Crime and Culture

An Historical Perspective

René Lévy, Amy Gilman Srebnick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Law
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351947626
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Law

Scholarly interest in the history of crime has grown dramatically in recent years and, because scholars associated with this work have relied on a broad social definition of crime which includes acts that are against the law as well as acts of social banditry and political rebellion, crime history has become a major aspect not only of social history, but also of cultural as well as legal studies. This collection explores how the history of crime provides a way to study time, place and culture. Adopting an international and interdisciplinary perspective to investigate the historical discourses of crime in Europe and the United States from the sixteenth to the late twentieth century, these original works provide new approaches to understanding the meaning of crime in modern western culture and underscore the new importance given to crime and criminal events in historical studies. Written by both well-known historians and younger scholars from across the globe, the essays reveal that there are important continuities in the history of crime and its representations in modern culture, despite particularities of time and place.

PART I

CRIME AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF HISTORICAL NARRATIVE

Chapter 1

Does the Representation Fit the Crime? Some Thoughts on Writing Crime History as Cultural Text¹

Amy Gilman Srebnick

In the past ten years scholarly work on the history of crime has focused on several related topics: the history of specific, even celebrated, criminal events and their cultural meaning, the changing perceptions of crime and criminals over time, the relationship between crime and the development of mass culture. In American studies much of this work has focused on the nineteenth century, particularly on murders or presumed murders, and on crimes set in metropolitan cities. These studies have used crime history not as an end in itself, but as a window into issues and themes in the history of society, culture, and politics.²

Interestingly, in U.S. history, at least, many of these works were not originally intended as studies either in the history of crime or of criminology. Unlike notable work in English and Continental history, they were not self-consciously about long-term trends in the history of crime or punishment, about policing or even social control; rarely were they intended as explorations of changing attitudes about social polity. Indeed, with the exception of works that focused on issues of slavery, race, and Southern history, they studied the history of culture and explored issues such as the history of sexuality and gender, the history of urban culture, or even the transformations of literary forms. And while the possibilities of this new connection were exciting for historians like myself, who unexpectedly found themselves attached to a new (for us) sub-discipline of the history of crime and justice, it was also clear that our approach was somewhat different from the already established work in the history of crime that tended to focus on police history, crime rates, and criminology.³

Whether this latest scholarship focused on specific events, on the construction of the criminal, or on the genesis of particular patterns of legal or criminal behavior, it shared several working assumptions which gave it definition: 1) It accepted the notion that crimes, as well as criminals, were essentially social and historical constructs; 2) It depended for evidence and analysis on the close reading of texts (usually, but not necessarily literary texts, including police reports, depositions and trial narratives as well as newspaper accounts and ephemeral literature); 3) It adopted many of the techniques of more traditional literary analysis, taking what the theorist and historian Dominick LaCapra has identified as a ‘literary turn’ in order to understand these same texts; 4) It often regarded what had previously been seen as literary topics (the development of genres and forms of representation – the newspaper, the execution sermon, the sentimental novel) as both historical and literary constructs; and 5) It employed several assumptions of cultural theory and analysis: the reciprocity of high and low cultural forms, the importance of discourse, and the moveable wall between imaginative works and non belles lettres, language-based texts; it acknowledged the importance of ideology and power; and it was concerned with ideology and the modes of cultural production. In these cultural areas it drew quite consciously from the works of Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and Raymond Williams. In a sense, these new works in ‘crime’ and cultural history (produced on both sides of the Atlantic) were the historian’s (postmodern) version of what literary scholars had defined rather awkwardly as the ‘New Historicism.’⁴

Because this kind of historical analysis depended so essentially upon the interpretation of texts, it is not surprising that theoretical questions about the use of narrative – the reliability of narrative accounts and the interpretation of texts generally – also made so many of us particularly sensitive to the debates over truth and objectivity that were simultaneously raging within the profession; here I am referring to what Peter Novick, drawing upon questions raised most provocatively by Hayden White, defined several years ago as the ‘Objectivity Question.’⁵ The problematics of deciphering point of view and subjectivity in archival sources and of accounting for polyphonic voices and interpretations was, from the start, critical to our work. Moreover, the process of writing crime history, of creating our own narratives about crimes and criminal events, raised certain unusual historiographic questions.

