Unsuspecting Souls

by Barry Sanders

  Ghosts and the various other versions of the undead provided fairly graphic ways of representing the disappeared human being in the nineteenth century. The age, however, found other, equally effective ways of exploiting the idea of the disappeared—of the body deprived of its essence. In the growing visual and commercial culture of the nineteenth century, at a time when ordinary people became both more aware of and more fascinated with their own radically changing condition, entrepreneurs exploited an eerily lifelike representation of the undead. Municipalities made major renovations to city museums to accommodate a new interest in public displays of the disembodied body. In England and in the Scandinavian countries, curators moved from straightforward taxonomic displays, early in the century, to the tableau vivant, living scenes projected onto walls by yet another ghost-producing machine, invented by Daguerre and patented in 1824, called the diorama.

  While the movie theater certainly had an influence on the creation of new resting places for the disembodied body, two very different kinds of venues appeared during the period to capitalize on the feeling of loss that had so terrified Gorky. One was a new phenomenon called the wax museum, the most famous of which Madame Marie Tussaud opened in her first permanent location in London in 1835. In a cavernous space, she exhibited effigies of historical figures. Alongside those figures, to capitalize on the century’s attraction to and repulsion for criminals, she opened what she called the “Separate Room,” which the press dismissed as “that ghastly apartment into which ladies are not advised to enter.”8 Such a pointed and gendered dismissal, of course, only boosted attendance by ladies desperate to see up close the wax models of history’s most depraved and dangerous.

  So popular had that exhibition of the gruesome become that, by 1846, the Madame had indeed opened a separate room, this time without the scare quotes, and this time consigned to its proper psychological place, the basement. She dedicated the space entirely to the effigies of criminals in the act of, say, bloody murder. This new room, which drew more people than the upstairs ever did, she named, with all the great entrepreneurial flair she loved to employ, the Chamber of Horrors. To walk down the staircase into the deep recesses of the chamber was to descend into the subconscious of the general London population.

  The 1880s and 1890s were a boom time for wax museums all over Europe as popular bourgeois entertainment, particularly in the Scandinavian countries and in Germany and Italy. Each featured its own version of the Chamber of Horrors; it was inevitable, for the wax effigy, as other historians have pointed out, carries an automatic association with the dead, or the seemingly dead, body. (By the mid-nineteenth century, the press had begun to use the word effigy as a verb, “to body forth.”) Wax effigies are psychologically confusing mannequins. (The word mannequin—spelled manikin beginning in the sixteenth century—refers initially to a dwarf or pygmy; and, in 1837, for the first time, to a highly lifelike model of the human being.) While they offer to an audience a model of the departed, these waxy mannequins are still and forever with us; they seem prepared, forever, to leave for the other side, but never really take off and make the journey.

  Wax figures occupy an odd and unsettling category, odd enough to unhinge even Sigmund Freud. They upset him so much that viewing them prompted from him a famous essay, first published in 1925, titled “The Uncanny” (literally, “The Unhomely”). Struggling to find what makes wax effigies and automata so unsettling to us, Freud finally decides that effigies unnerve because they appear as indefinable creatures hovering so indefinitely (and so contentedly) between life and death. From a distance they look very much alive, but on closer inspection we declare them decidedly dead. We even say about people who look very ill that their skin has turned waxlike. In titling his essay, Freud borrows the word uncanny from the previous century, when it referred to people strangely possessed of supernatural powers.

  During those same years, in the 1880s and 1890s, people included various kinds of animals, too, in their growing fascination with the undead. This came about because of the rise of a related new art, taxidermy. People had been tanning animal skins for a very long time. But in this period, professionals began stuffing the animals with cotton and other batting material, lending to a lion or tiger all the aliveness of, well, a wax effigy. Taxidermy shops opened in both small towns and large cities. The revival of ventriloquism, too, helped foster a general feeling of undeadness—dummies, made of wood and wax, grew more lifelike and eerie, and helped, as some critics said, to separate the voice from its source, a necessary feature of the telephone and the radio and motion pictures. Ventriloquism came in handy at séances, as well.

