Session 2: Constructing the Constructed

3rd Global Conference

Thursday 15th March – Saturday 17th March 2012
Prague, Czech Republic

Gilles de Rais and the Construction of Evil
Darren Oldridge
University of Worcester, UK

The French nobleman Gilles de Rais was hanged in 1440 for the murder of over a hundred children. He confessed to the torture and killing of his victims. These crimes provide an exemplary instance of human wickedness: indeed, if they cannot be called “evil” then the word itself seems redundant. As these acts took place almost six hundred years ago, they also offer an opportunity to examine changing perceptions and explanations of a particular narrative of cruelty and murder. Viewed in this light, the case of Gilles de Rais reveals much about the historical development of the idea of evil.

This paper surveys the various interpretations of Gilles’ deeds, and locates them in their cultural contexts. In his own time the killer was associated with the Devil, and confessed to necromancy at his trial; he was also an exemplary penitent in his final days. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries he was identified with witchcraft. Later thinkers viewed him in more naturalistic terms: thus in the nineteenth century Sabine Baring-Gould portrayed him as a kind of evolutionary atavism, and Richard Krafft-Ebing diagnosed him as a sexual sadist. In the work of J. K. Huysmans, George Bataille and Valentine Penrose, his story was used to explore (and even celebrate) the allure of transgression. More recently, the novelists Edward Lucie-Smith and Robert Nye have focused on the corrupting atmosphere of Gilles’ court and the acquiescence of its inhabitants.

Some striking issues arise from this literature. The meaning of Gilles’ story has changed markedly over time. Many of the motives for his crimes that were presented at his trial no longer make sense to western observers; and later attempts to explain his behaviour seem equally strange. This observation casts doubt on contemporary explanations of “evil”, and indicates the contingency of the concept itself. The many representations of Gilles de Rais also illustrate some recurring themes in the discourse of human wickedness: these include the tendency to imbue certain types of malefactor with inhuman or superhuman qualities, and the desire to present evil as the defining quality of particular individuals. This paper considers the effects of such ways of thinking on the shifting interpretations of Gilles de Rais, and points to their wider implications for the representation and understanding of evil.

Necessary, Evil and Contagious: Execution and the Construction of the English Crowd, 1800- 1868
Stephen Banks
University of Reading, UK

Foucault has asserted the importance of execution in reconstituting the power of the sovereign. Execution, he argued, sustained a justice system predicated upon seeing and learning – with the executioner as tutor. The chapter discusses the abolition of public execution in England in 1868 and considers the different strands in the preceding debate. Traditionalists continued to assert the power of example. Abolitionists, opponents of capital punishment per se, argued that capital punishment usurped divine function and denied the ever present potential of grace. However, there was a third strand in the debate. Intra-mural executionists denied the value of the seen example and feared the violence that they alleged it might unleash. Influenced by phrenology and by the miasmic theory of disease they asserted that evil could be approximated to a species of contagion transmitted through the senses. To men of sensibility the violence implicit in execution was negated by reflection upon the virtuous purposes for which it was performed. However, the coarse imitative qualities of lower orders, defective in their resistance to vice, ensured that the sight of state violence provided no instruction. Instead execution induced violent imitative acts divorced from their original moral setting. Thus, the author argues, when intra-mural execution was adopted it was not as a consequence of increased humanitarianism but rather as a result of an increasing suspicion of the nature and the culture of the lower orders. It marked but one further step towards

the recasting of popular culture as either the actual repository of national evil or at the very least the miasma in which it could take root and flourish.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Multi-Mentioned, Multi-Dimensional, and Multiplied in the Tales of Despereaux: Understanding Human Concepts of Evil Through the Simple and the Simply Told
Phil Fitzsimmons and Edie Lanphar
Avondale College of Higher Learning, Australia & Garden Street Academy, Santa Barbara, California, USA

This paper critically unpacks the concept of evil as narratized in DiCamillo’s international bestseller, The Tales of Despereaux. As this text breaks the taboo that children’s literature should avoid any explicit reference to evil by explicitly mentioning and applying the term multiple times, it crosses over into the realm of ‘deformed discourse. It thus steps into the realm of apophatic literature, and the heart of the monstrous’ (Fitzsimmons 2008). As such, this text not only becomes representative of the cultural body in which it was created, but the category crisis within that culture. These concepts are further emphasized as through the course of the text, evil is not only named and an associated typology created, as is typical of apophatic texts, but the concept of good is not. Thus a labyrinthine possibility of inversion and disorder is set up in that what is named and framed may not be as it seems, and in fact the opposite could be the case. That is, what is perceived as evil may have a substance of truth and genuine ‘good’. Another layer of inversion representative of category crisis is the centrally highlighted motif in this text that evil exists, thrives and is entered through a stairwell into a dungeon. As a ‘mouth’ this ‘vaginal symbol of the subincision wound’ (Campbell 1969:103) is also an inversion symbol or signifier of menstruation and castration. Thus the geographical site of evil is also a psychological site rich in the symbols of birth, life and resurrection with a corresponding collapse and inversion of cultural meaning. In essence this text suggests that what is cultural perceived as evil, is not what is seems and that an actual socio-cultural ‘initiatory wound and shedding of blood’ reveals the need to find a new institutional narrative and a new existential myth.