Trials of Passion
Authors: Lisa Appignanesi
For
Suzette Macedo
Adam Phillips
Marina Warner
(friends who always inspire)
Every love story is a potential grief story.
Julian Barnes
I must draw an analogy between the criminal and the hysteric. In both we are concerned with a secret, with something hidden ... In the case of the criminal it is a secret which he knows and hides from you, whereas in the case of the hysteric it is a secret which he himself does not know either, which is hidden even from himself... The task of the therapist, however, is the same as that of the examining magistrate.
Sigmund Freud
Contents
I. CHRISTIANA EDMUNDS AND THE
CHOCOLATE CREAM MURDERS
5
Sex and the Victorian Hysteric
10
âEnceinte! She Says She Is, My Lord'
11
Murder, Gender and Shifting Public Attitudes
II. A HYSTERIA OF THE HEART:
THE CASE OF MARIE BIÃRE
19
âA Hyper-excitation of the Affective Faculties
III. HYSTERIA, HYPNOSIS AND
CRIMINAL RESPONSIBILITY
23
Hypnotic Murders 1: The Chambige Affair
24
Hypnotic Murders 2: L'Affaire Gouffé
IV. NATURALIZING THE
IMPULSIVEFEMININE
25
Henriette Caillaux Meets the Press
30
The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing
34
Mad Harry: American Psychiatry Meets the Law
36
Star Witness for the Defence
37
The Prosecution Counter-attacks
38
Climax: âMurder as a Cure for Insanity'
41
The Second Trial of Harry K. Thaw
This is the story of crimes that grew out of passion, their perpetrators, and the courtroom dramas in which they were enmeshed. It is also the story of how medics who became experts in extreme emotion came to probe and assess the state of mind of these passionate transgressors. The cases in question as well as the experts' views affected justice and left their mark on history. The views were no more gender-blind than justice itself.
When thirty-one-year-old Mary Lamb, not yet co-author of the long-loved
Tales from Shakespeare
, murdered her mother in 1796, her brother Charles told the Coroner's Court she was mad. This resulted in her being sent home into his care and absolved of all responsibility for her crime. Murder was considered to be an act, not an essence marking her out as a naturally born criminal, an aberrant being tainted by degeneracy from birth â as various crime and mind experts might insist a century later. No psychiatric witnesses were called on to investigate Mary's state or to give an opinion in court. The determination of her lunacy' was â everyone agreed â visible to a common-sense appraisal by coroner and jury. Sifting what and who was bad from what and who was mad took no expert training. Roman Law enshrined a principle of mitigation for those who were
non compos mentis
â of unsound mind and not in control of their mental faculties. English common law followed suit: law-breakers with a defect of understanding, such as children, or a deficiency of will, such as lunatics', could not be held accountable for their acts. Madness was its own worst punishment; Mary Lamb needed no additional one.
In the course of the nineteenth century and into the beginning of the twentieth, such rulings took on the growing complexity we recognize as the norm today. The line between who was mad, who bad, grew more opaque and began to waver. If justice was to be done, an untrained eye could not be trusted to make the judgement. This required the expert opinion of mad-doctors and âalienists' (the keepers of people whose reason has been âalienated'), nerve medics and those who by the turn of the century as the profession proliferated had started to become known as âpsychiatrists'. Theirs was an expertise founded on the very passions that sweep reason away, on vagrant emotions and erratic cognitive powers, on manias, delusions, delirium and automatisms. Their knowledge could serve the courts and inform justice, as well as protect society. Disseminated from debates in the courtroom through an ever more popular press, their thinking also subtly changed our view of the human.
A Pandora's box flew open as psychiatric experts and a sensationalizing media probed motivation in a variety of murder and attempted-murder trials. Transgressive sexuality, savage jealousies, rampant forbidden desires, passions gone askew, vulnerable, suggestible, hysterical minds, were revealed to be aspects not only of those âothers' we label mad, but potentially of us all. When humanity dreamt collectively â as Robert Musil noted in
The Man Without Qualities
, his novel about the year that led into the Great War â it dreamt a Moosbrugger, a sadistic pervert, a psychotic murderer who wore an everyday aspect of mild good citizenry, a face âblessed by God with every sign of goodness'.
