Language, Ideology and Identity in Serial Killer Narratives

Christiana Gregoriou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781138886056
• eBook ISBN: 9781136837838
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In this book, Gregoriou explores the portrayal of the serial killer identity and its related ideology across a range of contemporary crime narratives, including detective fiction, the true crime genre and media journalism. How exactly is the serial killer consciousness portrayed, how is the killing linguistically justified, and how distinguishing is the language revolving around criminal ideology and identity across these narrative genres? By employing linguistic and content-related methods of analysis, her study aims to work toward the development of a stylistic framework on the representation of serial killer ideology across factual (i.e. media texts), factional (i.e. true crime books) and fictional (i.e. novels) murder narratives. 'Schema' is a term commonly used to refer to organised bundles of knowledge in our brains, which are activated once we come across situations we have previously experienced, a 'group schema' being one such inventory shared by many. By analysing serial murder narratives across various genres, Gregoriou uncovers a widely shared 'group schema' for these murderers, and questions the extent to which real criminal minds are in fact linguistically fictionalised. Gregoriou's study of the mental functioning and representation of criminal personas can help illuminate our schematic understanding of actual criminal minds.

1
Crime Scenes

Perhaps this is the purpose of all art, all writing, on [serial] murders, fiction and non-fiction: Simply to participate.

Moore and Campbell (2000, II: 3)

We are all familiar with world-known reality TV shows such as Big Brother, The Apprentice, and Wife Swap, shows which have penetrated screens mostly since the turn of the 21^st century, taking over participants’ lives, challenging personal boundaries and generating debates the world over. Such reality TV frequently claims to offer its audience “reality rather than realism, revelation rather than fantasy, authenticity rather than artifice, access to real experience, joy or suffering rather than dramatised emotion” (Biressi and Nunn, 2005: 8). The issues reality TV brings to bear can be likened to those of crime, a subject which “hardly exists outside of narrative” (Peach, 2006: viii). Much like reality TV, contemporary crime narratives have come to erode the distinction between the public and the private, the media and social space, fiction and reality, entertainment and cultural politics. Whereas reality TV, however, is about representing the ordinary, ‘normal’, or non-elite (see, for instance, Biressi and Nunn, 2005), contemporary crime narratives are about representing the aberrant, the deviant, the abnormal among us. But, as Biressi (2001) put it, this extraordinary violence is often grounded in the everyday. And it is the ‘extraordinary’ violence of multiple killing that concerns the current study, a type of killing that I take to be synonymous to serial killing, following OED’s definition of the term as “a series of murders with similar characteristics committed by the same person”. In accordance to this definition, I take mass killings (multiple killings which take place at the same time and place) to be a subtype of serial killings. Traditional rhetoric’s ‘kairos’, in reference to the timeliness and placing of things (see, for instance, Cockcroft and Cockcroft, 2005) bears relevance here. In other words, I use serial in reference to killers taking the life of many, regardless of the time (‘serial’) or actual place/moment (‘mass’) aspect of the killings.

In this volume, I explore the portrayal of the serial killer identity and its related ideology across a range of contemporary crime narratives from both sides of the Atlantic, including detective fiction, the true crime genre and media journalism, narrativisation which often aims to inform, caution, disturb, incite fear in, or even merely entertain (via voyeurism) the audience in question. By employing linguistic and content-related methods of analysis, my research aims to work toward the development of a stylistic framework on the representation of serial killer ideology across factual (i.e. media texts), factional (i.e. true crime books), and fictional (i.e. novels and TV shows) murder narratives. How exactly is the serial killer identity and consciousness portrayed, how is the multiple killing linguistically justified, and to what extent do factual accounts differ linguistically from those that are factional and fictional?

