of the presence of a destructive and malevolent force. At the same time, the word unconsciously elevated Bush and the United States (U.S.) to the level of saviors and vanquishers. This 187

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type of exaltation, in conjunction with a viral and ubiquitous media, perpetuates the illusion of a religious war and contributes to both political and religious violence. The religious exclusionary power of evil takes on a secularized, but equally forceful power in contemporary political rhetoric. The term evil thus maintains its role in morally excusing one group— in this case America and the West—for not fully sharing its resources with the rest of the world. WHAT’S IN A WORD? The term evil notoriously evades neat definition. Evil, in its contemporary usage, implies a certain immorality and malcontent; intention and purpose rather than the far more mundane usage. The word is thought to have derived from the Old English yfel” meaning bad, wicked, ill, or vicious (Online Etymology Dictionary 2016). During that period, evil would have been used to refer to anything that was unpleasant or destructive. It might be used to refer to disease, poverty, the failure for children to thrive, crops to grow, or the occurrence of natural disasters. This use also appears in the term’s entry into Christianity. The term was first formally used in a religious context as a mistranslation in John Wycliffe’s adaptation of the Bible into English during the fourteenth century. Wycliffe translated the word malum from the original Latin to evil. Though this was a small error, it dramatically changed the meaning of certain passages and has sparked debate amongst scholars ever since. For example, his translation of Isaiah 45:7: “Forming light, and making darknesses, making peace, and forming evil; I am the lord doing all these things” (1395). Many scholars, however, believe that this was a mistranslation and that a more appropriate translation would be “disaster” or “destruction” in place of the term evil. This difference is reflected in more contemporary translations today, which leave a profoundly different impression (for instance, the English Standard Version, or the New American Bible). The substitution here shows the initial close correlation between evil and destruction rather than evil and malevolence. The contemporary perspective cements the notion of intentional malevolence to the term. Some scholars have even implied that the term evil has become increasingly wicked over time. As etymologist John Ayto (2005) pointed out: “‘Evil’ has gotten distinctly worse over the millennia. Originally it seems to have signified nothing more sinister than ‘uppity,’ and in the Old and Middle English period it meant simply ‘bad’; it is only in modern English that its connotations of ‘extreme moral wickedness’ came to the fore” (201). The evolution of the term’s usage over time has led to a bifurcation of its definition into two distinct categories: natural evil and moral evil. The term natural evil is used to indicate misfortunes such as disease and natural disasters, much more in alignment, perhaps,

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with its original usage. Moral evil, on the other hand, indicates an intentional, malevolent motive or action. This term moral evil is used in an attempt to create context for situations and events which seem to evade logic or basic human understanding, such as mass murderers, genocide, and the rise of militant fundamentalists. The primary differentiating quality between moral evil and so-called natural evil seems to be primarily one of motivation. Moral evil, in this case, is an intentional wrong. As Daniel M. Haybron (2002) points out: “Evil actions are thus distinguished primarily by motives of the agent: the absence of significant desires for other’s welfare, as well as the presence of desire for other’s harm, or for objects resulting in the serious harm of others” (6). The emphasis on intention places evil firmly in the human arena rather than in a larger theological context. Words like “motive, desire, and intention” are all indications of free will, which make this definition of evil a matter of choice or intent. This notion of free will emphasizes human agency, secularizing the theological resonances and making them ripe for appropriation by democratic political rhetoric. THE THEORY OF THE ATROCITY OF EVIL Claudia Card (2002) argues that the atrocity theory of evil assigns the term evil to such horrific crimes as genocide, slavery, domestic abuse, mass rape, and the use of weapons of mass destruction. It does not, however, include so-called natural evil, such as disease, natural disasters, and other non-man-made calamities (5). Evil then, from Card’s perspective, acts as a sort of ranking system that helps people decide how to allocated resources. Jason Campbell (2009) similarly uses the notion of degree to decide when to apply the term evil to an act, and he sees instances of genocide at the top of the list (119). Based on such definitions, in a world of limited resources, the severity and innate evil of an act should affect the primary allocation of those resources. In the case of moral evil, this might include refusing to share resources with the evil parties or allocating resources to fight against them. Whether natural or moral, Card’s theory of atrocity specifies that the greater the evil, the greater the measure of response. To apply Card’s theory of atrocity, society needs “to be able to make judgements of right and wrong” (5), as otherwise no clear ranking system can be applied. This requirement of a universal ethics makes Card’s theory less directly applicable in contemporary society, as there are other categories of actions and beliefs that are deemed evil by some but not by everyone. For instance, there are those who feel that abortion is a significantly evil act. Following Card’s proposition for the priority of action, these individuals would see the assault on physicians who perform abortions not only as justified but also as a priority for the allocation of re-

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sources. On the other hand, there are those who do see murder as a significant evil act but do not consider abortion to be murder. These people would feel that attacking the physicians would constitute the greater evil. This extreme difference of opinion complicates universal application of Card’s theory. Because of such discrepancies between what actions do or do not constitute evil, there have been attempts to identify absolute cases and causes under a moniker that does not refer directly to evil, namely, “crimes against humanity.” According to the international Criminal Court, “crimes against humanity” include many of the same horrific acts indicated in both Card and Campbell’s definitions of evil. These are crimes that are committed as a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population with both the knowledge and perpetuation of the attacker. While claiming specifically to be evil, “crimes against humanity” implies acts that are so far beyond acceptable human behavior that they are an assault on humanity as a whole. As such, the “crimes against humanity” is a psychologically more inclusive term. It places humanity as a whole against violations that are universally offensive. Humanity is united together against such horrific crimes, implying that they should not be committed at any time, in any place, or for any reason. Evil, on the other hand, is something far more primal, even tribal. The term is generally used to differentiate the us (the good guys) from the them (the bad guys). While evil can certainly be used to describe some of the horrific crimes categorized as crimes against humanity, it can also have a psychologically galvanizing effect when one group feels threatened, whether or not that threat is actually real or directed at them. This threat also legitimates taking actions that otherwise would be considered socially abhorrent. By defining something as evil, it becomes outside the tribe and thus not meriting protection, or even necessarily consideration. This mark of difference divides society into us v. them, or more appropriately, it. Such overidentification with one group or identity can be seen not only in the instances of Islamic fundamentalism, but also in the hyperpatriotism that followed the 9/11 attacks. In the collective minds of the American public, this assault transformed dissident radicals into evil terrorists and sparked the declaration of the longest war in U.S. history. This irrational projection is both exacerbated and exemplified by the use of the word evil to describe the opposing group or ideology. Evil is supernatural and by its very nature evades reason. It is a useful categorization, however, in that it is a powerful tool for creating a separation between a traumatizing event and personal identification. The vastness of the terror becomes contained, even manageable or combatable, if it is separated somehow by a physical boundary whether imaginary or otherwise. This need to scale grand concepts connects the question of evil, or innate malevolence, to the human desire to understand and contextualize

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the surrounding world. Initial tribal communities managed this through religious characterizations, designating misfortune and atrocity as the territory of wrathful or displeased deities. In a secularized society, responsibilities that once fell to the divine now fall heavily upon humanity’s own shoulders. From wars, ecological disasters, poverty, and famine, human beings have increasingly found themselves as the perpetrators of what some would certainly be called evil in the world. Therefore, human beings are not being afflicted by some malevolent force, but are, through their own actions and intent, the greatest threat other than nature. This is an incredible psychological burden to bear both individually and collectively and rhetorical strategies have been deployed as coping mechanisms. This leads back to a fundamental question about the nature of evil itself. In philosophy this is known as the problem of evil, which states: (1) If God exists, then he is omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good. (2) If God were omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good then the world would not contain evil. (3) The world contains evil. Therefore: (4) God does not exist or is not omnipotent (Philosophy of Religion, 2015). This is the age-old religious/philosophical dilemma. When one takes this argument one step further, by invalidating God, humanity is left without a clear defender against the forces that create the formerly termed evils in the world. Secular society has generally ascribed the duty to the State (cf. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan [1651]). However, sometimes the State or any other group has picked up the rhetoric of righteousness, leading that group to feel justified to push beyond what might be considered a normal response to a threat. If evil is the greatest threat, then, the theory of atrocity proposes, any means necessary might be evoked to overcome it. The ends justify the means, and sacrifices must be tolerated for the greater good. There is within this logical escalation the danger of an implied omnipotence of the part of the self-righteous group. For even though this inflation of identity is unconscious, it is in danger of following the problem of evil to an even further logical end which says that: (5) If, indeed, God cannot or will not vanquish evil in the world, then it is the moral obligation of the government, State of moral entity to do so. This position is extreme and only the most adamant would take it to this logical extent, but it reveals the unconscious power of using archetypal terms such as evil in political hyperbole. RELIGIOUS SCARCITY The utilization of the term evil, whether in religious or political context, makes that dissociated projection even more powerful. While it can be easily asserted that almost all violence is triggered by the notion of scarcity, whether economic, political, or through the maldistribution of re-

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sources, Hector Avalos’s (2005) “illusion of religious scarcity” becomes particularly relevant in a conversation about the use of evil in political rhetoric. In a globalized economy with an emphasis on secularization, religious authority and validation have become rare and valuable assets. Avalos believes that religious scarcity is created or perpetuated first by what he calls “enscripturization” which is a literal read of a sacred text thought to be inerrant and infallible. This text, considered to be the one and only authentic revelation of the divine, becomes contentious and scarce in that it is the only text awarded authority. The second is the notion of “Sacred Space”: a physical structure or territory thought to have significant religious import; and the third is “Salvation” which is reserved only for certain groups or individuals. Unlike tangible resources, religious resources cannot be doled out or contained, nor can they be substantiated or refuted. They are unknowable and therefore immeasurable, so are open to endless dispute and dissention. However, when the validity of these assertions are questioned or threatened, the defense against the opposition, whether symbolic or real, can become violent. Though Avalos restricts this scenario to a religious context, when religious language or sentiment is brought into the political arena, a similar sense of divine righteousness can occur. A prime example of this appears in the elevation of the state into a pseudo-religious entity by some formerly communist countries and fascist regimes. Karl Marx famously called religion the “opiate of the masses,” so religions were systematically and brutally wiped out throughout communist Europe, China, and other parts of the world. However, the apparatuses of deluding the masses—the temples and churches—were almost immediately replaced by images of party leaders and state propaganda. Such worship and defense of the state came to take on some of the same fervor as seen in extremely devout or fundamental religious contexts. Similar state worship can still be seen in North Korea, whose depiction of the “Supreme Leader” and his father can be seen throughout the country plastered on the sides of buildings, monuments, and commemorated in enormous statues. The title itself, “Supreme Leader,” carries with it a sense of divine devotion and exaltation. He is not only one of many potential leaders, but the one and only Supreme Leader ruling in the one and only true way thus repeating the psychological pattern represented in the notion of religious scarcity. Agreeing with Avalos’s general position, Charles Kimball (2008) acknowledges that scarcity contributes to religious violence, but feels that it accounts for only one part of it. For Kimball, the problem comes not in the distribution of authority, as Avalos claimed, but in knowledge. Religion, he states, is synonymous with ultimate meaning, so any time a group or individual claims to be the supreme authority of what God wants, that

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group or person is also claiming to be the supreme authority on what constellates meaning, providing an opportunity for conflict or violence. While both Kimball and Avalos apply this propensity toward violence to traditional religious contexts, the same vehement defenses can be seen mirrored in secular ideologies such as capitalism and democracy. When the terms good or evil are applied to political orientations or economic policies, then these secular ideologies gain some of the same fervor over authority and meaning as expressed in fundamentalist religions justifying the use of violence and retaliation. As Anna Geiss and Christopher Hobson (2014) say: The invocation of “evil” can entail an escalation of conflict, limit deliberation and prevent compromise. It is also a powerful manifestation of identity politics. . . . Speakers who talk of “evil” usually are referring to others and the acts they may have committed, while failing to recognize the possible evil that they may themselves be responsible for. Adversaries are stigmatized, condemned and excluded from domestic or international society; civilian or diplomatic solutions are ruled out with actors who are labeled as “evil” (1).

According to this, the evocation of the term evil implies that action must be taken, often without full regard of possible consequences. It is a force that must be stopped and because of its inherent badness, must be prevented at all costs. Often, the ones who feel they are righteous are the ones who feel not only that they are obligated to stop it but also that they are the only ones who are capable of stopping it. USING EVIL TO DEFINE THE TRIBE Despite evil’s seeming secularization, the moral intentionality, a vestigial holdover from its theological introductions, enables proponents of the term to justify its insertion into political and even legislative language. In this context, the secularization of evil maintains the force of the religious notion but leaves people, rather than a deity, culpable both for its creation and its expulsion. As journalist and writer William Shawcross (2000) asserts “[i]n a more religious time it was only God whom we asked to deliver us from evil. Now we call upon our own man-made institutions for such deliverance. That is sometimes to ask for miracles” (413). He proposes that this confrontation is the responsibility and obligations of larger man-made institutions, particularly the United Nations, to protect the world from the influence of a very relevant danger. When secular communities pick up the burden Shawcross identifies, its weight can manifest as depression, anxiety, and panic. In an individual, it can leave the person vulnerable to neurosis and self-destructive behavior. Collectively, in a nation or identified group, this internalization of the fear

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instinct can lead to civil unrest or even revolution, splitting groups into factions or sects, threatening the destruction of entire groups or societies. However, when the experience of anxiety is projected outward, onto another group, nation, religion, race, or ethnicity, the collective is relieved from the burden of responsibility. The process defines those inside the group as innocent and those outside the group as evil and guilty. As Wolfgang Geigerich (2007) noted: “The more that irrational terror is captured in the safe container of some interior, behind a fence or in a shell or in a clearly defined ‘problem,’ the more concentrated and literal—that is physical—the terror will become” (106). In other words, the terrifying element becomes concretized in the designated other. It is projected outward and away from the tribe, therefore leaving them with the impression of its members being untainted. The concretization into the other gives the psychological illusion of containment. It is no longer an internal battle against internal destructive forces, but the responsibility of a common external foe. Historically, this mechanism can be seen at work with the persecution of witches and heretics in medieval Europe and the colonial U.S. Many of the actual women and men who were burned, tortured, jailed, and executed during this period were not actual threats to the Church or the government at the time. However, they symbolized a greater perceived danger, thus resulting in an extreme overreaction and the literalization of an abstract fear. Labeling these individuals as evil suggested not only that they were bad, but also that they threatened to taint the society as a whole. The preservation of the tribe thus justified their destruction. The potency and effectiveness of the external projection is dependent, not on the authenticity of the other’s actions or intent, but on how effectively the illusion of malevolence can be supported by the collective unconscious of the community. A sort of critical mass must be reached in which the internalization of the fear instinct becomes so overwhelming that it is thrust outward into the world in a convincing way. In fascism, this is promoted through the proliferation of propaganda and hate speech; in politics, it is the demonization of the other as being unpatriotic or even, as we have seen, evil; and in religion it actualizes as fundamentalism and a withdrawal from the mainstream. Essentially, these are all forms of neo-tribalism, or perhaps, even a return to more primitive tribal identities perpetuated by the perception of scarcity and the threat of competition. This can result in what Michael Grosso (1995) calls “ontological hysteria,” that is “a profound fear of imminent annihilation [and] panic over the insecurity of existence. People experience it in disastrous [or] disorienting times” (197). Traditionally this occurs when panic and projection becomes strong enough that a group can feel that its entire survival is at risk whether or not this is actually the case.