Musil had his characters respond to the murderer Moosbrugger in ways that have become common: their gaze idealizes him into an exceptional individual â a sublime beast, a genius, a criminal revolutionary; or it pathologizes him â as a deviant, degenerate, the very âlust murderer' the Austrian forensic psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing examined in his
Psychopathia Sexualis
of 1886. But Moosbrugger is also an ordinary man who inhabits a historical moment and a particular set of circumstances that propel him into the murder of prostitutes. If he
had been a woman â as many of the passionate criminals in what follows are â not only his choice of murderee but also the diagnosis he received and society's response would have been quite different. So too might the court's verdict. It may aspire to be, but justice is rarely blind to its time's expectations of gender.
This book journeys into the heart of dark passions, feminine and masculine, the crimes they impel, and their trial by daylight and doctors in the courts of justice and in the larger public arena of the press between 1870, the date of my first case, and 1914, when war changed so much. It also charts a power struggle that continues today between the law's definitions of insanity and the more complex understandings of the human that the mind specialists promulgate. Where does justice lie?
The criminal law envisions a human who is an emphatically rational (male) being, capable of knowing his own motives and intentions, of recognizing his freely willed acts and the difference between right and wrong. The humans, often enough female, who stand in the dock rarely live up to this enlightened ideal. They may be of partially âunsound mind', derailed by passion, in states of disarray or numbed coldness. Trapped in what may be their own delusional system, their criminal act seems to them a (heroic) way of attaining justice, of righting a fundamental wrong, of warding off a greater evil, or of achieving a reparation for some unnameable suffering. Sometimes the expert psychiatric witnesses who speak in their defence seem to understand them as little as the judges. Their form of control or âtherapeutic confinement' is not necessarily any less punitive than the prison.
Though the line between madness and badness becomes increasingly difficult to draw, the authorities all agree that the line is fundamental to any legal system. This was already clear to the English Solicitor General, Charles Yorke, back in 1760 at the height of the Enlightenment when the modern law was being established. The 4th Earl Ferrers was on trial for murder. Known for his heavy drinking, womanizing and violence, this major landowner had killed his estate
steward after the latter had sided with Ferrers' wife during the divorce proceedings she had instigated on grounds of cruelty. Ferrers' friends had made him put up a plea of occasional insanity. John Monro, physician to Bethlem Hospital, served as an expert witness, one of the first to be recorded. In everyday language and based on his observation of inmates at Bedlam, Monro stated that uncommon fury, jealousy and suspicion without grounds were common symptoms of insanity. The Solicitor General summed up astutely:
My Lords, in some sense every crime proceeds from Insanity. All cruelty, all brutality, all revenge, all injustice is Insanity. There were philosophers in ancient times who held this opinion as a strict maxim of their sect; and my Lords, the opinion is right in philosophy, but dangerous in judicature. It may have a useful and a noble influence to regulate the conduct of men, to control their impotent passions, to teach them that virtue is the perfection of reason, as reason itself is the perfection of human nature; but not to extenuate crimes, nor to excuse those punishments which the law adjudges to be their due.
Passions out of control, Yorke states, do not equal
legal
insanity. The bad are bad. Ferrers was hanged, despite his rank. But the uncertainty about crimes of passion and their relation to madness was hardly resolved by this early case.
When it was a woman whose passions had led her to crime, the uncertainty mounted. After all, a woman's hold on reason had long been thought to be weak: passions, ever dangerous to her mental balance, could so easily topple it. Infanticide, the most prevalent form of murder by women in the nineteenth century, brought into being an early and legally accepted link with madness in what continues to be understood as a post-partum psychosis. This was treated leniently by the courts and rarely punished by the hanging that other capital offences incurred. Even today, women's malign passions are often turned against those helpless infants and children whom they fail to
see as separate from their own bodies and whom they attack in the ways they may attack themselves.
If a woman was being tried for murder and there was no insanity plea, then she could only be either innocent or a monster of depravity. There was little terrain in between. By the mid-nineteenth century, women of the upper classes had become the symbolic keepers of society's virtue, embodiments of a greater, nurturing goodness, of purity and morality. Their crimes of passion â particularly if they were independent women, wives who strayed, or spinsters â thus challenged all received wisdom about femininity. They had transgressed the very boundaries of nature. Press and public peered anxiously and voyeuristically at these objects of shuddering fascination and tried to understand secrets, motives and desires that before our own time rarely faced public exposure. The questioning and reporting of these private passions and inchoate emotions elaborated the ways in which women and their sexuality could be conceived.
