The Ripper's Victims in Print

by Rebecca Frost

  Some authors argue that the apparent lack of resistance on the women’s part is a testament to the Ripper’s skill, arguing that he must have caught them off guard completely. While Annie—the poor creature—is ill and not expected to have fought back, Liz is most often put forward as the candidate most likely to have been physically able to defend herself. More often the “easiest prey” makes itself even easier by spending coins on alcohol instead of a bed, and these women place themselves on the street, inebriated and clearly unable to fight back. The question of whether their lives would have been worth fighting for is rarely raised in the face of women expected to be unable to fight, much less to make the decision over whether their lives would be preferable to death.

  Some authors go so far as to not even name the women, relying on location or date to distinguish which body is being discussed. Instead of Annie or Kate, these authors refer to the second victim or to the Mitre Square victim, as though order—or location—of death supersedes any individual identifying factors. Indeed, the identity of the Ripper can be investigated without the names of his victims, causing Bob Hinton to ask what use it is to research the biographies of these women, or Bruce Robinson to admit bluntly that, for him and for so many others, Catherine Eddowes’ life was no longer than thirty-five minutes. The women—derelicts, creatures, or prey—are only notable because of their deaths, and thus their deaths are continually the focus while their lives are largely ignored.

  Representations of the murdered women have caused some contention between authors who respond to previous books with arguments over whether earlier narratives depicted the women too kindly. Annie is most often at the center of these discussions, with authors arguing for or against the “romantic” view of a woman down on her luck, merely trying to make a living as best as she can. Arthur Douglas seems to praise the Ripper for “call[ing] a whore a whore and not a fallen angel,”3 a jibe which is also directed as those who have written about the murders before he did. The representation of these women seems to swing between those two extremes—whore and angel—without the acknowledgment that people are rarely either just one, and that identity is in fact a spectrum. Authors tend to cling to what facts they can find and not extrapolate between them, very nearly the opposite of what tends to happen with their Ripper suspects.

  A span of months or years with no documentation in the life of a suspect seems to be a blank canvas for authors to suppose and suspect. Patricia Cornwell has especially been accused of wildly filling in the blank spaces, but she is hardly the only author to do so. There are expectations of the sort of person the Ripper must have been, based largely on the FBI and popular culture representations of serial killers since the 1980s, and those gaps seem to be an invitation to authors to fit those pieces together for a compelling argument.

  Thus we are confronted with Bob Hinton’s entreaty to put ourselves in the Ripper’s shoes and imagine ourselves as Hutchinson, scorned by the beautiful woman we have attempted to woo away from her dreary life and, finally, driven to murder her. We have David Abrahamsen, who argues that his Ripper suspects were themselves victims and thus made their families victims, as well. The murders they enact have become Martin Howells and Keith Skinner’s “antiseptic and painless experience,”4 creating a distance from which readers need not mourn the murdered women but from which they can also gaze upon the Ripper with fascination—and, if authors like Hinton and Abrahamsen have their way, with empathy.

  The move, then, continually seems to be away from the murdered women. There is a small resistance in the 1990s when authors such as William Beadle, Philip Sugden, and John Tully attempted to give the women as much time and space on the page as they gave the Ripper, arguing for their humanity and dignity while deriding the Ripper. “Spare no thoughts for him,”5 Beadle argues, although his narrative spares plenty. It is simply impossible to write a book about Jack the Ripper without dwelling on him, especially when that book means to argue a case for his identity. Some later books of the 2000s manage to devote more time and energy to the murdered women than to the Ripper, if only because they are specifically setting out not to champion a suspect. Even these are standouts among texts that fall back on, as Tony Williams put it, “what comes easiest”6—in the case of the authors not prostitution, but the ignoring and deriding of prostitutes. The Ripper narrative encourages authors to draw closer to the Ripper while shifting his victims out of the spotlight and at times even offstage entirely.

  Sacrifice, Redemption, Immortality

  The practice of referring to the murdered women as “sacrificial victims” began as early as 1937 with Edwin T. Woodhall, but it was not a passing fad. In 1975 Richard Whittington-Eagan suggested that the women were “redeemed by the enormity of their deaths.”7 In 1988 Paul Begg wrote that their deaths gave them “a sort of immortality”8 that could not even be shared by the richer or more well-known figures of the day. Russell Edwards calls it a “strange immortality,”9 but it is one that nevertheless exists. R. Michael Gordon proclaims that the women “walked into history”10 on the nights when they were murdered. It is not a constant refrain—not as constant as the denigration of these women, certainly—but it is one that has popped up occasionally, even within the past few years.

  If the women’s deaths were indeed a sacrifice, they were certainly not bloodless. Instead of being categorized in the same way as a shipwreck, the women now share space with ritually slaughtered animals in way that moves beyond Robin Odell’s 1965 proposal that the Ripper was in fact a Jewish slaughterman. A sacrifice is performed in order to appeal to a higher power, whether in thanks or in pleading, and blood sacrifices are often highly ritualized and respected occasions. Human sacrifice is frequently relegated to pre–Columbian civilizations in the New World or ancient civilizations in Europe and is dismissed in recent times as divergent, underground behavior. If the victims of Jack the Ripper are meant as human sacrifices, then they are far removed from the religious practices of the day; if they are meant as animal sacrifices, then they are once again no longer human.

