Too Awful to Describe

Abstract

IN MURDER MOST FOUL, KAREN HALTTUNEN CHRONICLES THE STRANGE career of evil in American life as it moved from an accepted part of the Puritan's daily world to the periphery of the liberal Enlightenment, where it made its presence felt-if not exactly understood-through the emergence of a haunted Gothic imagination. Her subject is murder and the various narrative strategies deployed to understand it. Beginning with the Puritan execution sermon, she argues that evil, construed as a fact of life in early American, did not require explanation. Original Sin was deemed to be explanation enough for the existence of evil. As a result, the execution sermon was conceived as an occasion in which the murderer and the congregation acknowledged themselves as secret sharers in a bond of depravity and turpitude. Bizarre as it might sound to modem ears, the murderer was not viewed as strange or anomalous. Quite the opposite: he or she was seen as representative of the general condition in which all God's children would find themselves but for the benefit of His grace. Halttunen argues that this extraordinary acceptance of evil began to unravel in the second half of the eighteenth century with the emergence of an Enlightenment world view, which posited a liberal subject that was essentially good, rational and capable of self-government (4).