De/mythologizing Jack the Ripper

Jack the Ripper cannot be contained. This much rings true for the historical criminal, yet in another sense also applies to the popular cultural counterpart. Despite their cultural pervasiveness and no lack of so-called “final” solutions offered by Ripperologists and creative writers alike, the Ripper remains defined by an almost quintessential elusiveness. De/mythologizing Jack the Ripper approaches this paradox by foregrounding its imaginative rather than its criminological dimension. Considering the lingering condition of mystery as both epistemological problem and invitation to creative potential, this part literary, part mythographic study investigates Ripper fiction as adaptations and thus interpretations of an already inherently fragmentary, indeterminate historical text lacking canonical authority into a highly intertextual culture-text which defies containment by decade, medium, genre, or often any sense of fidelity to historical reality. With particular focus on early narratives and more recent treatments, comparative readings chart the ways in which fictional representations of the Ripper give meaning to mystery. De/mythologizing draws on the multi-faceted concept of myth to shed new light on the development of Ripper narratives as ‘culturally significant stories’ in early group-texts The Lodger and Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper through almost opposing etiological and symbolic principles. Later intrusions of intertexts Sherlock Holmes and Dracula serve another tension, examined as mechanisms to stabilise meaning for the Ripper by external influence, or in turn to destabilise traditional order in those sources. Following in this deconstructive angle, postmodern ‘dissections’ of history From Hell and Limehouse Golem are analysed as metanarratives of the collapse of singular significance itself inside the Ripper myth – as well as the desire to (re)establish meaning nonetheless. Contents Acknowledgements xi 1. Introduction: Reflections on a Cultural Phenomenon 1 1.1 Research interest: a cultural puzzle and its narrative possibilities 2 1.2 The corpus: in preparation of a postmodern dissection of the textual body 5 1.3 State of research: vectors of investigation versus areas of interest, and a case for interdisciplinary Ripper Studies 12 1.4 Methodology and analytical perspective: close readings versus intertextual, mythographic approaches 25 2. In Pursuit of the Unbound Text: Intertextuality, Semiology and Mythicity as Interconnected Frameworks 29 2.1 Defining and confining the Ripper-text: fallacies of a Final Solution 31 2.2 Historiography: circumscribing history with narrative structure 36 2.3 Mythography: studying subjects and functions of myth 41 2.4 Semiological Mythologies : descending from the sacred to the mundane 46 2.5 Intertextuality: aggregating from tracer to the culture-text 54 2.6 Mythicity: bridging the ontological gap 60 2.7 Synthesis: mythical intentions in literature 65 3. Foundations of the Ripper Mythology: The Historical Case, its Context, and its Media Discourse 67 3.1 Newspaper narratives: the mass dissemination of speculative prototypes 71 3.2 ‘Fan mail’: character creation as collaborative effort 78 4. Where Myths Are Born: From Rumours to Urban Legends of The Curse Upon Mitre Square 80 4.1 The Curse Upon Mitre Square: A.D. 1530-1888 82 4.2 A resonance of intertexts: invoking a “Nemesis of Neglect” 85 4.3 Ghosts: metaphors of rumour as haunting presence 91 4.4 Mythopoeia: evolving from rumour to myth 94 4.5 Conspiracy discourse: connecting dots across fact and fiction 102 4.6 Psychogeography: locating legends 108 4.7 An outlook: forgotten histories and prophecies 114 5. The Lodger , or, the ‘modern werewolf’: Rationalized Typologies of Terror and the Serial Killer Paradigm 116 5.1 “The Lodger” (1911) 118 5.2 Fiction and criminal profiling: ‘The Avenger’, a serial killer 129 5.3 Myth and folkloric profiling: the werewolf, or, the beast within 134 5.4 Making monsters: negotiating and projecting deviancy 137 6. Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper and the Iconicity of Evil 144 6.1 “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” (1943) 146 6.2 Of monsters and men: between identity and alterity 150 6.3 ‘Brother(s) to the Darkness’: the slashers as icons of horror fiction 154 6.4 Psychological stimuli: horrors from ‘that twisted little world inside our own skulls’ 160 6.5 Narrative subjectivity and identification with evil: “Just call ME... Jack” 164 6.6 ‘Living to tell the tale’: survival and authority of intradiegetic mythologies 169 7. ‘Minding the Gap’: Historicity and Intertextual Transplantations as Emerging Connective Tissue 175 7.1 Continuity offshoots: “In the Fourth Ward”, and what happened after 1888 176 7.2 Time-traveling Rippers: transcending time and space in “A Toy for Juliette” and Time After Time 179 7.3 The ‘based on a true story’-trope: text, gaps, and an influx of historical referentiality 189 7.4 Profiling serial perpetrators: mapping out a literary landscape 202 7.5 Iconic encounters: Ripper meets Holmes and other intertextual crossovers 213 8. The Last Sherlock Holmes Story and Gotham by Gaslight : The ‘Great Detective(s)’, the Ripper and the Collapse of Archetypes 222 8.1 Metamorphosis of ‘The Bat-Man’ – a transformation from unknown terror to heroic symbol 224 8.2 Strange case of Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper: a schizophrenic appropriation of the Jekyll/Hyde motif in The Last Sherlock Holmes Story 240 8.3 Across the fourth wall: transdiegetic myth and the problem with interpretation 252 9. Anno Dracula : A Polyphony of Terror and Ideologies 263 9.1 Literary vampirism: adaptation as ‘turning’ the text 267 9.2 What’s in a name? Semiological considerations about noms de guerre 274 9.3 Ripping narratives to shreds: multiperspectivity and narrative fragmentation as deconstructive strategy 281 9.4 Shifting paradigms: turning Stoker’s world upside down 284 9.5 Unsteady heroes, unstable signifiers: constructing the Ripper 290 9.6 Dracula and its heroes: a text with dissociative identity disorder 295 9.7 Dracula -text vs. Ripper-text as mutually destabilizing palimpsests 304 10. From Hell and the Myth of Misogyny: Ritual Murder as Fourth-dimensional Text 314 10.1 Adaptable conspiracy: one mythic plot, multiple medial manifestations 316 10.2 ‘Whores of the apocalypse’: rethinking the victims of Ripper fiction 325 10.3 Archi text ure, ‘writ in stone’: the city as psychogeographic text 333 10.4 Mythologies of misogyny: religion, patriarchal magic, and the semiology of gender war 338 10.5 ‘What is the fourth dimension?’: space-time and its implications for the text 343 10.6 Mythopoeia and the (mytho)graphic novel: medium and unique potential 354 10.7 Glancing sideways, beyond the text: the significance of paratext 358 10.8 Approaching apocalypse: recognizing the dialectical potential of the Ripper-text 362 11. Dan Leno & the Limehouse Golem : Metaphysical Detection and the Palimpsest of Victorian Murder 364 11.1 May contain traces of Rippers: a game of allusions 366 11.2 (Neo-)Victorian murder(s), (s)he wrote: unreliable narrators and problematic authority 369 11.3 “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts”, performed as mass culture 371 11.4 ‘The murder(er) unbound’ in the mythological cityscape of murders 381 11.5 What’s in a name, reprise – how to create a golem according to legend 387 11.6 Things without a form, and the struggle for shape 392 11.7 Taking form, emerging from page unto silver screen 397 11.8 Charade of stereotypes: stealthy poisonous dames, violent slashing men, and the inequality of aesthetic value 406 12. Ripper Street , Whitechapel , and The Lodger (2009): (Rip)percussions and (Rip)perpetuations of Mythmaking 417 12.1 Stories of the aftermath 417 12.2 Ripper Street : a copycat diversion, exorcism, and a still lingering presence 423 12.3 Whitechapel : Ripperology as the script for copycat murder 427 12.4 Gazing at the ‘Gates of Hell’: Whitechapel as intertextual node of London crime 442 12.5 The Lodger (2009): ambiguities of physical and psychological presence 448 12.6 Endless intertextual refractions of fact and a promised apocalypse 450 13. Conclusion: Quo Vadis, Jack the Ripper? 457 13.1 Of vagrants and permanent residents in popular cultural and literary space 457 13.2 An odyssey through a ‘stupendous whole’ of intertextuality 469 13.3 Apotheosis, the ultimate ascent to cultural significance 475 13.4 Apocalyptic visions and a glimpse beyond the metanarrative of myth 478 Bibliography 482 Appendix: Extended Bibliography – Chronological Group-texts 499