"Normal people are so hostile"

That's a quote from Dexter, my favorite show and my ultimate hero. If you've never seen the show, he's a serial killer who only takes out bad guys. But mainly he's incredibly hot, and smart, and just all around fabulous. He often says fabulous things, like the title of my post. It fits today but I won't bore you with details.

Next, to the real world. Last weekend turned out to be a complete blast, only to be followed by this week which has also been amazing. I'm finished for the year! Yippee! All that is left to do is to finish the dissertation and I'm golden. Life is good.

I'm working right now on a chapter on theater and mimesis, focusing on Genet and Artaud in general and Les Bonnes in particular. It's added a whole new dimension to the dissertation, which feels much richer now. If only I could make all the chapters feel like they fit together. But they all seem almost independent of each other. Chapter one covers the traditional murder narrative, the expectations of readers and analyses of a few early stories. Chapter two discusses the Papin sisters, their crime, testimony and trial, looking at how this true crime refuses incorporation into any traditional murder narrative. Chapter three examines the killer and the female as other, beginning with Aristotle's designation of female as monstrous and working towards other types of alterity created by/confirmed in their crime. Chapter four discusses theater and its ability to incorporate this monstrous other into the self, thus being the sole medium able to tell the story of the Papin sisters in a way that captures the essence of the women and their crime. Anyway it's exciting to get back to writing and to leave teaching behind for a while.

Here are a few images from various productions of Les Bonnes. The first is from a Theatre des Halles in Avignon's 2006 production of the play:
I love this set, from Teatro Altrove in Genova, 2008:

And this amazingly beautiful stage set by Alain Ollivier from the Studio-Theatre de Vitry in 1991:

What I would give to be able to actually see this play! Is anyone putting it on anytime soon?

Okay, back to work...

Papin sisters

So the dissertation is finally moving along. I went back and began at the beginning, which is always a good thing. I'm analyzing the actual testimony of Christine and Lea to see where there are gaps in their statements that may have drawn in other writers. Here's a bit of what I've found about the crime scene, just for a taste of what I'm dealing with. Get a load of this stuff:

Physical evidence:

Two photos extant of the crime scene. Show weapons still on the ground. Notes and a diagram identify the various hubris surrounding the bodies: keys, handbags, hairpins, an eye, a package of soap, broken plates, buttons, skin, a bracelet, a hat, dried flowers, part of a wig, a comb, a knife, a chain, socks and gloves.

Medical report of Dr. Chartier:

Madame : At the morgue, part of an ear (determined to be that of Madame Lancelin) and two eyeballs are resting “dans le tour de cou” – they had been found under the body when it was lifted and put there by the attendants moving the body. Madame is practically scalped. Much description of damage done to the face…no longer recognizable. Arms not injured. hands are still in gloves, are cut and bones are broken. Watch stopped at 7:22. Right hand is more injured than the left.

Mademoiselle : Watch stopped at 7:47. Face equally unrecognizable. Left eye found on staircase. Skin sliced in the form of a V on upper lip and right cheek. Skull fractured and brain matter coming out. Left hand, holding brown hair. Right hand, palm sliced open. Thigh sliced after death. Several cuts through the muscle. She had her period, wearing “une garniture tachée de sang.” Left leg cut through to the bone. Pants pulled down by the killers and shirt pulled up.

Christine's (pictured at right above) testimony:

They left the house before dark – I don’t know exactly what time it was. They didn’t give us any work to do and we had already been working very hard. The iron blew out; I had just picked it up from being fixed. When they got home, around 5h 30, I told Madame I was unable to iron because the iron was broken again. When I told her that, she acted as if she were about to attack me. Seeing that she was going to jump on me I lunged at her face and pulled out her eyes with my fingers. When I say it was Madame I attacked, I was wrong – it was Mademoiselle whom I attacked and pulled out her eyes. During this time Léa jumped on Madame and also pulled out her eyes. They fell down and I went to the kitchen to get a hammer and a kitchen knife.

I closed and locked the doors downstairs because I wanted the police to find the bodies, not out patron. We washed our hands, which were very bloody, in the kitchen, and took off our bloody clothes. We put on a nightgown and locked the door and got in the same bed, where you found us.