  The use of the word “sacrifice” suggests that the act was made to someone or something, or for someone or something. A sacrifice involves the giving up of something, generally something that the enactor will miss. Sacrificing a good animal means that that person’s family will not be able to eat it, but the ritual itself is made for a perceived greater good, such as the favor of a god. Such favor is only earned through this decision to take a personal loss and, as such, the size of the sacrifice should be large enough that the person is affected by it. A man who sacrifices a single goat when he has twenty is making a different offering than the man who kills his only animal.

  What, then, was sacrificed in the deaths of Polly, Annie, Liz, Kate, and Marie Jeanette? Their killer certainly took a risk in breaking laws and taboos in order to commit both murder and multination, but he—or she, or they—was never caught. Perhaps, if the religious aspect of sacrifice is considered, he sacrificed his soul, but to what purpose? If the women’s deaths were a sacrifice and not merely the actions of a person seeking a forbidden thrill, what was the intended outcome? What was meant to be the payoff of the sacrifice?

  Various authors, Paul Begg included, have observed that the spate of murders drew attention to the appalling conditions of the East End and led to social change that was meant to help the people living there. Gas lighting was only one project implemented because of this attention. However, few are willing to credit the Ripper with such a social conscience, considering his method. If someone wished to literally and figuratively shed light on the East End, a “sacrifice” of numerous strangers would seem like a risky, if not entirely foolish, means of doing so.

  The actual loss of this “sacrifice” is, first and foremost, the lives of the women murdered. Paul Begg and John Bennett argue that there were other losses, as well, in the form of simple fear—the loss of a feeling of safety—or copycat murders. It would seem, however, that the killer himself has lost nothing, not ev
en his anonymity nearly 130 years on.

  The women certainly did not choose to die. The very fact that these are called “murders” and Jack the Ripper labeled a “serial killer” shows there is no argument. They did not commit suicide because they had nothing to live for, and as of yet no author has suggested that the murdered women planned their own deaths for the sole purpose of social change and enlisted the killer of their own free will. Those who suffered the greatest loss did so unwillingly and with no promise of better things to come. Once again they are relegated to the position of the sacrificial animal. The lives they lost have even been argued to have been worthless in the first place and thus no great loss for anyone involved.

  Their deaths, after all, are often argued to have been swift, with the mutilations being enacted after the slit throat. The lack of noise coming from any murder scene does suggest that the women were either dead or incapacitated before the mutilations took place, but the general narrative technique of jumping between the last sighting of the living women and the discovery of her body means that the deaths themselves go unseen and unexplored. Tony Williams, arguing that the Ripper both comes from his own family tree and was a doctor, has a specific vested interest in making the gruesome murders as sanitary as possible—a doctor, after all, is meant to preserve life, not to take it, and he is discussing a man rather closely related to him by blood. The continual insistence that death was swift, if not entirely painless, permeates the Ripper narratives, allowing authors and readers alike to skip the moment of transition from life to death and instead to be able to concentrate on the murdered women’s bodies solely as objects.

  This time skip supports both the practice of drawing the women away from the spotlight and the centering of the killer in its exact middle. By ignoring the acts themselves and instead concentrating on the amount of skill it would take to perform them in the dark, as well as the minimum amount of time required, the murder becomes distanced and antiseptic, presented in terms of a coroner and doctors and not blood on the cobbles. Any suffering the women went through in their deaths is minimized or outright dismissed, removing the need for empathy. The killer himself is rarely, if ever, depicted actually completing the act, allowing authors to craft their supposed Rippers as attractive, or troubled, or sympathetic. If they are not shown inserting the knife or rooting around in a still-warm body cavity for the desired organs, then perhaps those moments are the deviation and the killer’s public face is the truth. The question becomes “What sort of man could commit these murders?” and not “What sort of man could hide behind his public mask of sanity?”

  As sacrifices, if that was what they were, it would seem that the murdered women were flawed. Most religious sacrifices are meant to be of high quality—granted, at times so the temple might over-charge penitents with the argument that the sacrifice they personally brought was not pure enough—but, in terms of the moral standards of the day, prostitutes were not pure. Paul Roland is a rare author who suggests that the women have a chance to “redeem themselves”11 on their own and in life, through honest labor and by getting themselves off the streets and away from the bottle. The mere statement that they could redeem themselves—ignoring the practicalities of how—indicates that the women are definitely in need of redemption.

  This redemption is generally granted them through their murders. It would not have been enough for them to have died of other causes, or even to have been murdered by someone other than the Ripper. It is this public outcry and the newsworthiness of their corpses that provides redemption for their lives. More specifically, their murders provide redemption for their prostitution.

