B.A., M.A. (Delhi, India), Ph.D. (Trent)
Thesis: Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics of Murder: Jack the Ripper to Dorian Gray
Examining Committee:
Jonathan Bordo (Supervisor), Suzanne Bailey, and James Penney
External Examiner: Elana Gomel, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Internal Examiner: Yves Thomas
Chair: Veronica Hollinger
Abstract
This dissertation examines how sex crime and serial killing became a legitimate subject of aesthetic representation and mass consumption in the nineteenth century. It also probes into the ethical implications of deriving pleasure from consuming such graphic representations of violence. Taking off from Jack the Ripper and the iconic Whitechapel murders of 1888, it argues that a new cultural paradigm – the aesthetics of murder – was invented in England and France. To study the ‘aesthetics of murder’ as countless influential critics have done is not to question whether an act of murder itself possesses beautiful or sublime qualities. Rather, it is to determine precisely how a topic as evil and abject as murder is made beautiful in a work of art. It also questions what is at stake ethically for the reader or spectator who bears witness to such incommensurable violence. In three chapters, this dissertation delves into three important tropes – the murderer, corpse, and witness – through which this aesthetics of murder is analyzed. By examining a wide intersection of visual, literary, and cultural texts from the English and French tradition, it ultimately seeks to effect a rapprochement between nineteenth-century ethics and aesthetics. The primary artists and writers under investigation are Charles Baudelaire, Thomas De Quincey, Oscar Wilde, and Walter Sickert. In bringing together their distinctive styles and aesthetic philosophies, the dissertation opts for an interdisciplinary and comparative approach. It also aims to absolve these writers and artists from a longstanding charge of immorality and degeneracy, by firmly maintaining that the aesthetics of murder does not necessarily glorify or justify the act of murder. The third chapter on the ‘witness’ in fact, elucidates how writers like De Quincey and Wilde transferred the ethical imperative from the writer to the reader. The reader is appointed in the role of a murder witness who accidentally discovered the corpse on the crime scene. As a traumatized subject, the reader thus develops an ethical obligation for justice and censorship.
Dr. Anhiti Patnaik is a tenure-track professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Birla Institute of Technology and Science- Pilani, India. She defended her doctoral dissertation “Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics of Murder: Jack the Ripper to Dorian Gray” in May 2018 at the Department of Cultural Studies, Trent University. It theoretically probes how sex-crimes and murder were aestheticized for the time in the Victorian Age through the works of Charles Baudelaire, Thomas De Quincey, and J.K. Huysmans, leading up to Oscar Wilde and Walter Sickert. Her dissertation also investigates the ethical position of the reader and the traumatic nature of one’s attraction to narratives of gore and violence.
Anhiti is an Ontario Trillium Scholar and Fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University. She read for a Masters and M.Phil. in English at the University of Delhi, India before joining Trent. She is a prolific Wilde scholar and has been published in Neo-Victorian Studies, The Confidential Clerk, and Victorian Network. Her areas of interest include Creative Writing, Queer Theory, Trauma Studies, Postmodern Adaptations, and intersections between Law and Literature.
She may be contacted at anhitipatnaik@hyderabad.bits-pilani.ac.in