Abstract
The 1927 trial and execution of the anarchist immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti in Massachusetts offered a complex and conflicted template through which contestations of the moment—between the working classes and capitalists, certainly, but also between traditional versions of whiteness and mass immigration from southern Europe; between Boston Brahmin women and men; between the competing visions of America as a project of constitutional democracy and as a white, Protestant nation—were projected onto the global stage, leading to protests and riots around the world. This piece uses the psychoanalytic concept of the transference to explicate the ways in which these legal contestations turn into libidinal investments in literary form—with all the phantastic satisfactions and resistances such textual investments entail. It uses focused close readings of four texts responding to Sacco and Vanzetti: Upton Sinclair’s Boston: A Documentary Novel (1928), Edna St. Vincent Millay’s ‘Justice Denied in Massachusetts’ (1927), William Carlos Williams’s ‘Impromptu: The Suckers’ (1941) and John Dos Passos’s USA Trilogy (1938) to trace how the psychoanalytic transference operates to create meaningful, if ultimately unsatisfying, political and juridical positions. It concludes by proposing, briefly, that this literature of the Sacco and Vanzetti case offers a model for thinking about how the literary transference might be effective in bringing about political change.
Highlights
In his analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, J
Copies of any film of the funeral destroyed.4. This long, scandalous case offers fertile ground for tracing the ways that historical events develop into multiple textual modes: how do we move from a small-town robbery to worldwide protest, and how do texts manage and amplify those movements?
The development of the case over those seven years appeared, to many observers, startlingly outrageous on its face, ripe for vehement protest: the men had not fled the area, they had no criminal record, police could not find the stolen cash, the prosecution’s witnesses were threatened and changed their testimony multiple times, another man confessed to the crime, and the judge showed open contempt for the these non-white immigrant pacifist anarchists who had refused to fight in the First World War
Summary
In his analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, J. By looking at contemporary literary responses to the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants to the US who were executed for murder in 1927, we can begin to trace these movements from one textual form to another, from disparate historical events to artefacts with their own pleasures and power. In every form—police reports, court transcripts, news items, editorials, pamphlets, edicts, novels, and poems—there exists a fantasy of completeness, of getting it right and resolving a conflict. This desire for wholeness, for adequation, on such fraught, passionate, contradictory, legal terrain, is a function of the transference. Nothing quite fits, nothing closes the case, and the search for words that will ‘do justice,’ resolve contradictions, and return us to sleep persists—even, in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, to this day
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