AS A YOUNG BOY, I was particularly frightened to read that the wolverine was such a nasty, bloodthirsty mammal that it would kill other animals for no reason. The biggest member of the weasel family, not generally exceeding fifteen kilograms in weight, this particular carnivore had a reputation for attacking much bigger animals. But the no-reason thing troubled me. Why would an animal rip another to shreds for the fun of it? I doubt that it is true that the wolverine acts, or kills, merely for its own entertainment. But the image of killing for its own sake haunted me.
Others too have been upset to the very core by the idea of senseless killing. In Cold Blood, the 1966 account by the American Truman Capote, explores the true story of two ex-convicts who invade the home of a wealthy Kansas wheat farmer to steal his money. Not finding any, they slit the throat of the farmer, shoot him in the head, and go on to murder his wife and two of their children. The crime, which took place in 1959, shocked and riveted Americans, and Capote’s subsequent account became a bestseller. The bloodshed that seems irrational and inexplicable is the kind that frightens us the most.
Another form of murder sits much more easily with us: killing for entertainment. This is the central theme of Suzanne Collins’s bestselling novel The Hunger Games. The story’s sixteen-year-old protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, like most citizens in the post-apocalyptic nation of Panem, is subjugated by the ruling class of people in the capital city. Every year, as punishment for having once risen up against the ruling powers, each of the twelve subjugated provinces must offer up one boy and one girl, between the ages of twelve and eighteen, for a ritualistic bloodbath in the woods. The fight to the death is televised for the entertainment of the people in the Capitol, who are caught up annually in the orgiastic pleasure of viewing the participants, finding ways to assist or hinder them during the battle, and salivating as they die in the most hideous, gruesome ways. Only one survivor can normally win. Since the novel features a sixteen-year-old who has volunteered for battle to save her younger sister from having to do so, it is not hard to imagine how Katniss will fare against her opponents, many of whom are bigger, stronger, better trained, better equipped, and more bloodthirsty. The Hunger Games is an adventure story, but it can also be read as a condemnation of a society that lusts to see blood spill.
The novel indicts reality television for its exploitation of human suffering, and offers a futuristic version of the munera — gladiatorial combats — witnessed by the masses from the comfort of their gathering-places. As early as the third century BCE, thousands of Romans began to congregate in arenas for these spectacles. Prisoners of war, criminals, Jews, slaves, women, and others were offered up for the amusement of those who would come to watch, and cheer, and perhaps roar in favour of sparing the lives of those who fought valiantly in defeat. The spectacles were enacted to confirm the rulers’ power, to warn others about the dangers of opposing the state, and to entertain Romans. The thrill was about the spill, but not all were seduced by it. The Roman philosopher and orator Cicero, for example, wrote about the Pompeii Games of 55 BCE: “But what pleasure can it possibly be to a man of culture, when either a puny human being is mangled by a most powerful human beast, or a splendid beast is transfixed with a hunting spear . . .”
Humans do like the sight of blood. We don’t permit murder, but we certainly have no problem planting the idea in the public psyche. At a National Rifle Association conference in Houston in May 2013, delegates visiting the vendor displays could see a life-sized, three-dimensional, female target for sale. It was called “the Ex.” When “the Ex” is shot, she bleeds.
It is not difficult to imagine why the National Rifle Association has had such an enduring influence in the United States, and has been so successful at opposing efforts to curb the use of guns by American citizens. The Second Amendment to the American Constitution invokes “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” although the specific meaning of those words is contested. People who believe that citizens should have the right to carry guns argue that the Constitution backs them up. Others, however, say that the Second Amendment does not offer a blanket right to all civilians, but rather to those who form part of a state-organized militia.
Regardless of constitutional interpretation, violence does beget violence, which is exactly what underpins some objections to capital punishment. With its long history of state-sanctioned shooting, hanging, gassing, electrocution, and lethal injection, the United States is the only G8 country that continues to carry out capital punishment.