  Which leads to the second venue for viewing the undead. From its inception, the morgue, a French institution, served as a depository not just for any dead person, but for those who had died anonymously. In 1800, the Paris police had issued a decree that argued strongly for establishing the exact identity of those who died, as essential to preserving “the social order.” That desire for closure gets reflected in the word morgue itself, which derives from the Old French morguer: “to have a haughty demeanor”—or, more to the point, “to stare, to have a fixed and questioning gaze.” While no one seems to know the word’s exact origin—much the same fate as the orphaned corpses themselves—the choice of that word for a place to house the dead perhaps tries to capture the look of frozen desire on the faces of the corpses, the hope of reclaiming an exact identity.

  Whatever prompted the word into existence, by 1840, the morgue, now newly relocated to the Ile de la Cité, had opened with a large viewing room, enabling crowds of people to gaze upon row upon row of neatly lined-up corpses. One contemporary observer, Léon Gozlan, called the morgue “a central neighborhood spot”: “The morgue is the Luxembourg, the Place Royale of the Cité. One goes there to see the latest fashions, orange trees blooming, chestnut trees that rustle in the autumn winds, in spring, and in winter.”9 By 1864, city officials had relocated the morgue to yet another new location, this one elaborately designed as a Greek temple, with the words Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, the slogan of the French Revolution, cut deeply into the marble across its imposing front entrance. The revolution may have prompted, to some extent, the horrors of both the wax museum and the morgue. Madame Tussaud kept models of the guillotine and other instruments of torture as permanent parts of the exhibits in her Chamber of Horrors.

  According to the newspaper L’Eclair, the new morgue attracted an astonishing number of visitors—over one million a year. A very scant few of them came to identify a missing loved one. The great majority of them came to stare, to gaze, to sip a glass of wine and, as the French do better than most, toss about this idea and that; surely a good many of those discussions must have touched on the topic of death, and in particular anonymous death. The morgue provided a gruesome twist on the old philosophical question: If no one is there to claim the body, did anyone actually die? Or, if the body has no name, did anyone really die? On both counts, I say not really, for here was death, it seems, not as a mournful gathering, but as occasion for intimate social interactions. Here was death as a museum event, a gallery opening. By 1867, the curious could even linger over the bodies for extended periods of time, for in that year a German chemist, August Wilhelm von Hoffman, had discovered formaldehyde, the chemical that became the foundation of modern embalming, enabling the morgue to hold bodies with no cold storage for weeks on end.

  Physicians contributed to the period’s fierce obsession with corpses. In the first decades of the century, scientists tried to understand the nature of life and death by cutting up human bodies. Under the Murder Act of 1752, when London authorities hanged murderers, they transferred the bodies to the city’s Royal College of Surgeons for their experiments in dissection. Such cuttings constituted additional punishment for the heinous crime of murder; the practice lasted until 1832, when legislation outlawed cruel and unusual punishment. Even in this legal way, anatomists could not satisfy their needs and they demanded more—many more�
��bodies. So, in 1829, when John Abernethy, a surgeon, addressed his students at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital with the line, “There is but one way to obtain knowledge . . . we must be companions with the dead,”10 he was sending a message: Get the bodies any way you can. And that meant buying corpses from a nefarious group of entrepreneurs, the grave robbers, or the body snatchers, or, as the newspapers called them, in a creepy religious echo, the resurrectionists. These were the undesirables who went out in the dark of night burking, named after the chief grave robber in Scotland at the time and a hero to the medical profession, William Burke. With his accomplice, William Hare, Burke not only robbed graves but obtained other bodies by strangling to death unsuspecting victims. Burke’s crimes gave rise to another, even more insidious meaning of burking: “murdering, as by suffocation, so as to leave no or few marks of violence.” Helen MacDonald, in a book about the history of autopsy in London, Human Remains: Dissection and Its Histories, places the gruesome practice of body snatching in the context of the century’s continuing search for that Frankensteinian secret of life:The social anxieties about the precise boundary between life and death that were common in Europe at this time were expressed in novels and poems, and also circulated in dark tales about people who had been buried alive. Certain people who had been executed had even later revived on the College’s own dissecting table.

