Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Imagination

Abstract

Murder Most Foul: The Killer and American Imagination. By Karen Halttunen. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Pp. xiv, 322. Illustrations. $29.95.) Karen Halttunen situates origins of conventions that shape contemporary tales of murder-mystery and horror-in antebellum America, and thus is appropriate that this journal include a review of her latest book. Murder Most Foul is as inspired and compelling as best of studies concerning the American mind or the American character. Halttunen's concern is not so much with murder as is with evil. She proposes that rise of humanitarian and liberal notions of self as sentient, autonomous, and virtuous during second part of eighteenth century made difficult to explain evil. In doing so Halttunen develops some of points that she made in an article in American Historical Review ( 1995), which suggested that appearance of concepts of pain and empathy enabled rise of nineteenth-century reform. At outset, Halttunen states that she seeks to demonstrate that the Gothic imagination has proved a major factor in shaping modern liberal concept of criminal and mental `deviance' and what should be done about it (6). Whereas colonial Americans understood evil as necessarily a part of every human being, and therefore Murderer as Common Sinner (chap. 1), nineteenth-century Americans fashioned evil as extraordinary and aberrant and Murderer as Mental Alien (chap. 7). Journalists, lawyers, and physicians sought to explain murder without theological ramparts that had sustained Puritan clergy. Instead, they sought to reason with evil. When such a strategy failed (as would and did), Americans mystified evil using tropes of mystery and horror. Some readers might not accept Halttunen's picture of United States as secularized. Many church historians would argue that disestablishment had little effect on vitality of American religion, which between 1780 and 1850 experienced a series of revivals, intense denominational competition and growth, and birth of multiple sects. At this time, seeds of liberal Protestantism were planted which would have a profound effect on conceptualization of evil and sin. Many Americans maintained religious conviction while seeking answers in medicine and science about human condition. It might be argued that formation of multiple explanations for murder that Halttunen aptly describes-sensational, legal, or medical-enriched theological and religious sensibilities rather than dulled them. Religion is cast aside, and so its history does not inform book's analysis. Halttunen relies on execution sermons, confessions, autobiographies, memoirs, court proceedings, and exposes that commercial printers distributed in form of broadsides, pamphlets, newspaper accounts, and books. As varied and rich as they are, sources do not provide sufficient evidence to sustain book's arguments. This is due in part to their narrow sphere of representation and in part to absence of corroborating historical data about events that texts narrate and about murder in United States. First, seems as if today's cultural historians face an impossible problem: diversity of American people precludes generalizations. …