Mortal Remains: Death in Early America

2. Blood Will Out: Sensationalism, Horror, and the Roots of American Crime Literature

Chapter 2 Blood Will Out: Sensationalism, Horror, and the Roots of American Crime Literature Daniel A. Cohen Horror and fatality have been stalking abroad in all ages. Why then give a date to this story I have to tell1 ? —Edgar Allan Poe, "Metzengerstein " (1832) In a culture preoccupied with the proximity of death, early American readers were particularly fascinated by murders and public executions. Although publications on crime and punishment were consistently popular, they changed dramatically in form and content between the late seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Most of the earliest publications were Puritan execution sermons, religious works that focused not on the sordid details of crimes and trials but on universal issues of sin and salvation . Bythe first half of the nineteenth century, however, American crime literature became far more secular, legalistic, and sensationalistic. Coinciding with an upsurge of crime coverage in newspapers, murder publications of this latter period most often took the form of trial reports and criminal biographies or autobiographies. Whether in newspapers or in separate books and pamphlets, treatments of crimes and trials tended to focus far more attention than the earlier sermons on the specific, sometimes shocking , physical details of individual homicides and on the lives and motivations of individual killers.1 In Murder Most Foul: The Killer and theAmerican Gothic Imagination (1998), cultural historian Karen Halttunen particularly focuses on the latter period . She characterizes the new configuration of murder literature in the early republic as "Gothic," linking it to a mode of fiction popularized during the second half of the eighteenth century, and she argues that these publications were an ironic "response" or "indispensable corollary" to "the modern liberal view of human nature introduced by the Enlightenment" 32 Daniel A. Cohen and to a "revolution" in "humanitarian sensibility." According to Halttunen , the new "Gothic" narratives tended to focus on particular types of homicides such as mass murders, domestic murders, sex-related murders, and murders involving claims of insanity.These texts also generally emphasized certain details or motifs, such as the personality and motive of the killer, the sequence of events leading up to the crime, the precise time and setting of the murder, the weapon used and specific injuries inflicted, the pain suffered by the victim, the disposition of the corpse (especially in cases of mutilation or dismemberment), the execution of the criminal, and "the reader's role asvoyeur to the crime."2 Halttunen organizes her "Gothic" themes and motifs into twomain categories : "the cult of horror" and "the construction of murder as mystery" (or, more briefly, "horror" and "mystery"). She claims, in one of her most provocative formulations, that these "Gothic" elements coalesced into a new "pornography of violence." Above all, Halttunen emphasizes the "Gothic" construction of the murderer as an "unnatural" or "subhuman" monster, a phenomenon she attributes to the ultimate failure of Enlightenment thought to comprehend human evil. "The most important cultural work performed by the Gothic narrative of murder," she writes, "wasits reconstruction of the criminal transgressor from common sinner with whom the larger community of sinners were urged to identify" into a "moral monster from whom readers were instructed to shrink with a sense of horror "and "mystery."3 There may be, however, a fatal chronological flaw in Halttunen's characterization of the early nineteenth-century configuration of American murder literature as a "response" or "corollary" to the "humanitarian" Enlightenment (or to related cultural movements of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). Most of the major themes and specific motifs that she describes as constituting a newpattern of literature were not only present , but prominent, in popular English murder publications of the early to mid-seventeenth century—and virtually all of the other elements she describes had appeared by the end of that century. It is difficult to see how themes and motifs whose popularization largely predated the Enlightenment and the humanitarian revolution can be explained as responses or corollaries to them.4 To understand the transformation of American crime literature, it is crucial to recognize the remarkable similarities that exist between seventeenthcentury English murder publications and the pattern of writing and reporting that emerged in the United States by the early nineteenth century . In light of these similarities, crime literature of the early republic cannot be explained as the ironic by-product of a new "Enlightenment" or "humanitarian" world view. Rather, the new literary pattern resulted from a gradual breakdown of exceptional Puritan cultural controls in New England (where almost all of the older execution sermons had...