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The “perceived crisis” or “fear of annihilation” can result in what Thomas Singer and Samuel L. Kimbles (2004) describe as a cultural complex: group complexes have to do with trauma, discrimination, feelings of oppression and inferiority at the hands of another. [. . .] Cultural complexes are based on repetitive, historical, group experiences that have taken root in the cultural unconscious of the group. At any ripe time, these slumbering cultural complexes can be activated in the cultural unconscious. [. . .] The inner sociology of the cultural complexes can seize the imagination, the behavior and the emotions of the collective psyche and unleash tremendously irrational forces in the name of their “logic.” (7)

This type of witch persecution and scapegoating can still be seen in certain parts of the world today today. For instance, in the publication Times of India, a National Crime Records Bureau report revealed that over 1,000 women were murdered for witchcraft over the last decade. It is believed that these numbers are actually much larger because many instances are not reported (2015). Many of the women were killed because of tragedy that affected the villages, leading the villagers to believe that it was the women’s evil practices that brought on the misfortune and contaminated the villages. The notion of contamination is imperative to this type of cultural complex. In smaller groups who feel threatened, “they often withdraw from mainstream society to create a counter culture” (Armstrong 2000, xii). In larger groups or nations, however, this can result in mass persecution and even attempted extermination, as seen in the persecution of heretics in the Inquisition and in virtually every case of genocide throughout the world. While evil is not always used to distinguish the contaminating faction, the implication is certainly there. In Nazi Germany, this manifest as the purity of bloodlines. Jews were seen as a threat because they would dilute the gene pool; their very existence became the symbol of all that ailed the German people and their country. All the evil of a failed state was projected on the Jews and other marginalized people, such as homosexuals, gypsies, and other “undesirables,” thus containing the evil and dissociating themselves from it. As seen in this example, the annihilation of the other becomes a substitute for the fear of annihilation of the self. Historically the notion of tribe and its threats were geographically based, either through small geographic areas or, later, through national identification. However, in the age of the Internet, tribes are no longer exclusively based on a shared heritage derived from proximal influences. The utilization of the Internet and social media has further exacerbated “ontological hysteria” not only through the perpetuation of the fear and the projection of the “evil other” but also in the recruitment of the “collective us,” or tribalization. The repetition of images, memes, and catch-

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phrases act like mantras, emphasizing collective fear and opinion. The power of these images and phrases are made even more powerful because they are often decontextualized, as they are shared in posts and tweets limited to just a few characters or single images. No longer does one learn about the history between Muslims in the Middle East and the West before seeing images of planes crashing into buildings or screaming men and women burning American flags. These images do not speak to logic, but an impulse for self-preservation and identification with the threatened group. Such fear runs the risk of becoming even more prevalent through the use of mass media. While Hitler, Stalin, and Mao utilized radio, press, film, and physical propaganda to disseminate their agendas to an effective and often terrifying degree, today’s proliferation of coverage and headline competition has made the dissemination of fear and sensationalism instantaneous. The reciprocal effect of producing fear of the other is creating fear in the other. While mainstream media is useful in projecting a political agenda and justifying group or government actions, virtual or social media has been essential in the establishment of these so-called terrorist cells or regimes. Utilizing the abundant technology and information available on the Internet, terrorists and radicalized groups have become experts at recruitment and the perpetuation of their ideals and agendas. Rather than functioning as small dissident groups within organized cultures and political boundaries, contemporary terrorists have become truly global and pervasive: the physical communities governed by national rule and geography are being replaced by virtual communities. No longer limited by geographical, linguistic, or even cultural boundaries, virtual communities are coming together around similar fears, beliefs, and the designation of the other as evil throughout the world. Through the virtual experience of the Internet, many people have been able to simulate a feeling of tribalism amongst individuals who would otherwise be separated by geography, language, culture, or even time. Rather than being restricted or defined by these criteria, new, virtual communities can be invented solely on the basis of ideology, turning ordinary individuals into prophets or martyrs for their cause. Despite the lack of physically shared experience, such groups gain a shared identity around the resulting cultural complex: Individuals and groups in the grip of a particular cultural complex automatically take on shared body language and postures[. . .] like personal complexes, cultural complexes provide a simplistic certainty about the group’s place in the world in the face of otherwise conflicting and ambiguous uncertainties . . . [They] tend to be bipolar so that when they are activated the group ego becomes identified with one part of the unconscious complex, while the other part is projected out onto the suitable hook of another group. (Kimbles 2004, 21)

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This evolution in the mechanisms of defining “us” and “them” complicates the ability to defend against the threat to one’s (group or tribal) identity. While the member of the cultural complex might stand knowing that one person has thousands, if not millions, of virtual compatriots, at any given moment, that person might be existing alone and feeling exiled. This sense of loneliness, even if shared, differs from the numerical strength historically facilitated by being a member of a tribe and exacerbates the fear that the group’s survival is at risk. Karen Armstrong (2000) describes this phenomenon in certain religious circumstances: [Fundamentalists] do not regard this battle as a conventional political struggle, but experience it as a cosmic war between the forces of good and evil. They fear annihilation, and try to fortify their beleaguered identity by a means of selected retrieval of certain doctrines and practices. (xii)

This does not just occur in religious groups, but in any group that feels threatened or is at risk of profound inner conflict. For instance, Shawcross and other proponents of this use of evil in political rhetoric argue that the labeling of groups, institutions, and actions of others as evil is not only justified, but necessary. In cases where the projection is large enough, the projection of a “cosmic war” can actually encompass an entire society, culture, or race, manifesting as a revenge fantasy and an impulse to inflict harm upon others. The more convincing and ubiquitous the image of the other as harmful and evil, the more justified individuals and societies feel in projecting violence or retribution onto the other party or group. THE POLITICAL RHETORIC OF EVIL Though the group dynamics have shifted in the age of mass and social media, the rhetorical weight of the term still helps solidify group allegiances against forces defined as external and as evil. Evil, either by intended action or by symbolic representation, evokes an equal and respondent collective call to action: Since no man lives within his own psychic sphere [. . .] but is connected with his fellow-men by his unconscious humanity, no crime can ever be what it appears to our consciousness to be: an isolated happening. [. . .] Everybody joins in, feels the crime in his own being. [. . .] Something is set aflame by that great fire of evil that flared up in the crime. (Jung 1964, 200)

In other words, evil action, or the perception of evil action, generates a contagious response.

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This galvanization of the opposing archetype has been prevalent throughout the history of political rhetoric. For instance, Ronald Reagan in his 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, notoriously named the Soviet Union “The Evil Empire.” This was not simply the evocation of political differences or strategies, but the complete dissociation of both the country and its overarching philosophy. These groups were not merely “enemy combatants,” or “threats to national security,” but “evil:” something unnatural or perhaps even inhuman. By deeming something evil, that person or thing is no longer considered individual or specific, but fundamentally and irretrievably tainted. In the 1980s, and during the Cold War, that threat was communism and its perpetuation by the former Soviet Union. The threat of communism ignited an arms race the size of which has never been seen before in history and sparred ideological “puppet” wars throughout the world. The Soviet Union and communism became symbols of all that wasn’t American and were depicted as fundamental threats to humanity and personal freedom. The destruction of symbols not only indicate liberation, as in the destruction of the Berlin Wall, but also act as retribution, as well. Historically, we can find countless archeological evidence of the decimation of one civilization’s temples, gods, and monuments by the influx of new conquering armies or civilizations. Even today, this type of destruction can clearly be seen in the strategic demolition and defacing of Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan and Greek temples in Syria by Islamic extremists. But perhaps few examples are as poignant or personal to the American psyche as the attacks on 9/11. The choice of target on that day was not accidental. The Twin Towers were symbols of the colonial, financial institutions of the West. To attack them was to symbolically attack the feelings of oppression and ineffectuality that had been plaguing the Muslim world. Just as George Bush deemed certain nations in the Middle East evil, the “West” and its financial institutions had likewise become a symbol of evil to many in the Middle East who felt oppressed by the secular influence and financial dominance of Europe and the United States. For many, the influence of the West in the Middle East was, and still is for some, perceived as a form of neo-colonialism that threatens an autonomous, Muslim, Arab identity, which is instrumental in creating an atmosphere of intense cultural anxiety. This perceived assault on their identity, the threat of annihilation to the psyche, has expanded amongst these fringe groups to be an assault against the whole of the Western world with the rise of the Islamic State and other militant fundamentalist groups. With the increasing volatility of international politics, and religious extremism, the evocation of the term evil in politics and political rhetoric has been proliferating. Though it is certainly tempting to label some of these extreme crimes as evil, there is a reason for caution. Once another is called evil there is a danger of perpetuating the same types of evil that

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one is supposedly trying to fight against and therefore has no place in politics: “When evil breaks at any point into the order of things, our whole circle of psychic protection is disrupted. Action inevitably calls up reaction, and, in the matter of destructiveness, this turns out to be just as bad as the crime, and possibly even worse, because the evil must be exterminated root and branch” (Jung 1964, 200). Such reaction explains the rhetorical force of the evil, even in an age in which it no longer contains strong religious resonances. While it might no longer encapsulate the fear of the antithesis of the beneficent divine, it still encodes the primal desire for protection against the marauding other, a potential source for the global creations of mythos that not only explain why bad things happen but also justify doing bad things to protect oneself and one’s tribe. Thus, evil in politics is dangerous because it communicates directly to our most primal and unconscious fears. It leaves no room for negotiation and it promotes paranoia and even violence: that we are intentionally being asked to set aside our logic and discernment in order to cater to our more primal fears and motivations. Other, more neutral designations can be utilized to differentiate truly horrific crimes or actions from those of lesser infractions. Terms like “crimes against humanity” act not as a call to tribal justice or the distancing of one group from another, but unite us together against injustice and cruelty. Regardless of other designations or categorizations, however, the term evil is here to stay and will inevitably find its way back into politics, but it is up to us how we choose to react. REFERENCES Armstrong, Karen. 2000. The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism. New York: Random House. Avalos, Hector. 2005. “Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence.” Talk of the Nation. National Public Radio. August 22. Ayto, John. 2005. Word Origins: The Hidden Histories of Words from A to Z. 2nd ed. London: A & C Black Publishers, Ltd. Campbell, Jason J. 2009. “On the Concept of Evil: An Analysis of Genocide and State Sovereignty PhD diss., University of South Florida, 2009. Card, Claudia. 2002. The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil. New York: Oxford University Press. “Evil.” 2016. Online Etymological Dictionary. Accessed March 14, 2016. http://www. etymonline.com/index.php?term=evil. Geiss, Anna, and Christopher Hobson. 2014. “The Existence and Use of ‘Evil’ in International Politics.” International Politics 51(4): 458–74. Accessed December 12, 2015. URL: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ip/journal/v51/n4/full/ip20148a.html. Giegerich, Wolfgang. 2007. Technology and the Soul: From Nuclear Bomb to the World Wide Web. London, Ont.: Spring Journal Books. Grosso, Michael. 1995. The Millenium Myth: Love and Death at the End of Time. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books. Haybron, Daniel M, ed. 2002. Earth’s Abominations: Philosophical Studies of Evil. New York: Rodopi.

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Hobbes, Thomas. (1651) 2008. Leviathan. Edited by J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. International Criminal Court. 2016. “What are Crimes Against Humanity?” Accessed January 20, 2016. URL: https://www.icc-cpi.int/en_menus/icc/about%20the%20 court/frequently%20asked%20questions/Pages/12.aspx. Jeffery, R. 2008. Evil and International Relations: Human Suffering in an Age of Terror. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jung, C. G. 1964. “Civilization in Transition” Collected Works, Volume 10. Princeton University Press. Kimball, Charles. 2008. When Religion Becomes Evil. New York: HarperOne. Kimball, Samuel L., and Thomas Singer. 2004. The Cultural Complex: Contemporary Jungian Perspectives on Psyche and Society. Hove and New York: Brunner-Routledge. Philosophy of Religion. 2008. “The Problem of Evil.” Accessed November 3, 2015. http://www.philosophyofreligion.info/arguments-for-atheism/the-problem-of-evil/. Romero, Frances. 2011. “Top Ten State of the Union Moments.” Time. January 25. Shawcross, William. 2000. Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords, and a World of Endless Conflict. New York: Simon & Schuster. Shiva, Vandana. 2005. Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace. Cambridge: South End Press.

