Essay on The Liturgy of Humiliation

“A Hanging” by George Orwell is an influential, autobiographical essay, in which the subject of capital punishment is powerfully examined. The essay is based on a prisoner’s execution in a Prisoner of War camp in Burma during the Second World War. In the essay, Orwell is a prison guard for the camp and carefully illustrates his views on capital punishment. The structure of the essay is of three distinct sections. These sections provide the reader with contrast and repetition, and are grounded in reality but with emphasis on the creative,

The execution or punishment itself is most often carried out by a state-appointed executioner, working as a direct representative of the sovereign’s power in order to further dissuade the public witnessing the execution of committing other crimes (DP, 9). Around a hundred years later, there was a shift away from these public displays of power and violence to a more corrective and rehabilitating process. Foucault defines disciplinary power as the power to return a wrongdoer to the normative standards of society (DP, 179). As the years go on, power is taken away from a central body and is exhibited through institutions such as schools, prisons, and hospitals where power and knowledge is maintained through the sciences (e.g. psychology, sociology, and psychiatry) rather than laws. This new form of power is exercised over the individual’s soul rather by disciplining their body (DP, 30). In other words, these new houses of power prefer a correctional approach in order to rehabilitate the wrongdoer and cut down on the amount of individuals not adhering to the norms of society (DP, 19). By doing this, disciplinary power and punishment is exercised over subjects through hierarchical

Thus, the executioner (an institution of control under the monarchy) employed the spectacles of torture as an example to other members of society that their refusal to work or that any crimes they committed would not be tolerated. Hence, penal tortures and public executions were used as a political ritual that would exhibit the absolute power of the monarchy. The main purpose of the torture was to force the offender to confess his or her crime, justifying the sovereign’s power to punish through the acknowledgement of crime and punishment by both the criminal and the general public. Not only did the spectacle justify the penal torture, but the systems of punishment also acted as revenge for the monarchy. Thus, the monarchy ruled society through fear and utilized confessions brought about by torture and public execution to justify its power to

Introduction Throughout eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain, the ways of punishing criminals and the ways in which criminals were treated, went through many changes. In the start of punishing criminals, the idea was to punish the body of the criminal for all to see as a public example. Without a fully developed justice system, those guilty of almost every crime, even petty crimes, faced their fate through public execution. As society faces urbanization, citizens rely on the anxiety of fear through the justice system and instead of public punishment, Britain’s justice system moves from punishing the body of the criminal to punishing the mind and those guilty of crimes were sentenced to imprisonment and later transportation to America

England and France in 1775 were flourishing with crime and violence, with unfair and harsh punishments that didn’t fit the misdemeanor. Often times, however, there wasn’t enough control and order for any type of protection or justice from these unlawful acts. If there was, the masses used the gory punishments as a vulgar form of entertainment. A respectable and honest man during the day had the potential to become a robber or a murderer at night. Corruption of religion increased with the emergence of false prophets and the superiority of the clergy. Corruption in the governments of England and France also increased considerably, especially in France where inflation grew because they would make money and spend it quickly on needless luxuries.

Before a person was killed by guillotine, the spectators gave them a chance to speak, keeping their dignity intact. Then without any suffering or torment, they would meet the same fate and die in the instant that the guillotine sliced their neck (Clift). The guillotine treated all people with equal mercy in keeping the process short and painless. Despite a variety of reasons one would be killed by guillotine, the machine treated them all humanely and equally, and establishing the revolutionaries’ values toward justice amongst all men and

French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault conceptualized justice as an ever changing product of man. He uses the example of the regicide trial of Robert-Francois Dameins as a prime example of how justice is ever changing.3 In the year of 1757 Damiens was publicly executed by drawing and quartering, a form of execution in which Convicts were fastened to a hurdle, or wooden panel, and drawn by horse to the place of execution, where they were hanged (almost to the point of death), emasculated, disemboweled, beheaded and chopped into four pieces. Foucault mentions this because of the fact that less than a 100 years later the first modern prisons are created and rules for them are identified. It shows the huge change that has happened with justice, when in which hanging and quartering at a time was found to be a just form of capital punishment, now it is considered inhumane and cruel. "Justice must always question itself,” Foucault argues, “just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions4."