Interestingly, both Seltzer (1998) and Jenkins (1994) highlight that not only is there evidence that actual serial killers may pattern themselves on fictional accounts, but that fictional accounts are often based on official accounts, which in turn often draw on fictional accounts. According to Karim (2008: 158), for instance, Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter character was a composite of various real serial killers: part Ted Bundy, part Ed Kemper, while Harris himself “told Cleveland librarian Ron Wise that he got the idea of Lecter from a little known serial killer called William Coyner” (Laughlin, 1999; quoted in Karim, 2008: 158). In other words, it would not be too much to argue that the boundaries between the fact and fiction of serial killer accounts are currently blurred, even to the point of nondistinction. Such a blurring of fact and fiction is also true of sexual crime accounts. As Soothill and Walby (1991: 40) note for example, ‘sex beasts’ in the popular media are linked to earlier ‘fiends’ whether real (the Yorkshire Ripper taking up the mantle laid down by the original Ripper of the previous century) or not (such as the media naming of real-life sex attackers after ‘Dracula’, from Bram Stoker’s (1897) legendary vampire story). My question here, though, is ‘how distinguishing is the language revolving around criminal ideology and identity, across these distinct narrative genres’?

SERIAL MURDER NARRATIVES “SELL”: THE BACKGROUND AND METHOD

Serial murder appears to be a sort of currency. In turn, accounts of serial murder have generated a lot of academic study. As Biressi (2001: 34) claims, “the emphasis upon the figure of the serial killer (as opposed to the domestic murderer for example) by academics can be attributed to the high media currency of this figure since the 1980s in the US”, a currency which she argues “stems from the popular perception that serial killers are a peculiarly North American phenomenon”. To mention a few approaches, there have been feminist investigations of serial sexual murder such as those of Caputi (1987) and Cameron and Fraser (1987) and, more recently, various social-construction approaches, including that of Jenkins (1994), Tithecott (1997), Seltzer (1998), Schmid (2005) and Peach (2006).

Having distinctively defined serial murder narratives as referring to a number of killings by a single person over a period of months or even years (which she distinguishes from mass killings which take place at the same time), Caputi (1987: l3) sees serial sexual murder as “an eminently logical step in the procession of patriarchal roles, values, needs, and rule of force”. Jack the Ripper, who killed five women in London in the 1880s is, of course, the serial killer landmark, the prototype. Caputi sees the beginnings of what she calls the “Ripper mythos” as a “new gynocidal archetype” (1987: 5), an inhuman and monstrous figure which, driven by fantasies of power and revenge, targets female prostitutes. Besides, professional women are, it seems, the archetypal victims. Similarly, Cameron and Fraser (1987) also concentrate on popular accounts of sexual murder, highlighting not only the monstrosity and deviance but also the heroising of the killers, making the same distinction between the “respectable” women victims and the prostitute victims, a distinction made also not only on behalf of the killer, but also of the police.

More recently, Jenkins (1994) wrote on the social construction of serial homicide, revolving around both popular media discussing trials of actual killers, and the publicity surrounding fictional works such as the film The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1992 USA) and Elis’ novel American Psycho (1991). Jenkins draws on the growing literature on the complex role of the media in depicting extreme crime and deviance, despite the fact that “this type of violence accounts for only about 1 percent of American homicide, and possibly less” (Jenkins, 1994: 13). In spite of the ‘unlikeliness’ of the serial killer problem, Jenkins argues that “serial murder stories usually account for between a third and half of the output of [the true crime book industry]”, which makes it scarcely too much to describe multiple murder in the last few decades as “a cultural industry in its own right, with serial killers as a pervasive theme in television, the cinema, and the publishing world”; serial murder is, as he puts it, a “modern mythology” (Jenkins 1994: 101).

Tithecott’s (1997) account focuses on the construction of, fascination with, even need of the serial killer, and discusses the models we draw on (i.e. those killers that are freaks of nature, as opposed to those that are results of bad families). On a linguistic note, he talks about the alienating discourse we use to describe them, serial killers being a virus or disease that needs extermination, or a wildlife species that poses threat to the rest of us ‘normals’, the dangerous species requiring ‘thinning out’ by the police. “The crimes of the serial killer are made more mysterious by our figuring them as originating in nature, and in the process exterminatory powers seem all the more justified” (Tithecott, 1997: 31).

Seltzer (1998) discusses serial killers in the context of America’s “wound culture”, a culture fascinated with “torn and open bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound” (Seltzer, 1998: 2). Serial killing, he argues, otherwise known as ‘stranger-killing’, has become something of a career option at the turn of the century, with serial killers as a ‘species’, even ‘superstars’ who, having made a study of their own kind of person (in reading books about serial killers themselves), engage in motiveless, senseless, often sexualised murders.

