The Gothic Death Penalty

Ebury, Katherine

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-52750-1_3

Katherine Ebury³

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights ((PSLCHR))

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on the representation of death itself within modern capital punishment. The lack of visibility of the death penalty in the twentieth century spurred the public imagination: crueler, more gothic and baroque representations of capital punishment emerge from this very lack of knowledge. Three interrelated themes emerge from the exceptionality of the death penalty as a form of punishment: firstly, instances of survival, haunting and commemoration beyond the death penalty; secondly, the impression of ‘death-in-life’, or feeling dead before execution, expressed in both fictional and nonfictional representations of the death penalty; and, finally, the death drive and ‘the suicide plot’ in a death penalty context. The particular focus is a psychological understanding of execution as a ‘nonexperience’ via its gothic and theatrical qualities in literary representations by authors including Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O’Brien, M. R. James, E. F. Benson and Agatha Christie.

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Notes

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2.
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3.
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4.
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21.
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23.
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Autoscopy means ‘a form of visual hallucination in which a person sees an image of himself outside his own body’ (OED): this specific term predates the more common ‘out-of-body-experience’ and ‘near-death experience’ which were coined in the 1960s and 1970s respectively. The term had its first English usage in The New York Times in May 1904.
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66.
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67.
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68.
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69.
Derrida, The Death Penalty: Volume II, 67.
70.
Sachs, Does Capital Punishment Exist?, 11–12.
71.
Davies and Matteoni, Executing Magic, 89–90.
72.
Potter, Hanging in judgement, 373.
73.
For example, John Ellis reflects, in describing the execution of Joseph Deans in 1916 that he had had to take special precautions to prevent wounds from an attempted suicide from reopening (Diary of a Hangman, London: Forum Press, 1992, 192); a similar case is also discussed by Ellis in his execution of Robert Upton in 1914 (Ellis, Diary of a Hangman, London: Robert Hale, 1989, 230–231); Dernley describes how Piotr Maksimowski (executed 1950) had to be ‘patched up’ with heavy bandages after a suicide attempt only days before the execution (Dernley, The Hangman’s Tale, 90).
74.
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75.
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76.
Sir Ernest Arthur Gowers et al. Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, 1949–1953, REPORT, Presented to Parliament by Command of Her Majesty September 1953 (also known as Gowers Commission Report), London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1953, paragraph 58, pages 19–20.
77.
Reik and Freud, ‘View on Capital Punishment’ (1926), in The Compulsion to Confess: On the Psychoanalysis of Crime and Punishment, New York: Grove Press, 1961: 469–474 (474).
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80.
Victoria Stewart, Crime Writing in Interwar Britain: Fact and Fiction in the Golden Age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, 40, 105.
81.
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82.
Gowers et al. Royal Commission, paragraph 606, page 212.
83.
Gowers et al. Royal Commission, paragraph 168, page 60–61.
84.
For excellent work on this strand of Speedy Death, see Paul Peppis, ‘Querying and queering golden age detection: Gladys Mitchell’s Speedy Death and popular modernism’, Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 40, No. 3 (2017): 120–134 and, on Mitchell’s psychoanalytic interests in gender and sexuality, see, Brittain Bright, ‘The Unshockable Mrs. Bradley: Sex and Sexuality in the Work of Gladys Mitchell’, Murder in the Closet: Essays on Queer Clues in Crime Fiction Before Stonewall, ed. by Curtis Evans, Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2017: 78–92.
85.
Gladys Mitchell, Speedy Death, London: Vintage, 2014, 308.
86.
Agatha Christie, Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, London: Harper Collins, 2002, 261, Christie’s italics throughout.
87.
Christie, Curtain, 277.
88.
Pierre Bayard, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?: The Murderer who Eluded Hercule Poirot and Deceived Agatha Christie, trans. by Carol Cosman, London: Fourth Estate, 2000, 144.
89.
Christie, Curtain, 278.
90.
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91.
Christie, Curtain, 284.
92.
Christie, Curtain.
93.
Derrida, The Death Penalty Volume I, 239.
94.
Naas, ‘The Philosophy and Literature of the Death Penalty’, 54.

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School of English, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
Katherine Ebury

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Ebury, K. (2021). The Gothic Death Penalty. 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_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52750-1_3
Published: 11 February 2021
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-52749-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-52750-1
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