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1 Defining the Monster Serial Killing and the FBI For years the Marquis de Sade has been an object lesson in how a monster ought to behave. Bataille uses the term volupte in reference to the wicked Frenchman, a term Jane Gallop explains, "is.characterized by the exceeding of a certain quantitative level. The prevalence ofquantification and categorization and the vast number of victims in Sade's text account for Sade's unprecedented success in doing violence to humanistic notions of man's dignity and individuality. The Sadian hero appears as someone with an insatiable quota to fill, someone with an heroic task which does not afford him any simple pleasure" (Gallop 30). In Downtown Milwaukee, Jeffrey Dahmer, or "The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough" as Anne E. Schwartz describes him in the title of her book, does his best to emulate the aristocrat of murder and mayhem . Or so the story goes. Never mind Dennis Nilsen's assertion that the term serial killer is misleading on the grounds that each murder is intended to be the last. Our monsters are on an (anti)heroic quest for the biggest score possible. For the Sadian monster, this task is mingled with everyday life, a combination which constitutes his monstrosity: "The intensity which is the seriousness of volupte becomes intolerable by being deflected onto everything! onto the innocent little pleasures of everyday life. The result is not pure violence, but the violently impure" (Gallop 33). On one level Dahmer's life seems to have been the pursuit of those simple pleasures. But he always managed to mess up, get it wrong somehow. Sharing a beer with friends would have been fine until one of them opened the refrigerator. Lunch with his colleagues at the chocolate factory would seem like a nice way ofbreaking the monotony . Only Jeffrey has to spoil it all by filling his sandwiches with leftovers from the night before. Dahmer can be the Sadian "monster 17 PART I. POLICING THE SERIAL KILLER within": the perverse within the mundane, the unnatural within the natural, the animal within the social, the antiheroic within the unheroic . He is the archetypal figure of impurity, the representative of a world which needs cleansing. If Sade is too aristocratic or too foreign, then there are models to be had much closer to home, namely, those familiar monsters of the nineteenth-century novel. Dahmer is "the average-looking man" (Schwartz, picture caption), a "former tennis player, the son of middleclass parents" (Davis 1991, back cover), who has the appearance of being "a nice guy" (Norris 1992, 1). But Dahmer, the boy next door, is also he who emitted "wolflike howling" and "demonic screams" (Norris 1992, 8) when he was arrested, and when we read that "many witnesses quoted in the press have attested to his extraordinary Jekylland -Hyde transformations when drinking" (Masters 1991, 266), we have little trouble in constructing Dahmer as the latest descendant of Stevenson's character(s). When we tell stories about our monsters, we like to imply that their monstrosity is everywhere, only hidden from view, concealed within. The figure of the serial killer is "violent impurity " personified, and it is a construction that necessitates figures of violent purity to confront it. The expulsion of the perverse from the mundane, the unnatural from the natural, the animal from the social are heroic tasks, and the heroes who perform them need to be mirror images of the men who threaten man's dignity and individuality. Mary Douglas has written extensively on the involvement of the opposition of pure and impure in the way we classify the world around us. She suggests that "reflection on dirt involves reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death" (Douglas 5). Describing oneself as an agent of cleanliness is a tried and tested way of justifying one's actions. Having a crack at appealing to our sense of order, the self-proclaimed "Streetcleaner," Peter Sutcliffe, explains, "The women I killed were filth, bastard prostitutes who were just standing round littering the streets. I was just cleaning the place up a bit" (quoted in Beattie 81). Historically, to be designated society's Mr. Clean has been a good way of gaining state-sanctioned power. With reference to nineteenth-century Britain, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White note that "the discursive elision of disease and crime suggested an elision of the means with which to cope with them: like crime...

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