THIRTEEN A “Fiend Incarnate” Sin, Science, and the Problem of Evil in the New American Nation Jeffrey Mullins

In February of 1846, former New York governor William Seward entered the courtroom to argue for the innocence of a convict in the Auburn penitentiary, a man who intentionally stabbed and killed a fellow inmate. This was only the first in a string of murder trials that Seward would participate in over the course of a six-month period during 1846. In undertaking these most extreme of criminal cases, Seward explicitly increased his engagement in a dialogue over the nature of human guilt, one that asked whether prima facie evil deeds such as murder might in fact be understood as emerging out of the perpetrator’s environment. Under such a view, the perpetrator was more the conduit than the agent of violent actions. Unsurprisingly, many Americans strongly objected to this reconfiguration of conventional definitions of evil. Although the ensuing debate played out across American culture, criminal trials were among the most prominent venues for this struggle. Presenting the most extreme transgressions, and thus the most extreme shift in understandings of evil, criminal trials were often the focal point of contemporary discussions of evil. William Seward’s 1846 criminal trial marathon provides a rich opportunity to explore the dynamics of this debate. Andrew Delbanco (1995) traced nearly four hundred years of American thinking about evil, and posited the “death of Satan” in American culture. He identified the nineteenth century as a decisive turn201

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ing point in this trajectory. Delbanco is partly right: a fundamental shift in American thinking about evil did indeed take place in the decades before the Civil War. Traditional conceptions of moral transgression did indeed come under serious fire, resulting in some permanent changes. Looking across the broad range of American culture at that period (or any to follow), however, it is difficult to conclude that Americans gave up on a belief in evil. Rather, the parameters of the discussion on evil underwent a profound change. Contemporaries introduced the possibility that terrible acts, committed with clear intention, might not arise from any evil or sinful disposition. Underlying this entire process, as we shall see, was a shift in the understanding of human agency. In recent years, scholars have increasingly tried to come to grips with how to understand evil and the violent actions emerging from it. Some have worked to place violent events and trends in their specific historical context, examining how an array of social, economic, and cultural factors led to specific instances of violence (Bellesiles 1999). Others have explored popular efforts to oppose violence, often with a focus on the movement to stop the participation of government in the taking of life, even of murderers (Jones 2011). Among those scholars who have tackled American concepts of evil per se, there have been at least two identifiable approaches. Many agree with Steven Mintz (2007) that, unavoidably, “Contingency is a hallmark of many historical accounts of evil,” and that historical inquiries are appropriately “distinctive in their emphasis on specific and unique examples of evil and on the diversity of the motives, aims, dynamics, and consequences” of various acts that have been labeled evil (5). Other historians, without denying these concerns about specificity, have explored the broader public dialogue on evil at various points in the past, hoping to see what assumptions framed contemporaries’ understandings of specific actions—to see, in brief, what was counted as evil, and why (Gin Lum 2014). This chapter synthesizes these two methodologies. By looking at a cluster of events—all taking place in a single year, in a single region—one can respect the specificity of historical context while detecting patterns that transcend a single event. And by placing these patterns in their broader context, we can also recognize trends, larger developments in cultural thought. Criminal trials offer two distinct advantages as sites for investigating conceptions of evil. First, and most obviously, they inherently involve an assessment of whether certain actions violated a community’s moral and legal norms. Such legal contests, however, need to be understood in their contexts. As historians have established, after 1800 “a strikingly new configuration of crime literature emerged” (Cohen 1993, 26). The more religiously oriented execution sermons and final speeches by the condemned gave way to published reports of the trials themselves, extensive newspaper coverage of both crimes and legal proceedings, and a literary treat-

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ment more sensationalized and romanticized than aimed at the moral redemption of readers. 1 This more secularized treatment of crime tended to focus on the horror of the event, aiming to inspire what one historian has characterized as “an emotional state that mingled fear with hatred and disgust” (Halttunen 1998, 3). Furthermore, such coverage often aimed to convey a sense of mystery, stressing “the impossibility of achieving a full knowledge and understanding of the crime” (3). Certainly one finds all of these narrative dynamics playing out in the 1846 murder trials in which Seward participated. However, there were even larger conceptual dynamics at work: the trials help bring to light the shift in understandings of human agency toward an emphasis on environmental shaping of personal dispositions, presenting challenges to conventional accounts of evil. The other chief advantage of exploring understandings of evil by examining criminal cases is the inherent element of praxis present in such settings. It is useful, of course, to study people’s reflexive moral reactions, just as it is to explore more deeply reflective discourses on the nature of evil. There is usually not a direct connection, however, between a society’s more abstract or principled set of beliefs about morality and the specific actions of individuals and local alliances. Criminal trials allow us to examine conceptions of evil as people actually employed them, even as they actively debated the meaning, scope, and applicability of such conceptions. And when contestants brought new moral principles to bear on a case, not only did they need to articulate the nature and relevance of these principles, their opponents had to articulate the reasons for holding to more conventional principles. One finds precisely this dynamic at work in the 1846 murder cases. Criminal trials were statistically uncommon, with most people never encountering them directly. Furthermore, the question of evil and accountability ranged over a far greater scope than just criminal proceedings. That said, criminal trials carried enormous implications. The emergent understanding of agency (and hence evil, or its absence) identified actions as frequently being the products of environmentally produced dispositions, and so not immediately within an individual’s control. If this account could be applied to such extreme acts as murder, all the more so would it be understood as doing so in lesser transgressions. Each of the cases that Seward took on in 1846 was rather complex, and generated substantial public debate. Of these, the case of Henry Wyatt most clearly illustrates the American ambivalence about how to understand the place of evil in human life. It illustrates how early nineteenthcentury traditional understandings of evil were seriously challenged— and partially displaced—by an emerging environmentalist account of human nature. This account attributed some extreme human misdeeds to dispositions that (1) the individual had no immediate control over, (2) were developed by means beyond the individual’s control, and (3) had

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the potential to be refashioned, thereby rehabilitating the perpetrator. At its core, the new account of human agency rested on a version of naturalism, believing that humans were shaped and governed by the same natural laws of the world as plants and animals. Environmentalism was a corollary to this naturalism: individuals were molded by their environment, by their natural and cultural surroundings. From this perspective, actions that might previously have been designated as evil now might be seen as the unfortunate result of a combination of natural factors. On the surface, it could appear that the competing accounts of evil rested on a science-versus-religion foundation. Proponents of the emerging account of evil founded their case on claims to a more scientific understanding of human nature, and opponents to it routinely held up traditional Christian values as part of their rebuttal. The revised depiction of evil, however, actually had its roots in the most central theological discussion in early America: how to reconcile divine sovereignty with human agency. By the early nineteenth century, these debates over agency and evil were increasingly linked to a fierce battle over the fate of American culture, one framed in terms of advancing “civilization” versus maintaining “society.” Although these views were well ventilated in the newspapers and periodicals of the era, it is in the efforts to put these respective positions into practice that best show the interplay between conceptual implications and practical consequences of these competing perspectives on some of the most fundamental aspects of the human condition. NATURALISM, HUMANITARIANISM, AND THE CONTESTED MEANING OF EVIL William Seward had recently returned to his hometown of Auburn after two terms as governor of New York State. The return must have been a welcome escape from internecine political battles between his own Whig party and the opposing Democrats that characterized the era. It also gave Seward a chance to become financially solvent again, as the social obligations of being governor had placed him significantly in debt. He had been home only two years, however, when he chose to take on a series of criminal cases that would become both politically charged and financially draining (since they were all done pro bono). Nonetheless, Seward found this cause so compelling because he was one of a large group of advocates for a more “humanitarian” approach to dealing with those who transgressed social norms. These murder cases—all involving the possible insanity of the defendant—gave him the opportunity to forward his agenda. Auburn was the county seat of Cayuga County, in the Finger Lakes district of central New York. The medium-sized town was home to what

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would become one of the world’s premier institutions aimed at humanitarian reform: the New York State Penitentiary at Auburn. This penitentiary is the original model of the prison that we are so used to seeing in movies—multi-tiered, individual cells for sleeping, workshops for useful employment during the day. Nothing like it had been created before, and it quickly captured public attention. In 1845 alone, nearly 8,000 people paid to take a tour of the prison, a number far greater than Auburn’s entire resident population (Lewis 1922, 188). The Marquis de Lafayette, Harriet Martineau, and George Combe all visited the penitentiary. By carefully structuring the physical and moral environment of the inmates, reformers believed that they could instill entirely new dispositions into those left to their care. Reality in the penitentiary, however, did not always live up to the original ideals. Violence abounded, both among prisoners and in the form of harsh punishments meted out to inmates by guards. In March of 1845, an altercation took place inside the walls of the New York State Penitentiary at Auburn, one that would launch Seward on his new crusade. Henry Wyatt, a convict, killed another inmate under uncertain circumstances. Apparently convict James Gordon had told prison officials that Wyatt, who was in prison for burglary, was wanted in Ohio for murder. It is not clear whether the accusation was true or false, but it could have brought Wyatt trouble either way. Wyatt, using one half of a pair of large sheers, left his place in a line of marching convicts coming out of their cell block, and approached James Gordon. Wyatt stabbed Gordon repeatedly with the makeshift weapon, and Gordon died shortly thereafter. Henry Wyatt was not yet a year into a ten-year sentence at Auburn for stealing a gold watch from a home, but now was facing far more serious charges (Report 1846). William Seward stepped forward to offer his services, pro bono, as Wyatt’s defense counsel. Wyatt’s case did appear before the August term of the Court of Oyer and Terminer (1846), the defense requested more time to prepare, and so the case was put off until the next session. That Seward would take on Wyatt’s case is surprising when taken by itself, given his professional focus, but more understandable when placed in a larger context. Although Seward was a generalist as a lawyer, his more recent work had been in the field of patent law. At the same time, he had a long history of supporting humanitarian causes. Seward was carried into the governor’s mansion in 1838 as part of the ticket of a recently formed Whig party. The Whigs were committed to both the enhancement of New York’s physical infrastructure (e.g., canals, roads) and the development of a new network of institutions (e.g., prisons, schools, asylums) that aimed to transform American society by reshaping and uplifting its individual citizens (Holt 1999). The overall goal of these humanitarian reforms was to create “selfgoverned” individuals, citizens who could reliably arrive at morally ap-

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propriate choices without the guidance of others. Individual self-government had long been an ideal for citizenship, but the rapid development of urbanization and a mobile market economy in which people were increasingly strangers to one another—and set loose from the traditional moral authorizes who had held sway in smaller, more stable communities—by the 1840s made achieving the goal of self-governed individuals imperative (Block 2002). At the core of these social reform movements was an increasingly naturalist understanding of human nature. Contemporaries saw key aspects of human experience—moral dispositions, free will, emotional temper—as acting according to the laws of natural science. They perceived human nature as plastic, and so capable of being molded. The target of these reforms was the human mind, ultimately accessed through its seat in the physical brain. Since there was rarely any immediate access to the brain, however, reformers targeted the body. This led to a wave of reforms in the 1820s and after to change diet, exercise, dress, posture, and a host of other seemingly trivial aspects of human existence (Mullins 1995). All of these had taken on intense moral significance, including challenges to conventional understandings of evil. So, too, had the broader environment in which the body was situated. Whatever impacted the sensory organs would ultimately shape the brain, and hence the mind. All of this reorientation of cultural understandings of human nature had profound implications for the categories of virtue and vice. What had previously been considered sin was now often understood as misshapen character. Many people believed that this could be reversed, utilizing institutions such as the penitentiary. What had been evil (a disposition to sin) was now seen as flawed design, or even subsequent damage. Certainly contemporaries understood the connection between dire circumstances and the turn to crime. One newspaper in Syracuse in 1846 observed, “It is no wonder that there should be so much crime in New York, when it is know that there are more than 12,000 seamstresses working and living in that city, at 12 cents per day.” The author noted that at “such a beggarly remuneration for incessant toil” (“[No Title]” 1846), a turn away from a legal and virtuous life was almost assured. If community members wanted to engage in humanitarian outreach, and at the same time reduce the incentive—sometimes the absolute need—to turn to crime, then improving the conditions of people such as these should form the “great object of philanthropy.” One implication of the environmentalist understanding of human nature, especially in the case of reform institutions, was a revised explanation of the origins and character of evil. If the penitentiary promised to reshape its inmates by providing a controlled environment, and yet through physical violence caused mental derangement in some of its charges, then the state-run institution might well be considered the au-

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thor of evil deeds performed by such inmates. Seward would employ just such a defense when he took on the Wyatt case. Early in 1846, just as Wyatt’s case was about to come to trial, another violent death took place in the Auburn penitentiary—Charles Plumb. The circumstances of Plumb’s death appeared to underscore the possibility that the state might itself be the author of evil. In late January of 1846 prison guards disciplined Plumb for ruining some workshop equipment and intermingling with civilians touring the prison, delivering the punishment of thirty blows with the six-stranded “cat.” For additional infractions Plumb received at least another dozen blows with the cat—some accounts placed the number at closer to fifty—and was sufficiently affected that guards sent him to the prison hospital, where he died shortly thereafter. The case of Charles Plumb likely influenced the thinking of some Auburnians in at least two ways. First, it could serve to further the view that the state-run institutions of reform could themselves be (in their own way) as evil as the inmates whom they were charged to positively transform. The subsequent cover-up could only have solidified such a view. When concerned citizens asked to see Plumb’s body, prison officials offered the body of a completely different convict, who happened to have died at nearly the same time. A search was mounted, and Plumb’s actual body was found hidden in a barrel. Secondly, some observers thought that Plumb was mentally ill, and that the blows to his spinal column—the highway of nerves connecting the body to the brain—could only have aggravated that situation (“State Prison Excitement” 1846). These late January occurrences provided some of the context, then, when Henry Wyatt’s trial opened on February 11, bringing William Seward, assisted by junior law partners Christopher Morgan and Samuel Blatchford, into the Cayuga County Courthouse to square off against Luman Sherwood, Cayuga County’s district attorney. The testimony and cross-examinations were directed toward two main questions. First, were prison officials responsible for transgressions and abuse against Wyatt? Second, did Wyatt suffer from some form of insanity? The two questions were closely related, because the defense’s case relied on the claim that guards’ excessive flogging of Wyatt’s back—and especially the spinal cord—damaged his nervous system, which brought on mental disorder. As the lead lawyer for the defense, William Seward led the twopronged argument that (1) the current leadership of the Auburn penitentiary had failed in its mission, engaging in brutal punishments, and (2) that one direct result of this was the mental derangement of Henry Wyatt, placing him in such a state as to not be accountable for his actions. Seward argued that Wyatt had been “flogged and tortured with an inhuman instrument of torture, and that the prisoner was driven to desperation, and that a homicide was the result” (Report 1846, 11). If one was

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identifying evil actions in this case, then, they were those of the agents of the state. In order to forward his vision of humanitarianism, Seward turned to medical science, in the form of physicians brought in as expert witnesses on insanity. Indeed, it was the case that reformers in a variety of fields found that humanitarianism was often best delivered by doctors. Physicians could make a scientific and enlightened case, employing the environmentalist and naturalist assumptions of the day. While prior to the nineteenth century physicians had occasionally been called to the stand to testify to a particular medical fact (e.g., the cause of death of an individual), their role there was generally quite limited. Courtrooms were the realm of law and lawyers; medicine and physicians appeared merely to assist with some specific question. By the early nineteenth century this situation was quickly changing. An expanding medical science brought physicians into court for a range of issues, from uncovering malicious poisonings to assessing medical malpractice. (Mohr 1993) By far the most controversial role they played, however, was when they were called upon to assess an individual’s level of self-government. In judging agency—whether in the case of a will and estate or of a violent crime—medicine took on a role previously reserved for law. Wyatt’s case was especially charged because Seward had put forward the defense of “moral insanity.” Under this relatively recent category of insanity, the intellectual faculties were largely or entirely unimpaired, but the emotions (the seat of the conscience or moral power) were disordered or diseased. Thus a person might act and appear sane, but have some specific aspects of their personality over which they had little or no control (e.g., pyromania). The legal defense of general insanity met with some skepticism, however, the legal defense of moral insanity was particularly controversial. One of the key witnesses whom the defense called to testify regarding Henry Wyatt’s mental state was Dr. Charles Coventry. Coventry was a professor of medicine at Geneva Medical College, and a member of the board of directors at the New York State Lunatic Asylum at Utica. Coventry’s beliefs about the constitution of human beings were fairly typical for his time. He ascribed to the integrated model of human nature, stating that, “Man is endowed by his creator with certain physical, moral, and intellectual faculties” (Coventry 1842, 4). Furthermore, he extended a naturalist view to the immaterial mind, holding that the non-material portion of mankind was regulated by laws as ironclad as those governing the physical world: “The results of the moral laws of creation are no less certain (though not so apparent), than those of the physical” (Report 1846, 10). The advances in medical science allowed physicians to now learn both sets of laws, and minister to both the moral and natural aspects of the human condition. And in keeping with Seward and others hoping to use science to guide a reform of society, Coventry argued that progress