Seen from this perspective, the history of crime became increasingly bound to a set of theoretical and methodological questions about narrative history that are at the center of the already widely acknowledged debates over historical method and interpretation. Three recent publications, A.S. Byatt’s, On Histories and Stories, Dominick LaCapra’s, History and Reading, and Carlo Ginsburg’s Rhetoric, Narrative and Proof, address, from different perspectives, the two interrelated issues in historical studies that I have already alluded to: 1) the nature of historical truth and its adjunct – ‘the objectivity question,’ and 2) the interpretation of sources by the application of methods of literary analysis and theory (these two issues are quite obviously related since both implicitly are concerned with the reading of historical texts and the ways in which we, as historians, arrive at our conclusions about the past). And, since these two conjoined issues are at the heart of the focus of this collection of essays, I would like to address some of this recent work, and suggest how the perspectives of Byatt, LaCapra and Ginsburg help to raise and illuminate questions about writing the history of crime. My purpose here is not to summarize the recent discussions about either the relationship of literary and cultural theory to historical analysis, or the currently very intense and, I think, quite complex debates about the objectivity of historical narrative and analysis, but rather to problematize these issues more specifically in terms of writing crime history. My hope here is simply to open the door a crack, and then, by briefly examining a celebrated case in U.S. history, to suggest the relevance of this recent work to understanding how representations of crimes in historical studies serve as prisms for understanding past cultures.⁶

On Reading, Narrative, and History

A.S. Byatt’s essays, On Histories and Stories, address the connection between history and literature from the perspective of a fiction writer and literary critic. In this collection Byatt explores the way fiction writers use historical events, and even ‘real’ historical individuals, as the subjects of contemporary fiction. At issue here is not the use of history in fiction in the traditional sense – as devices to provide setting and detail for fictive or imaginative tales – but rather a much more self-conscious use of the historical event or individual, or even the historical moment, as vehicles for fictive narratives. Byatt’s specific subject is the recent explosion in historical novels – the works of Graham Swift, Pat Barker, or Peter Ackroyd, to name just a few in English letters.

Byatt, who has written many novels with specific and dense historical detail, is also a biographer who approaches historical subjects with great care – hence she approaches the relationship between history (and histories) and stories with knowledge and respect for the issues. As she notes at the outset, the ‘renaissance of the historical novel has coincided with a complex self-consciousness about the writing of history itself.’⁷ Referring to the contemporary discussions inspired by Hayden White and others about narrative, subjectivity, and modes of interpretation in historical studies, Byatt is particularly sensitive not only to the multiple uses of history and historical events as subjects for imaginative writing, but also to the uses of the past more generally. Why, she asks, is there this ‘renaissance,’ in historical novels? She answers this question in several ways: 1) it is a response to the simple power, what she calls the ‘narrative energy,’ of the past; 2) it stems from a desire to recreate the histories and, presumably, actual narratives of those on the social margins – slaves, for example, as in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a novel about infanticide; and 3) in the case of war novels, it indicates the ways in which wars, in particular, make possible the subtle manipulation of biological or linear time and allow either for the exploration of the self as an essential modernist theme, or for the investigation of the fragmentation of that same self in a post-modern context.⁸

Byatt takes this issue a step further because she is also curious about what she identifies as the ‘slippage between personal histories and social or national histories,’ and how both novelists and historians have chosen to meld history and fiction.⁹ Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night – a book divided into the two sections ‘History as a Novel’ and ‘The Novel as History’ – is still one of the classic examples of this genre. More recently, Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy about World War I illustrates this phenomenon quite clearly: Barker uses the ‘real’ characters of the poet Siegfried Sasoon and the psychologist W.H.R. Rivers in her novel Regeneration, but she has them interact with a purely ‘fictive’ character, Billy Prior.¹⁰ The historian Simon Schama uses the real and the imagined freely in Dead Certainties, a work about the celebrated murder of George Parkman at Harvard University in 1849. And a host of other recent works do the same, for example, Alexandra LaPierre’s Artemesia, a new novel about art, crime (rape), and law in Renaissance Italy, or the works of Thomas Pynchon, as well as many other well researched works of fiction. Even Michael Frayn’s play, Copenhagen, set off a series of debates about his interpretation of the famous 1941 meeting between Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.¹¹ All of these works are extremely well researched, many cite their sources, and some even include historiographic and bibliographic essays. In short, their authors all attempt, like good historians, to represent the past, and all the works are intentionally mimetic in their artistic renderings. Comparing her research method to that of a traditional historian, Byatt speaks of how, when working on a project, she immerses herself, sometimes over a period of years, ‘in a disparate set of texts.’¹² Taking Byatt’s discussion under consideration, the historian might ask not what the differences are between the historian and the novelist – a debate that goes back to Aristotle’s Poetics – that is not the point; but rather how the forms of the novel, particularly the contemporary novel with its multiple points of view, its concern with the relationship between narrator and subject, its validation of subjective responses to historical events, and its lack of linearity, might help the historian to understand and even to write about the past. In other words, how does the novel, or rather the new construction of the historical novel, offer useful models for the historian struggling with representations and narrative?

