Homicidal Envy: The Case of Richard Henry Dana, Sr.'s, Paul Felton

Although accurate data for rates of crime (especially for domestic violence) in earlier periods are notoriously difficult to unearth, there is evidence that familial homicide increased from the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth century.¹ What is still more certain is that when men murdered wives and even entire families in the early nineteenth century, they did so under the increasingly intense scrutiny of a burgeoning press, a press that not only reported but also shaped the meanings of crime.² In their own efforts to understand crime in the antebellum United States, recent scholars of domestic violence have tended not to interrogate its causes, focusing instead on analyzing the patterns either of actual violence or of its varied literary representations. Some historians have certainly offered provocative suggestions of causality, although typically sketched in broad speculative strokes.³ Drawing in particular on the claims of Karen Halttunen and Randolph Roth that domestic murder was somehow endemic to the changing ideology of the family, I want to elaborate a quite specific cause for a particular crime that seemed suddenly to enthrall Americans in the early decades of the nineteenth century—a man's delusional and murderous jealousy of his wife. One cause of this pathological jealousy is envy, as Melanie Klein has described it—an envy linked to the fact that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the mother came to take on a much more central and exclusive role in the emotional and psychic life of the family.

According to Klein, envy is the expression of innate aggression, primarily toward the mother. While it needs to be said that mothers are not overtly part of the explanatory narratives concerning violently jealous men in the nineteenth century, they nevertheless appear time and time again. Indeed, in numerous instances men's eruptions of jealousy coincided with the first signs of their wife's pregnancy. When John Lewis killed his wife in 1759, for example, she was pregnant. John Cowan, believing his wife was unfaithful, killed her and their two small children in 1835—and his jealousy crystallized around her pregnancies. In another instance, Adam Horn killed his wife in 1843 because he suspected adultery. At the time, Malinda Horn was four or five months pregnant. Horn, it turned out, had also killed his first wife when she was pregnant with his third child. Lastly, in 1850, John Windsor shot and killed his wife, convinced she was unfaithful. They had two small children, and each time his obsessive jealousy corresponded with his wife's pregnancies. Indeed, she was pregnant again when he shot her. Motherhood, pregnancy, accusations of infidelity, insanity, jealousy, and murder are all inchoately present in these narratives—present and even contiguous, but not explicitly linked. In this essay I seek to link what early Americans left unlinked, telling a story that was unnarratable in the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. The presence of an unassimilable maternity in these cases disrupts the self-reflexive closure of recuperable stories, demanding that we speculate about unconscious motives for the murders.⁴

While I begin by looking closely at two real pathologically jealous husbands, highlighting the crucial role mothers play in their violence, my focus is a fascinating yet long-neglected novella by Richard Henry Dana, Sr., called Paul Felton, published in 1822.⁵ Dana's novella is the story of a man driven to kill his wife, whom I argue is pregnant, ostensibly out of jealousy but in fact out of much more complicated drives that Dana figures through a gothic landscape of doppel gangers and evil forces. Paul Felton's view of one man's disturbed psyche evades all the commonplace antebellum explanations of crime (alcoholism, lack of self-discipline, loss of religion). Instead, it discloses more elusive causes—unconscious determinants of behavior rooted in early experience and in the cultural formations that shaped that experience. Dana's novella offers a portrait of a delusionally and violently jealous man whose jealousy seems merely a symptom, masking a more fundamental, more unspeakable, envious impetus to destroy the mother.

That both...