Judith Walkowitz's 'Jack The Ripper'

Jack the Ripper was one of the most famous and renowned killers in history. Even though he was not the first serial killer, he was the first killer to strike on a metropolis setting. Jack the Ripper was in his prime at a time when the media had a strong control over society and society as a whole was becoming much more literate. Jack started his killing campaign at a time of political controversy between the liberals and social reformers along with the Irish Home rule partisans. The reports of Jack the Ripper were collected and reported by the police, but then the different newspapers with their political influences slightly distorted the stories to give them their own effect. It has been more the one hundred years since the last murder

In Trifles, Susan Glaspell debates the roles between men and women during a period where a debate was not widely conducted. Glaspell wrote Trifles in the early 1900s—a time when feminism was just getting started. In this play, Glaspell shows us her perspective on the roles of men and women and how she believes the situation would play out. Trifles seems like another murder mystery on the surface, but the play has a much more profound meaning behind it. Glaspell presents the idea that men and women analyze situations differently, and how these situations are resolved based on how we interpret them. Research shows that women’s brains “may be optimized for combining analytical and intuitive thinking.” On the other hand, male brains are predominately “optimized for motor skills and actions” (Lewis). In the play, this research shows true when the women, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, analyze details rather than looking at the apparent, physical evidence, and they find out the motive of the murder. The men, on the other hand, look at broader evidence that does not lead to any substantial conclusion. When Glaspell was writing this play, she wanted the women to be the real instigators, the ones that would end up solving the mystery. While the men in the story laugh at the ‘trifles’ that women worry about, these details mean a great deal in Glaspell’s eyes. Glaspell presents the idea what men and women are different in the way they live their lives through detail.

In “ ‘A Steep Price…’” it analyzed the opinions of the public, media, victim, and aggressor in defending their particular take on the case. The article offers mild bias, so it does not completely report the events of the case, because it mostly focuses on the opinionated effects and not so much the facts. In “Feminist Put Judge...”, major bias is introduced by claiming to be in support of the feminist cause; however, the article uses a stronger ethical appeal to attract a broader, more unified audience. In “Here’s the Powerful Letter…”, the author recants the letter the victim wrote to her attacker, Brock Turner. She not only aims for the audience to feel the distress and havoc the case has relinquished on her life, but also a chance to spread a more positive message to thank her supporters while encouraging her audience to stand up for themselves and their self worth. The overall purpose of analyzing all these different media sources is to be able to recognize how the multiple points of view that a story can be told from will alter the objectivity of the event. A society’s culture will emphasis bias or certain point of views to get the public to believe one interpretation of the story based on the

The media played a large role in narrating the story of how and why the boy’s death occurred. Giroux uses the term “privatized discourse” in discussing the treatment of the case within American media and culture. “...Dangerous because they invoke wider social considerations and prevent [them] from wallowing in a purely privatized discourse that, in the end, for instance, only allows [them] to focus on the most narrow and restricted of issues such as the personality of the shooter, George Zimmerman” (Giroux 2**). The preceding quote highlights one of Giroux’s main focuses, the tendency for the public

In the story Cohen makes use of the most trivial murder of 1836 to show the twisted societal accommodations of those who are considered privileged, hypocritical channelled views towards sexuality and legal codes exploitation with a mingling of tabloids journalism and mere politics. In her story Cohen brings out a really sensational fact that a place for women is determined by a man.

The Whitechapel Murders and those of Jack the Ripper are not generally one and the same. Over a period of three years towards the end of the nineteenth century a number of prostitutes were murdered under different circumstances – the murder of prostitutes was not an especially unique occurrence during those times but several of the murders drew particular attention on account of the savagery with which the victim's bodies were mutilated. Within the Whitechapel Murders was a cluster of murders that demonstrated sufficient similarities as to suggest that they were committed by the same person. One of the first instances of serial murder was thus identified and sensationalised in the media as the work of ‘Jack the Ripper', nicknamed on the

Jack the Ripper is significant to history because he was one of the most famous serial killers.

