. The Media and the Death Penalty

In late 2005, the imminent execution in Singapore of a 25-year-old Vietnamese-Australian man, Van Nguyen Tuong, dominated the Australian media. He was arrested at Singapore’s Changi Airport in December 2002, for carrying 396 grams of heroin, while in transit from Cambodia to Australia. Singapore has a mandatory death sentence for anyone arrested carrying over 15 grams of heroin. When Van Nguyen was hanged on 2 December 2005, he became the first Australian to be executed in 12 years.^[1] His lawyers kept his case out of the media, fearing negative coverage would alienate the Singapore government and endanger his chance of a reprieve. After legal appeals had failed, however, his case became a media sensation, and featured prominently in newspapers, on current-affairs programs, and on Internet sites for several weeks.^[2] Although a poll suggested that the Australian public was divided over Van Nguyen’s execution, the media coverage was overwhelmingly sympathetic to him.^[3] In response to publicity, candlelight vigils and other events protesting against his execution, and the death penalty, were staged around Australia. Church bells rang to mark the moment of his death, and his funeral, held in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne, drew more than a thousand mourners. Such outpourings of public compassion have become more common in the wake of the ‘global mourning’ that followed events such as the death of Princess Diana, 9/11 and the Bali bombings.^[4] But that such a ‘groundswell of public protest and grief’ occurred in response to the state execution of a previously unknown Vietnamese-Australian convicted of drug-smuggling — whose execution notably took place in Singapore rather than in Australia — calls for analysis.^[5]

At the time, I was researching another contested death-penalty case, which occurred in London in late 1922. This case involved 28-year-old Edith Thompson and her young lover, Fredrick Bywaters, who were jointly convicted of murdering her husband. Although Bywaters confessed, she was convicted of aiding and abetting the murder on the controversial evidence of her love letters.^[6] At the conclusion to a sensational trial, they were both found guilty and sentenced to death. Between 11 December 1922, when the verdict was announced, and 9 January 1923, when they were hanged, debate about whether the pair should be executed raged in the British press. Although separated by 85 years and different countries and historical contexts, there are some significant parallels in newspaper representations of the Van Nguyen and Bywaters cases, and striking differences from Thompson’s case. In the cases of the men, journalists used a sentimental aesthetic, particularly focusing on their grieving mothers and their youth, to value their lives, to arouse empathy and to generate support for a reprieve. By contrast, although there was considerable unease with hanging a woman, Edith Thompson was not a figure of sympathy but of contempt. In her case, ‘sentimentality’ functioned rhetorically as a term of invective, which distanced the public from her. The aftermath of the executions, however, tells a different story. Whereas the Bywaters and Van Nguyen cases dropped out of the limelight quickly, Thompson’s execution produced rumours that ‘something horrific’ had happened, and that several of the witnesses suffered severe psychological distress. In reporting on Thompson’s ‘disintegration as a human being’, and the traumatic effects of her execution on witnesses, newspapers, however unconsciously, highlighted those characteristics of her execution that psychoanalytic critics have identified as ‘the abject’ — a powerful affect that may trigger shame, disgust and outrage. When these rumours about Thompson’s execution again surfaced in the period after the Second World War, her case became a symbol of the excess of state violence and, as such, regularly featured in the campaign to abolish the death penalty in Britain in the late 1940s and 1950s.^[7] Thus, the stark contrast between the cases of the men, on the one hand, and the woman on the other, raises issues about the gendered aesthetics of sentimentality and abjection in media representations of contested death-penalty cases.

Literary and cultural critics have recently explored how real-life murder, including capital punishment, is mediated by aesthetic forms including literature, drama, visual and textual images, and the media.^[8] One does not have to agree with Joel Black’s contentious claim that our experience of murder is ‘primarily aesthetic’ to appreciate the cultural work performed by the aesthetic mediation of death penalty cases.^[9] I take it as given that newspapers did not simply report, in a neutral or objective fashion, on these cases. Rather, in the cases I analyse, newspapers used aesthetic tropes, images and generic conventions to mediate the wait for execution or mercy, to highlight the pathos of untimely death, to produce ‘sentiment’ and ‘controversy’, and, of course, to sell newspapers. What role did gender play in these mediating representations? How did gender figure, respectively, in the aesthetics of sentimentality and abjection? Can a sentimental aesthetic do more than provoke momentary empathy with the sympathetic victim? Or, as Wendy Lesser has argued, is sentimentalising the victims of the death penalty ultimately a vicious act, because it suggests that only those people with whom we can identify and empathise are worthy of our protests?^[10] What role, in Thompson’s case, did an aesthetic of abjection play in transforming her execution into a symbol of the excesses of state violence, which in turn rendered it rhetorically useful in the British campaign to abolish the death penalty? Does her case suggest that an aesthetic of abjection might more effectively underpin a politicised movement to abolish the death penalty than sentimental appeals? My aim in analysing cases from two different historical and cultural ‘moments’, involving both male and female victims, is to use a comparative approach to consider the cultural and political effects of the gendered mediation of these cases, as a means of contributing to debates about the politics of sentiment in protests against the death penalty, and in public life more generally.

