Literature, Psychoanalysis and the Death Penalty, 1900-1950

The key aim of this project is to examine how the cultural and ethical power of literature offered early twentieth-century readers opportunities for thinking through capital punishment in the UK, Ireland and the US in the period between 1900 and 1950. Further, during this period both literature and conceptions of justice were profoundly influenced by the developing science of psychoanalysis. In a 1926 article 'Über die Todesstrafe' Thomas Mann used Freud's 'Totem and Taboo' in support of his view that capital punishment was inherently retributive. And in fact, Freud published a short anti-death penalty tract called 'View on Capital Punishment'; his followers Theodor Reik, Hans Sachs and Marie Bonaparte would lobby powerfully against the death penalty using psychoanalytic arguments. This aspect of the history of psychoanalytic theory has been insufficiently studied, but it was one of the key ways in which psychoanalysis made a major intervention in culture, as there was a general consensus in support of the death penalty except for specific writers and specific advocacy groups. In fact, the impact on readers of literary representations of the death penalty informed by psychoanalysis cannot be overestimated, given that capital punishment was no longer a public spectacle. I will examine the way that the death penalty had gone into the cultural unconscious, its reality only accessible by means of imaginative effort, and how efforts by literature and psychoanalysis to imagine and reimagine the death penalty had a powerful effect on public debate in the period.

Further, the impact of psychoanalysis was also political since abolitionist movements were divided about the value of affect and empathy and these arguments were informed by psychoanalytic discussions. For example, in the UK, there were two differing abolitionist movements: one, The Howard League, which rejected emotive tactics and which still exists today, and the other more idiosyncratic, founded by Violet vander Elst, which used shock tactics modeled on suffragette campaigns. The project will consider how the power of literature in this context is demonstrated in, for example, the irresistible appeal of literature to campaigners in the debate: while both the American lawyer Clarence Darrow and the anti-death penalty activist Violet van der Elst published nonfictional works that advanced their causes, each were also inescapably drawn to fiction as a medium. In 1905, Darrow published a now-forgotten novel about capital punishment that influenced Dreiser's 'An American Tragedy', while in 1937, the same year that van der Elst published 'On the Gallows', and with the same press, she published a volume of popular ghost stories that reflect on judicial violence. The project will therefore examine how connections between 'high' and popular culture seem particularly inextricable where the death penalty is at stake.