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and “a more enlightened philosophy,” meant that the belief that insane is a divine affliction have been banished (Report 1846, 9). On this account, many actions previously labeled as evil in fact had a foundation in the body and its environment, and so came closer to being a medical condition than a moral transgression. Seward and his colleagues did not rely solely on physicians, however. They brought up other recent cases where juries had found reason to believe that, when faced with compelling evidence, insanity was an appropriate reason to find a person not guilty (although still needing to be confined—just to an asylum, not a prison). This appeal to other cases, along with the testimony of Coventry and others, appears to have made an impact on the jury. The jury deliberated from 3:00 p.m. on Tuesday until 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday. The result was a hung jury, with five jurors voting for acquittal and seven for conviction (Report 1846). This hung jury decision did not set Wyatt free, or even to an asylum; but it did spare him from the hangman’s noose. When his case would come up for a re-trial, it would become inextricably bound up with that of another former penitentiary inmate who went on to commit murder. Henry Wyatt’s prison house slaying of James Gordon raised the question of whether a brief but traumatic physical episode could fundamentally alter a person sufficiently so as to relieve them of responsibility. This was a variation on the normal environmentalist position, which focused on numerous influences over a long period of time. Naturalism (in this case, the nervous system’s connection to the brain, the seat of the mind) allowed for sudden changes. This seemed to carry the day for many of the jurors. Overall, then, the Wyatt case highlighted a fundamental tension in nineteenth-century American conceptions of the moral status of criminal acts. On the one hand, according to the emerging naturalist understanding of human nature, there were at least three considerations that mitigated the characterization of human misdeeds as sinful or evil. First, there was a greater sense that those who transgressed the moral code might be brought back into the fold. Hence the great array of institutions—penitentiaries, reformatories, insane asylums—designed to accomplish precisely this. Second, an emphasis on the somatic element of human nature meant that someone who had received great physical trauma (especially to the head or nervous system) would pass outside the bounds of selfgovernment, and so not be morally accountable for their behavior. Third, in cases where such physical damage came at the hands of governmentemployed caretakers, many believed that it was the state that was actually engaged in evil practices. These three considerations might even cause a jury to treat a killer as someone disordered, and in need of a moral realignment, rather than as an embodiment of evil. On the other hand, in the face of certain circumstances, the older model of morality could reassert itself. It is to such a case that we turn now.

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THEOLOGY, AGENCY, AND THE CHALLENGE OF CRIME Not long after the inconclusive result of Wyatt’s trial, another violent event shook the community of Auburn. On March 12, 1846, William Freeman, a free black day laborer, attacked a family farmhouse south of town, killing four residents and wounding a fifth. All of the victims were white, and so racial tensions were at a peak. As local sheriffs were bringing Freeman to the jailhouse, two separate lynch mobs attempted to take matters into their own hands. Although there were many aspects of the Freeman case that were fundamentally different from those of the Wyatt case, there were enough overlapping elements that the two were often linked in the public mind. At the funeral of the four victims, the Rev. Aaron Winfield categorized Freeman as a “monster,” and argued that he did not simply arrive at that status suddenly, but rather by “committing smaller offenses first” (Winfield 1846, 14). In this account, Freeman had willfully engaged in a steady progression of misdeeds, with each step “the nearer like a fiend he becomes, until he makes the last awful plunge, and is numbered among them” (14). Evil, then, was ultimately a chosen disposition. For those who adhered to Christian principles, who would “[f]ollow the directions of the gospel,” however, “there is no danger” (14). As the details of Freeman’s life history emerged, however, there seemed to be other possible explanations. Freeman appeared to fit into many aspects of the naturalist understanding of human nature that characterized the modern science of morality. His early environment was largely barren of the key components that contemporaries routinely argued were necessary to develop as a self-governed individual. From an early age he had only one parent, his father having died in an accident. His mother was so overburdened with her many children that she put young William out to work at a very young age. Since Freeman was black, the doors of the church and schoolhouse were closed to him. Falsely imprisoned for horse theft, he entered the gates of the Auburn penitentiary at age sixteen. While there, Freeman’s austere early environment was compounded by major head trauma, as he was severely beaten over the head with a heavy wooden plank by a captain of the guard. He was never the same after that. When he reached the end of his five-year sentence in September of 1845, he quickly became known as “Crazy Bill,” for his very odd behavior. Furthermore, Freeman barely knew the victims, and there was no clear motivation for the attack (Hall 1848). Months before the Freeman trial even began, there was trepidation in the local community about the implications of this case. Although Seward was out of the state on a business trip at the time of Freeman’s attack, many believed that he would take up Freeman’s case just as he had that of Wyatt. They also feared that he would interpose a defense of insanity,

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bringing in lots of experts in medical science to explain why Freeman was not morally responsible for his actions. If a jury could split over whether Wyatt—whose situation was neither as dire nor as extended of that of Freeman—was insane, many feared that Seward would try to invoke science to excuse a grievous sin. Such popular concerns—which ultimately proved correct—illustrate how charged an individual criminal could be in terms of its impact on broader cultural questions. Moral accountability was clearly becoming a matter bound up with medical science, and many in the community were prepared to fight to maintain more conventional definitions of evil. It can be tempting to posit a science-versus-religion divide here, but two considerations militate against that position. First, the entire midnineteenth century conundrum over the existence and status of human evil had its roots in several generations of theological efforts to establish the moral accountability of individuals. The traditional Calvinist combination of divine predestination of ultimate moral dispositions (determining whether a person would be amongst those going to heaven) paired with full accountability for earthly actions began to break down by the early seventeenth century. Jonathan Edwards’s mid-eighteenth-century meditations on this problem of “acceptance of responsibility for even those qualities in ourselves which we had no power to will into existence” were by far the most thoroughgoing and influential in early American history (Fiering 1981). The next century of American theological debates on the freedom of the will was largely an extended debate on Edwards’s proposed solution to this dilemma, a solution that entailed individuals being considered free agents so long as they could act as they desired, no matter the source of those desires. Although he had his ardent supporters, he had numerous opponents, and even more theologians who worked to produce some kind of compromise situation. Secondly, by the 1830s religious leaders were deeply divided on the question of how much the social and physical environment determined the dispositions of individuals. The most famous revival leader of the era, Charles Grandison Finney, argued that if ministers organized their camp meetings and revival gatherings correctly, they could be assured of a certain yield of converted souls. A modern understanding of human psychology could further traditional Christian goals (Hambrick-Stowe 1996). Other ministers and theologians objected, however, that if specific physical arrangements and patterns of sermon could guarantee a specific outcome, then the supposedly spiritual conversions were more the work of man than God (Mullins 2006). If the eighteenth century witnessed diverging solutions to the problem of how to reconcile divine agency and human accountability for evil, in the early nineteenth century the designation of evil was becoming something that two groups could use against each other. Traditionalists

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saw reformers as trying to allow killers to escape just punishment. Reformers saw traditionalists as persisting in outdated views of human nature. So, evil became a contested category, rather than a single agreedupon category, about which the existence might be debated. For traditionalists, evil was a characteristic of individuals. For reformers, evil was a pattern of persecution of those whose deeds were not ultimately under their own control. When the circuit court convened again in Auburn in June of 1846, it determined to hear Wyatt’s case first, then that of Freeman. One key difference between the Freeman and Wyatt cases was the type of insanity being argued for. In Freeman’s case, Seward claimed only that Freeman was—in some fashion—significantly mentally impaired. In Wyatt’s case, however, Seward argued that the defendant suffered from the particular ailment of “moral insanity.” For Wyatt’s re-trial, Luman Sherwood was joined at the prosecution table by John Van Buren, Attorney General of New York State. Governor Silas Wright dispatched Van Buren to assist with the case, since it was becoming clear that it would have significant implications for both legal and cultural norms. Sherwood and Van Buren fiercely criticized the moral insanity defense when it came up in Wyatt’s case, as did many commentators outside the courtroom. Sherwood and Van Buren pursued this tactic as part of a larger strategy. If Seward and his colleagues were pressing the cause of humanitarianism, Sherwood and Van Buren strove to counteract this effort. In its place, they emphasized “morality,” by which they meant a more conventional approach to human nature, agency, and accountability. They resisted the medicalization of human nature, they upheld the power of individual choice even in the face of extreme external constraints and evident internal defects, and as a consequence they held people responsible for their actions in all but the most pronounced cases of mental disorder. When John Van Buren gave the closing argument for the prosecution, he focused on three key themes. First, he stressed that, “Insanity must be proved, and not inferred from the audacity of the crime” (“Trial of Henry Wyatt” 1846). Some acts were so heinous that it seemed that a person must be—in some sense—mad in order to carry them out. However, Van Buren stressed that, if “crime alone proved insanity, then the most desperate criminals would go unpunished” (“Trial of Henry Wyatt” 1846). Following on this principle, he argued that the “rules of law” should not be “made to yield to medical theories” (“Trial of Henry Wyatt” 1846). Employing the sarcasm that was a signature of much of his rhetoric, he enjoined, if what was at issue was really “a medical question, the Governor should have sent the Surgeon General to try this cause, and the jury should have been a jury of doctors” (“Trial of Henry Wyatt” 1846). Finally, Van Buren stressed that, although this was just one case, the stakes were larger than it might at first appear. He asked, “If this plea is sus-

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tained, where is the safety of the prison officers, or how can justice be administered?” (“Trial of Henry Wyatt” 1846). The attorney general contrasted “the public peace and order of society on the one hand, and the prisoner and his crime on the other” (“Trial of Henry Wyatt” 1846). One or the other had to prevail, and he trusted that the jury would come to the correct conclusion. The jury did not need long to deliberate, returning with a verdict only “a short time” later. The editor of the Cayuga Patriot reported over the jury that “several of them were in tears,” although he did not state the reason. Wyatt, on the other hand, was “unmoved” (“Wyatt’s Trial” 1846). As was conventional, the court waited for another session to pass sentence on the defendant. The court reconvened the next morning at eleven o’clock, whereupon Judge Whiting announced that Henry Wyatt was to be hung by the neck until dead. Although Freeman’s defense was not the particularly contentious one of “moral” insanity, the fact that the lawyers, witnesses, and category of defense in the Wyatt case were nearly the same as those soon to appear in Freeman’s case did not bode well for the latter. William Freeman’s case was, if anything, more complex than that of Wyatt. His limited cognitive ability was manifest, and the court ordered a major preliminary trial to determine his mental competency. Once found “sufficiently sane” to stand trial, Freeman faced the trial on the murder charge. Two factors weighed heavily against Freeman, however. First, with his attack coming so soon after the initial Wyatt trial, many in the community believed that criminals were learning that they could get away with murder if they feigned insanity. Second, as a marginalized black man who killed a respected white family, there was a pervasive sentiment that he had to pay for his crimes. His actions were routinely depicted as being the product of pure evil. For instance, the Cayuga Tocsin (1846) immediately labeled Freeman a “fiend incarnate” and a “devil incarnate.” Furthermore, this local newspaper wasted no time in linking Freeman’s actions with the recent Wyatt case: “How far the late trial of Wyatt and the doubts cast by its proceedings and results upon the power of the criminal tribunals of the land to protect the lives of our citizens may have sharpened the assassin’s knife and steeled his heart, the public, who are conversant with it, must determine” (“Murder of John G.” 1846). In the end, Freeman was predictably found guilty of murder. At least two factors, then, contributed to the convictions of Wyatt and Freeman. First, the proximity—temporally and geographically—of Wyatt’s first trial with Freeman’s attack on the Van Nest home sparked a pronounced reaction from local residents. For many Auburnians, it seemed as though Wyatt’s initial escape from conviction had emboldened others to commit murder, believing that they could use the insanity defense as a shield. Second, in an era of profound racial tensions, the idea that a black man might slaughter a respectable white family and “get

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away” with it proved unacceptable in this overwhelmingly white community. Although Freeman had been established as “Crazy Bill” long before the Wyatt trial or his attack, and although the case for his mental derangement was far stronger than was that for Wyatt, most in the community were done giving consideration to the insanity defense. Not so, however, in New York at large. For all of the massive publicity surrounding these two cases, there were other cases elsewhere in the state that continued to give consideration to the naturalist model of human nature, even in cases of murder. CIVILIZATION OR SOCIETY? One might reasonably come to the conclusion, given the strong backlash labeling the insanity defense as a cover for acts of pure evil, that the residents of central New York would not give an audience to such an explanation for crime anytime soon. Such was not the case, however. Both during and shortly after the high-profile trials in Auburn, New Yorkers proved willing to countenance the insanity defense in cases of murder. One major reason for this was that the struggle to define humanon-human violence as evil or as an outcome of environment was part of a larger debate concerning what should be the paramount values in American culture. For those who backed the new wave of reform movements and institutions, adoption of the environmentalist account of human nature helped to place the United States in the ranks of civilized nations. Science and rationality, not superstition and reaction, should guide the nation’s policies. While agreeing on many fronts, when it came to violent crime their opponents countered that such claims to science actually undermined the safety of society. Under the broad rubric of humanitarianism, one corollary to the social reform drive was a strong sense that one ought to have sympathy for those who passed beyond the bounds of self-government. In this framework, “compassion and a reluctance to inflict pain became identified as distinctly civilized emotions, while cruelty was labeled as savage or barbarous.” As Karen Halttunen has noted, the “culture of sensibility steadily broadened the arena within which humanitarian feeling was encouraged to operate” (Halttunen 1995, 303). Not inflicting unnecessary pain or punishment was part of what it meant to be civilized. The truly cultivated person would have strong emotional aversion to pain and suffering in others. William Seward and his colleagues stressed this position that in order to be considered civilized, a society needed to have more humane treatments than those to which Freeman and Wyatt were subjected at the hands of the state while incarcerated in the Auburn penitentiary. This sense of humanitarianism, which had launched many of the reform

