Delaney, John
Description
Violence in the penal system and the changing attitudes to it as a
spectacle in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the primary
subject of this thesis.
I begin my story with the public (and usually violent) forms of
punishment as they existed in the eighteenth century. I treat them as
cultural phenomena which are to be understood as part of a wider
context of attitudes to the body and rituals. This chapter acts as the
counterpoint to the following chapters where I try to explain...[Show more] why all
these public forms of punishment disappear by the 1860s.
These chapters cover three main themes. Firstly the influence of
labour demands as manifested in the mercantilist period, when
criminals are discovered as useful subjects (many are set to work in
colonies and houses of correction instead of punishment by death and
mutilation), and later how the labour requirements of the industrial
revolution (freedom of movement and a reduction in the cost of the poor
law by modifying diet and social activities) necessitates an
internalisation of morals and habits (via the new prisons and plans for a
system of national education) instead of the more negative treatment of
crime by public exposure. Secondly the role of the soft/hard dichotomy,
whereby the nervous system of women is portrayed as peculiarly delicate
and weak in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century medical tracts,
a portrayal which is, in turn, used to reinforce the domestic
subordination of women. As a result the 'softer' sex are not expected to
enjoy spectacles of punishment, which is a contradictory notion as
women were as liable to execution or flogging as men. Finally the
changes in the attitudes to death and representations of the dead body
are reflected in the abolition of public dissections and the gibbet; there is
also the fear that public executions (as well as exhibitions of the dead
criminal) are perversely attractive to some individuals, which
completely undermines their value as a deterrent.
These various themes are united by the constant reference to the
body: the body as the object of public and violent forms of punishment and
changes in the perception of the body as the basis of their demise.
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