Too Awful to Describe

Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination. By Karen Halttunen. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. 322 pages. $29.95 (cloth).

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 modern 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). Under this new regime evil had little if any official place. Hence, its eruption into the bonhomie of the social order began to require increasingly elaborate explanations, explanations which eventually displayed all the histrionics the Gothic imagination could muster. In Halttunen's account, the problem of explanation was compounded by the fact that the courtroom replaced the pulpit as the primary site of moral authority. In the modern courtroom there is no single authoritative explanation to be found. Explanation is constructed out of a heated contest based on conflicting testimony and partial evidence. Far from being viewed as liberating, this absence of closure created even greater anxiety in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This anxiety resulted in a variety of strategies designed to "close the gap"--all of which only served to underscore the absence of any genuinely satisfying master narrative. Celebrated as the supreme expression of Enlightenment rationality, the courtroom found itself bedeviled by a curious paradox of Gothic proportions: the more explanations which were marshaled to account for a particular murder--such as environmental and psychological factors impinging on the mental state of the suspect, the autopsies of the medical examiners, the conflicting reports of eye-witnesses as well as a host of other newly-minted experts--the more those explanations seemed to beg the question of why the murder occurred in the first place.

Halttunen argues that the Gothic imagination takes its point of departure from this very dilemma. As the foregoing suggests, the Gothic imagination is not defined by its preoccupation with evil so much as it is by its own acknowledgement of the failure to explain evil at all: hence its constant invocation of the trope of "speechlessness" before scenes "too awful to describe." Transfixed by what they cannot explain, Gothic mysteries and horror stories tend to dwell on the grisly particulars of death--blood-stained sheets, a battered pelvis, mortifying flesh--even as they fail to reconstruct a satisfactory narrative out of those particulars that would exorcise their terrifying power. Seen in this light, Halttunen argues, Victorian detective fiction emerges as a "fantasized solution to the problem of moral uncertainty in the world of true crime" (131).

Contrary to conventional opinion, Halttunen insists that it is a mistake to read the Gothic imagination as an "irrational reaction against an excess of Enlightenment rationalism." Instead, she urges her readers to view the "cult of horror" as an indispensable complement to Enlightenment liberalism, the innocence of which it protects by constructing evil as outside the...