How Poetry Explores Crime

Posted on April 2, 2014 by Jessica French

DH Final Project Proposal

Original Proposal:

Because I am a Sociology Minor currently enrolled in Criminology, I thought it would be interesting to combine the two disciplines in exploration of how Modern Poetry treats crime and its understanding of criminality.  I plan to use a digital tool such as Prezi to explain the theories of criminology during the periods of modernism, as discussed in our class.  I will begin by defining the roots of criminology from a sociological standpoint, including photographs of contemporary theorists (in relation to the timeline from which criminology began, as this is newer area of study), their corresponding ideas of criminality, and perhaps illustrations of their studies.  Perhaps I may include some information on crimes of historical social significance that might have influenced the way poets treated and responded to violence and criminal behavior.  To illustrate crimes of history, of course, I will elaborate utilizing pictures of newspaper clippings, some crime scenes, the killers, motives, etc. to keep this part, not only informative, but also visually stimulating.  Popular crimes during the era of modernism will provide useful background concerning what was threatening to poets and their awareness of the same.  I plan to use most likely four or five poems from a variety of poets (spaced out between the time periods of modernism) to explore the social discourse between the poets and the world in relation to crime.

Preliminary Research:

Walsh, Anthony.  Criminology: The Essentials.  Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2012.  Print.  

Walsh’s book offers up a detailed history of the study of criminology, including the scientists behind its theories.  In order to better understand the literary treatment of criminality and society’s responses to it, the best place to start is from the inception of criminology.  I will offer my audience snapshots of contributions each theorist is responsible for, including the potential relevance a theory has in relation to my primary material.  Based on my search results, I may be able to tie criminologists with specific theories that were of social and literary significance.

Casey, Christopher A.  “Common Misperceptions:  The Press and Victorian Views of Crime.”  Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLI:3 (2011).  367 – 391.  MLA International Bibliography.  Web.  29 March 2014.

Casey begins his argument by discussing the waning and waxing of the popularity and institution of capital punishment in Victorian England.  He points out that “New Journalism – the shift away from primarily parliamentary or political news in daily and weekly periodicals to more popular and often sensational content” spearheaded the public’s growing obsession with crime (372).  Furthermore, as the reading population grew, so did its love for violent crime, particularly murder.  By highlighting Casey’s main points in Common Misperceptions, I will be able to divulge the roots behind the growing fascination with crime.  As we have discussed in class, modern poets were very sensitive to changes in the world around them, as much was happening in the way of literature, fiction, non-fiction, and [sensationalist] journalism.  The “common” peoples’ responses and connections to the perverse will cause most modernists to form their own responses of it, and in turn, their own brand of connectedness.

Heilman, Ann and Mark Ilewellyn.  “What Kitty Knew:  George Moore’s John Norton, Multiple Personality, and the Psycholpathology of Late – Victorian Sex Crime.”  Nineteenth-Century Literature 59.3 (2004).  372 – 403.  MLA International Bibliography.  Web.  30 March, 2013.

So far, I have been able to find great conversation of crime that is included in fiction novels.  Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn explore the psychopathology behind George Moore’s character, John Norton, as it relates to Late-Victorian Sex Crimes.  More often than not, crimes that receive the most social and political attention and out lash, include sexual deviance.  This article is great at supporting criminology theories involving explanations of sexual deviance as a cause of some sort of mental trauma on the part of the perpetrator.  Heilmann and Llewellyn argue that Moore was just one of the artists that “appl[ies] contemporary cultural theories and newly emerging scientific concepts and philosophies” as a response to “investigation[s] of psychopathology and the workings of repressed desire and trauma on the impulses of the female – and male – hysteric” (374).  During my study of criminology, my favorite theorist was not only known for his work in the area of psychology, but also sociology.  Freud conceptions encompassed both disciplines, but collectively explain many of the underlying factors for crime.  At a time when “doing gender” was just being understood, writers of all colors, were exploiting it.  In this article, I was pointed to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.  Again, a novelist, but he was also a poet.  If sexual deviance was a theme in other forms of literature, I am willing to bet it is also included in poetry…and many others like him.

I just think this is a great quote…

In Confessions of a Young Man (1888), George Moore admits why he enjoys playing the part of agent provocateur, “Naturalism I wore round my neck, Romanticism was pinned over the heart, Symbolism I carried like a toy revolver in my waistcoat pocket, to be used on an emergency” (246).

Levay Matthew.  “Remaining a Mystery:  Gertrude Stein, Crime Fiction and Popular Modernism.”  Journal of Modern Literature, 36.4.  1 – 22.  MLA International Bibliography.  Web.  30 March 2014.

