Others had the making of me : the cultural construction of serial murder

Abstract

This thesis examines the framing devices which are used to interpret serial murder and their role in shaping our understanding of this most disturbing subject. Each chapter considers a period of writing which, I have argued, can be aligned with contemporary representations of serial murder. In chapter one the image of the serial killer as an outsider who is doomed to an aberrant worldview is explored within the context of the writing and aesthetics of the Romantic era. The work of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and William Hazlitt are analysed in detail. The period’s concept of the individual and, in particular, the artist as an anomalous figure who is driven by his own inner-directed motives to discover the most intense aspects of human experience is juxtaposed to modem representations of serial murder which posit the killer in a similar role. The sexual implications of personal and artistic transcendence and the aesthetic of the sublime are linked to accounts of the violent and extreme deeds of the serial killer. Building upon these basic ideological correlations between Romanticism and contemporary narratives of serial murder, this first chapter also examines texts by Thomas De Quincey and Edgar Allan Poe, and argues these writers’ preoccupation with death, especially death by murder, can be interpreted as the genesis of a particular mode of representation which has remained central in modern-day discourses on serial murder.