Murder, Myth, and Melodrama: The Theatrical Histories of Jack the Ripper

In 1888, several murders in the London boroughs of Whitechapel and Spitalfields became the first modern serial killings reported by mass-circulation daily media. These were identified with “Jack the Ripper,” a name that still resonates in popular culture and entertainment. This dissertation looks to the theatrical culture of London, arguing that theatre and drama provided models for the creation of this figure, which has the cultural status of a “myth” in the sense defined by Roland Barthes. Drawing on the vocabulary of Barthes and on Diana Taylor’s idea of the “scenario” as a unit of enacted narrative with mythic cultural force, four case studies from a variety of London stages trace how ideas and anxieties about urban modernity were taken from the stage and used by newspaper writers and the public to imagine the Ripper. The first looks at a production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that took place at the same time as the murders, showing how these modeled the killer for a middle-class audience. The second describes an illegal basement theatre in the East End that used representations of the murdered women as one of its variety of entertainments, arguing that these both resisted and confirmed definitions of the murders, the victims, and Whitechapel itself as “obscene.” A third case looks at London Day By Day, a successful 1889 melodrama, arguing that this was the first representation of the Ripper on a legitimate stage, albeit in a conflicted and partially-obscured way that nevertheless reveals how crucial melodrama and its iconography was to popular understandings of the murders in the first place. The final case study looks at The Lodger, a 1914 novel that was adapted to stage and screen, tracing how urban legends about a possible killer functioned to consolidate the image of the murders in the 20th century. In conclusion the contemporary practice of “Jack the Ripper Walking Tours” is briefly surveyed to argue that contests over visuality, poverty, obscenity, and urban space that had important currency in the late-Victorian theatre are an integral part of the Ripper myth and remain relevant to this day.Ph.D.2018-02-05 00:00:0