France’s Reign of Terror offered the world a new symbol for execution: the guillotine. Today the electric chair, lethal injection, and firing squad provide the same image. All symbolize death as well as the crime that the perpetrator committed. In 1793 in France, an individual met the guillotine because he or she committed treason by going against the radical ideas of Maximilien Robespierre. In the modern United States, citizens face one of the instruments of capital punishment after they commit murder, treason, or espionage. Though the instruments and charges for capital punishment have changed, the basic principle remains the same. Capital punishment, more harshly known as the death penalty, has become a well-known and controversial part of the United States’ criminal justice system. Ever since societies began to practice the capital punishment, people have tried to abolish the death penalty. The United States, however, should continue to practice the death penalty until it reduces the number of homicides and other serious crimes committed by its citizens to help protect innocent citizens.

Analysis of A Hanging Part one: Hangings, injections, electrocutions, firing squads and gas chambers, all different forms for capital punishment. We execute people who have committed horrible crimes. Some might argue that these executions are acceptable, and some might argue they are not. In the short story “A Hanging”, by George Orwell, we are presented with a firsthand example of this. “A Hanging” is a short story about a Hindu man, who is on his way to his hanging.

(Camus 96). That question illustrates the court’s unfair persecution of Meursault because he is being condemned for prior events not connected to the murder. Meursault is eventually convicted of murder without extenuating circumstances. His lawyer tells Meursault to expect a favorable verdict, but since Meursault showed no remorse and his opinions contradicts the God-fearing, moral ideologies of the court, his sentence elicits the worst

On a cold November morning, in the year of our Lord 1835, two lawfully convicted felons were hung by the neck on gallows erected outside London's notorious Newgate Prison. A large crowd bore witness to the ghastly ceromony and many persons present hissed to express their contempt for the outrageous injustice of both verdict and sentence.

Watching Citizen Evrémonde walk towards the place I currently sit, I examine his structure and analyze his appearance. After he nears me, I formulate this is not the same Citizen Evrémonde that attended La Force with me. He approaches me as we both await the aristocracy’s hands. Inquiring me for answers to questions the real Citizen Evrémonde already knows, further proves my theory. To encounter death with someone by my side, I counter the questions of his personal life, like his release and why he has been condemned back to this hell. I immediately feel pity for the Citizen Evrémonde imposter and ponder why he has given up his life outside of this revolution. Eventually, I confessed my knowledge of his true identity as we ventured in the carts toward the

“A Hanging”, composed by George Orwell, is a personal testimony set in the 1920’s in Burma. The narrative depicts the death of an unknown prisoner and the role of those who enforce the death sentence. Through the process of the execution, Orwell illustrates the effects of capital punishment on the executioners and the executed in an attempt to convey an Abolitionist message. While stated only once in his story, Orwell takes an emphatic position against capital punishment. The author does not use the classic argumentative style; instead, he uses implications of his characters to present the four main points against capital punishment. George Orwell’s Abolitionist message in “A Hanging” is conveyed through the prisoner, dog, functionaries, and their actions, words, and body language.

In his writing, Discipline and Punishment, Foucault recounts the very graphic execution of a prisoner for regicide. He makes the point that, during that time, the main purpose of the ritual of punishment was to make the body very visible and inflict unspeakable pain on the victim as a show of immense power by the Sovereign. Foucault analises the history of punishment in an attempt to appreciate how power has changed over time and the way it has become dispersed throughout institutions. The shift from torture to incarceration reveals a form of discipline which has proven to be more effective and the rational system of reform which replaces the aforementioned brutality directs punishment inward to the soul. Instead of punishment being a spectacle

Despite the fact that the French penal ordinance set out very harsh penalties against punishment, there was still a gap between theory and the punitive practice (Foucault, The spectacle of the scaffold, 2008). The exercise of torture and public execution were no longer frequently administered as forms of punishment. However, use of torture as a considerable part of penalty still existed. In this perspective, torture refers to an exact measurable amount of pain through the investment of the "economy of power." The use of torture was meant to be a tool for revealing the truth, which would be determined at different degrees. The investigation process