Postimperial Landscapes: "Psychogeography" and Englishness in Alan Moore's Graphic Novel From Hell: A Melodrama in Sixteen Parts
2006; University of Minnesota Press; Volume: 63; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/cul.2006.0019
ISSN1460-2458
Autores Tópico(s)Crime and Detective Fiction Studies
ResumoOn November 9th, 1888, in 13 Miller's Court, Jack the Ripper executed his masterpiece, the violent mutilation of his final victim Mary Jeanette Kelly. In the graphic novel From Hell: A Melodrama in Sixteen Parts, a comprehensive study and fictionalization of the Whitechapel murders, which decisively entertains the notion that the Ripper is none other than Sir William Gull, Royal Physician in Extraordinary to Queen Victoria, Alan Moore devotes an entire chapter to this most romanticized and vicious attack in the Whitechapel murders. In Moore's version, Kelly's death marks the zenith of Sir William Gull's madness and the fulfillment of his mythological beliefs. Eddie Campbell's illustrations here are primarily abstract close-ups of knife hitting arteries, organs, and flesh, and of Gull lovingly arranging Kelly's body into the chaos that was captured in the now-infamous police photographs of what is presumed to be Kelly's corpse. The energy required to kill Kelly causes the boundaries of time to dissolve: Gull hallucinates back to his days as a surgeon performing an autopsy in an operating theater but also forward in time to the present as his exertions cause him to burst into the twentieth century. In an ecstatic hallucinatory state, Gull suddenly finds himself triumphantly brandishing a scalpel in the middle of an open-walled office (see Figure 1). He accuses the workers around him of being numbed by the shimmering numbers and ... lights of the twentieth century. Think not to be inured to history, he announces, black root succours you. It is INSIDE you. Are you asleep to it, that cannot feel its breath upon your neck, not see what
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