In his book on Natural Born Celebrities, Schmid (2005) highlights the existence of celebrity serial killer culture, concentrating on the conditions that allowed for the emergence of that culture. He argues that the serial killer celebrity figure inspires contradictory feelings of repulsion and attraction, condemnation and admiration, hence combining “roles of monster and celebrity in a particularly economical and charged way” (Schmid, 2005: 8). Besides, much like many contemporary reality TV show celebrities, serial killers achieve fame and notoriety “not by performing meritorious acts or possessing outstanding qualities, but by being seen” (Schmid, 2005: 9). And it is that visibility that ascribes our serial killers not only with fame but also with recognition and exposure, even acceptability.

Finally, Peach (2006) argues that, as serial killing narratives have proliferated and become more sophisticated, the emphasis has fallen upon the complex physiologies and repetitive methods of those conducting the murders. In some texts, killers are seen as “a product of a dysfunctional childhood” (Peach, 2006: xv), while in others as “the embodiment of a cold, calculating evil” (Peach, 2006: 156). In either case, the narratives, Peach argues, focus on the killer as masked performer, masquerading away, while making a spectacle of his (serial killers are mostly men) victims, before returning to ordinariness in society afterwards.

Following earlier points, Schmid (2005: 109) argues that despite the big array of serial killer studies, most have had little to say about the celebrating of these monsters, “because to do more than acknowledge the existence of that fame cursorily might make it necessary to discuss one’s own imbrication with and contribution to that fame”. In this sense, I could well be accused of contributing to the serial-killer celebrity-making culture by adding to the discussion that surrounds these sorts of narratives. Also, since many real killers offer their desire to be known as a motivation for killing (see, for instance, Boyle, 2005: xiv), I could, like others, equally well be accused of promoting, even serving these particular killers’ cause. Nevertheless, regardless of whether my own work actually contributes to this celebrity-making or not, I believe that these figures’ depiction indeed needs to be addressed, and that it is through engaging with such texts on a linguistic and structural level, that the related ideologies emerge long enough for us to ponder over, and hopefully question. I invite the reader to arrive at their own conclusions having reached the end of this book, and hopefully begin to be actively critical in their readings of such texts as a result, rather than passively receptive.

As a stylistician, my approach to the subject of murder narratives is linguistic (see Gregoriou 2002, 2003a, 2003b, 2007a and 2007b on the stylistics of the criminal mind style). In particular, I have used Fowler’s mind style (1977), to linguistically discuss impressions of a deviant world-view, mostly where criminals are concerned in detective fiction and, more recently, true crime genres. Mind style is where, linguistically, narrative viewpoint deviates from a commonsense version of reality (for more on mind style see Leech and Short, 1981; Bockting, 1994; Semino and Swindlehurst, 1996). In previous work, I have used this notion of mind style to consider extracts which linguistically allow access to the criminal consciousness and justification. In particular, I explored such texts’ grammar (processes of transitivity), metaphorical patterns and lexical choices. In engaging with texts that are not all literary, and certainly portray ideologies, my current approach is not only linguistic stylistic, but also critical discourse analytic. Besides, Critical Discourse Analysis is similar to stylistics in that it also “uses textual evidence to support certain interpretative conclusions” (Jeffries, 2007: 10). What’s more, favourite tools of CDA practitioners (and critical linguists) include processes of naming and describing (see Jeffries, 2007; 2010), transitivity, modality, metaphoricity, semantic presuppositions and implications (for CDA see, for instance, Fairclough, 1992; for Critical Linguistics and “the News”, see Fowler, 1991), all of which concern my analysis here also. There are several different analytical traditions that I draw on here as a result, including early cognitive linguistics in the form of schemata (see below) and conceptual metaphor theory (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980), but also systemic-functional linguistics (see Halliday 1973, 1985) in the form of grammatical analysis, particularly of transitivity patterns and voice. Halliday (1973: 99) describes the ideational function of language (and his grammar) as that “concerned with the expression of experience, including both the processes within and beyond the self—the phenomena of the external world and those of consciousness—and the logical relations deducible from them”, and it is precisely that component that mostly concerns the current study. Following Fairclough’s (1992: 64) understanding of the term ‘ideational’, by interrogating linguistic choices, one can explore “the ways in which the texts signify the world and its processes, entities and relations”. Besides, to take a linguistically relativistic view (see Sapir, 1921, 1926; Whorf, 1956), language very much shapes how we see and experience the world around us, how we categorise entities and view notions, and language “can (unconsciously) influence thought and determine or reinforce particular, non-neutral, world views” (Wales, 2001: 103). To return to the current study, the approach in question can help one see how serial murder—related ideologies and opinions come to be expressed, but also constructed linguistically.