  Some experiments performed at the College aimed to determine the time of death with certainty. They were so violently crude that Clift [William Clift, conservator of the College’s Hunterian Museum] clearly found his job distressing. In an uncharacteristically stumbling hand, he recorded what he was instructed to do to the body of Martin Hogan as it lay on the dissecting table in 1814, which was to thrust a needle into each eye to see if that produced an effect. Other investigations were undertaken in a more systematic way as College men sought to understand whether an absence of obvious animation was a sign that the life force had merely been suspended or was irretrievably extinguished. And although this was never stated in the context of the College’s work on murderers, they were also wondering whether it was in the power of medical men to return people to life.

  Fascination with disembodied death continues into our own time. Starting his work in the 1970s, a German anatomist named Gunther von Hagens raised the embalming procedure to the level of performance art. Instead of injecting corpses with formaldehyde or some other chemical, Hagens, billing himself as a sculptor of dead people, pumped them full of a plastic compound. He took as his medium human flesh, flaying open the skin and emphasizing the organs, creating strange perversions of classical Greek statues. In 1997, Hagens launched an exhibition of his work, Body Worlds, at Mannheim’s Museum of Technology and Work. Close to eight hundred thousand visitors came to see over two hundred corpses offered by Hagens as individual works of art, each with its own explanatory label, including a brief history of the subject along with the kinds of materials used.

  In November 2005, the South Street Seaport Exhibition Centre in New York featured a show, titled Bodies . . . The Exhibition, promising “real human bodies, preserved through an innovative process and then respectfully presented.” Soon afterward, in October 2006, the National Museum of Health and Medicine, founded in 1862 in Washington, D.C., as the Army Medical Museum, launched an art exhibit of prints made from the scars of people who had suffered horrendous traumas—automobile accidents, third-degree burns, gunshot wounds, mutilations, and so on. The art pieces carry titles like Splenectomy Scar, Lung Removal After Suicide Attempt, and Broken Eye Socket Repair Using Bone from the Skull After Car Accident. The artist, Ted Meyer, lays onto the scars and the surrounding area block-print ink, and then presses paper to the skin to make an image, which he further enhances with gouache and pencil. The National Museum of Health and Medicine owns a collection of over one thousand objects, including the preserved leg of a man afflicted with elephantiasis. The museum is the city’s principal museum of fleshy art; the Army, while using young men and women as so much cannon fodder, may be the organization that makes mothers and fathers and wives and husbands and children most aware that what suffers heavy-duty wounds and even death are actually bodies—fleshy, breathing human beings. We ought to refer to those sons and daughters as something other than “collateral damage” or “body counts.”

  Even though no one referred to them as such, the corpses that arrived at the Paris morgue constitute the first official missing persons. In the 1880s, the Chicago Police Department did issue the world’s first missing persons list. It had to, for the reality of people vanishing from sight, without a trace, had already taken hold of the popular imagination. Newspapers in England and in this country carried banner headlines, in the seventies and early eighties, screaming about young women, lost forever, in the bustling cities of Chicago, London, and New York. For most of the nineteenth century, the disappearance of people had been a theoretical idea, discussed at a rather abstract level by philosophers and explored by artists and writers and a good number of scientists. But the police took the idea out of the realm of fiction and art, yanked it off the stage, and turned it into a grim reality: Image became instance, theory became fact. Day by day, it seemed, common citizens vanished from sight without a trace. Reports started to appear in great numbers during the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, where young English and European women had come to find jobs in one of the many booths.

