Return to Ripper street: Neo-Victorianism, gothic landscapes and true crime after the watershed

Millette, Holly-Gale (2014) Return to Ripper street: Neo-Victorianism, gothic landscapes and true crime after the watershed. Captivating Criminalities Conference, Corsham Court, Bath Spa University, Bath, United Kingdom. 24 - 26 Jul 2014. (Submitted)

Abstract

At approximately 3.20am on Friday, the 31st of August 1888, MaryAnn Nichols, an alcoholic mother of two, was killed by a cut to the throat in Buck’s Row, Whitechapel Ward, London. She was forty-two years old. She was not the pretty young thing full of gaiety and song of modern myth’s depiction. She was destitute, displaced, hungry and unlucky. Two months later five women would be dead and the history and mythology of Whitechapel would change forever.

This paper will consider aspects of the BBC’s Neo-Victorian return to Ripper Street in 2013. Specifically, I would like to discuss: 1) why imbricating a television drama within the narrative and topos of an unsolved Victorian murder was viewed as a favourable marketing strategy; 2) what parallels exist in the strained social fabric and precarious identities laid bare by austerity; and, 3) how post-structuralism intersects the narrative, thereby highlighting mechanisms of critical discourse embedded in the drama.

This paper will consider the cruel paradox of Murderer and Criminal as Social Reformer. In it, I will argue that two concurrent waves of slum clearance legislation sanctioned an excising of the Ward from all sides, leaving it vulnerable to violent crime. Included with this will be a discussion of the Freudian uncanny and both Freudian and Lacanian aspects of gender and otherment visible in the violence that took place – on a regular basis – in Whitechapel Ward.
In watching the programmes, I was struck by how – less than two years after the London Riots, with immigration figures on par with those of the 1880s, and in the grip of a recession – 2013’s viewers of Ripper Street participated in release by revisiting an unsolved murder and Victorian detective narratives. In short, I do not think this mirroring was accidental rather, I believe, it was relative to a similarity of ideological patterns and political discourse embedded in the Gothic topos and True Crime narrative of the Whitechapel Murders.

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Contributors

Author: Holly-Gale Millette

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