Framing Christine Papin

Les blessures assassines [Murderous maids]. Written and directed by Jean-Pierre Denis. Rialto Pictures, 2000. 94 min.

Madness is what by essence cannot be said. The history of madness itself is . . . the archaeology of a silence. . . . [But] is not an archaeology, even of silence, a logic, that is, an organized language, a project, an order, a sentence, a syntax, a work? Would not the archaeology of silence be the most efficacious and subtle restoration, the repetition . . . of the act perpetrated against madness?

—Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference

On the evening of 2 February 1933 Monsieur Lancelin, a barrister in the provincial town of Le Mans, France, returned home to discover his wife and daughter murdered—their thighs slit, their heads smashed in, their eyes torn from their sockets. ¹ In their attic bedroom, lying together in bed, were the family's two maids, Christine and Léa Papin, who immediately confessed to the murders. The cause? Fear of being rebuked for a broken iron, a blown fuse, a house left untended while the maids secluded themselves in their room. Yet these causes appeared so petty, and the murders therefore so inexplicable, that the many people fascinated by the Papin affair since the 1930s have looked for a larger motive. ² Despite the Papins' refusal to give any coherent account of their actions, speculation has focused on the possibility that the two women were insane, involved in an incestuous lesbian relationship, or disgruntled over the conditions of their employment. ³ These divergent accounts of the crime yield not so much the truth about the Papins' mysterious psyches as they do a spectacle of present concerns projected onto the past.

This is especially so in the contemporary cultural moment, in which the threat posed by the murderous sisters has made numerous returns. The mid-1990s witnessed much academic discussion of the Papins, as well as the 1994 release of the English film Sister My Sister. The new millennium brought even more academic and popular studies of the affair, along with the appearance in France in 2000 of a documentary film, Claude Ventura's En quête des soeurs Papin [In search of the Papin sisters], and a fictional film, Jean-Pierre Denis's Les blessures assassines, released in the United States in 2002 as Murderous Maids.

It is in the context of this contestation of and retrospective speculation about the sisters' motives that we must approach Les blessures assassines, which strongly suggests that the elder sister, Christine, was indeed insane. If, like all representations of the Papin affair, Les blessures assassines confronts the problems inherent in making any claim to knowledge about the sisters' enigmatic crime, the film's presentation of madness as an explanation raises the equally vexed problem of how to represent insanity, which defies conventional uses of language and narrative. Telling the story of another person's madness involves not directly recounting the experience of madness in itself—an impossible task—but evoking the context in which madness germinated and unfolded. Moreover, as Jacques Derrida argues, the "history of madness" is not, as Michel Foucault claims in Madness and Civilization, "the archaeology of a silence." Instead, madness is "what by essence cannot be said." ⁴ The artist—or the scholar—who persists in the desire to speak of madness is unavoidably complicit in the violence through which the figure of the "madwoman" is constructed: in a vicious circle, the act of representation produces the very incomprehensibility that is offered as evidence of her insanity. ⁵

The impossibility of speaking or writing of madness accounts, perhaps, for the prevalence of dramatic and cinematic accounts of the Papin affair, for they can use not merely words but also sound and vision to evoke the derangement that often characterizes insanity. ⁶ Yet any representation—whether literary, dramatic, or cinematic—through which we believe we can know the madwoman is structured by what Jacques Lacan would describe as méconnaissance, the...