I do not regret what happened, in other words, I can’t tell you if I do or not. I would rather have the skin of my mistresses than for them to have mine and my sister’s. I didn’t plan the crime, and I didn’t hate her, but “je n’admets pas le geste qu’elle eut ce soir…à mon égard.”

Léa (pictured at left):

My employers left the house around 3:30, they left us alone with my sister. She ironed and I cleaned. Before leaving they did not scold us, there was no discussion at all. They came home around 6h or 6h 30.

Here Lea refuses to continue; the investigators read her sister's statement to her.

Everything that my sister told you is exact, the crimes happened exactly as she told you. My role in this affair is absolutely that which she indicated. … No more than my sister, I haven’t the least regret of the criminal act we committed. Like my sister, I would rather have the skin of my employers than that they have mine.

When asked “Before you hit your employers, were you and your sister hit by them?” she replies: "They didn’t hit us, they only made a gesture as if they were about to strike us. I repeat, I would rather have had their skin than that they have mine and, I repeat again, I have no regret.”

Some kind of case. It's a creepy world out there.

Murder, mayhem and madness

Here's what I've been working my ass off for the last month to finish. I may never complete it though, since the journal I'm submitting it to has given giving me tons of leeway, which has only led to a great wasting of time...

Here's the intro. Enjoy.

Léa (on left) and Christine Papin before...

...and after the murders they committed. (Here Christine is on the left, Léa on the right.)

One of the most gruesome, bloody and violent murders of modern France is also one of the most written-about crimes of the twentieth century. The event known as l’affaire Papin refers to a crime which took place in February 1933 at the home of the Lancelin family in the provincial town of Le Mans, France. Christine and Léa Papin, two sisters who had worked as maids in the household for six years, killed the mother and the daughter of the family following an electrical outage caused by the iron Christine had been using. Apparently in reaction to Madame’s anger at the discovery of the blackout, the sisters jumped on their employers in a remarkably brutal attack: Christine and Léa ripped out the eyes of the other two women with their fingers, then beat them to death with a pitcher and hammer and sliced their faces and bodies with a kitchen knife. Found huddled together in a single bed behind the locked door of their attic bedroom after the crime, the sisters willingly went with authorities to be questioned at the police station.

Despite the abundance of facts around the case – Christine and Léa were able to give police a detailed account of the murders – there is no single all-encompassing narrative to explain the crime, primarily because of the sisters’ inability to elucidate any reason for the killing. Their lack of emotion and apparent confusion about why they killed has generated such numerous and varied explanations in the both factual and fictive accounts that it serves as a marker for a shift in what it means to solve a crime. Traditionally, this explanation consists of identifying and finding the criminal, bringing him before a judge, and punishing him for his act, the implication being that the crime is solved once the the murderer is contained. Deprived of any sense of finality in this particular case upon discovering the identity of the killers, journalists and other writers found it necessary to assign their own interpretation on the event, as murder is an event for which the public demands a clear, cohesive and rational explanation. Perhaps even more than the lack of motive was the somewhat ready-made quality of the sisters’ story. Faced with the elements of incest, eye-gouging, homosexuality, Oedipus, class relationships, mirroring, and the dualities of light and shadow (the electrical blackout) and Jekyll and Hyde (the two photographs of the sisters,) writers could hardly not write the narrative of this crime.

Speaking of the rise in crime literature in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Ken Morrison states: “The work of detection within literary space was designed to show how murder was to be handled, how it would be investigated, and how it would be accounted for” (305.) This crime occurs at a moment in literary and cultural history where more than just the body of the criminal was required. Questions which had been broached in psychology in general and psychoanalysis in particular compelled the act of detection in another direction. Not only did it involve searching for physical clues, evidence and truths, but looking for deeper hidden truths about crime and the criminal. Morrison goes on to say “The presence of the investigator is predicated on the idea that the truth is hidden from view and that the investigative gaze alone will reveal this truth…The aim of detective fiction is to bring the murderer to justice by unraveling or disclosing the truth” (306.) By 1933, this ‘truth’ had changed. Whereas traditional crime writing focuses on finding the criminal, the question now is shifting from finding the person who committed the crime to seeking dark truths which lay in the heart of a killer. Who were the Papin sisters? How could two killers lurk beneath the calm domestic exterior of their starched maids’ uniforms? Does the blank slate provided by their crime inspire a “delirium of interpretation,” whereby writing the story is imperative to understanding something essential about the human soul?