The author uses pathos to appeal to the audience’s sense of open-mindedness about women who make national news. O’Connor tries to get the reader to realize how being human can cause people to overlook certain stories and make them seem unimportant. In her essay she states, “We don’t pay as much attention to someone missing from a community we don’t know or are not familiar with” (661). This quotation symbolizes how sometimes people can be overlooked in today’s news. The issue about who makes national news can appeal to more than just a sense of open-mindedness, it can also appeal to your sense of sympathy. When news reporters get their stories, no one is for sure how long the story can stay lingering amongst people. Earl Hutchinson, a political analyst, states, “When you raise the issue people say, “This is a tragedy and we should do more,” Hutchinson said. “But it only lasts a hot minute.

Eric Larson pulled me in once I read the title of the first chapter, “The Black City”. What locked me in, however, was when Larson expressed women in the city and the dangers of being a female during the specific time period. Public warnings addressing that “advertisements upon their face bear the marks of vulgarity, nor do we regard it safe for any lady to answer such unseemly utterances” (Larson pg 11) make it clear that there is a problem. Although it seemed like a lot of information to grasp in the moment, looking back I’ve noticed that the author left room for me to picture what these criminals wanted from such innocent women.

Susan Glaspell’s one-act play covers issues regarding female oppression and patriarchal domination. The play still exists as a fascinating hybrid of murder mystery and social commentary on the oppression of women. When Margaret Hossack was charged with the murder of her sixty year old husband John, the man she had been married to for thirty three years. Killed by two blows to his head with an ax, John Hossack was thought to be a cold mannered and difficult man to be married to, but he didn’t deserve his

“A Jury of Her Peers” is a short story written by Susan Glaspell in 1917 illustrates early feminist literature. The two female characters, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, is able to solve the mystery of who the murderer of John Wright while their male counterparts could not. This short story had been adapted from Glaspell’s one-act play Trifles written the previous year. The play consists of the same characters and plotline as the story. In both works, Glaspell depicts how the men, Sheriff Peters and Mr. Hale, disregard the most important area in the house, the kitchen, when it comes to their investigation. In the end, the women are the ones who find clues that lead to the conclusion of Minnie Wright, John Wright’s wife, is the one who murdered him. Both of Glaspell’s female characters illustrate the ability to step into a male dominated profession by taking on the role of detective. According to Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide, written by Lois Tyson, a reader-response critique “focuses on readers’ response to literary texts” and it’s a diverse area (169). Through a reader-response criticism from a feminist lens, we are able to analyze how “A Jury of Her Peers” and Trifles depict how a patriarchal society oppresses women in the early twentieth century, gender stereotypes confined both men and women and the emergence of the New Woman is illustrated.

The media today, is highly selective in their constructions of offences, offenders and victims. Media representations of crime are moulded and women are portrayed in a way that is entertainment driven and is appealing to the audience. Despite the fact that women seldom stalk, murder outsiders or commit sequential murders- in fact they are rarely vehement, “accounting for only ten percent of convicted violent offenders- those who do so are highly newsworthy because of their novelty” (Jewkes 2011, p. 123) Present day media admits that because fierce women are comparatively uncommon, they are all the more appealing and diabolical to the audience as a result. The essay shall discuss the reason and presentation in the media of female offenders, female victims and women specific crimes.

In the short story, “A Jury of Her Peers,” a neighbor has just discovered the body of John Wright up in his bed, dead, with Minnie Wright in a rocking chair downstairs. The three men that come to investigate this murder don’t actually find any clues that they believe pertain to the crime; the two women that come along discover trifles that have been overlooked and do in fact solve the murder. Susan Glaspell shows that repression is brought by social expectations due to imposed gender roles, through the use of setting, symbolism, and irony. First, Glaspell makes effective use of setting to portray the role that women were expected to play in society.

Though it is refreshing that news coverage is no longer solely focused on offenders, the increased coverage of crime victims can have unintended consequences (notes). The media tends to increase coverage levels for crimes (or perpetrators or victims) that are “unusual, unexpected, strange, or perverse” (Karmen, 2015, p. 47); in turn, increased media coverage levels can lead to additional pain and suffering for crime victims and their

Jack the Ripper was known for the gruesome deaths of five women( Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly). These five victims were known as the Canonical Five. The reason the police thought that these five women were the only victims killed by Jack the Ripper out of the eleven murders that happened in Whitechapel, London is because the canonical five’s throats were all slashed and their abdomens were sliced open. Whitechapel, London was in poverty at the time, which explains all of the violence, murders, and robberies. But these murders still shocked the people of Whitechapel,