Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Imagination

Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Imagination. By Karen Halttunen. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Pp. xiv, 322. Illustrations. $29.95.) Karen Halttunen situates the origins of the conventions that shape contemporary tales of murder-mystery and horror-in antebellum America, and thus it is appropriate that this journal include a review of her latest book. Murder Most Foul is as inspired and compelling as the best of the studies concerning "the American mind" or "the American character." Halttunen's concern is not so much with murder as it is with evil. She proposes that the rise of humanitarian and liberal notions of the self as sentient, autonomous, and virtuous during the second part of the eighteenth century made it difficult to explain evil. In doing so Halttunen develops some of the points that she made in an article in the American Historical Review ( 1995), which suggested that the appearance of the concepts of pain and empathy enabled the rise of nineteenth-century reform. At the outset, Halttunen states that she seeks to demonstrate that "the Gothic imagination has proved a major factor in shaping the modern liberal concept of criminal and mental `deviance' and what should be done about it" (6). Whereas colonial Americans understood evil as necessarily a part of every human being, and therefore the "Murderer as Common Sinner" (chap. 1), nineteenth-century Americans fashioned evil as extraordinary and aberrant and the "Murderer as Mental Alien" (chap. 7). Journalists, lawyers, and physicians sought to explain murder without the theological ramparts that had sustained Puritan clergy. Instead, they sought to reason with evil. When such a strategy failed (as it would and did), Americans mystified evil using the tropes of mystery and horror. Some readers might not accept Halttunen's picture of the United States as secularized. Many church historians would argue that disestablishment had little effect on the vitality of American religion, which between 1780 and 1850 experienced a series of revivals, intense denominational competition and growth, and the birth of multiple sects. At this time, the seeds of liberal Protestantism were planted which would have a profound effect on the conceptualization of evil and sin. Many Americans maintained religious conviction while seeking answers in medicine and science about the human condition. It might be argued that the formation of multiple explanations for murder that Halttunen aptly describes-sensational, legal, or medical-enriched theological and religious sensibilities rather than dulled them. Religion is cast aside, and so its history does not inform the book's analysis. Halttunen relies on execution sermons, confessions, autobiographies, memoirs, court proceedings, and exposes that commercial printers distributed in the form of broadsides, pamphlets, newspaper accounts, and books. As varied and rich as they are, the sources do not provide sufficient evidence to sustain the book's arguments. This is due in part to their narrow sphere of representation and in part to the absence of corroborating historical data about the events that the texts narrate and about murder in the United States. First, it seems as if today's cultural historians face an impossible problem: the diversity of the American people precludes generalizations. …