I first read Patricia Cornwell’s Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed in the first decade of this century. I thought she nailed it. As far as I was concerned, she had apprehended Jack the Ripper!
I’m not as sure today after reading her new edition of that book. Don’t get me wrong. Her case is still strong. If she hasn’t exactly collared the killer, she is at least in proximity to him. Her research has created tools which will aid in the eventual resolution of the case. A resolution which may not comport with her findings but that I predict will validate her efforts. I hope that validation will be enough compensation for the genuine suffering she endured tackling the case.
This is in spite of all the moronic barriers the UK has set up to prevent any thorough examination of the evidence. Jack the Ripper is apparently a protected copyright of the United Kingdom. The forensic value of studying human darkness is apparently lost on Britain. The case is at once an opportunity to decode the autonomic compulsions that animate killers like the Ripper and bring them to light where things like early intervention and prevention become possible. It lends credence to the Class Theory approach to the Ripper that if he wasn’t in league with the Royals he was at least doing the upper class the service of dispatching female vermin. The suffering of the poor in Britain persists because it is of social utility to the ruling class. That is a point hard to argue with, phony calls for unity to the contrary.
Cornwell is not a class theorist. And I don’t want to misrepresent her position. Read her books. The first and the rewrite. But I went there when I read her. I went to “class warfare”. I went to Freud and Jung. I went to Oscar Wilde. And The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Freud because there seems a clear case of castration anxiety if not performance anxiety in Cornwell’s Killer. The blade becomes the substitute penis compensating for any anatomical inadequacies or deformities. With it the Ripper achieves the ultimate penetration. In psychoanalytic circles, old and new, the ability to penetrate a female was analogous to social success for the healthy Freudian Male. It was a symbol of making one’s way in the world. Reich took that further. Sexual satisfaction was the key to mental health if not bodily health for all humans, male, female, and in between or outside. Cornwell’s Ripper is a man who has been deeply humiliated in the sexual arena. Fear of being sexually laughed at, rage over the humiliation. He literally dissected his anxieties.
Jung because we’re talking about an almost completely disembodied society in Victorian England. Nothing as earthy and disgusting as sex was allowed by the stiff uppers. Freud’s return of the repressed morphs into Jung’s Shadow. The sexual impulse killed off by Judeo-Christian animal abuse is resurrected in the autonomic nervous system where it becomes an autonomous being. Blended with any unprocessed emotions endemic to anatomical deformity, it can become quite the monster. Think of Morbius’s Id in Forbidden Planet.
It doesn’t mean disfigurement necessarily leads to homicidal behavior. The Elephant Man was not a mass murderer. And I’m not sure physical disfigurement was the Ripper’s problem as much as the social disfigurement brought about by Victorian sexual mores which were crimes against humanity.
This is the reason we should study the Ripper (as opposed to exploiting him). We ourselves are in danger of complete disembodiment due to moral inquisition in the form of “wokeness”. The dark is being repressed on a scale not seen since Victoria. The monstrous is manifested by repression. The idea I have no monster in me begs the unconscious mind to make one. Why do the woke find sex so disturbing? Why is it, along with race, the weapon of choice in murder by cancellation? Why do they so readily confess the sins of others, so classically projecting the shadow that one imagines Carl Jung turning in his grave? What monster will emerge from wokeness? The completely disembodied hologram? The zombie? The Cyborg? All of them, cyborg, hologram, zombie inquisitors flogging disgusting flesh like abusive dog fighting trainers?
I would side with the Class Theorists in that Cornwell’s Ripper seems the very incarnation of “class warfare”, a monster of Upstairs, Downstairs proportions. A protector of the chastity of the wife and a deep penetrator of foul lower class genetically inferior female sexuality. Not ok to rip the wife. But you can do anything to a whore. This was a direct result of the horrific sex hatred of the period.
But Cornwell’s Ripper was a painter. If she hasn’t done so already, Cornwell might want to write an analysis of his artwork where the art is the only evidence. That would be a good book. It causes me to wonder. Oscar Wilde knew Cornwell's Ripper. Could Dorian Gray have been Wilde’s Ripper Thesis?
Of course, that would mean the painter wasn’t the Ripper. The model was. Cornwell’s Ripper painted the actual Ripper! He was the original Rippersploitationist. Maybe even his publicist.
This line of "thought" is why some believe the “Ripper” to have been an ordinary “sex killer” without any special genius to him. His work was co-opted by publicity hounds out to make a quick buck. This view certainly causes one to turn to Aaron Kosminski as a person of interest whatever the status of DNA evidence against him. Kosminski’s effeminacy fits the profile of the inadequate sexual milquetoast out to achieve penetration any way he can a la the bantam rooster syndrome.
If that seems too colorful by half, let’s check our shaming mechanisms. Sex should be a considerably lighter subject than the heavy water experiment Victorians made it out to be. As such, the true “Jack the Ripper” was toxic Victorian sexual shame. It blanketed the UK during the Ripper Era.
And that means anyone could have been the “Ripper”.
Any sex. Any class. Any one.
