Book Review

Karen Halttunen's study of popular accounts of trials traces the shifting cultural representation of murderers from the colonial period, when understandings of murder were shaped by Calvinism's emphasis on the universal nature of sin and strove to define the murderer as part of the community, to the nineteenth century, when a literary interpretation, which cast the murderer as an outsider and used the Gothic tropes of mystery and horror to make that understanding stick, prevailed. As that suggests, her work may be read as a cultural history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one that sketches out the effect the shift from the religious to the secular had on popular understanding of crime and murder more particular-ly; but her actual agenda is broader. She seeks to trace out the historically contingent attitudes towards murderers and capital punishment that were formed in the nineteenth century and have shaped our current understandings of that crime.	1
The product is a nuanced interpretation of nineteenth-century trial reports, which closely analyzes how tropes about gender reflected cultural norms and drove the narratives of different trials. But it is also a meditation on the rise of the secular and the related loss of a particularly religious perspective on the relation between sin and crime. Contrary to many who dismiss religious values as inspiring a particularly punitive approach, Halttunen argues that the desire for vengeance that, she asserts, has driven our national understanding of the death penalty from the nineteenth century to the present, reflects our secular society's inability to comprehend and respond to either evil or sinfulness. This is a sort of hubris, one that leads its proponents to dismiss crime as a containable form of evil that can be vanquished if we only work at it hard enough, and Halttunen devotes her final chapter to offering a pointed criticism of the late twentieth-century manifestation of that attitude.	2
That aspect of her argument makes this book more provocative, as well as more timely, in 2003 than it was when it came out in 1998, but in other respects, the book raises more questions about the relation between culture and law than it answers. In particular, the book leaves unexplored the issue of how cultural under-standings of murder influenced actual trials, by shaping jurors' responses to evidence, lawyers' arguments, or judges' instructions. Presumably cultural influences that were strong enough, and lasted long enough, to determine twentieth-century understandings of murder and murderers had some impact within courts, as well as in the world outside them. Indeed, one assumes that they could not have succeeded to the extent they did unless there was no clear divide between the world of law and the world of popular culture.	3
That points to a second question that deserves further consideration. Halttunen's analysis of the way literary motifs influenced trial reports, and so shaped popular understanding of murder and murderers, is complex, exploring the influence of genre and specific tropes, but her focus is almost exclusively on how those cultural practices dictated understanding of women, men, family life, domesticity, domestic violence, and violence more generally. As evocative as that is, one wishes she had spent even a little time offering as complex a reading of popular attitudes towards things legal, including law itself, the courts, lawyers, or judges. The nineteenth century was a period rich in literary treatment of law, particularly criminal law. Novelists such as Mark Twain, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Gilmore Simms wrote about lawyers and trials, and their works probably helped shape the cultural forces that Halttunen described, and were doubtless shaped by them. More practically, those works also provided the context in which people in the nineteenth century developed their attitudes toward the entire legal system, and in that respect they may have helped shape law itself.	4
The absence of that consideration means that for legal historians, especially those interested in broad questions about the relation of law and culture in the nineteenth century, Halttunen's book serves chiefly as a prologue for a further study. Like any good prologue, it points us in the right direction, offering an evocative picture of why the story--in this case, the relation between culture and law--is important. But it is not the story itself; that awaits another book.	5
Elizabeth Dale University of Florida

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