Ultimately, I wish to uncover a widely shared ‘group schema’ for our contemporary extreme criminals. ‘Schema’ is a term commonly used to refer to organised bundles of knowledge in our brains, which are activated once we come across situations we have previously experienced. A ‘group schema’ is one such inventory shared by many, as opposed to the inventory being idiosyncratic and individual (for schema theory and the stylistics of prose, see Gregoriou 2009, Chapter 5). In a recent crime fiction symposium (April 20, 2008, New York Lighthouse International), forensic psychologist and serial killer analyst Katherine Ramsland proved keen to argue that there is no such thing as a profile or blueprint for serial killers in the context of forensic science. Nevertheless, I anticipate that my analysis of serial murder narratives across various genres will help me uncover a widely shared ‘group schema’ rather than a ‘profile’ for these murderers. Besides, what interests me is what exists in the mind of readers, which very much depends on the language of surrounding related texts, rather than what sorts of actual murderers indeed surround us. I further wish to question the extent to which real criminal minds are in fact linguistically fictionalised through such texts. As noted in Gregoriou (2007b: 36), such study of the mental functioning and representation of criminal personas can help illuminate our schematic understanding of actual criminal minds. Much like Young (1996: 15–16) then, my concern in this book is with “how crime is ‘imagined’”.

In addition to exploring the identity of serial killers, I also want to move the focus to their victims, whether real or fictional. Victim figures often go unnoticed, stripped of life of course by the killers, but also dignity, particularly as each figure is not only very often randomly chosen by the killer, but also one of many. As Rule (1989: 488, cited in Boyle, 2005: xv) says in her true crime book about serial killer Ted Bundy, “[b]ecause Ted murdered so many, many women, he did more than rob them of their lives. He robbed them of their specialness too [ … ] All those [ … ] women became, of necessity, ‘Bundy victims’. And only Ted stayed in the spotlight”. Further to this sidelining, serial killer victims are also victimised (whether deliberately or not, but surely not ‘by necessity’) by those who pen accounts of their deaths, who “simply identify them as a ‘type’ (prostitute, co-ed, mother)” and which again in turn “robs them of their individuality and, arguably, makes it more difficult to sympathise with them” (Boyle, 2005: xv) also. Denying the victims a real sense of identity and true actual ‘selves’ is to deny them of empathy, and to deem them possibly deserving of their fate as a result. What sort of schemata do we actually have of such serial killer victims then, and which ones are closer to an imagined ‘ideal’? Who do we value, who do we ignore, and what sort of pecking order do we linguistically slide such victims into? I return to this point in the concluding section; the victim ordering and typology becomes clear once the material is introduced and accordingly analysed.

WRIGHT, DEXTER, AND THE REST OF ‘THEM’: THE MATERIAL

As previously noted, “[c]rime hardly exists outside of narrative” (Peach, 2006: viii). In the context of the crime narrative genre, Simpson (2000: 15) has gone as far as to identify the serial killer narrative as having a number of “subgeneric conventions”, including the killer being literally programmed to kill, yet also being a traumatised visionary, while the remaining of mankind is ultimately doomed as a result of his actions. Despite the “serial killer” being an originally American or American-influenced phenomenon, it has certainly been universalised (Tithecott, 1997: 4), internationalised, in its narrative form. This study draws on such narratives from Britain as well as the US, collectively looking at crime journalism, true crime genres, as well as crime fiction.

According to Jucker (1992: 3), “[n]ewspapers want to inform through hard news, features, reports and interviews, they want to express an opinion by means of leaders and commentaries, and they want to entertain with reviews and stories”, though he ...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Stylistics
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Crime Scenes
• 2 Killer Headlines
• 3 True Crime!
• 4 Buying Crime
• 5 The Verdict
• Appendix 1 UK Newspapers
• Appendix 2 US newspapers
• Bibliography
• Index