"What Alice Knew': The hunt for Jack the Ripper

Modern murder begins with Jack the Ripper. There was plenty of casual violence and systemic social disorder in 18th- and early 19th-Century cities, as any reader of Henry Fielding or Charles Dickens knows. No doubt there were prowling psychopaths who preyed on the anonymous poor. But the idea of the serial killer was born only with the Ripper.

Consider literature's previous purveyors of violence. Macbeth steeped himself in blood for the sake of ambition, meaning that he was an aristocrat who killed other aristocrats to climb to the top. For this he was hacked to pieces, first by conscience and then by Macduff.

Heinrich Kleist's Michael Kolhaas— still a cautionary figure for our times— was a simple fellow who, like a Joseph K. in reverse, turned a world upside down in pursuit of justice. Frankenstein's monster, the quintessential outsider, hunted his victims more selectively, but for the same purpose. In a world that precluded ambition or thwarted justice, violence was an understandable if not necessarily a justified response.

Theater of violence

Jack the Ripper was no literary figure but a real menace. The world he preyed on was the demimonde of Victorian prostitution, at a time when London, like many large cities, was experiencing an unprecedented population surge. London's prostitutes serviced a wide social spectrum, including the respectable middle classes.

A newly thriving press made the city's daily violence breakfast fare for all. The city itself was in fact being redefined as a theater of violence, in which the fourth wall of the stage drew uncomfortably close to the audience.

(The history of the modern stage is in itself an interesting paradigm of the shifting spatial boundaries between social classes— but that's a story for another day.)

Jack the Ripper gripped the Victorian imagination, as he continues to grip ours, not only for the savagery of his crimes but for the fact that he left each victim as the calling card of a perverse work of art. Each one was not merely killed and mutilated, but in a horrific way inscribed.

As Foucault pointed out, mutilating acts of execution had formerly been the exclusive prerogative of the state. Now a private citizen had taken upon himself the role of judge, jury and executioner.

But of what crime had his victims been guilty, other than being female and sexually available? Jack's private theater of judgment touched the raw nerve of Victorian respectability: Was there not a little of him in everyone else as well?

Intellectuals join the hunt

Paula Marantz Cohen, novelist and scholar, has taken Jack's uncomfortable proximity to ourselves as the starting-point of What Alice Knew, an erudite fantasy that imagines America's most famous intellectual family being caught up in the hunt for Jack. The "Alice" of the title is Alice James, the bedridden sibling of the novelist Henry James and his brother William, the Harvard psychologist and philosopher. Alice's bedchamber becomes the focal point of the family's fascination with Jack, and her sharp if not infallible intuition the axis of the novel's action.

Expatriate Henry, who dines out with the smart set— the novel begins with a brilliant evocation of late Victorian luminaries, including Oscar Wilde— is already settled in London, while his elder brother is summoned by baffled authorities who hope he can provide them with a psychological profile of Jack.

(Life, as usual, imitates art, as we're reminded by the debacle over hiring former New York City Police Commissioner William J. Bratton to help "investigate" the recent London riots.)

Popularity without intimacy

Since Jack will of course never be caught or even identified, the novel really pivots around the character and interaction of les frères et soeur James themselves. Henry James is a figure whom even massive biographies haven't been able to humanize. Cohen captures him in early middle age— not yet the marmoreal figure of his later years— as a writer still striving to make his career, and a failed dramatist bitter at his lack of success on the stage.

He is growing stout and bald. Although his social calendar is full, his life lacks intimacy. He visits his Alice in her Mayfair flat and takes pleasure in her waspish intelligence, but otherwise he has only what he describes as the "brutality" of his imagination for company.

William, who soon joins the cast, is at this point far and away the family's most illustrious member, a brilliant thinker and successful academic at the apex of his profession, but for all that a repressed and tormented personality. He and Henry recognize each other as natural opposites, the one whose outward health and prowess conceal depths of depression and self-doubt, the other diffident to the world but the king of his imagination.

Invalid's complaint

As for Alice, her intuitive penetration of men and events enjoys no outlet in specific talent, and, denied any but a passive role in the world by her gender, she rebels by withdrawal— a willed invalid whose complaint her century cannot diagnose.

Meanwhile, Jack the Ripper goes his merry way, possibly giving William a close shave into the bargain. The James trio makes a pretty good detective among them, finally hitting on a suspect— fittingly enough, a prominent artist— with whom Alice falls a little bit in love.

In contrast, Scotland Yard's methods are more plodding and conventional, but Jack proves more elusive than any of his pursuers. In the end, a second suspect is tragically run to ground, leaving the Jameses to ponder not only the costs of crime but those of fighting it.

In part a detective thriller, in part a scalpel-sharp dissection of late Victorian London, and in part a sidelong look at America's most distinguished intellectual family, What Alice Knew is an exceptional tour de force. Above all, it's a meditation on violence in the modern city, the crucible into which, for better or worse, most of us have now been cast. Man is a predatory animal, and in an environment in which he has nothing to prey on but himself, Jack the Ripper may have more to tell us about ourselves than we might wish to know.