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movements of the Antebellum era, entailed multiple implications. To begin with, “civilized” nations did not engage in such “barbaric” practices as lashing prisoners across the spine or beating them over the head. Furthermore, in an “enlightened” age, society (and the law) needed to recognize that those people who did not have control of their mental faculties could not be held accountable for their actions. In short, humanitarians like Seward argued, recently emerging understandings of human nature meant that older social practices (based on older understandings of human nature) needed to be updated to be in accord with how human beings actually operated, not how one might have thought that they did. If Seward and his colleagues had a larger mission in taking on the Wyatt case, so too did the prosecution. If there were many people who wanted to see American society become more civilized by replacing traditional practices with more humanitarian means of dealing with citizens who had passed beyond the bounds of self-government, there were also those who believed that such traditional approaches had stood society in good stead for generations, and wished to preserve them. Van Buren and Sherwood structured their case to appeal to such a perspective. To accomplish this, they juxtaposed an emphasis on “morality” to the defense’s stress on “humanitarianism,” arguing that the core elements of free will and human nature were matters of common sense (and not medical expertise), and asserting that the courtroom was the domain of law, not medicine. In many ways, then, the drive to implement humanitarian reforms led to a cultural struggle to define the basis of moral accountability, including the definition of evil. Even some physicians pushed back on what they perceived to be an overly medicalized account of human nature. A decade after these trials, the superintendent of New York’s insane asylum at Utica, Dr. John Gray, wrote a stiff rejection of the doctrine of moral insanity: “That a man may have a clear perception and consciousness of right and wrong, and the full use of his reason, and yet be so infirm of will that sometimes he cannot refrain from doing what he knows to be wrong, or persist in doing what he knows to be right, is so true that the doctrine of moral insanity can derive no aid from the position. It is the usual condition of those, who, in plain speaking times, were called bad men” (Gray 1858, 319–20). At the same time, even in the midst of the fury over Wyatt and Freeman, central New York juries were willing to consider the insanity defense for murder. And they did so with the now notorious Seward at the defense table. On May 9, 1846, as Wyatt and Freeman were both awaiting trial, Levi Clearwater attacked and killed Nathan Tiffany in Milford, ninety miles east and south of Auburn. Both men were present at a communal work event, where the drunk Clearwater attacked Tiffany with a pocket knife, wounding him in the abdomen. Tiffany retreated, “holding his entrails with his hands, which had been exposed by the stab he received” (“Dreadful Murder” 1846). Clearwater did not let matters rest,

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however, and as Tiffany stumbled to his nearby house, Clearwater pursued, “determining to ‘finish him’ on the spot” (“Dreadful Murder” 1846). Tiffany’s wife emerged from the house, though, with a pair of fire tongs and beat Clearwater back from the threshold. Although Clearwater fled, authorities found him the next day, and committed him to the jailhouse. Clearwater expressed deep regret, and “tears were frequently seen trickling down his cheeks” (“Dreadful Murder” 1846). He blamed his drinking for his troubles, as he had been “addicted to intemperance for several years” (“Dreadful Murder” 1846). Although Seward had spent two solid months in court defending Wyatt and Freeman, he also took on Clearwater’s defense. When the trial took place in September, Judge Philo Gridly ultimately handed down a sentence of only four years on a conviction of third-degree manslaughter (Stevens 1903). As the Auburn Journal reported, “The principal ground of the defence [sic] . . . was that the act was committed in the heat of passion, on great provocation, and therefore did not amount to murder, within the meaning and true intent of the law” (“Clearwater’s Murder” 1846). So, the Clearwater case indicates that New York juries did not necessarily reject the insanity defense per se, even after the much-publicized Wyatt and Freeman cases. The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed a profound shift in American conceptions of the category of evil. It became possible to uncouple actions from the agency of the actor. This shift in thinking, however, was by no means universal. Although environmentalism gained widespread acceptance as the foundation for most of the era’s social reform movements, its application to criminal cases met stiff resistance. Ultimately, neither side can be said to have won this fierce debate. Certainly the contests of 1846 would not see any ultimate resolution to these questions. Rather, these battles reconfigured the cultural and conceptual landscape in which the dialogue on evil was conducted. The contention that a person might not be morally accountable for their misdeeds—that a murder might not be evil, properly speaking—became a viable position to adopt. And it was now possible to conceive of harmful individual actions, including murder, as emerging from the collective prior actions of others. From that era to our own, then, discussions about moral praise and blame have had to take this possibility into account. NOTE 1. Cohen (1993) attributes these changes to “intellectual tensions generated by earlier crime publications, shifts in the legal system and the social status of lawyers, and profound changes in the very nature of New England society” (26). Without disagreeing about the importance of these structural factors, I believe that the debate on the nature of evil—and the crimes that it inspired—stemmed from even more fundamental shifts in the understanding of human nature.

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REFERENCES Bellesiles, Michael A. 1999. Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History. New York: New York University Press. Block, James E. 2002. A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Brigham, Amariah. 1845. “Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity.” American Journal of Insanity: 258–74. “Cayuga Oyer and Terminer, August Term, 1845.” 1845. Auburn Journal and Advertiser, August 6. “Clearwater’s Murder.” 1846. Auburn Journal and Advertiser, September 30. Cohen, Daniel A. 1993. Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Litterature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860. New York: Oxford University Press. Coventry, C. B. 1842. Address to the Graduates of the Medical Institution of Geneva College: Delivered January 25th, 1842. Utica, NY: Democrat Office. Delbanco, Andrew. 1995. The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. “Dreadful Murder.” 1846. New York Tribune, May 16. Fiering, Norman. 1981. Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context. Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, VA, by the University of North Carolina Press. Gin Lum, Kathryn. 2014. Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press. Gray, John. 1858. “Moral Insanity.” American Journal of Insanity 14 (4). Guelzo, Allen C. 1989. Edwards on the Will: A Century of American Theological Debate. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Hall, Benjamin F. 1848. The Trial of William Freeman for the Murder of John G. Van Nest: Including the Evidence and the Arguments of Counsel, with the Decision of the Supreme Court Granting a New Trial, and an Account of the Death of the Prisoner, and of the PostMortem Examination of His Body by Amariah Brigham, M.D., and Others. Auburn: Derby, Miller & Co. Halttunen, Karen. 1995. “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in AngloAmerican Culture.” The American Historical Review 100 (2): 303–34. ———. 1998. Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E. 1996. Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Holt, Michael F. 1999. The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. Jones, Paul C. 2011. Against the Gallows: Antebellum American Writers and the Movement to Abolish Capital Punishment. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Kuklick, Bruce. 1985. Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lewis, Orlando Faulkland. 1922. Development of American Prisons and Prison Customs, 1776–1945; with Special Reference to Early Institutions in the State of New York. Albany: Prison Association of New York. Mintz, Steven. 2007. “Introduction.” In The Problem of Evil: Slavery, Freedom, and the Ambiguities of American Reform, edited by Steven Mintz and John Stauffer. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Mohr, James C. 1993. Doctors and the Law: Medical Jurisprudence in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Mullins, Jeffrey A. 2006. “‘Fitted to Receive the Work of God’: Emotions and Scientific Naturalism in the Religious Revivals of the 1830s.” International Social Science Review 81 (1/2): 3–15.

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———. 1995. “Duties to Science, Duties to God: Medical Theory, Physiology, and the Discourse on Morality in Nineteenth-Century America.” Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia 17: 45–60. “Murder of John G. Van Nest and Family.” 1846. Cayuga Tocsin, March 14, 1846. “[No Title].” 1846. Syracuse Daily Star, July 25. Report of the Trial of Henry Wyatt, a Convict in the State Prison at Auburn, Indicted for the Murder of James Gordon, another Convict within the Prison, before the Court of Oyer and Terminer Held at Auburn, N.Y., Commencing Wednesday, February Eleventh, Eighteen Hundred Forty-Six 1846. Auburn, NY: J. C. Derby & Co. “State Prison Excitement.” 1846. Auburn Journal and Advertiser, January 28. Stevens, Ezra. 1903. Early History of the Town of Milford, and Other Parts of Otsego County, New York, from 1773 to 1903. New York. “Trial of Henry Wyatt, for the Murder of James Gordon, The.” 1846. Auburn Journal and Advertiser, July 1. Winfield, A. B. 1846. Sermon at the Interment of the Bodies of John G. Van Nest, Mrs. Sarah Van Nest, G.W. Van Nest, their Son, and Mrs. Phebe Wykoff, Who Were Murdered March Twelfth Inst. by a Colored Man Named William Freeman: Preached in the R.D. Church, at Sand Beach, Owasco Lake, March Fifteenth. Auburn, NY: Napier Press of J. C. Merrell & Co. “Wyatt’s Trial.” 1846. Cayuga Patriot, June 24.

Index

9/11, 58, 165, 166, 175, 177, 178, 179, 182, 183n10, 187, 190, 198 abhorrent, 8, 9, 112, 190 abnormal, 102, 103, 104, 109, 113n5; abnormality, 70, 102, 106, 110, 111 absolution, 19, 102 Ace in the Hole, 8, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163; Douglas, Kirk, 149, 152, 160, 161; Minosa, Leo, 149, 150–151, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157–158, 159, 160–161, 162; Tatum, Charles, 149–150, 151–155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160–161, 162–163 Adam (Biblical character), 13, 14, 24, 76, 77, 82n1 agency, 21n1, 69, 203, 204, 210, 211, 216; human agency, 189, 202, 203, 204, 212 agent, 16, 18, 43, 46, 122, 152, 154, 170, 173, 175, 189, 201, 208, 211 alien, 173, 181, 183n8 Alighieri, Dante, 42, 70, 82n1 alliance, villain-hero, 55, 120, 203 alter ego, 123, 125 Althusser, Louis, 69 ambiguity, 13, 15, 37, 42, 47, 49, 58, 93, 98, 102 America, 8, 9, 53, 57, 58, 61, 85, 89, 90, 101, 105, 108, 112n2, 113n5, 117, 118, 132, 134, 137, 140, 141, 142, 145, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 156, 158, 160, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 182, 182n4, 183n6, 183n8, 187, 188, 190, 195, 198, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 209, 211, 214, 215, 216. See also United States American, 9, 53, 57, 58, 61, 85, 89, 90, 101, 105, 108, 112n2, 113n5, 117, 118,

132, 134, 141, 142, 145, 149, 150, 152, 153, 156, 158, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183n6, 183n8, 188, 190, 195, 198, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 209, 211, 214, 215, 216; American South, 132, 141 amoral, 38, 144, 157 angel, 39, 44, 74, 80, 81, 82n5 antebellum, 8, 132, 133, 138, 141, 143, 144, 145, 214 antihero, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61, 64, 171 anxiety, 40, 50, 125, 193, 194, 198 apartheid, 8, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128n1, 129n3. See also post-apartheid Arendt, Hannah, 2, 8, 106, 107, 109, 113n4, 157 Aristotle, 5 art, 5, 7, 23, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 42, 54, 58; artist, 29, 62 Asia, 172 assault, 137, 189, 190, 198 atheism, 38, 39, 43 atomic bomb, 106 atonement, 18, 19 atrocity, 12, 57, 71, 189, 191 audience, 7, 25, 29, 31, 32, 39, 40, 43, 45, 49, 50, 53, 56, 58, 61, 73, 131, 132, 144, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162, 163, 166, 168, 214 Auschwitz, 105, 106, 107, 108, 111, 112n2, 113n3, 113n5 authentic, 12, 133, 181, 191, 194 authority, 26, 43, 59, 107, 113n4, 121, 123, 128, 129n7, 135, 192, 193; historical, 131; moral, 2, 118, 131; patriarchal, 27

219

220

Index

avenge, 11, 12, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 120, 138, 173, 175, 176, 177, 183n15 Avengers, the, 173, 176, 177 Avalos, Hector, 191–193 backstory, 61, 62, 169, 170 bad, 8, 39, 41, 55, 56, 63, 65, 91, 111, 112, 126, 127, 146, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 160, 161, 162, 167, 171, 188, 190, 193, 194, 198, 215 banality of evil. See evil, banality of Bataille, Georges, 86, 87, 91, 92 benediction, 18, 20, 21 Bible, 13, 14, 15, 24, 85, 87, 90, 93, 188 Big Bad, 55, 56, 65 binary, 39, 53, 54, 55, 119, 122, 125, 127, 128; hero-villain, 8, 53, 118, 119, 120, 122, 125, 126, 127, 128; moral, 56, 65, 150; non-binary, 54 biography, 72, 105, 111, 112n2. See also memoir body, 18, 21n1, 27, 31, 48, 64, 71, 72, 87, 89, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 103, 110, 111, 150, 175, 196, 206, 207, 209 boundary, 31, 65, 75, 190 brain, 2, 46, 49, 95, 173, 174, 205, 207, 209 Brunvand, Jan Harold, 131, 133 Buchanan, George, 46–47 Bush, George W., 183n9, 187, 198 Cable, George Washington, 134, 135, 136, 137, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145 Cain, 73, 74 Caliban, 76, 79, 80 Calvinist, 211 Captain America (Cap), 9, 166, 167–172, 173, 177–178, 179–180, 181, 182n4, 183n13 Carnival, 12, 145, 150, 152, 155, 156 cartography, 69, 70 castration, 102, 109, 177 categorization, 57, 58, 60, 190, 199 Catholic, 18, 23, 29, 30, 31, 33, 39, 42, 51n5, 104; Catholic, anti-, 49; Catholic Church, 17, 18, 29, 49; Catholic Interpretation, 13, 21n1. See also Catholicism Catholicism, 28, 29

chaos, 12, 13, 42, 58, 74, 117, 119, 122, 123, 125, 127, 169 China, 172, 176, 192 Christ, 73, 80, 88. See also Jesus Christian, 37, 38, 39, 43, 50, 71, 72, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 95, 98, 99, 146n1, 204, 210, 211 Christianity, 40, 50, 72, 98, 137, 188 Church, 17, 29, 31, 43, 49, 69, 89, 155, 192, 194, 210 citizen, 5, 103, 123, 135, 137, 138, 143, 168, 205, 207, 213, 215 civil war, 128n1; Civil War, the, 201; Civil War, The, 178–181, 183n11, 183n13, 183n14 civilian, 59, 179, 190, 193, 207 civilization, 59, 75, 90, 168, 198, 204, 214 Claudius, 38, 44, 45, 47, 50. See also Catholic Church Cold War, 166, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 181, 182, 183n7, 183n8, 198 colonial, 117, 120, 194, 198 comic book, 165, 166, 169, 174, 177, 178; Golden Age of Comic Books, 166, 169, 182. See also narrative, comic communism, 175, 198; commie, 173, 174; communist, 120, 166, 172, 173, 174, 175, 182, 192 community, 3, 5, 57, 70, 71, 77, 78, 80, 90, 95, 98, 156, 178, 179, 182, 194, 202, 210, 213; community of Scholars, 1; community, sense of, 1 concentration camp, 97 confession, 11–12, 14, 15, 16, 18–19, 20–21, 161 convict, 201, 205, 207 Copernican Revolution, 41, 42 corrupt, 3, 5, 89, 118, 123, 126, 129n5, 143, 154, 179, 181; corruption, 8, 24, 29, 46, 47, 48, 96, 121, 124, 126, 128, 143, 167 cosmology, 39, 146n1 court, 27, 29, 31, 105, 113n6, 122, 145, 190, 205, 208, 212, 213, 216; courtroom, 9, 201, 208, 212, 215 crime, 19, 44, 46, 47, 49, 71, 102, 105, 112n1, 113n6, 119–120, 121, 125, 126, 128, 135, 138, 141, 144, 146, 159, 162, 175, 189, 195, 197, 198, 199, 202–203,