Of course, the cultural meanings and effects of sentimentality and abjection change over time, and vary in different cultural and historic contexts, and thus, the ways in which sentimentality and abjection operate in these particular cases is no guide to future cases. As Michael Bell has pointed out, there is considerable ambivalence and confusion about ‘the value of emotion in modern Anglophone culture’, in which feeling is both valued and distrusted.^[11] Since the late eighteenth century, sentiment — and, particularly, the sentimental — has been coded, in literature and philosophy, as feminine, and associated with the masses and with ‘popular clamour’ — all of which have contributed to its repudiation.^[12] For my purposes, it is important to recognise both continuities and ruptures in the discourse of sentimentality, as it functioned in British press in the early 1920s, and in the Australian press in 2005. In the 1920s, at the height of modernism, the cultural elite despised sentimentality and distanced themselves from a sentimental aesthetic. The suspicion of sentimentality continues within some fields of philosophy and cultural theory today. In analyses of the global media’s representation of ‘distant suffering’, critics such as Luc Boltanski have argued that sentimentality is a momentary, shallow and self-indulgent emotional response.^[13] When used in relation to events of social, political or historical significance, pathos may generate a politics grounded in pity rather than in justice.^[14] In the past 20 years, however, there have been challenges to the repudiation of a sentimental aesthetic. Since the 1980s, some feminists have affirmed the positive cultural work of sentimentality, even when, or especially when, it is disavowed. Other feminists remain sceptical of the gendered effects of a sentimental aesthetic, and its implications for women. Moreover, since the 1990s, the rapid rise of trauma and memory as a transdisciplinary paradigm has granted priority to events involving trauma, emotion and affect, which has led to a re-consideration of ‘feeling’ in the public sphere. In practice, sentimentalised representations are frequently used in the public sphere today, especially to transmit the suffering of war, genocide, famine and other disasters, to the extent that ours has been referred to an ‘an age of sentimental politics’.^[15] This ambivalence over the cultural value attached to a sentimental aesthetic was manifested, in varying ways, in the cases that I analyse.

Although Van Nguyen’s case was represented across a range of media, including newspapers, television, radio and the Internet, the cases of Bywaters and Thompson were debated primarily in the newspapers. Thus, I focus on newsprint representations of these cases, analysing their methods for mobilising collective sentiment, and their production of sentimentality and abjection. In the first section, I draw on Simon Cottle’s suggestive study of ‘mediatised ritual’ to provide a framework for analysing the production of sentiment and its effects in newsprint mediation of these cases. While his approach is useful for showing how the media produce symbols that mobilise collective sentiments about contested public issues, I turn to feminist theory to develop a more fine-grained textual analysis of gendered images and discourses. In the second section, I draw on Kahane’s psychoanalytic approach to analyse gendered images of the suffering mother and the vulnerable child, which were extensively used in newspaper representations of the Van Nguyen case, and to a lesser extent in the Bywaters case. I suggest that the maternal image functioned not only to engage collective sentiments about the sanctity of the mother-child bond and of human life, but, more problematically, as a screen that distracted attention from the terror and finality of execution. In the third section, literary critic Suzanne Clark’s work on modernist antipathy to a gendered sentimental aesthetic in the 1920s, which she links to the psychology of abjection, grounds my analysis of Thompson’s case. I argue that the contempt in which sentimentality was held at the time was transferred to Thompson, which resulted in her exclusion from the imagined community. Finally, Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject enables me to reflect on the cultural and political significance of Thompson’s execution, and its recuperation by the British abolitionist movement. The feminist psychoanalytic theorists I bring together — Kahane, Clark and Kristeva — are all concerned with how unconscious processes and dynamics are manifested in representations. Identifying the unconscious meanings and identifications implicit in media representations is an important dimension of my argument, as I believe the ways in which the aesthetics of sentimentality and abjection operated in these cases reveals cultural beliefs and values that did not have to be defended explicitly, as would be the case in arguments which opposed the death penalty on principle.