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** This is an archived, static copy of the Casebook messages boards dating from 1998 to 2003. These threads cannot be replied to here. If you want to participate in our current forums please go to https://forum.casebook.org **
City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Walkowitz)
Casebook Message Boards: Ripper Media: Specific Titles:
Other Books (Non-Ripper):
City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Walkowitz)
Author: Roshanna Sylvester
Thursday, 19 November 1998 - 08:08 pm |        | | I'm amazed that there is no reference in your list of Ripper-related non-fiction to Judith R. Walkowitz's provocative book, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). It should be required reading for any Ripper aficianado. |
Author: Chris George
Thursday, 19 November 1998 - 08:09 pm | | Stalking the Myth of Jack the Ripper:
The Interdisciplinary Triumph of Judith R. Walkowitz
by Christopher T. George
For more than 20 years, Johns Hopkins University professor Judith R. Walkowitz has ventured into the gaslit world of 19th century England to examine the sexual underworld of the Victorian age, where private behavior often belied the veneer of public decorum. From her 1974 Ph.D. thesis at Rochester University, "'We Are Not Beasts of the Field': Prostitution and the Campaign Against the Contagious Diseases Acts, 1869-1886," to her recent book, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Victorian London (University of Chicago Press, 1992), she has gone far toward providing us with a full analysis of the realities of that twilight world. Lately, she has been pursuing the ghost of Jack the Ripper and putting that Victorian criminal into the context of his times--cutting the myth down to size to examine what Jack the Ripper truly meant to England of the late nineteenth century and to analyze the implications of the Ripper phenomenon to the incipient Victorian women's movement. Her interdisciplinary triumph is to recognize that the media of the day was a major player in the promulgation of the Ripper myth.
Walkowitz's latest book is a direct outgrowth of an article of hers that appeared in Feminist Studies 8(Fall 1982):542-74 on "Jack the Ripper and the Myth of Male Violence"--though in City of Dreadful Delight the author goes much further by examining the dynamics of prostitution and London society before the Whitechapel killings of fall 1888, including discussing tabloid exposés of child prostitution and their effects on Victorian notions of "white slavery." (Walkowitz characterizes chapter 7, the part of the book specifically devoted to the Ripper, as "an extensively revised version" of her 1982 article.) Her intent is to demythologize Jack the Ripper and the male violence that he symbolized, and in this endeavor she succeeds brilliantly.
City of Dreadful Delight is an extraordinary contribution to interdisciplinary studies. While Ripperologists might be disappointed that the author does not spend enough time discussing the Ripper crimes themselves, it is nevertheless refreshing (and enlightening) to go beyond the details of the Ripper crimes and look at their significance to society as a whole.
It is also refreshing to have a strong female voice added to the field of Ripper studies, which to date has been largely dominated by men (another male myth here?).
The best of historians can perpetuate and enlarge upon biases already present in society, be they racial, ethnic, or gender-specific. Domination of the field of Ripper studies by male historians has tended to promulgate the myth that the Ripper was a clever, and preferably upper class, male--a sort of "super killer." Thus, there have been theories advanced that the Ripper was a society physician and even the Royal physician Sir William Gull, or a member of the Royal family, e.g., Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence, Queen Victoria's grandson, touted as a suspect in a 1972 book by Michael Harrison that has since been discredited (Court circulars prove the prince could not have been in the East End of London at the times the murders occurred). Most of these male "Ripperologists" have not heeded crime historian Colin Wilson's advice that serial killers more likely come from the working classes. The allure of the clever upper class suspect, the "super killer," is much too strong--and, after all, to come forward with the theory that the Ripper was such an individual is one way of attracting modern-day media attention!
Walkowitz emphasizes that the newspapers of 1888 played a major role in determining how the public viewed the killings. In this sense, she is one of the few historians to follow Temple communications professor Jerry W. Knudson's advice to historians to recognize "the wider significance of the role of the press in both reflecting and shaping society" ("Late to the Feast: Newspapers as Historical Sources" AHA Perspectives 31(Oct. 1993), pp. 9-11). Walkowitz rightly views the Ripper killings as a "media event." Though we are talking here of incidents that occurred 106 years ago, have times really changed that much? The media, that is to say newspapers and magazines fed on every titbit of the crimes, much as the media of our day have fed on each morsel of crime and scandal in our day.
Indeed, the newspapers of 1888 reported on and fed into the hysteria over the Ripper crimes, and in Walkowitz's opinion helped to perpetuate and contribute to the myth of male violence--with dire consequences for the women's movement.