Index 206, 212, 213, 214, 216n1; capital crime, 43, 59; crime and punishment, 12, 14; against children, 120, 121, 123; against humanity, 108–109, 190, 199 crime fiction, 117–120, 122, 125–128, 129n2, 129n3 criminal, 9, 105, 118, 119, 122, 123, 125, 168, 190, 201, 202, 203, 211, 213, 216; criminality, 8, 86, 125, 126. See also trial, criminal crisis, 41, 49, 59, 174, 183n7, 195 crowd, 8, 135, 136, 141, 142, 146, 149, 150, 151, 152, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161 crucifixion, 86, 88, 89, 91, 92, 95, 98 cruelty, 2, 11, 12, 15, 19, 21n1, 33n1, 47, 62, 88, 91, 94, 95, 97, 122, 138, 139, 199, 214; animal, 97 culpability, 58, 112, 150, 160 culture, 9, 21n1, 29, 50, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 61, 70, 71, 74, 80, 81, 118, 131, 134, 137, 142, 143, 165, 166, 170, 172, 176, 187, 195, 196, 197, 201, 214 damned, 38, 39, 40, 49, 50, 77 damnation, 38, 40, 50 Dante. See Alighieri, Dante death, 7, 21, 27, 30, 31, 46, 47, 50, 56, 59, 63, 71, 72, 87, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 101, 108, 110, 112, 112n2, 113n4, 123, 124, 125, 133, 135, 144, 150–151, 153, 154, 157–158, 159, 160–161, 170, 174, 201, 207, 208 Death Is My Trade, 105, 106, 108, 111–112, 112n2. See also Merle, Robert debate, 2, 60, 108, 175, 180, 183n12, 188, 201, 203, 204, 211, 214, 216, 216n1 deception, 17, 30, 32, 42, 43, 46, 150; self-deception, 6 degradation, 112n1, 152 dehumanization, 91, 106 Delbanco, Andrew, 201 demon, 3, 7, 8, 9, 25, 42, 43, 48, 49, 54, 59, 65, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 81, 86, 104, 108, 127, 134, 140, 143, 166, 182, 183n14, 194 depravity, 45, 96, 150

221

destruction, 2, 13, 28, 71, 77, 79, 80, 87, 91, 92, 93, 142, 143, 181, 183n9, 188, 189, 193, 194, 198 detective, 97, 119–120, 121, 122, 125, 128; detective fiction, 8, 20; detective Comics, Inc, 166 deviance, 85, 86, 167; sexual, 8, 105–106, 112, 125 devil, 1, 3, 38, 39, 43, 48, 49, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 81, 213; Devil, the, 7, 24, 37–40, 43–44, 46, 48–49, 71, 74, 76, 77, 81, 213. See also Lucifer; Satan dialectic, 42, 74, 78, 79, 80 dichotomy, 3, 11, 41, 86, 98, 166, 167 discourse, 2, 43, 54, 57, 74, 165, 166, 167, 173, 174, 175, 182, 183n7, 183n10, 183n12, 203; discourse communities, 2–3 dismemberment, 39, 40, 71, 91 dominance, 48, 88, 90, 95, 111, 198 drama, 39, 43; medieval, 51n2; melodrama, 152; Renaissance, 7, 8, 27, 37, 38, 49, 50; television, 54, 55, 58 dramatic monologues, 18, 20 Duncan, 45–46, 51n3 duplicity, 16, 19 economy, 9, 191, 205; economic, 180, 191, 193, 202 Eden, Garden of, 11, 13–14, 16, 89 Edwards, Jonathan, 211 ego, 44, 86, 196 eighteenth century, 211 Elizabeth, Queen, 29, 30, 34n2, 42 Elizabethan, 40, 42, 123 enemy, 9, 12, 13, 16, 17, 18, 55, 59, 111, 166, 169, 172, 173, 174, 177, 179, 181, 182, 198 environment, 29, 46, 89, 113n6, 201, 203, 204, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 211, 214 environmentalism, 204, 216 eschatology, 42, 50 ethics, 42, 50, 64, 119, 151, 187, 189; ethical, 30, 50, 60, 65, 118, 127, 161, 180. See also journalism, ethics ethnic, 120, 165, 172, 173, 178, 194

222

Index

Europe, 33, 49, 136, 152, 168, 169, 172, 174, 182n5, 192, 194, 198 Eve, 13, 14 evil: Axis of, 176, 183n9, 187; banality of, 2, 8, 106, 108, 113n4, 157; deeds, 21, 24, 25, 56, 62, 106, 113n4, 160, 201, 204; good and, 7, 8, 21, 27, 43, 53, 54, 55, 56; moral, 2, 151, 188–189; motives, 106; natural, 2, 93, 151, 188–189; nature of, 2, 23, 57, 94, 106, 191, 203, 216n1; problem of, 2, 9, 191, 201; radical, 7, 53, 106–107 existential, 58, 64 exorcism, 49, 51n4 exploitation, 105, 151, 153, 155, 158 extermination camp, 105, 106, 107, 108 faith, 7, 33, 39, 40, 42, 45, 175 Fantastic Four, The, 174, 175, 176 fantasy, 31, 45, 103, 111, 126, 128, 129n6, 197 fear, 9, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 38, 43, 44, 45, 49, 50, 74, 80, 91, 92, 102, 107, 125, 172, 173, 174, 180, 187, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 203, 210 femme fatale, 123 fiction, 8, 20, 40, 43, 59, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 110, 111–112, 117, 118–119, 122, 125–126, 127, 129n2, 129n3, 178; fictional, 8, 39, 40, 50, 58, 64, 101, 103, 105, 106, 107, 109, 111, 112, 112n2, 117, 135, 149, 150, 154, 159, 177; fictionalization, 101–102, 105 fiend, 9, 54, 71, 72, 73, 78, 80, 81, 210, 213 film, 8, 73, 81, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 182n5, 183n6, 195 Final Solution, 107, 108 flashback, 61–62 foe, 16, 78, 167, 168, 172, 194 foreigner, 9, 165, 166, 168, 170, 176, 178 forgiveness, 90, 161 fragmentation, 91 Frankenstein (novel), 72, 76; Frankenstein, Doctor, 80; Frankenstein’s monster, 75, 77, 78, 80

free will, 14, 38, 69, 81, 189, 215 freedom, 31, 48, 86, 97, 107, 122, 125, 127, 179, 198, 211 Freeman, William, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216 French, 7, 42, 85, 103, 105, 106, 110, 111, 112, 112n2, 113n3, 134, 142 French literature. See literature, French. fundamentalism, 190 Genesis, 13–15, 21n1 genocide, 102, 107, 110, 111, 112, 112n2, 189, 195 German, 101, 102, 103, 109, 111, 112n2, 113n5, 113n6, 129n3, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 182n5, 195 ghost, 8, 50, 75, 81, 85, 131–134, 136, 138, 140, 141, 145, 146, 146n1, 175; Banquo’s Ghost, 45, 49; King Hamlet’s Ghost, 44, 49–50; Red Ghost, 175; slave ghost, 137, 140–141, 143, 146. See also haunting, haunted; supernatural ghost story, 131–132, 133–134, 136, 138, 141 global, 3, 9, 57, 60, 181, 191, 196, 198 God, goddess, gods, 4, 32, 70, 71, 86, 93, 123, 198; Christian, 11, 13–14, 15–17, 18–19, 24, 27, 29, 31–32, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42–44, 46, 50, 51n1, 71, 72–73, 74, 81, 82n1, 82n2, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 105, 191, 192, 193, 211; demigod, 161; God-cursed, 71; playing god, 7 good. See evil, good and Gordon, Avery, 132, 133, 138, 140–141 Gordon, James, 205, 209 Grendel, 3–4, 7, 71–73, 75–76, 80–81, 82n2; Grendel, 4, 78 grief, 90, 94, 157 Griessel, Benny. See Meyer, Deon guilt, 11, 14, 18–20, 44, 45, 50, 59, 63, 72, 92, 97, 150, 161, 162, 194, 201 guilty, 18, 42, 47, 49, 50, 98, 154, 159, 194, 209, 213 gypsies, 95, 174, 195 Halttunen, Karen, 203, 214 Hamlet: Hamlet, 37, 38, 39, 44–45, 50; Prince Hamlet, 41, 44, 47, 49

Index haunt, 94, 134, 138, 140, 141, 146n1. See also ghost; supernatural Heel-Face Turn, 55, 56 Hell, 38, 39–40, 41, 43, 49, 73–74, 77–78, 80, 81, 178 Henry V, 32 heretic, 194, 195 hero, 7, 8, 9, 27, 39, 46, 51n2, 53–55, 56–58, 59–60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 77, 88, 95, 117–118, 119–121, 122, 124–125, 126–128, 128n1, 149, 150, 153, 159, 160, 165–167, 168, 170–172, 173, 174, 175, 176–180, 181–182, 182n3, 182n4, 183n6, 183n10, 183n15 heterosexuality 110, 171 historical figures, 102, 105 Hitler, Adolf, 101–104, 112, 168, 169, 182n3, 196 Hobbes, Thomas, 41, 191 Hoess, Rudolf, 105–112, 112n2, 113n5 Holocaust, the, 102, 105, 106, 107, 108 homophobic, 113n6 homosexuality, 8, 104, 111, 112, 113n6 honest, 38, 50, 108, 152, 153–154, 157, 162 honor, 15, 93, 120, 122, 124, 177 horror 77, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 137, 146; American Horror Story, 145; horror stories, 137, 138 human, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8–9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 21n1, 23, 24, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 37, 41, 45, 47, 50, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 65, 70, 71, 72, 74–76, 78–79, 80, 81, 82n1, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 95, 96, 98, 105, 106, 107, 113n4, 117, 126, 133, 141, 142, 149, 159, 168, 171, 172, 173, 181, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 201, 203, 204, 208, 209, 211, 214; human experience, 32, 53, 65, 206; human nature, 45, 162, 203–204, 206, 208, 209, 210, 212, 214–215, 216n1 humanity, 24, 41, 46, 75, 76, 79, 81, 106, 150, 156, 168, 181, 190, 198 humanitarian, 158, 204, 205, 206, 208, 214–215 humors (humours), 48 Iago, 23, 33n1 id, 85

223

identity, 69, 97, 124, 171, 190, 191, 196; American, 9, 165, 166, 179; core, 166; national, 9, 165, 182; secret, 166; sexual, 102 ideology, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 80, 81, 113n3, 117, 133, 170–171, 174, 183n7, 183n12, 190, 193, 196, 198; ideological conformity, 81; ideological discrimination, 8; ideological enemy, 173; ideological motives, 170; ideological norms, 85; ideological Structures, 71; ideological Values, 80 idol, 30 idolatry, 29 imaginary, 37, 38, 190 immoral, 7, 53, 93, 98, 106, 138 incest, 95, 103, 104 infidelity, 25 inherent nature, 61 inhumanity, 73, 75, 106, 161, 168, 172, 198 injury, 12, 15, 20, 21, 63, 102, 113n4, 125, 145 injustice, 117–118, 121, 122, 135, 171, 199 innate, 14, 17, 75, 85, 113n4, 189, 190 Innocence, 44, 62, 90, 108, 201 insane, 91, 208, 209, 210, 215 insanity, 9, 19, 204, 207, 208, 209, 210, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216 instinct, 15, 94, 106, 193, 194 intelligence, 43, 139, 173 Internet, 195, 196 International, 9, 112n2, 113n5, 129n3, 163, 175, 176, 187, 190, 193, 198 irredeemable. See redemption, irredeemable Islam, 101, 190, 198. See also Muslim Italian, 29 Jacobean, 7, 27, 37, 40, 48 Japanese, 168, 172, 182 jealousy, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 33, 35, 37 Jesus, 28, 49, 51n4, 75, 86, 88, 89, 137. See also Christ Jew, 72, 102, 104, 107, 108, 113n4, 170, 195

224

Index

journalism, 142, 149, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156. See also press journalist, 106, 135, 136, 138, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 161, 193. See also reporter Judeo-Christian, 57, 70, 71 justice, 11, 14, 15, 19, 21, 59, 92, 95, 117, 118, 120, 121–122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 129n4, 135, 138, 141, 143, 145, 171, 199, 212; divine, 12, 15, 16, 21, 21n1, 138, 141. See also vigilante, justice jury, 209, 211, 212, 213 killer, 120, 121, 122, 123, 160, 209, 211. See also murder, murderer King, Stephen, 8, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99; “Apt Pupil,” 91, 92, 93, 96, 97; Bowden, Todd, 91–92, 97; “Children of the Corn,” 86, 89, 91, 92; Creed, Louis, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96; Danny, 93; Darcy, 96, 97; Flag, Randall, 92; “Good Marriage, A,” 93; Halleck, Billy, 8, 92, 95, 96; Pet Sematary, 86, 87, 90, 91, 92, 93–94, 96; Salem’s Lot, 96; Stand, The, 60, 86, 92, 208; Thinner, 48, 92, 93, 95, 96; Torrence, Jack, 94, 96; “Under the Dome,” 93, 95, 96 LaLaurie, Madame Delphine, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146 Lang, Rudolf, 105, 106–107, 108–111, 112n2 Latin, 7, 8, 40, 42, 70, 72, 86, 112, 136, 160, 170, 172, 188 law, 4, 5, 6, 8, 40, 46, 51n3, 58, 60, 74, 95, 119–120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129n7, 142, 171, 203, 205, 207, 208, 214–215, 216; and order, 58, 117, 119, 122; code of, 117, 119, 127; divine, 85, 132, 133, 143–144, 146, 146n1; rule(s) of, 123, 212 learned, 171, 178 Lee, Stan, 173, 175 legal system, 120, 121, 129n4, 176, 216n1 Leviathan. See Hobbes, Thomas

lies, 154, 157, 162 literature, 7, 38, 103, 118, 122, 126, 202; French, 104. See also comic book; crime fiction; ghost story; horror stories logic, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 25, 37, 41, 46, 50, 51n1, 58, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 79, 80, 81, 85, 86, 91, 93, 94, 95, 97, 102, 103, 111, 113n4, 126, 127, 132, 133, 141, 160, 161, 170, 173, 182, 183n12, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 198, 199, 204, 211 loyalty, 56, 106 Lucifer, 41, 42, 46, 61. See also Devil; Satan Lucifer Effect, 59 Macbeth: Macbeth, 38, 45–46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51n3; Macbeth, 7, 37, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50 magic, 27, 30, 34n2, 37, 40, 43, 44, 50, 87, 174 malevolent, 63, 187, 188, 190 malice, 11, 15, 18, 56, 106, 122 Manichean, 49 Margery Kemp, 72 margin(alized), 1, 112, 131, 140, 141, 146, 195, 213 Martin Luther, 42 Martineau, Harriet, 134, 135–137, 138–140, 141, 142, 146, 204 Marvel Comics, 9, 166, 174, 175, 181, 182, 182n1, 183n7, 183n11 Marx, Karl, 192 Marx, Leo, 89 masculinity, 111, 177, 183n7 medical, 113n6, 177, 208, 210, 212, 215 medicine, 48, 208, 215 medieval, 37, 39, 42, 43, 46, 48, 49, 51n2, 51n3, 72, 73, 194 memoir, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 112n2. See also biography mental, 4, 17, 32, 58, 62, 142, 172, 179, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193, 197, 198, 201, 203, 204, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 212, 213, 214, 216, 216n1; disorder, 207, 212 Mephistopheles, 39, 40, 41, 50