  As early as 1965, Robin Odell puts forth the argument that prostitution was not a choice for these women but the only option that stood between them and starvation. Not every author chooses to stress this point. Many tales involve headstrong women willingly prostituting themselves, and Mary Jane Kelly is the most likely to take up prostitution as her own choice, wielding her youth and beauty as power over higher classes of men. Some variations have these women purposefully leaving their marriages in order to pursue prostitution, instead of being forced to engage in prostitution solely because their marriages fell apart. All failings of these women can be traced not to the bottle—although it is often part and parcel of the tale—but to sexual promiscuity. Those who still had living husbands often also possess a resentment of being tied down to the role of wife and mother. Somehow “prostitution” becomes equated with “freedom” in these narratives, and a woman seeking either is clearly in the wrong.

  Although Paul Roland suggests that any woman in this possession might indeed be capable of orchestrating her own redemption, it would seem that only Polly is given the chance, and she is unable to maintain her position as a maid, especially in a tee totaling household. It would not have been enough for her to earn wages through honest means—means other than prostitution—but she would also have had to spend them on necessities and not drink. The Ripper’s intervention stopped her from engaging in further prostitution or alcoholism, true, but also ended any chance the women might have had at improving their own lives.

  And yet, in spite of the conditions they lived through and the manner in which their lives ended, there is still a sense of envy or perhaps a righteous justification of the Ripper’s actions. Paul Begg and John Bennet write that the women “would otherwise be unknown to history”12 if they had not been murdered, and compare the relative wealth of information available about them to the lack of information about more prominent figures of the day. It is an opinion Begg had already presented in 1988, like Richard Whittington-Eagan before him when he suggests that their position might be one to envy. It is their “fame” that is the subject of such envy, since the women’s names—with various spellings and in various forms—are still written today, more than a century after their deaths, when even the name of their murderer might forever be unknown. It seems doubtful that this envy would stretch to being remembered as a common whore, a pitiful creature, or looking like a bad drawing of a human being, much less having had to go through the life experiences that landed these women in Whitechapel in the first place.

  The indication seems to be that, given the choice, many people—from prostitutes to politicians—would have gladly met the Ripper’s knife. It is a baffling proposition, since their deaths are the only event in their lives for which these women are known. In many cases, it is only their deaths and their mutilated bodies that deserve mention in the narratives, with even their names being left aside. Any woman murdered by Jack the Ripper is forever known as a Ripper victim above and beyond all else, although “all else” is hardly any more flattering: women abandoned by their husbands and children; alcoholics; and prostitutes to boot. Any kindness shown to their memory is attributed to their friends’ desire not to speak ill of the dead, or to other authors over-romanticizing the situation. The women are also frequently depicted as having put themselves in harm’s way and all but offered themselves up to the Ripper by not having the money for a bed that night, and thus they are not only ugly, dirty prostitutes but stupid, as well. It would seem that authors suggesting that theirs is a position to envy have not fully contemplated what, exactly, they are envying.

  Granted, a politician or person of higher birth might have had a better chance at an extended biography simply because someone on that position would be given a more complete of existence to start with. There is, however, no point of comparison between the murdered women and those imagined to be jealous of their enduring legacy, and thus no clear indication whether such a politician would be remembered for his own acts, or solely for the acts of the Ripper. It would seem, on the surface, that being murdered would be the easiest way to make it into the history books, although no one seems to want to consider whether the murdered women would have chosen that opportunity themselves. They were simply not given the option.

  Any acknowledgment of the tragic nature of the women’s murders tends to come by way of authors suggesti
ng that, with the mystery solved, their souls might now rest peacefully. As enviable as their positions might be, the fact that their murderer has so long escaped justice is unacceptable. So many authors make a token acknowledgment to the victims in their dedications, introductions, or final paragraphs, a variation on R. Michael Gordon’s entreaty that the women should now “rest well”13 because the identity of their killer is known. Their violent deaths, unable to be prevented, are avenged by the naming of a suspect who is dead by the time his—or her, or their—name is published. Indeed, by the time of many of these accusations, anyone who personally knew the women would also be dead. Closure, such as it is, is meant for the interested public and the descendants of those involved, should they know who they are. The raging curiosity behind the Ripper’s true identity is presented as a quest for justice for those who did not see much of it during their lives, or even in the narrative proclaiming vindication. The immortal women who are envied, redeemed, and avenged are still little more than East End whores who might not actually be deserving of envy, redemption, or vengeance, but who still somehow bought and paid for their deaths.

  Blame Lives On

  It would seem that the focus of so many Ripper narratives would be the person guilty of committing these crimes, when in fact responsibility for this string of murders is most often placed elsewhere. The Ripper was frequently driven to kill, and then by something other than his own demons—something outside of himself. Perhaps it was an overbearing mother or the absence of a father figure that shaped him, the way many serial killers have been presented since the 1980s. Perhaps there were warning signs that someone close to him should have caught, thus preventing the Ripper from ever murdering anyone. Instead of any of these explanations, however, so many authors prefer to assign guilt to the women the Ripper murdered instead of to the Ripper himself.