Ripperology (XI)

“But I enjoy the easier, lighter feeling of being out of England. I suppose if one lived in one of these countries one would take its problems to one’s self also, & be oppressed & darkened by them – even as I am, more or less, by those which hang over me in London. But as it is, the Continent gives one a refreshing sense of getting away—away from Whitechapel & Pamell & a hundred other constantly thickening heavinesses.” (Henry James am 29. Oktober 1888 aus Genf an seinen Bruder William. Schon 1885 hat sich James über die Serialität von Kunst und Verbrechen Gedanken gemacht — in einem Brief an Fanny Stevenson: “Ah, to whom do you say it — that the devil of the serial at one’s back mortifies the man & murders the artist.”)

Über Henry James,¹ Jack the Ripper, den kosmopolitischen Juden und Autorschaft handelt (im Anschluß an Sander Gilman² und Judith Walkowitz³) Sara Blair in Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation (Cambridge U. Press 1996), S. 123 ff. und zitiert The East London Oberserver:

“‘the crowd who assembled in the streets began to assume a very threatening attitude towards the Hebrew population of the District. It was repeatedly asserted that no Englishman could have perpetrated such a horrible crime as that of Hanbury Street, and that it must have been done by a JEW’ (15 October 1888; cited in Gilman. 117)”.

Ausländerangst und Antisemitismus produzierten die entsprechenden Verbrecherbilder:

(Zit. bei Blair, S. 124.)

Henry James’ Roman The Tragic Muse (1891), um den es hier geht, kannn z. B. bei “The Ladder. A Henry James Website” (von Adrian Dover) eingesehen werden.

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1. Der übrigens der Lieblingsautor von Paola Brunetti ist. [↩]
2. The Jew’s Body. New York: Routledge 1991. [↩]
3. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. [↩]

Verwandte Artikel:

1. Ripperology (III)
2. Ripperology (VII)
3. Ripperology (X)
4. Ripperology (VIII)
5. Ripperology (IX)