"Murder in My Soul": Genre and Ethos in Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery

i t.· ' ■■fr "Murder in My Soul": Genre and Ethos in Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery William J. Scheick University of Texas at Austin ISRAEL ZANGWILL'S biographers and critics tend to mention The Big Bow Mystery only in passing. Although this work generated numerous letters during the course of its serial publication in the London Star (1891),1 was reprinted in six later editions (1892-1923) during Zangwill's life, and was posthumously filmed three times (1928, 1934,1946), commentators on Zangwill's career commonly note that the book received little attention.2 They then generally ignore the book as if to suggest that inattention is indeed appropriate in this case. To date, the best that has been said on behalf of the book ranges from an appreciation of its "recréation d'une atmosphère d'angoise collective"3 and its "series of ironies" (making the work "a better-than-average example of its genre")4 to praise of its parable-like representation of Zangwill's life-long concern with ethnic marginality, specifically with "identity, self-concealment, and the tensions of an outsider posing as an insider."5 The reluctance of the critical community to inquire much further concerning the place of The Big Bow Mystery in Zangwill's literary career is peculiar, especially given this community's awareness of his seriousness of purpose as a writer, both early and late. In fact, if we may trust his own report in 1897, Zangwill deliberately included a social objective in his fiction at least three years before the appearance of The Big Bow Mystery. When he agreed to co-author a shilling shocker, published as The Premier and the Painter in 1888, he expressly insisted on including the "subtler possibilities of political satire" in order to render "nothing less than a reductio ad absurdum of the whole system of Party Govern23 ELT 40 : 1 1997 ment."6 Zangwill, in short, saw himself as a rebel artist with a cause from the outset of his career, a role that eventually evolved into his identification with Elijah's prophetic and reformational role as humanity 's conscience.7 The critics' general failure to reassess The Big Bow Mystery in terms of Zangwill's self-declared role results from their long-standing impressions about the genre of this work. As a mystery of the shilling shocker variety, rapidly written within a fortnight in response to an editor's call for something suitable for "the silly season,"8 this romance at first may seem little more than another trivial exercise in sensational entertainment . Typical of romance, Zangwill's book emphasizes an unusual setting (the site of Jack the Ripper's violence), melodramatic event (the murder of a philanthropist in a locked room), and cartoon-like caricatures (characters sketched in terms of eccentricities). As its history attests, popular forms of romance during the late nineteenth century often have been considered, at best, as frivolous diversions suitable for children or the lower classes and, at worst, as immoral media subversive to the social order. Recent reassessments of the genre have demonstrated the error of such perceptions. The history of the genre, in fact, includes a substantial number of serious authors, especially during the nineteenth century, who approached romance as a widely accessible form also sufficiently flexible to an artistic rendering of significant issues ranging from social mores to metaphysical inquiries. This variety of the genre employs the matter of romance in special, essentially edifying, ways that potentially encourage non-elite readers to see their world differently. Since it challenges the status quo for the purpose of either practical change or enlarged insight, this version of the genre conveys a special ethos embodied within the conventional matter of romance.9 Zangwill apparently invited readers to detect this element of purpose in his fiction. Not only did he reveal his early insistence on elevating the social function of sensational romance in his first work of fiction, but also in 1896 he explicitly repudiated various artists' attempts to eliminate social responsibility from aesthetic romance, specifically the artfor -art's sake romance espoused by "the empty-headed acolytes of the aesthetic."10 Zangwill claimed, for instance, that while Walter...