  As if simple murder were not gruesome enough, another, new and perverse form of vanishing began to haunt both England and America—serial killing. Much like the frames on a filmstrip, the serial killer committed the same act—in this case, the slashing and disemboweling of young women—over and over again. A corner had been turned, a moment had been reached, where art had foretold or forecast life itself. The serial killer firmly links the nineteenth century in England, the birthplace of serial killing, with our own times, in this country. A new kind of mayhem haunted nineteenth-century England. Not only was the world’s first serial killer, known initially as the Whitechapel Murderer and later as Jack the Ripper, invisible, but his invisibility made him all the more dangerous. No one knew what he looked like, what he believed, how he walked, or where he worked. He started his spree of ripping prostitutes apart in the winter of 1888 in the East End of London, and committed his horrors always between the hours of midnight and dawn.11 The milieu of the decadents had truly turned decadent. The Ripper killed at least five women, and left not a single significant clue. Newspapers described him as “the unseen killer.” The police never found their man, but had their suspicions about an American doctor who had taken up residence in London. They could find no fingerprints.

  Serial killers continue not just to fascinate us as historical oddities, but to raise serious questions for our own age, as well. Several dozen books in the last decade or two plumb the psyche of such monsters. Are these creatures human or subhuman? Can we even call them people? What creates and shapes them? Can society ever avoid such aberrations? The questions go on and on. In many ways, the serial killer more than the simple murderer exposes those places where the Chain of Being threatens to break apart. Serial killers not only make the night unsafe but because they come from the community itself—I knew that person at one time!—they make even the daytime frightening and charged. Can we really know for certain who will turn killer? As our paranoia and fear increase, we begin to see every custodian as a killer, every guard as a ghoul.

  The nineteenth-century serial killer became an object of fascination for the twentieth. In 1988, the novelist Thomas Harris made Hannibal Lecter the fright of the year in his novel The Silence of the Lambs. It quickly became a blockbuster movie. (Who could ever look at Anthony Hopkins the same way again?) Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho used the perversions of the midwestern serial killer Ed Gein as a model for its understated whacko lead character, Norman Bates. Several films—including a documentary and a drama—trace the journey of an even stranger anomaly, Aileen Wuornos, the most well-known female serial killer.


  In reviewing a shocking ten books on serial killing, in The New York Review of Books (1994), the novelist Joyce Carol Oates offers her own insights into the nature of such an aberration—murder—laid on top of a more perverse aberration—serial murder:Somehow it has happened that the “serial killer” has become our debased, condemned, yet eerily glorified Noble Savage, the vestiges of the frontier spirit, the American isolato cruising interstate highways in van or pickup truck which will yield, should police have the opportunity to investigate, a shotgun, a semiautomatic rifle, quantities of ammunition and six-packs and junk food, possibly a decomposing female corpse in the rear.12

  What could Oates mean—six-packs, ammo, a semiautomatic, and junk food: Is serial killing all about consumption? Or is it a low-level fantasy excursion into a military commando impersonation? In the serial killer’s demented mind, is he keeping us safe from the really bad people? Who knows? But the following statistic should give us pause: While the United States has only roughly five percent of the world’s population, it produces an astonishing seventy-five percent of the world’s serial killers.13 Do these numbers reveal human nature at its most elemental, consumptive, and depraved state—a human being reduced to total and mechanistic voracious-ness, without any moral constraint? What do we have here, Blackwater USA gone totally and literally ballistic? One critic must have that kind of greed and power in mind when he refers to the serial killer, in the most mechanical of terms, as “simply a biological engine driven by a primal instinct to satisfy a compelling lust.”14

  In that sense, we must consider deviants like Jeffrey Dahmer or Ed Gein as the other side of Victor Frankenstein, interested not so much in the power that comes from knowing the secret of life, but in the delight that comes from knowing the intimacies of death. There is terrific power in snuffing out life, as there is in igniting life into being. Nonetheless, serial killers blow apart all categories of human being. They prowl the night like vampires. Some nineteenth-century newspaper accounts threw them in with the living dead. Certainly, they do not deserve to participate with the fully alive.