Index Merle, Robert, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 112n2. See also Death Is My Trade metaphysical, 47, 126 Meyer, Deon, 8, 63, 119, 120, 121, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129n3; Devil’s Peak, 8, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129n7; Mpayipheli, Thobela, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129n5, 129n6; Griessel, Benny, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129n6, 129n7 Milgram, Stanley, 113n4 mind, 2, 6, 14, 19, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 39, 41, 45, 47, 49, 50, 94, 99, 101, 105, 108, 124, 144, 158, 168, 175, 180, 190, 205, 208, 209, 210 Mintz, Steven, 202 mob, 136, 140, 142, 143–144, 145, 146, 156, 157, 210 monster, 4, 7, 56, 61, 69, 70–71, 72, 74–75, 76, 77, 78–80, 81, 85, 86, 93, 96, 97, 109, 150, 171, 183n8, 210 Moore, Alan, 177 Morality, 8, 9, 39, 51n2, 53, 56, 58, 59, 64, 65, 70, 92, 96, 99, 106, 118, 119, 132, 133, 137, 139, 140, 141, 144, 150, 162, 165, 167, 171, 188, 203, 209, 210, 212, 215; moral absolutes, 57, 60; moral code, 117, 120, 171, 209; moral compass, 165; moral continuum, 54, 64; moral relativity, 54, 60; moral universe, 58, 146; social morals, 141, 144. See also binary, moral motivation, 20, 189, 199, 210 motive, 4, 5, 44, 45, 50, 54, 61, 106, 160, 170, 189, 202 Mpayipheli, Thobela. See Meyer, Deon murder, 9, 11, 13, 16, 20, 21, 38, 44, 45, 47, 49, 56, 80, 88, 91, 92, 93, 95, 97, 107, 120, 121, 125, 140, 162, 189, 195, 201, 203, 204, 205, 209, 213, 214, 215, 216; murderer, 45, 56, 96, 104, 106, 108, 124, 152, 162, 188, 202. See also killer Muslim, 195, 198. See also Islam myth, 3, 4, 5, 12, 21n1, 31, 50, 53, 63, 124, 126, 131, 137, 140, 146, 160, 198

225

narrative, 6, 17, 18, 23, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 76, 80, 87, 88, 90, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 122, 123, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 149, 150, 151, 177, 178, 180, 181, 203; comic, 165, 169, 172, 175; historical, 131, 133, 138, 141; of morality, 58, 141; structure, 18, 53, 55. See also comic book nationalism, 113n6, 120, 165–166, 169, 173, 175, 177; national, 9, 45, 107, 113n3, 122, 128n1, 129n3, 165–166, 167, 173, 176, 177, 178, 182, 195, 196, 198; national security, 198. See also identity, national natural, 3, 6, 8, 30, 48, 49, 50, 70, 87, 90, 91, 94, 95, 188, 189, 203, 205, 208. See also evil, natural naturalism, 203, 204, 209 naturalist, 46, 89, 205, 208, 209, 210, 213 nature, 2, 3, 5, 7, 12, 18, 21, 23, 27, 32, 44, 45, 47, 48, 55, 57, 58, 61, 72, 74, 86, 87, 88, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 101, 106, 110, 124, 131, 134, 136, 145, 158, 161, 162, 172, 190, 191, 201, 203, 204, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216n1 Nazi, 2, 8, 97, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 112n1, 113n3, 113n4, 113n5, 113n6, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 182, 182n5, 195 Nazism, 101, 106, 107, 170 nemesis, 17, 172, 174 New Orleans, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146; Royal Street, 8, 134, 135, 136, 140–141, 143, 145, 146 newspaper, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140, 145, 152, 154, 158, 161, 204, 206, 213. See also periodical nineteenth century, 120, 128n1, 168, 201, 203, 204, 208, 209, 211, 216 norm, 6, 85, 122, 125, 126, 143, 166, 168, 202, 204, 212; normal, 7, 26, 44, 45, 70, 95, 101–103, 104, 106, 109, 110, 111, 113n5, 183n8, 187, 191, 209

226

Index

Nuremberg Trials. See trial, Nuremberg ontological, 126, 127, 194, 195 opportunism, 149, 152 order, 13, 50, 58, 59, 70, 73, 74, 78, 81, 87, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122–123, 124, 125–126, 127, 128, 129n6, 129n7, 133, 140, 142, 144, 199, 213; and chaos, 117, 119, 127; divine, 146n1; orders, 20, 21n1, 27, 106, 111, 113n4, 140, 144, 155, 160, 175, 213. See also law, and order; society, social order Originals, The, 54, 56, 58, 61, 64 other, 18, 48, 61, 70–71, 74, 76–77, 79, 80, 87, 97, 98, 104, 109, 120, 167, 171, 194, 195–196, 197, 198–199; othering, 93, 167, 181; otherness, 70, 79, 167 Other Side, The, 74, 104. See also Parte de l’autre, Le pagan, 30, 39, 42, 71, 87, 90, 167, 192, 194, 195 Paradise Lost, 38, 42, 72, 77, 81 paranoia, 9, 64, 173, 181, 199 Part de l’autre, Le (The Other Side), 104 patriarchal, 25, 27, 74, 75, 94 patriotism, 165, 190; Patriot Act, 178, 183n12 peace, 13, 18, 19, 47, 74, 81, 122, 125, 175, 181, 188, 212 penance, 21, 23, 28 periodical, 204. See also newspaper perpetrator, 44, 63, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 112, 113n4, 201, 203 perversion, 24, 93, 96, 111 perversity, 101, 156 phallic, 110, 111 phenomenology, 167 philosophical, 2, 54, 56, 71, 179, 180, 191 philosophy, 1, 2, 5, 107, 167, 191, 198, 208 piety, 40 Plato, 5 poison, 8, 44, 47, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 128n1, 208 police, 5, 59, 89, 95, 113n4, 113n6, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 129n5,

129n7, 138, 140, 141, 142, 163, 175, 177, 178, 179; policing, 121 political, 1, 3, 4, 9, 42, 49, 56, 77, 88, 101, 106, 107, 118, 119, 126, 128, 132, 140, 143, 167, 169, 170, 171, 174, 175, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 187, 189, 191, 193, 196, 197, 198, 204; political rhetoric, 187, 189, 191, 197, 198 politician, 124, 155, 171 politics, 9, 124, 171, 188, 190, 192, 193, 194, 196, 198, 199 popular culture, 53, 54, 56, 57, 61, 165, 166, 170, 172 post-apartheid, 8, 117, 121, 125, 127. See also apartheid postcolonial, 129n3, 167 power, 1, 3, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 50, 56, 57, 58, 59, 65, 69, 70, 71, 81, 86, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 102, 107, 110, 113n4, 121, 124, 126, 127, 160, 161, 167, 169, 170, 171, 173, 175, 180, 181, 187, 190, 191, 193, 195, 208, 211, 212, 213 pragmatism, 55, 59 prayer, 18, 44, 90, 157, 158 press, 8, 12, 16, 17, 23, 24, 41, 51n4, 74, 76, 80, 81, 92, 93, 94, 97, 109, 110, 113n4, 113n5, 119, 120, 122, 124, 125, 137, 140, 149, 150, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 165, 167, 175, 181, 188, 193, 194, 195, 198, 212, 215 primal, 94, 190, 198, 199 principle, 2, 50, 75, 203, 210, 212 prison, 4, 21n1, 56, 59, 62, 86, 107, 112n1, 112n2, 113n4, 117, 204, 205, 207, 209, 210, 212, 214; penitentiary, 201, 204, 205, 206, 207, 209, 214; prisoner, 4, 107, 113n4, 205, 207, 212, 214 propaganda, 42, 168, 192, 194, 196 Propp, Vladimir, 122 protagonist, 7, 11, 38, 40, 45, 50, 54, 55, 56, 150, 153, 160, 168, 177, 179, 182n2 protection, 190, 198 Protestant, 23–24, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 39, 42, 51n5 psyche, 47, 102, 103, 112n2, 195, 198 psychic, 37, 79, 197, 198 psychoanalysis, 96, 170

Index psychology, 46, 101, 113n5, 211; Psychological, 1, 5, 6, 37, 46, 51n1, 58, 85, 86, 91, 93, 95, 97, 103, 111, 113n4, 170, 190, 192, 194; Psychologist, 58, 103, 104, 105, 108, 110, 112n2, 124, 170 psychopath, 95, 144 public, 5, 8, 24, 28, 43, 56, 101, 102, 106, 113n6, 121, 126, 127, 128, 134, 137, 140, 143, 144, 145, 146, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 166, 172, 173, 174, 176, 177, 180, 181, 190, 195, 202, 203, 204, 210, 212, 213, 216, 216n1 punishment, 5, 14, 15, 20, 39, 41, 44, 49, 50, 72, 102, 129n4, 205, 207, 211 Purgatory, 38, 39, 43, 49 pure, 25, 33, 38, 54, 110, 124, 127, 213, 214 purity, 89, 143, 195 queer, 111 racism, 117; racist, 113n3, 140, 141, 145, 166, 182n3. See also violence, racial radical, 32, 72, 140, 162, 181, 190, 196. See also evil, radical rage, 5, 8, 14, 26, 27, 37, 40, 58, 61, 62, 78, 97, 103, 109, 113n6, 122, 142, 144, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 168, 195, 202, 203, 214 rape, 32, 76, 95, 104, 111, 120–121, 122, 123, 125, 127, 189 Rational, 31, 39, 44, 93, 94, 168, 174, 190, 194, 195 rationality, 90, 94, 214 reader, 12, 17, 20, 38, 39, 46, 85, 87, 88, 91, 92, 95, 96, 98, 104, 108, 111, 120, 121, 143, 155, 157, 159, 160, 167, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 180, 181, 202 real life, 7, 101, 102, 104, 106, 108, 110, 112n2, 179 real world, 46, 55, 59, 81, 101, 149, 153, 170, 177, 181, 182 reality, 1, 3, 27, 43, 49, 50, 54, 85, 96, 97, 134, 182n5, 205 reason, 17, 24, 38, 39, 41, 42, 45, 48, 49, 50, 54, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 82n1,

227

82n5, 94, 109, 111, 123, 131, 138, 150, 156, 166, 190, 198, 203, 209, 213, 214, 215 rebel, 7, 14, 48, 56, 171, 177 Reconstruction, 136, 143, 144, 145, 146 Red Skull, 169, 171, 173 redemption, 7, 8, 23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30–31, 32, 33, 54, 55, 63–64, 65, 88, 119, 150, 162, 202; Irredeemable, 55, 150 reform, 43, 49, 162, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 211, 214, 215, 216 rehabilitation, 33, 161 religion, 1, 3, 29, 30, 40, 43, 70, 137, 178, 187, 191, 192, 193, 194, 204, 211 religious, 1, 5, 6–7, 11, 15, 17, 18, 19, 28, 29, 30, 42, 50, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 93, 96, 98, 137, 187, 188, 190, 191–193, 197, 198, 211 repentance, 18, 21, 31, 44, 161 reporter, 149, 150, 152, 154, 155, 161, 163. See also journalist Republic, The, 5, 56 responsibility, 121, 141, 150, 193, 194, 209, 211 retaliate, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 27, 63, 193 retribution, 7, 11–12, 13, 14, 18, 19, 20, 118, 123, 197, 198 revenge, 7, 11–12, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20–21, 44, 71, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 197 revolution, 41, 54, 56, 58, 61, 64, 172, 193 rhetoric, 11, 12, 14, 15, 19, 21, 39, 47, 48, 58, 133, 134, 166, 187, 189, 190, 191, 197, 198, 212 Richard III, 23, 33n1 righteousness, 15, 56, 93, 121, 187, 191, 192 ritual, 12, 18, 19, 21, 23, 32, 56, 71, 72, 73, 91, 124, 133, 146, 146n1, 211 Rogers, Steve, 169, 171, 177, 179 Romano, Giulio, 29, 34n2 Rosenbaum, Ron, 102, 103 sacred, 19, 21, 82n1, 86, 90, 92, 191 sacrifice, 4, 19, 56, 63, 71, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 95, 96, 178, 191

