Abstract
This chapter examines a formal feature common to many narratives of the death penalty: the extended confession of the murderer, which in the texts discussed is produced and conditioned by the rhetoric of the death penalty, if not always by its literal reality. It shows how the legal and penal culture of the period frequently prevented the condemned person making a public confession or innocence claim, often circumscribing opportunities for the prisoner to speak at their own trial and suppressing their last letters to the press or to loved ones. The literary texts studied in this chapter fill a gap in public access to condemned prisoners’ writings, as authors including Flann O’Brien, Agatha Christie, Elizabeth Bowen, Dorothy L. Sayers and Anne Meredith produce their own narratives and create imagined confessions of guilt which reflect on the psychology of murder and the death sentence.
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Notes
- 1.
Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000, 4.
- 2.
E. S. Burt, ‘The Autobiographical Subject and the Death Penalty’, The Oxford Literary Review, Vol. 35, No. 2 (2013): 165–187 (167).
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Theodor Reik, The Compulsion to Confess, The Compulsion to Confess: On the Psychoanalysis of Crime and Punishment, New York: Grove Press, 1961, 212.
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Reik, The Compulsion to Confess, 209.
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Reik, The Compulsion to Confess, 292.
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See Doyle and O’Donnell on the case of William O’Shea in Ireland in 1943 (‘A Family Affair: English Hangmen and a Dublin Jail, 1923–54’, New Hibernia Review, Vol. 18, No. 8 (2014): 101–118 (110–111)).
- 23.
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West, The Meaning of Treason, 198.
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Knott, ‘Introduction’, xxiv.
- 32.
Knott, ‘Introduction’, xxix.
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The National Archives, PCOM 8/203.
- 34.
The National Archives, HO 45/25843 and PCOM 8/214.
- 35.
Doyle and O’Donnell note the unlucky case of John Fleming (executed in Ireland 1934) who was executed after being sent an incriminating letter from a friend (‘A Family Affair’, 106).
- 36.
The National Archives, PCOM 8/203.
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The National Archives, PCOM 8/203.
- 38.
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2003, 44.
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The National Archives, PCOM 8/203.
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The National Archives, PCOM 8/203.
- 41.
The National Archives, HO 144/1637/311643/182.
- 42.
Cobain, History Thieves, 262.
- 43.
Cobain, History Thieves, 263.
- 44.
Cobain, History Thieves, 35.
- 45.
The National Archives, PCOM 8/214.
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Robert G. Elliott and Albert R. Beatty, Agent of Death: The Memoirs of an Executioner, London: John Long, 1940, 115. Elliott includes many of these ‘last speeches’ by prisoners he executed within his memoirs.
- 47.
Similarly, in the last lines of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), a dark comedy loosely based on Roy Horniman’s Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal (1907), the newly exonerated Louis D’Ascoyne Mazzini, 10th Duke of Chalfont, having narrowly escaped execution, is approached by a reporter from Titbits seeking the publication rights to his story. Louis has written out his life story while in prison, which is presented to the film’s audience in flashback with his voiceover. Louis confesses that though he is innocent of the crime of which he is accused (the murder of his lover’s husband, who actually committed suicide), he has instead killed six members of his family through increasingly baroque means in order to inherit the dukedom and avenge their treatment of his mother. In the rush of his escape from the gallows and his sudden release, when new evidence is finally produced by his lover, Louis has left his confession behind, where it may be read at any moment by the prison authorities. The film concludes with Louis’s agonised recognition of his self-betrayal: ‘My memoirs? Oh, my memoirs. My memoirs’ (Kind Hearts and Coronets, Dir. Robert Hamer, Ealing Studios, 1949).
- 48.
Victoria Stewart, Crime Writing in Interwar Britain: Fact and Fiction in the Golden Age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, 12.
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Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 12–13.
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Theodor Reik, The Compulsion to Confess, 265.
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Theodor Reik, The Compulsion to Confess, 261.
- 52.
Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 160–161.
- 53.
Carl R. Lovitt, ‘The Rhetoric of Murderers’ Confessional Narratives: The Model of Pierre Riviere’s Memoir’, The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 22, No. 1 (1992): 23–34 (24).
- 54.
Pierre Bayard, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?: The Murderer who Eluded Hercule Poirot and Deceived Agatha Christie, trans. by Carol Cosman, London: Fourth Estate, 2000, 36.
- 55.
Elizabeth Bowen, ‘The Disinherited’, Collected Stories, London: Vintage, 1999, 395.
- 56.
Bowen, ‘The Disinherited’, 398.
- 57.
Stewart, Crime Writing in Interwar Britain, 124.
- 58.
R. Austin Freeman, ‘The Art of the Detective Story’ Nineteenth century and after, May 1924, 718.
- 59.
Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty: Volume II, ed. by Geoffrey Bennington and Marc Crépon/trans. by Elizabeth Rottenberg, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017, 234.
- 60.