For a country where bloodshed was wantonly and publicly celebrated as part of capital punishment, though, one must look to France and its use of the guillotine.
During the French Revolution, a violent movement during the last decade of the eighteenth century to overthrow the monarchy and institute republican government, the use of the guillotine rose as part of the so-called Reign of Terror. In less than one year (1793–94), it is estimated that more than sixteen thousand enemies of the revolution were guillotined in France. That works out to forty-three beheadings a day. The guillotine symbolized the Reign of Terror. Maximilien de Robespierre, one of the key revolutionary leaders, stated that “terror is nothing else than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible.” Robespierre, who had successfully advocated for the guillotining of King Louis XVI in 1793, and who as part of the so-called “Committee of Public Safety” had vastly increased the number of public executions, eventually fell out of favour with his co-revolutionaries and was guillotined himself, in 1794.
Among the many victims of the Reign of Terror was Louis XVI’s wife, Marie Antoinette, who was guillotined in Paris on October 16, 1793. Asked at her trial if she had anything to say about all the allegations against her, Marie Antoinette said, “I was a queen, and you took away my crown; a wife, and you killed my husband; a mother, and you deprived me of my children. My blood alone remains: take it, but do not make me suffer long.”
Marie Antoinette spoke with the same dignity and composure as her late husband, Louise XVI, whose last words before being executed were: “People, I die innocent! Messieurs, I am innocent of all I am accused of. I hope that my blood may cement the happiness of the French people.”
Marie Antoinette was thirty-seven years old on the day she was beheaded, some nine months after her husband was killed in the very same way. Louis XVI was given the opportunity to prepare for his trial, as well as a goodbye dinner with his family. Marie Antoinette had been detained in a dungeon at length and had no such privileges before she was hauled through the streets in an open cart en route to meet her executioner at a scaffold in the Place de la Révolution. She had been persecuted in a sham trial over two endless days (sixteen hours one day, and fifteen hours the next), and accused of charges including but going far beyond treason. Today, it is widely believed that the allegations were bogus, but the dethroned queen was also vilified for aberrant sexual behaviour.
For years, pamphlets featuring pornographic drawings of her had circulated widely in France, alleging that Marie Antoinette — still seen as a foreigner in France, given her Austrian heritage — had a rapacious sexual appetite for men and women. They alleged she organized orgies in the palace at Versailles. (Words that might have evoked pride among male aristocrats helped hasten the execution of the dethroned queen.) In trial, Marie Antoinette was also accused of sexually abusing her own son. When pressed for an answer to that charge, she refused to discuss the matter and simply said: “If I haven’t answered it is because Nature herself refuses to answer such a charge against a mother. I appeal to all the mothers present — is it true?” While Marie Antoinette stood trial over two long days, she was bleeding profusely. Historians now speculate that she may have been suffering from uterine cancer. In a letter composed in her prison cell on the morning of her execution to her sister-in-law (who would never receive the letter, and who would soon also be guillotined), Marie Antoinette wrote: “I have just been sentenced to death, but not a shameful one, sin
ce this death is only shameful to criminals, whereas I am going to rejoin your brother.” Among the countless thousands of people summarily executed by a regime gone wild with paranoia, the persecution of Marie Antoinette shows perhaps better than most the pitfalls of submitting to rulers who are so rabidly intent on extracting blood that the truth becomes nothing more than a stone to be kicked from view.
Although the rate of public executions fell off as the Reign of Terror came to a close, guillotining remained a fact of life in France as the standard mode of execution. The last people to be guillotined in Paris were Claude Buffet and Roger Bontems in 1972, and the last person executed in France was Hamida Djandoubi in 1977.
Considered barbaric by today’s standards, the guillotine was named after Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who had urged the French parliament to consider a more civilized and painless manner of beheading people. Previously, aristocrats had been executed by means of the broadsword or axe, but others were burned at the stake or broken over the wheel, or faced the long, slow strangulation of the gallows. During the Reign of Terror, Charles-Louis Sanson became the official executioner and praised the guillotine. On April 25, 1792, he said: “Today the machine invented for the purpose of decapitating criminals sentenced to death will be put to work for the first time. Relative to the methods of execution practiced heretofore, this machine has several advantages. It is less repugnant: no man’s hands will be tainted with the blood of his fellow being . . .”