228

Index

sadism, 37, 135, 141, 142, 143 sadistic, 7, 38, 92, 97, 101, 106, 135, 137, 138, 146 sadomasochism, 102, 104 Satan, 41, 49, 73, 77, 80, 89, 201 savage, 46, 89, 172, 214 savior, 165, 181, 187 scapegoat, 102, 195 scarcity, 187, 191–192, 194 science, 9, 48, 51n2, 174, 176, 204, 208, 210, 211, 214 scientist, 173, 174 Scotland, 45, 46 Second World War, 103, 105. See also World War II secular, 1, 6, 7, 42, 43, 57, 89, 187, 191, 193, 198 secularize, 1, 43, 88, 188, 189, 191, 192, 193, 203 segregation, 128n1, 143, 144. See also apartheid seventeenth century, 30, 31, 33, 38, 128n1, 211 Seward, William, 9, 201, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207–209, 210, 212, 214, 215, 216 sexual, 4, 8, 20, 25, 26, 27, 47, 95, 101–105, 106, 108–112, 112n1, 113n5, 137, 167, 176 sexuality, 7, 25, 26, 101, 102–105, 106, 108–109, 110, 111–112, 113n6; abnormal, 102, 109, 113n5; perverse (perverted), 96, 101–102, 103, 106, 111 shame, 30, 37, 141, 155 Shawcross, William, 193 similitude, 17, 28 sin, 9, 14, 15, 18, 19, 24, 31–32, 39, 42, 70, 71, 72–73, 75, 80, 81, 85, 87, 90, 95, 132, 150, 160, 162, 201, 202, 206, 209, 211; original sin, 15, 85, 87; sinner, 14, 15, 32 sixteenth century, 33 slave, 8, 79–80, 128n1, 132, 134–144, 145, 146 slaveholder, 136, 137 slavery, 8, 117, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138–139, 140, 141, 142, 146, 189; chattel, 132, 140; institution of, 8, 137; system, 132, 134, 137, 139

social media, 58, 195, 197 social order, 59, 78, 81, 119, 123, 124, 125–126, 127, 140, 142, 144 society, 3, 4, 5, 6, 27, 47, 49, 55, 56, 57, 59, 69, 72, 74, 76, 81, 85, 117, 118, 122, 123, 125, 127, 131, 133, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 173, 182, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194, 195, 197, 204, 205, 208, 212, 214, 215, 216n1 sociology, 101, 167, 195 soul, 12, 18, 19, 24, 38, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 72, 73, 74, 88, 91, 211 South Africa, 8, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 128n1, 129n2, 129n3, 129n4 South, American. See American South Soviet Union, 166, 174, 175, 198 spectacle, 8, 150, 154, 159 spectator, 40, 92, 149, 150, 151, 157, 158, 159, 163 spiritual, 12, 19, 23, 32, 71, 72, 73, 91, 133, 146, 146n1, 211 Stalin, Joseph, 39, 106, 195 state, 5, 9, 42, 44, 69, 101, 106, 107, 124, 127, 129n2, 156, 166, 174, 176, 181, 191, 192, 195, 198, 204–205, 206–207, 208, 209, 210, 212, 214 superego, 85, 86 superhero, 55, 171, 176–177, 179–180, 182, 182n3, 183n6, 183n10; Superhero comics, 165–166, 168, 170, 171, 173, 178; Superhero Genre, 170, 182; Superhero Registration Act, 179, 180, 183n15 superiority, 111, 143, 187 supernatural, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9, 38, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 58, 86, 92, 94, 95, 96, 98, 132, 190. See also ghost; haunt symbol, 13, 87, 89, 90, 110, 111, 123, 126, 169, 195, 198 taint, 57, 58, 64, 91, 119, 125, 187, 194, 196, 198 technology, 176, 181, 196 television, 7, 53, 54, 55, 58, 64, 134, 158 temple, 88, 192, 198 terrible, 43, 45, 144, 201 terrify, 40, 73, 106, 194, 195

Index terror, 75, 90, 144, 181, 183n11, 190, 194; War on Terror, 9, 165, 176, 178, 187 terrorism, 178 terrorist, 171, 175, 176, 196 theodicy, 2, 38, 85 theology, 1, 2–3, 5, 6, 38 theological, 1–2, 41 threat, 13, 18, 25, 43, 62, 78, 92, 122, 124, 125, 127, 182, 190, 191, 194, 195, 197, 198 threaten, 39, 60, 73, 77, 90, 117, 127, 135, 143, 144, 175, 190, 192, 194, 195, 197, 198 torture, 38, 41, 56, 59, 60, 87, 92, 113n4, 135, 136, 137, 140, 141, 145, 194, 207 totalitarian, 95, 106–107 tragedy, 5, 40, 61, 62, 123, 149, 150–151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157–159, 161, 162, 163; tragic, 38, 62, 146, 149, 152, 153, 155, 157, 159, 174 transgress, 4, 6, 30, 74, 87, 92, 96, 98, 122, 128, 129n7, 132, 144, 146, 151, 204, 209; transgression, 4, 6, 11, 14, 18, 44, 50, 81, 85, 92, 126, 127, 129n7, 144, 201, 203, 207, 209; transgressive, 30, 47, 98, 132, 142, 143 trauma, 46, 61, 63, 94, 96, 132, 190, 195, 209, 210 trial, 88, 90, 106, 124, 129n4, 180, 201, 202, 203, 207, 209, 210, 212–214, 215–216; criminal, 201, 202, 203; Nuremberg, 105 tribe, 187, 190, 193, 194, 195, 197, 199 tribal, 9, 75, 187, 190, 194, 197, 199 tribalism, 9, 194, 196 truth, 39, 43, 44, 47, 60, 108, 133, 137, 153, 162 twentieth century, 2, 37, 128n1, 182 tyrant, 7, 31, 38, 60 United States, 58, 152, 165–166, 167, 168, 169, 170–171, 174, 175–176, 178, 181–182, 183n9, 187, 190, 194, 198, 214. See also America unnatural, 45, 76, 80, 102, 198 urban, 131, 136, 206 us v. them, 126, 172, 190, 197 utilitarian, 59, 180

229

value, 2, 5, 32, 33, 44, 45, 50, 57, 59, 80, 86, 118, 124, 134, 165, 167, 170, 171, 204, 214; American, 166, 171, 179; judgment, 3, 5; nationalist, 166, 180 vampire, 3, 5, 7, 56, 90, 97; Vampire Diaries, The, 54, 56, 58 vice, 8, 23, 24, 51n2, 94, 206 victim, 7, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 21, 86, 87, 88, 92, 96–97, 98, 104, 106, 113n3, 118, 124–125, 133, 154, 157, 158, 162, 169, 210; victimhood, 11, 12, 13, 14, 20, 21; villainous victim, 11, 18, 20, 21 Vietnam War, 165, 175 vigilante, 120–121, 123, 125, 126, 129n6; vigilantism, 120–121, 125, 126, 129n4; vigilante justice, 123, 124 violence, 4, 11, 45, 62, 71, 80, 86, 88, 91, 92, 94, 102, 108, 111, 112n1, 119, 126, 137, 138, 144, 145, 146, 188, 191, 192–193, 197, 199, 202, 205, 206, 214; racial, 144; religious, 188, 192 violent, 45, 60, 73, 86, 89, 95, 101, 107, 112, 118, 135, 140, 141, 146, 158, 191, 201, 202, 207, 208, 210, 214 villain, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 23, 24, 25, 31, 32, 33, 33n1, 50, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58–61, 62–65, 88, 95, 117–118, 119, 120–122, 124, 125, 126–128, 129n5, 134, 151, 154, 160, 162–163, 166, 167, 168, 169–171, 172, 173–174, 175, 179, 181, 182; supervillain, 54, 169, 173 villainy, 1, 7, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 24, 25, 31, 44, 45, 62, 63, 64, 101, 170, 173, 174, 175 virtue, 18, 23, 27, 54, 133, 141, 145, 206 virtuous, 137, 206 War on Terror (War against Terror). See terror, War on Terror warrior, 5, 46, 124 West, the, 175, 187, 195, 198 Western, 21n1, 53, 54, 55, 168, 172, 198 white supremacist, 141, 146 wicked, 42, 47, 160, 188 Wilder, Billy, 8, 149, 150–151, 152–154, 155, 156, 158–160, 161, 162–163 wilderness, 75, 90

230

Index

witch, 4, 45, 49, 50, 194, 195 witchcraft, 49, 195 witness, 38, 61, 65, 92, 112n2, 131, 132, 133, 134, 138, 145, 153, 159, 163, 173, 175, 208, 211, 213; eyewitness, 136 World Trade Center, 166, 177, 178; Twin Towers, 198 World War II, 7, 9, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171, 174, 178, 182n3. See also

Second World War wrath, 15, 24–25; wrathful, 24, 26 Wyatt, Henry, 203, 205, 206–207, 208–210, 212–213, 214–216 xenophobic, 9, 174, 178 Zimbardo, Philip, 58–59, 113n4

About the Contributors

Riven Barton, PhD, graduated in 1998 from Prescott College with a degree in Philosophy and Religion, 2005 with a masters in Depth Psychology, and 2009 with a PhD in Mythology with an Emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Current publications include a book on dystopias in contemporary culture for Cambridge Scholar Press and another collaborative text on magical objects. Barton has a private practice as an archetypal psychologist in Brattleboro, Vermont, and writes and lectures throughout the U.S. on collective and social psychology and contemporary myth. Jim Casey is an assistant professor at Arcadia University in Philadelphia. Although primarily a Shakespearean, he has published on such diverse topics as fantasy, early modern poetry, medieval poetry, textual theory, performance theory, postmodern theory, adaptation studies, old age, comics, masculinity, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Battlestar Galactica. Chu-chueh Cheng is Professor of English at National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan. She was trained as a scholar of Victorian Literature at Texas Christian University, but her research interest has gradually evolved beyond the scope of nineteenth century English Literature. Now, she studies English-language literature and films of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in particular the works of Japanese-British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. Among her recent publications are a monograph The Margin without Centre: Kazuo Ishiguro (Peter Lang, 2010), “Cosmopolitan Alterity: America as the Mutual Alien of Britain and Japan in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novels” in Journal of Commonwealth Literature (2010), “Cosmos of Similitude in Nocturnes” in Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context (Ashgate, 2015), and “Old Fear in New Face: Yellow Peril of the Twenty-First Century in Sherlock” in Transcultural Identity Constructions in a Changing World (Peter Lang, 2016). She is currently executing a book project on transgression narratives across genres, media, and cultures. Olivia Coulomb is a PhD student at Clermont Auvergne University (France) and teaches English at the Technology Institute of Aix Marseille University. A member of the IHRIM-Clermont-Ferrand research team (UMR 5317, French National Centre for Scientific Research), she specializes in early modern drama and Renaissance sculpture. She is current231

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About the Contributors

ly writing a dissertation devoted to “Statues and stasis in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays” under the supervision of Sophie Chiari. Marion Duval, a native of France, received her PhD from the University of Iowa in 2011. Currently, she works as an Assistant Professor for the Department of French and Francophone Studies at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Duval’s teaching and research interests include the memory of the Second World War in France as well as the sexuality of literary villains. Her book, D’un Salaud l’autre: Nazis et collaborateurs dans le roman français (Tours: PUFR. Collection Perspectives Littéraires, 2015), which could be translated as From One Bastard to Another: Nazis and Collaborators in French Novels, examines the literary portrayal of perpetrators of the Holocaust. Her current research is focused on the depiction of female villains in contemporary French fiction. Malcah Effron is a lecturer in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication program at MIT. She holds degrees from Washington University in St. Louis (AB English and Mathematics, 2004), the University of Chicago (MA Humanities, 2005), and Newcastle University in England (PhD English Literature, 2010). She has taught writing and textual analysis courses at the university level since 2006, including for the SAGES program at Case Western Reserve University. Her research explores the role of narrative and rhetoric in shaping how people experience reality, especially as presented through popular genres. Her work appears in journals such as Narrative and Women & Language, as well as in several edited collections, including her own The Millennial Detective: Essays on Trends in Crime Fiction, Film, and Television, 1990–2010 (McFarland, 2011). Jessica Folio obtained her PhD at the University of Reunion Island, France, in which she cast light on the work of Stephen King, Peter Straub, and Chuck Palahniuk, analyzing their narratives in the wake of postmodern theories and enlightening the poetics of abjection ubiquitous in their texts. The door has been left ajar for further exploration. Thus, she passionately roams the path of the supernatural to link with the notion of transgression or the monstration of bodily voidification paradoxically intertwined with the pleasure of reading. She has published articles on Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Chuck Palahniuk, relentlessly following a comparative approach. Charity Fowler is an attorney and a doctoral candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University in the Media, Art, and Text doctoral program, whose dissertation focuses on the patterns of representation of gender and sexuality across a selection of television narratives and the secondary and tertiary texts which surround them. Her primary research areas in-

About the Contributors

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clude feminist media studies, audience reception, transmedia storytelling, popular culture, media and the law, Internet culture, and fan studies. Jamey Hecht is pursuing a second doctorate via psychoanalytic training at the New Center for Psychoanalysis. His first PhD was in Literature (Brandeis University, 1995). His scholarship has appeared in the Sixteenth Century Journal, English Literary History (ELH), the Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. His books to date include an elegy for President Kennedy called Limousine, Midnight Blue: Fifty Frames from the Zapruder Film (Red Hen Press, 2009), How To Write about Homer (Chelsea, 2010), Plato’s Symposium: Eros and the Human Predicament (Twayne, 1999), and a translation of Sophocles’ Three Theban Plays (Wordsworth Classics, 2004). He blogs at http://poetrypoliticscollapse.blogspot.com and www.jameyhecht.com. Brian Johnson is an assistant professor of Humanities at Cuyohoga Community College in Cleveland, Ohio, where he works closely with the the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Humanities Center. Johnson specializes in images of extreme politics within American literature and culture. He has published works on images of Nazis on television as well as booklength work, The Nazi Card, which explores the use of Nazi imagery in defining the dangers of communism for the American public at the dawn of the Cold War. Bettina Jossen holds an MA in German Literature from the University of Bern and is currently working as an editor at a publishing house. Her main areas of interest are the study of nineteenth century German literature with emphasis on the works of Theodor Fontane, about whom she wrote her MA thesis (a re-reading of the works of Theodor Fontane with Johann Jakob Bachofen), and Comics Studies. Julie Michot is senior lecturer in English at the Université du Littoral, France. She mainly wrote about Hollywood film, and edited four volumes of conference proceedings on the cinema published by Shaker Verlag. She is co-author of a chapter in a Hitchcock anthology in Critical Insights collection (Douglas A. Cunningham Ed., Grey House Publishing/ Salem Press, 2016), and is currently completing a book on diegetic music in Billy Wilder’s films to be published in March 2017 by the University Press of Reims. Jeffrey Mullins received his AB from Reed College and his PhD from Johns Hopkins University. He has been awarded faculty fellowships at the University of Oklahoma and Emory University, and is currently professor of History at St. Cloud State University, where he is Director of Graduate Studies. His prior research and publications have focused on

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About the Contributors

various dimensions of antebellum reform movements, with a particular interest in the concepts of race and human nature that inform them. Sam Naidu is an associate professor in the Department of English, Rhodes University, South Africa. Her main research and teaching areas are: South African crime/detective fiction; transnational literature; the poetry of Emily Dickinson; monstrous, grotesque and abject bodies in literature; and the oral-written interface in colonial South Africa. Joanna Nowotny holds an MA in German Studies from the University of Bern and is currently doing her PhD at ETH Zurich, dealing with the Jewish reception of Søren Kierkegaard in the twentieth century (project funded by Swiss National Science Foundation, SNF). She studied German language and literature, art history and philosophy in Bern and Vienna. Her academic fields of interest include comics studies, GermanJewish literature and culture, contemporary German literature, and gender studies. Her articles appear in works such as Kierkegaard Yearbook 2016, Matriarchatsfiktionen. Johann Jakob Bachofen und die deutsche Literatur des 20, and Graphisches Erzählen. Neue Perspektiven auf Literaturcomics. Karlien van der Wielen works as a scriptwriter. She completed an MA in the Department of English at Rhodes University, South Africa. Her research interests include Gothic fiction, South African crime and detective fiction, the macabre, the grotesque, notions of villains and villainy, and the representation of good and evil in genre fiction.