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‘But secondly, you say ‘society must exact vengeance, and society must punish’. Wrong on both counts. Vengeance comes from the individual and punishment from God (Victor Hugo).
What can be considered a ‘just punishment’ is a much-debated and complicated subject. Who has the authority in deciding whether the severity of a punishment is appropriate or too cruel? In his article ‘Going to See a Man Hanged’, published in Fraser’s magazine for town and country, William Makepeace Thackeray asserts his opinion against capital punishment, instilling the notion that society does not hold the right to execute such a severe ‘punishment’ for it goes against the Christian Law. He believes that by exercising such power over a person’s life, and death, society is reaching above its station and into God’s domain.
Considering that Thackeray was a member of the movement striving to abolish capital punishment, he strategically chose to publish his essay in Fraser’s Magazine since the journal was also pro-abolitionist. The writing of this article was also well-timed since he wrote this essay shortly after a motion to abolish capital punishment failed to pass. In his essay, Thackeray becomes the eyes and ears on behalf of the reader and retells his ‘partaking of this hideous debauchery’ in attending Courvoisier’s execution. He purposefully uses evocative language in his descriptions of the grounds and the emotions that the whole event struck in him. ‘As you see [the scaffold], you feel a dumb electric shock, which causes one to start a little, a give a sort of gasp for breath.’ Thackeray uses the phrase ‘gasp for breath’ to implant the idea of suffocation in his reader’s minds, ‘forcing’ them to empathize with the final moments of the person being hanged where they futilely gasp for breath. Through these descriptions, he is trying to rouse empathy and disgust from his readers in response to the crime that is execution.
One of the arguments that he makes in his article is that while the governing bodies believe that making a spectacle out of a public execution will deter the general population away from criminal activity; it instead becomes nothing more than a display to be enjoyed ‘ something that breaks away from the mundane. To further drive his argument home, he uses an anecdote where three successive decapitations took place. He states that at the sight of the first head, the spectators were struck with terror, disgust, and fear. The third head was looked at with interest but at the sight of the third head, the onlookers had become desensitized. Even worse due to a mishap ‘the punishment had grown to be a joke.’ Thackeray ends this story by commenting that the joke that came out of these events is a ‘pretty commentary, indeed, upon the august nature of public executions, and the awful majesty of the law.’
His article serves to admonish the ‘righteous’ people representing Law and Justice that stoop to the level of a criminal by claiming that they are doing the public service and calling their actions ‘punishment’. In the latter segment of his articles, he confesses his feelings of disgust at having to experience something as awful and debauched.
‘I am not ashamed to say, that I could look no more, but shut my eyes, as the last dreadful act was going on, which sent this wretched guilty soul into the presence of God.’
Thackeray chose to exclude any description of the actual execution; he closes the readers’ eyes much like he closed his own to spare them from the horrors of the act. He creates a moment of silence for the reader to digest what he just read before Thackeray continues on to pass judgment on both society and government.
He proceeds to express his loathing of the fact that society continues to hold on to what he considers antiquated, the Mosaic law of an eye-for-an-eye since he believes it goes against everything that reason and Christian Law stand for. He expresses his disappointment in the governing system for allowing the Judiciary System to be defiled and become a perverse version of the idea that it stands for. In his article, Thackeray states, ‘I came away down from Snow Hill that morning with a disgust for murder, but it was for the murder I saw done.’ In his eyes what was witnessed was not a ‘just punishment’ but instead the crime of murder under the guise of law and order. In his eyes, society has started to confuse what is punishment with what is outright murder. A man should not hold the authority to take another’s life and it is not the government’s place to decide that a person can no longer atone for their sins upon Earth. Thackeray seems to say that Man is greedily overstepping his bounds into the realm of God.
In his article, he mentions that the sight left a lingering impression upon him, but not what the government hoped that it would be’ that of deterrence ‘ rather, it is one of horror for the ‘butchery’ that he got to experience, which left him feeling ‘miserable ever since’ with Courvoisier’s death ‘[weighing] upon [his] mind’ and ‘as soon as [he] begins to write [‘Going to See a Man Hanged], [he] get melancholy’ he admit to his mother in his private letters. More striking is Thackeray’s closing sentence for his article:
I feel ashamed and degraded at the brutal curiosity which took me to that brutal sight, and I pray to Almighty God to cause this disgraceful sin to pass from among us and to cleanse our land of blood.
He firmly believes that only God has the power to absolve them of their sins for the hypocrisy of committing murder and calling it justice.
The subject of punishment is a complicated one. Regarding the severity of a committed crime, an equally severe punishment should be allocated. But what Thackeray tries to instill in his reader is not to become a monster themselves in the effort of culling and punishing the monsters of this world. In other words, he urges them not to stoop to the level of a criminal. No Man has the right to remove another’s life, as per the Christian law, and that should also be obeyed by society and not be made into an exception for the excuse of ‘punishment’.
‘Sarah Lewis claimed for Victorian mothers who kept within ‘the sphere which God and nature have appointed’ ‘no less an office than that of instruments (under God) for the regeneration of the world ‘restorers of God’s image in the human soul. Can any of the warmest advocates of the political rights of woman, claim for her a more exalted mission ‘a nobler destiny?” (Janet Larson). Discuss the destiny of women in any text(s) studied in this module.
Daughters of Decadence
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Emancipation: A Life Fable by Olive Schreiner
Life’s Gifts by Olive Schreiner
The Undefinable: A Fantasia by Sarah Grand
Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin
The destiny of an individual can be considered as a set of predetermined events that one is expected to struggle against and ultimately yield to. Much in this fashion, the destiny of women can be considered the expectation of them to follow societal norms of obedience and gentleness. In his lecture Sesame and Lilies, John Ruskin considers the position of women in society and how they should be educated in accordance with their sex. However, as seen in quite a few texts written by female writers of the period, women were not docile creatures waiting to fall at the whims of fate but rather fought against its constraints with vigor.
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