In Walkowitz's view, then, media manipulation is nothing new. It happened in 1888 and it happens today. In the fall of 1888, Jack the Ripper was a story with legs. Because the perpetrator of the crimes was not caught, the press were able to have a field day. And ultimately, as Walkowitz points out, the building up of the Jack the Ripper myth was at the expense of women. If before the Whitechapel murders, women had made significant strides in speaking out, the Ripper affair was a severe setback, allowing males to lay the blame for the Ripper killings on the "sinfulness" of women. Alternative perspectives on the Whitechapel horrors, offered by feminists and the poor of London's East End where the killings occurred, were, she says, subjugated to what was to become "the dominant discussion in the media, one that was shaped and articulated by those people in positions of power, namely male professional experts."
Walkowitz quotes one such male expert, Canon Samuel Barnett, rector of St. Jude's, Whitechapel, who commented in The Times of November 16, 1888 (a week after the murder of Mary Jane Kelly, the fifth and final victim most often attributed to the Ripper) that the "disorderly and depraved lives of women" were more "appalling" than the actual murders. Barnett, who wrote frequently to the press during the murder scare, commented that the police might be better employed putting down vice in the "wicked quarter-mile" in the area of the killings than in hunting for the murderer. A result of Barnett's pressuring of public opinion was that the common lodgings of the Flower and Dean Street areas were swept away and prostitutes and their fellow lodgers were rendered homeless. In Walkowitz's opinion, the murders thus "helped to intensify repressive activity already under way in the Whitechapel area."
By keeping women terrorized, women were warned not to step outside the "narrow boundary of hearth and home." The net effect of the Ripper's reign of terror, Walkowitz says, was to reinforce resistance to women's presence in public life when they were "just beginning to make real incursions."
In City of Dreadful Delight, Walkowitz is able to do something she was unable to do in her 1982 article on Jack the Ripper--to reflect at length in an epilogue on the role of today's media in the 1981 "Yorkshire Ripper" case. As Walkowitz states, because truck driver Peter Sutcliffe was caught and charged with the murder of 13 women in the north of England between fall 1975 and January 1981 and ultimately convicted, there was a sense of closure in that case not experienced in the Whitechapel crimes.
Walkowitz notes that here, as in the original Ripper case, the media played a significant role. During Sutcliffe's five-year killing spree, because commentators were anxious to make the parallel with the original Ripper (even down to painting the Yorkshire city of Leeds, where most of the killings took place, as a Gothic gaslit world akin to the East End of London of 1888), the assumption was that the perpetrator was another "super killer" much like the prototype. A tape recording and letters allegedly sent to the authorities by the killer were accepted as genuine, although they turned out not to be by Sutcliffe. (During the Whitechapel murders, numerous taunting letters were sent to the authorities in which the writer would state he was "down on whores" and so on--though their genuineness also is questionable.) As in the original Ripper killings, the myth grew larger than the reality and overrode the truth. The media plumped up the killer to be a cleverer man than he ultimately turned out to be, misleading the investigators and possibly prolonging the time before the murderer was apprehended.
If as a result of the Whitechapel killings, Victorian women ended up being repressed and suffered a reversal of their hopes for emancipation and recognition, in the case of the Yorkshire Ripper, changing historical circumstances led to women fighting back. Taking a hint from the actions of U.S. feminists in the Sixties, British feminists demonstrated against pornography and violent movies. They attacked porn shops and burned magazines felt to be degrading to women. Women were no longer willing to accept meekly the specter of male violence and to submit to the male- and media-driven myth, to lie back and take the abuse: They refused to be viewed as passive victims.
City of Dreadful Delight makes for vibrant, exciting reading and represents an important contribution to women's history and to our understanding of the world of Jack the Ripper. Walkowitz has written a worthy successor to her prizewinning previous book, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge University Press, 1982). Interestingly, although Jack the Ripper does not figure in that earlier work, which focuses on the deleterious effects of the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, with detailed case studies of prostitution and the downside of the acts' repeal in the British cities of Plymouth and Southampton, the paperback edition of the book features on the cover a photograph of women and children on the sidewalk outside an East End lodging house in the middle of Jack the Ripper's killing ground, at Flower and Dean Streets. A note states that the photograph was "taken shortly after the `Jack the Ripper' murders had riveted attention on this area of Whitechapel, where many of the murdered prostitutes resided." As Judith R. Walkowitz amply demonstrates, we cannot escape history or its implications--or the uses to which the media and society at large choose to make of history. |
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