Quite apart from debates about whether the guillotine was faster, more painless, and more humane than other forms of execution in vogue at the time, beheading became a public spectacle during the Reign of Terror. Crowds attended in large numbers, some cheering and jeering, others mumbling that the executions happened too fast to allow for much enjoyment of the actual act. As Robert Frederick Opie notes in his book Guillotine: The Timbers of Justice, gallons of blood were spilled at the beheadings, and packs of dogs would come to lap it up at night at the base of the scaffold. The audiences cheered the beheadings as a form of entertainment, despite the quantities of blood spilled and the resulting stench. The revolutionaries who sentenced their enemies to death were so pleased with their new instrument of decapitation — and so intent on asserting their power and intimidating French citizens — that in one case, after a man who had been sentenced to death by decapitation managed to commit suicide first, his corpse was hauled to the scaffold, where it was guillotined anyway.
People respected the executioner, but they did not like him. Indeed, the role of public executioner — like many other trades — was assigned to specific family dynasties. Sons and grandsons were trained in the work of their ancestors. It was a living, but it could not have been a happy or comfortable life for the executioner or his family. Opie writes: “Having entered into the profession, a family and his descendants were marked forever. There was no escaping their role; down through the generations brothers and sons were bound to the same employment and had to face the same prejudice. The only friends, associates and potential spouses of an executioner were the families of other executioners.”
I have no difficulty believing Robert Opie. If I were living during the Reign of Terror, the very last person I’d be inviting over would be the executioner. Who wants a figure of death haunting your breakfast table and breathing over your baguette? I’d sooner go hungry than break bread with the man who guillotined my neighbour.
Alas, for the hundreds of years during which beheadings and other forms of capital punishment were carried out routinely in France, people seemed to enjoy the spectacle but they shunned the executioner. Looking back at this time in history, I try to imagine the courage of individuals who opposed the will and the control of the state. Simply living individualistically, or insisting on the right to express political beliefs, would have been enough to expose one’s neck to the falling blade. In revolutionary France, and in so many other homicidal regimes, leaders used the spectacle of blood to exert power and to exact conformity.
IN THE PAST FIFTEEN YEARS, we have witnessed the publication of two series of books with unprecedented sales. Both series were aimed at children or young adults. And both dealt with blood. Blood didn’t merely spill in the books. These days, it’s hard to find a book or movie where blood doesn’t spill. These books — which, combined, have sold well over half a billion copies and have been devoured by children (and many adults) worldwide — turn on the very concept of blood purity. At the very least, hundreds of millions of children in the past decade and a half have been swept away by books in which the characters are fixated on the quality of blood. The books have become so omnipresent that it seems almost redundant to mention their names: the Harry Potter series about wizards, by J. K. Rowling, and the Twilight series about vampires, by Stephenie Meyer.
In Twilight, Bella Swan is a “good girl” who falls in love with the vampire Edward Cullen, who, in turn, protects and falls in love with her. Edward insists that she must maintain her virginity by not making love with him until they are married. Edward, because he loves her, must transcend his instincts and help Bella maintain her sexual purity and the purity of her human blood by resisting the very thing that vampires just love to do to young girls: seduce them and suck their blood and turn them into undead who get to preserve their youth and vigour forever.
You would have to be brain-dead, these days, to fail to observe how commercially successful vampires have become in contemporary culture. True, people have been talking about vampires for many centuries. In 1897, Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula helped set in motion contemporary obsessions with the undead who keep their youth and their powers (including legendary sexual prowess) intact by feasting on human blood. But in recent years, the focus on vampires seems almost a prerequisite for commercial success in the fantasy genre. The Vampire Diaries, True Blood, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are just three in a litany of TV shows on the theme.
