Why hello there. You might be curious about what I’ve been working on lately. Let’s take a little peek.
The Ripper Inside Us: What Interpretations of Jack Reveal About Ourselves is coming this spring from McFarland, and in many ways it’s the counterpoint to my first book, The Ripper’s Victims in Print: The Rhetoric of Portrayals Since 1929. That one looks at how authors have spent the past century or so writing about the Canonical Five women murdered during the Autumn of Terror, and The Ripper Inside Us examines the ways we’ve presented, and represented, the murderer.
Let’s take a look at the cover copy:
The story of Jack the Ripper has had continual interest since he stalked the streets of Whitechapel during the Autumn of Terror in 1888. During this time, the murders of the Canonical Five made headlines all over the world while in the modern day, the Ripper story continues to permeate all forms of media on the page, screen, in podcasts, and in fiction. We continue to search for something we will likely never, and perhaps do not even wish to discover: Jack’s true name.
This book looks at the lasting intrigue of Jack the Ripper and how his story, and the stories of the Canonical Five victims, are brought back to life through modern lenses. As psychological approaches and scientific techniques advance, the Ripper’s narrative evolves, opening a more diverse means of storytelling and storytellers. How these storytellers attempt to construct a full tale around the facts, including the burning questions of motive and identity, says more about us than the Ripper.
While I limited myself to, uh, print for The Ripper’s Victims in Print, my sources for The Ripper Inside Us run the gamut from print to stage to screen to waxworks. Basically we won’t let this story die – we keep adapting it to all kinds of media and situations, including romance novels, of all things. Katrina Jan‘s doing her doctoral work on the Ripper and romance novels, and she’s one of the awesome contacts I’ve made while working on representations of the Ripper.
The thing is, there are so few hard facts about the Ripper crimes. They were committed in 1888, and much of what was collected or written about them at the time has been lost or otherwise muddied in the retelling. Can we trust newspaper reports of the crimes or their versions of witness accounts? How much can we really glean from the surviving official documents? What assumptions can we make based on Victorian forensics?
On the one hand it becomes a game of connect the dots, asking us to take the small pieces we can trust and turn them into an integrated whole that makes sense. On the other it becomes a sort of Thematic Apperception Test: there are snapshots of a sort, but they’re ambiguous, and the story the viewer tells about the image reveals more about the teller than the scene being described.
When we take a look at these crimes and the evidence surrounding them and make a case for a suspect, we’re telling a story that makes sense for us, based on our own personal experience and what we have been taught by our home culture. One element of the tale is very nearly standard: the vast majority of us agree that the Ripper was indeed a Jack, because we can easily believe that a man would violently kill a large number of strange women. Police in 1888 didn’t have modern psychology or the benefit of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, but they – and the newspapers – agreed that a man could do this. His reasons might not have been clearly defined as they are today (for example, the fact that we currently recognize four types of serial killers, which handily gives us four broad motives) but the collective mind agreed that these murders were the work of a man.
When various authors, directors, or creators work to assign motive and identity to the Ripper, they explain what makes sense to them, in their time, and given current thought about violence. Some of these narratives are short-lived or otherwise quickly adapted into fiction – for example, the idea that Jack the Ripper was in fact Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale – while others linger and withstand changing ideas about violent crime.
The Ripper Inside Us has also received this advanced praise:
“The Ripper Inside Us: What Interpretations of Jack Reveal About Ourselves offers a holistic and rigorous examination of a controversial subject which had imbedded itself into our cultural psyche. The spectre of the Ripper has been with us for over 130 years, assuming a multiplicity of shapes through the decades. Frost adeptly stalks these manifestations of an unsolved mystery that refuses to die, exploring everything from nonfiction and novels to walking tours, documentaries, podcasts, wax works and movies while asking the uncomfortable question, what does our need to keep telling these stories say about us? Both balanced and insightful, Frost has expertly crafted what will be an essential text for anyone researching or teaching this subject.”
Hallie Rubenhold, Baillie Gifford Prize-winning author of The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
What does our need to keep telling these stories say about us? Mostly, I think, that we really need to take a step back and ask ourselves that … and then take a look at the stories we’ve told, and why we find them so believable. If we can empathize with a serial killer enough to metaphorically step into his shoes and explain his actions … well. How far do we actually stand from him, after all?
Rebecca Frost 