*

In a recent volume of essays, History and Reading, the historian Dominick LaCapra addresses similar issues of subjectivity, evidence, narrative, and interpretation. Like Byatt, LaCapra argues that wars are particularly important as markers of shifts in modes of historical interpretation and he explores two central texts to develop his argument: Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856), produced, he argues, in the wake of the French Revolution, and Foucault’s, History of Madness (1961), written against the backdrop of World War II. But LaCapra is really concerned with the inverse of Byatt’s interest in how imaginative writers read the past and employ it in fictive narrative: His quest is to explore how historians quite literally read texts and other forms of signification. Like Byatt, he begins by briefly noting the extent of current debates about objectivity and literary theory, and he investigates how the traditional paradigm of research, in which the historian reads for evidence, is no longer sufficient. ‘There is a sense,’ he writes, ‘in which placing language, or more generally, signification, in the foreground of attention and having it apply self-reflexively to the practice of the historian creates a crisis or at least a minor trauma in historiography.’¹³ ‘The current problem in historiography,’ he continues, is ‘to conjoin both reading and writing’ and to ‘attempt to determine what range of practices combines in an acceptable manner a revised understanding of research and modes of reading and writing (or, more generally), practices of signification.’¹⁴ A rethinking of the process of historical writing and analysis would thus necessarily involve alternative notions of objectivity as well as attention to the ‘referential dimensions’ of the individual assertions of both historians and the sources themselves. LaCapra sets forth five models by which historians read their sources, and ultimately argues for the usefulness of Bakhtin’s dialogic approach, which, he suggests, refers in a ‘dual fashion both to the mutually challenging or contemporary interplay of forces in language and to the comparable interaction between social agents in various specific historical contexts.’¹⁵ In other words, he pleads for attention to the relational aspect of historical sources, as well as attention to language, point of view, and even the role of transference, in the psychoanalytic sense, in the sources themselves and in the interpretation of those sources.

LaCapra’s concern with the voicing in narrative texts, their inherent subjectivity, and with the question of how historians read sources has special resonance for crime history. LaCapra’s work on historiography, which in recent years has been essentially about the relationship between the observer and the observed, and about the engagement of narrator and subject, suggests some additional issues for us to consider. Many years ago he wrote Madame Bovary on Trial, which analyzed the testimony used to prosecute Flaubert in 1857 (for an ‘outrage to public morality and religion’).¹⁶ But more recently LaCapra, still concerned with subjectivity in historical sources and in the construction of historical narrative itself, has moved his attention to the issue of trauma in historical interpretation. In this regard he has been part of a larger conversation involving historians such as Saul Friedlander, Geoffrey Hartman, and others that has been prompted, in particular, by reference to the historiography of the Holocaust.¹⁷

For a long time I have been acutely aware that researching and writing about crime, particularly certain crimes like murder, infanticide, or rape, raise particula...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables, Figures, Maps and Graphs
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: CRIME AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF HISTORICAL NARRATIVE
• PART II: DISCOURSE AND NARRATIVE IN THE HISTORY OF CRIMINOLOGY
• PART III: THE RECONSTRUCTION OF EVENTS IN POLICE AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE HISTORY
• PART IV: REPRESENTATIONS OF CRIMES AND CRIMINALS
• Index