Is it because vampires are unbelievably sexy, drawing upon centuries of sexual experience each time they bring a young thing to the very peak of pleasure (and remaining wrinkle-free despite their advanced age)? Is it because vampires are all-powerful, and can easily rip out a heart or pull off a limb? Is it the way that a vampire corrupts humans, draws them over to the dark side by contaminating their blood — the ultimate sacred fluid?
Just as many young people are drawn to vampire culture, many are also drawn to cutting themselves as a form of controlled self-abuse. Experts theorize that cutting among young girls is not generally the expression of suicidal impulses, but rather a way of managing pain and anxiety. The vampiric seduction is a private act, as is the act of drawing out one’s blood. People tend to get over their vampiric obsessions as they emerge from adolescence, as do most girls who have been drawn to cutting.
The vampiric attack is irreversible. Once you’ve gone over to the dark side, there is no coming back. You do get to live forever, but no longer as a human. Cutting, however, allows for more control. Who will see the marks, which you can cover up with clothing? How seriously are you to be hurt, by losing a little blood? For some, perhaps, cutting focuses one’s pain in the body, instead of in the psyche. But it is temporary. And most adolescents grow out of it.
THE ONE RECENT CHILDREN’S literary phenomenon even more famous than Twilight is J. K. Rowling’s seven-part series about wizards, named after protagonist Harry Potter. Harry’s life would have been a lot more peaceful if he could have taken easy refuge from a murderous, powerful, evil wizard named Lord Voldemort. Voldemort, the antagonist who pursues Harry to the very end of the series, is obsessed by notions of blood purity. Indeed, it is possible to read the Harry Potter series as a meditation about good versus evil, along the lines of blood. In Harry’s world, there are wizards (or witches) who descend only from other wizards, and others who have one muggle (human) parent and one wizard parent. There are even muggles who become wizards and can wield the power of wizards, without having a parent who is a wizard. Harry himse
lf is the son of a wizard (father) and muggle (mother). Even though almost nobody in the world of Harry Potter is a pure-blooded wizard, Voldemort (also of mixed background) and his followers are on a vendetta to exterminate wizards with any so-called blood impurities, who are known as “mudbloods” or “half-bloods.” Draco Malfoy, for example, is a wizarding student who sides with Voldemort, considers himself a pure-blood, and insults Harry’s friend Hermione Granger by calling her “a filthy mudblood.”
Ron Weasley, a wizard who becomes close to Harry and Hermione, explains to them early in the series: “Mudblood’s a really foul name for someone who is Muggle-born — you know, non-magic parents. There are some wizards — like Malfoy’s family — who think they’re better than everyone else because they’re what people call pure-blood . . . I mean, the rest of us know it doesn’t make any difference at all.”
The struggle between good and evil in the world of Harry Potter comes down to those (such as Voldemort, Draco, and his father, Lucius) who would exterminate people of impure blood, and those (such as Harry, Ron, Hermione, and their beloved wizarding school headmaster, Albus Dumbledore) who wish to stop the exterminators and live in peace.
J. K. Rowling has noted that in writing the Harry Potter series, she had in mind the obsessions with racial purity held by Nazis and other white supremacists. In answer to the question “Why are some people in the wizarding world called ‘half-blood’ even though both their parents were magical?” she has said:
The expressions “pure-blood,” “half-blood” and “Muggle-born” have been coined by people to whom these distinctions matter, and express their originators’ prejudice. As far as somebody like Lucius Malfoy is concerned, for instance, a Muggle-born is as “bad” as a Muggle. Therefore Harry would be considered only “half” wizard, because of his mother’s parents. If you think this is far-fetched, look at some of the real charts the Nazis used to show what constituted “Aryan” or “Jewish” blood. I saw one in the Holocaust Museum in Washington when I had already devised the “pure-blood,” “half-blood” and “Muggle-born” definitions, and was chilled to see the Nazis used precisely the same warped logic as the Death Eaters. A single Jewish grandparent “polluted” the blood, according to their propaganda.
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