The Beast Within - Emile Zola [6]
If the novel places a question mark against Lombroso’s criminal stereotyping, it appears more readily to embrace Tarde’s thinking on the ability of the criminal instinct to adapt itself to changing social conditions. This is seen in the way in which murderous intent exploits opportunities afforded by the new technology of the age, namely the railway. Both Roubaud and Flore are railway employees, and their lives are to a large extent regulated by the demands of their employment. Flore, it is true, manages from time to time to escape her duties and discovers a form of liberation and independence by roaming the nearby countryside. Yet she must always return to her job. It therefore comes as no surprise that when she and Roubaud plan their separate murders, they both think spontaneously of the railway as a means of achieving their end. Roubaud kills his victim in a reserved compartment on board an express train. Flore, considerably more resourceful and more calculating than Roubaud, thinks of three different ways of causing a train crash before chance provides her with an even better one. Pecqueux’s plan to murder Jacques also exploits the opportunity provided by his job with the railway company; he flings Jacques from the footplate of a locomotive travelling at speed. For Roubaud, Flore and Pecqueux, murder is conceived as an act of revenge, and as such their crimes proceed from the most ancient of motives. But in each instance revenge comes in ‘modern’ guise. The ancient crime proves itself to be abreast if not ahead of technological progress. As Aunt Phasie comments cynically in one of her rare moments of lucidity, ‘You can go on inventing better machines till the cows come home. It won’t change a thing. In the end we’re at the mercy of beasts’ (II). The novel thus engages with a sharply divided contemporary debate on the nature and causes of criminal behaviour.
In April 1888, this debate was given a particularly gruesome focus by the first in a series of murders of women prostitutes in London’s East End. In September 1888 a letter signed by ‘Jack the Ripper’ was passed to the London police, laying claim to these murders and promising that they would continue. The murders in fact continued during the whole period that Zola was preparing and writing his novel and for another year after the novel was published. They involved throat-cutting and in many cases severe mutilation of the victim’s body. ‘Jack the Ripper’ achieved instant notoriety, and his unsavoury exploits brought home the reality and urgency of the criminological debate, in a way that theoretical discussion could never do, to ordinary citizens going about their daily lives not only in London but in cities throughout the world. In an interview given to the Italian newspaper Tribuna in November 1889, shortly after the publication of the first three instalments of La Bête humaine, Zola speaks of Jacques Lantier as a criminal ‘cast in the same mould as “Jack the Ripper”’.5 Jacques has a psychopathic desire to kill women, and it is this terrifying compulsion that provides the central impetus of La Bête humaine. The name Zola gives his protagonist could not have failed to connect him in the reader’s mind with the legendary perpetrator of the Whitechapel murders (in French ‘Jacques l’Éventreur’). Like ‘Jack the Ripper’, Jacques Lantier’s preferred weapon is the knife. Like ‘Jack the Ripper’, his desire to murder is prompted by female sexuality, and he discovers that one murder is insufficient to satisfy his urge to kill. The novel thus goes beyond the well-trodden path of personally motivated murder and embarks on an exploration of the mind of a potential serial killer.
Jacques’s urge to kill is set within a broader context of violence and crime. The novel describes a total of five murders,