In keeping with discussion about modernism, Stein and Pound’s influences are deeply involved with crime fiction.  Again, more with novels, but utilizing this work’s bibliography, I am sure I will be pointed towards other examples of crime in poetry, as this area of literature was also experiencing modernism.  Moreover, Levay takes the reader through an in-depth review of the reasoning behind her exploration in crime fiction.  Stein, as a renowned modernist was also experimental.  However, Levay attempts to take the middle-road, as he provides his position concerning Stein’s reasoning behind immersing herself in crime fiction:  “modernism’s deep connections to popular and middlebrow culture…perceiv[ing] modernism not as an inherently high-brow and elitist cultural formation, but rather as a variegated and oftentimes conflicting collection of multiple artistic perspectives” (3).

Garland, David.  The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society.  Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, 2001.  Print.

Sheehan, Paul.  Modernism and the Aesthetics of Violence.  New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2013.  Print.

Other works consulted…

McChesney, Anita.  “The Female Poetics of Crime in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s ‘Mademoiselle Scunderi.’”  Women in German Yearbook, 24 (2008).  1 – 25.  MLA International Bibliography.  Web.  29 March 2014. 

I am not entirely sure where this article will fit in with my research, but it provides a thoughtful example of feminine poetic conceptions.

History of Criminology Blog Post #1

  • modern criminology is product of 2 main schools of thought: classical school (18th century) and positivist school (19th century)
  • father of Classical Criminology – Italian nobleman and professor of law, Cesare Bonesana marchese di Beccaria
    • On Crimes and Punishment (1764) – plea to reform criminal justice system, to humanize and rationalize law, and to make punishment more just and humane
    • citizens give up certain rights in order to gain protection from the state (social contract), i.e., laws
    • laws were often arbitrary and cruel
    • equals should be treated equally; unequals nonequally
    • “equal” and “unequal” refer to crimes offenders had committed, which should only be considered as a difference, not social standing
    • judges should not have ability to interpret laws, should only apply punishment for given offenses, as it was statutorily defined by the legislature
    • punishment should be certain, swift, and severe (based on nature and severity and should deter crime)
    • Jeremy Bentham and human nature
      • Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) – philosophy of social control based on principle of utility (utilitarianism)
        • human action should be judged moral or immoral by effect on happiness of community – “greatest good for greatest number”
        • maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain
        • hedonism – pleasure is main goal in life; other life goals are only desirable as means to an end of achieving pleasure and avoiding pain
        • rational – behavior consistent with logic; observe logical “fit” between goals people strive for and the means utilized to achieve them
        • free will – allows people to purposely and deliberately choose to follow a calculated course of action
          • if people see illegal pleasures, they do so freely and with full knowledge of the illegality of their actions
          • society has a perfectly legit reason to punish
      • to stop crime, punishment (pain) must exceed the gain (pleasure)
      • criminals weigh costs against benefits of crime and will not commit said crime if the costs exceed the benefits
      • value of pleasures and pains are considered in four ways
        • intensity/severity
        • duration
        • certainty
        • propinquity (how soon after the crime the pleasure or pain if forthcoming)
        • William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)
          • discussed human nature in poetry
          • “Wordsworth’s Vagrants explores the poet’s treatment of the ‘idle and disorderly’ in the context of the penal laws of the 1790s, when the terror of the French Revolution caused a crackdown on the beggars and vagrants who roamed the English countryside. From his work on the Salisbury Plain poems through to the poetry about vagrants, beggars, and lunatics in Lyrical Ballads, Quentin Bailey argues, Wordsworth attempted to imagine a way of relating to the vagrant and criminal poor that could challenge the systematizing impulses of William Pitt and Jeremy Bentham. Whereas writers had previously relied on sensibility and fellow-feeling to reveal the correct ordering of society, Wordsworth was writing in a period in which legislators, magistrates, and commentators agreed that a more aggressively interventionist approach and new institutional solutions were needed to tackle criminality and establish a disciplined and obedient workforce. Wordsworth’s interest in individual psychology and solitude, Bailey suggests, grew out of his specific awareness of the Bloody Code and the discussions surrounding it. His study offers a way of reading Wordsworth’s poetry that is sensitive to his early radicalism but which does not equate socio-political engagement solely with support for the French Revolution.”
            • Wordworth’s Vagrants: Police, Prisons, and Poetry in the 1790s by Quentin Bailey of San Diego State University, 2011; British Literature in Context in the Long Eighteenth Century  http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409427056
            • LOCKE
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