The magic of patriarchal oppression in Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell

ABSTRACT

In From Hell, Alan Moore establishes systemic patriarchal sexual violence against the backdrop of Victorian London. While rape and other acts of physical repression are easily linked to the notion of sexual violence, Moore’s treatment is concentrated on the society as a whole. His anti-hero, physician Sir William Gull, justifies the serial murders and dissection rituals as a necessary continuation of Victorian inequality and as a symbolic manifestation of patriarchy’s counterattack. Linking ancient religion and mythology to a thousand years of British history, the sexual violence in From Hell is cast in the frame of a successful victory of patriarchy over matriarchy. Alan Moore’s particular emphasis on the erotic as a biological and cultural force creates some ambiguity in the work’s pro-matriarchal ideological values by naturalising much of the tale within a libidinal machine. This is expounded by the anti-hero, Sir William Gull, in a ‘psycho-geography’ of London that privileges the masculine side in this conflict, and Moore and Campbell employ visual cues that implicate the structures of organised religion. The insights of feminist theologian Mary Daly will be presented to complement Moore’s approach to women’s societal battle. The matriarchal focus is presented anecdotally in the short presentation of the victims of sexual violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Alan Moore
• From Hell
• patriarchy
• matriarchy
• sexual violence
• Mary Daly
• London architecture
• Jack the Ripper

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This was also the outlet for portions of Moore’s Lost Girls, which appeared concurrently with From Hell in Taboo #7 (1992) (Arnt 2006).

2. In parenthetic references to citation from the graphic novel, the Roman numeral is the chapter, and the Arabic indicates the page number within that chapter.

3. The ‘goat’ who will be accused of the crimes, Mr Druitt, is shown to be sympathetic to the difficulties of women in society, to the degree that he says he is in favour of women’s suffrage, even telling his pupils, ‘from the story of Boadicea we learn that today’s call for women’s suffrage isn’t a new idea. We also learn that women really HAVE been treated unfairly’ (XI, 31). In the hapless patsy, the reader is served the same historical figure, Boadicea, as heroine.

4. Ho (2006); Ferguson (2009, 57–58).

5. Ferguson’s critique of Moore’s work as ‘Victoria-arcana’ is based ‘not [on his] political or cultural support of violent patriarchy, but rather to [his] exaggerated and undercritical investment in the same hermeneutics of suspicion and spectralization of power that animates the alternative historiography of New Historicism’ (2009, 46), in particular the lack of commitment to an ‘“authentic” account of the past’ (47).

6. The tale of marriage and then a disparaging end leading to prostitution as the outcome is also treated in detail in the case of Elizabeth Stride, originally Elizabeth Gustafsdotter from Gothenburg, Sweden (IX, 9).

7. Gull’s nurse and her paramours seek and achieve sexual fulfilment in Gull’s cell in the last chapter (XIV, 4).

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Notes on contributors

Michael J. Prince

Michael J. Prince is an Associate professor of American literature and culture at the Universtiy of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway. His research interests include, comics, the beat poets and film adaptation. He is a member of the Nordic Network of Comics Research and author of the book Adapting the Beat Poets: Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac on Screen (Rowman & Littlefield 2016).