Anne Meredith, Portrait of a Murderer, London: British Library, 2017, 55.
- 61.
Meredith, Portrait of a Murderer, 135.
- 62.
Meredith, Portrait of a Murderer, 170.
- 63.
Meredith, Portrait of a Murderer, 233.
- 64.
Meredith, Portrait of a Murderer, 235.
- 65.
Meredith, Portrait of a Murderer, 236, 232.
- 66.
See Stewart, Crime Writing in Interwar Britain, 168–169.
- 67.
Reik, The Compulsion to Confess, 279.
- 68.
Sayers, Whose Body?, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2016, 135–136.
- 69.
Sayers, Whose Body?, 190.
- 70.
Sayers, Whose Body?, 204–205.
- 71.
Sayers, Whose Body?, 205.
- 72.
Bayard, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?, 85–92.
- 73.
Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman, The Complete Novels, New York: Everyman’s Library, 2007, 223.
- 74.
Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, London: Harper Collins, 2002, 368.
- 75.
Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 358.
- 76.
‘I knew also that my soul was friendly, was my senior in years and was solely concerned for my welfare. For convenience I called him Joe.’ Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman, 240.
- 77.
Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman, 223.
- 78.
Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 9.
- 79.
Samantha Walton, Guilty But Insane: Mind and Law in Golden Age Detective Fiction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 176. Serafini, ‘“The Ghost of Dr. Freud Haunts Everything Today”’, 25.
- 80.
Freud, ‘Psycho-Analysis and the Establishment of Facts in Legal Proceedings’ (1906), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume IX, trans. by Strachey et al., London: Vintage, 2001: 97–114 (113).
- 81.
Freud, ‘Psycho-Analysis and the Establishment of Facts’, 113.
- 82.
See Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII, trans. by Strachey et al., London: Vintage, 2001: 7–66.
- 83.
Freud, ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX, trans. by Strachey et al., London: Vintage, 2001: 159–172 (166).
- 84.
Freud, ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’, 170.
- 85.
Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 62–72.
- 86.
For an excellent contemporary discussion of false confession, see Anne C. Dailey, Law and the Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Perspective, Yale: Yale University Press, 2017.
- 87.
Reik, The Unknown Murderer, 154–155.
- 88.
F. Tennyson Jesse, A Pin to See the Peepshow, London: Virago, 1988, 265 and 276. For productive close analysis of Edith Thompson’s real letters, see Matt Houlbrook’s ‘“A Pin to See the Peepshow”: Culture, Fiction and Selfhood in Edith Thompson’s Letters, 1921–1922’, Past & Present, No. 207 (2010): 215–249 and Rosanne Kennedy, ‘Affecting Evidence: Edith Thompson’s Epistolary Archive’, Australian Feminist Law Journal, Vol. 40, No. 1(2014): 15–34. On Thompson in general see Lucy Bland, ‘The Trials and Tribulations of Edith Thompson: The Capital Crime of Sexual Incitement in 1920s England’, Journal of British Studies, xlvii (2010).
- 89.
Jesse, A Pin to See the Peepshow, 310.
- 90.
Houlbrook, ‘A Pin to See the Peepshow’, 222.
- 91.
Rosanne Kennedy, ‘Affecting Evidence: Edith Thompson’s Epistolary Archive’, Australian Feminist Law Journal, Vol. 40, No. 1 (2014): 15–34, (23–24). See also Margaretta Jolly and Liz Stanley, ‘Letters As/Not a Genre’, Life Writing, Vol. 2. No. 2 (2005): 91–118.
- 92.
Kennedy, ‘Affecting Evidence’, 27.
- 93.
Jesse, A Pin to See the Peepshow, 292.
- 94.
Stewart, Crime Writing in Interwar Britain, 63–98.
- 95.
Stewart, Crime Writing in Interwar Britain, 86–87.
- 96.
Bayard, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?, 145.
- 97.
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2016, 255.
- 98.
Reik, The Compulsion to Confess, 288.
- 99.
Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, 256.
- 100.
Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, 256.
- 101.
Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, 256–257.
- 102.
Agatha Christie, Five Little Pigs, London: Harper Collins, 2007, 318.
- 103.
Agatha Christie, Towards Zero, London: Harper Collins, 2002, 29.
- 104.
Christie, Towards Zero, 33.
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Christie, Towards Zero, 33.
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Christie, Towards Zero, 34.
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Christie, Towards Zero, 283–284.
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Christie, Towards Zero, 285.
- 109.
Christie, Towards Zero, 291.
- 110.
Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 153.
- 111.
Christie, Towards Zero, 288.
- 112.
Christie, Towards Zero, 283.
- 113.
Derrida, The Death Penalty: Volume I, 155.
- 114.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII (1901–1905), trans. by Strachey et al., London: Vintage, 2001: 125–172 (159).
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Ebury, K. (2021). Confession and the Self. In: Modern Literature and the Death Penalty, 1890-1950. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52750-1_2
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