In Van Nguyen’s case, the media successfully used a sentimental aesthetic to invoke collective sentiments and solidarities, which were expressed in protests against his execution. These protests were primarily symbolic, since it was clear that they would have little if any effect on Singapore’s decision of whether to grant mercy. The cultural and ‘real’ politics of the Bywaters and Thompson cases differed significantly from Van Nguyen’s case. In the former, the British government carried out the executions of British subjects, and the King had the opportunity to grant a reprieve. Consequently, much more was a stake for the British government in these cases than for the Australian government in the Van Nguyen case. In many ways the newspaper mediation of the Bywaters case was similar to that of Van Nguyen’s. Bywaters was young, had no prior convictions, and before his affair with Thompson had led a ‘blameless life’.[54] The Daily Sketch, a popular paper, organised a petition for his reprieve.[55] In its campaign urging the public to sign the petition, the paper used images of his suffering mother, accompanied by headlines such as ‘Save My Boy’s Life’ — which cast Bywaters as a ‘vulnerable boy’ rather than a man who had committed a violent crime. Bywaters’ mother, whose husband had been killed in the war, was a heroic and poignant figure — a familiar post-war suffering widow and mother. Bywaters had been an exemplary son, and now she was going to lose him at the hands of the State, as she had lost her husband. Like images of Van Nguyen’s mother, images of Bywaters’ mother helped to keep the mother-child relation at the centre of protests against his execution, and rendered the British state culpable in violating the sanctity of family. Although the petition was allegedly signed by a million people, the Home Office discounted it. Significantly, there was no petition for Thompson. As a childless woman who worked, when jobs for men were scarce, and an adulteress when there was post-war anxiety about the lack of marriageable men, she was not a sympathetic figure. Moreover, it was widely believed that she played the leading role — that she took a younger lover, involved him in her fantasies, and thereby brought about his ruin and the death of her husband. Although Thompson was a beloved daughter, and a few articles about her grieving family appeared in the press, sentimentalised family relations could not overcome the widespread contempt towards her.
Whereas images of the suffering mother and the vulnerable boy were used to mobilise support for Bywaters, in Thompson’s case the term ‘sentimental’ was used as an epithet, to mobilise feeling against her. According to the OED, sentimental means a ‘tendency to be swayed by feeling rather than by reason’. A Daily Telegraph journalist approved of ‘the manner in which the case was tried’, praising ‘[t]he moderation of the prosecution, which was content to … let the facts speak for themselves, and the calm summing up … by Mr. Justice Shearman, in which, when sentimentalities had been curtly ruled out … have done justice’.[56] The Daily Mail consistently opposed the ‘crusade of the sentimentalists’. The author of ‘Should Women be Hanged?’ observed that: ‘Under the sway of a certain type of sentimentality the sentence on Mrs. Thompson is in some quarters being strongly criticized — not its justice … but the expedience or humanity of carrying it out.’[57] Another article claimed that any case for mercy should not rest on confusion about Thompson’s guilt: ‘[w]e have seen her described as the hapless victim of a wicked society which, by its novels and its plays and its newspapers, spreads corruption abroad. But the nauseous sentimentality of this dialectic is not likely to be persuasive.’[58] The phrase ‘nauseous sentimentality’ explicitly links ‘sentimentality’ with abjection through the metaphor of ‘nausea’; as Kristeva points out, vomit — the bodily expulsion of food — is one of the most common signifiers of abjection.[59] Such strong metaphorical language reveals the unconscious cultural forces that were at play in the debate about whether Thompson should be executed.
The hostility to sentimentality evident in responses to Thompson’s execution was part of a larger cultural trend, and has to be understood in this historical context. In the 1920s, the dichotomy between sentimentality and rationality was a gendered and class-based opposition with effects of power, which operated to exclude women and the lower classes from modernist culture. Opposition to sentimentality went far beyond the relatively small circle of modernist artists and writers, however, to permeate the culture at large. In her study of the relations between the sentimental tradition of women’s writing and male modernism, Suzanne Clark has persuasively argued that ‘[f]rom the point of view of literary modernism, sentimentality was both a past to be outgrown and a present tendency to be despised’.[60] Clark contends that ‘[a]s an epithet, sentimental condenses the way gender … operates as a political unconscious … to trigger shame, embarrassment, and disgust’.[61] In other words, a sentimental aesthetic is gendered feminine, and disgust for the sentimental is transferred to those who consume ‘sentimental’ culture, mainly women and the lower classes. An example of how gender operates as a political unconscious occurs in an article by the feminist journalist and novelist Rebecca West, published in a popular Sunday paper. Although West accuses the prosecution of having failed to make its case, instead of lambasting the court for an unjust verdict, she aims her fire at popular culture, speculating that Thompson’s downfall was caused by consuming ‘bad culture’, and that to prevent other women from ‘dreaming the wrong dreams’, they must be provided with ‘good’ culture.[62] What is telling, however, is not West’s explicit denunciation of mass culture, but her casual contempt for Thompson. In calling her a ‘shocking little piece of rubbish’ and ‘a poor, flimsy, silly mischievous little thing’ — garbage to be disposed of — West exemplified what Clark calls the ‘psychology of abjection … a psychology related to the formation of social and cultural groups’.[63] As she explains: ‘Western culture has developed a logic which is at work constantly to purify itself of unreason. At the level of culture … this creates scapegoats, strangers, groups representing the unreasonable others: women, Jews, slaves … working class, blacks, Arabs [and criminals] … At the level of psychoanalytic narrative, this creates the abject …’[64]
In alleging that Thompson’s habit of reading sentimental novels led to ‘the wrong dreams’, West positions Thompson as an ‘unreasonable other’, thereby legitimating her expulsion from society to purify it of ‘unreason’. As this analysis suggests, whereas sentimentality worked in Van Nguyen’s favour to create identification with him, it worked against Thompson. This variability indicates that the effects of a sentimental aesthetic are contingent; in other words, its significance depends upon the meanings attached to ‘sentiment’ and ‘feeling’ by a given culture in a particular context. Moreover, whether a particular individual can be sentimentalised depends upon the changing meanings attached not only to characteristics such as gender, class, youth, ethnicity, sexuality and the like, but to public values such as conformity, criminality, authority, and traditions of civic protest.
Despite the hostility towards Thompson, no woman had been hanged in England for 15 years, and her impending execution generated widespread anxiety. As one journalist prophetically wrote: ‘[t]he hanging of Mrs. Thompson will be a shock to public feeling (not a universal public feeling, but a widely prevalent one)’.[65] As if to confirm this prophecy, rumours started circulating shortly after she was hanged that her execution was horrific, and that witnesses were visibly distressed. The Daily Mail reported that she went ‘calmly to her death’ and that the execution was carried out ‘without a hitch’.[66] As the public later learned, executioners were instructed to say that the execution proceeded ‘without a hitch’. Other papers offered more disturbing accounts: that she had collapsed prior to the execution, was drugged, and was carried, semi-conscious, to the scaffold; that she disintegrated as a human being; and that she groaned like an animal going to the slaughter.[67] Several newspapers reported the devastating effects the execution had on witnesses. The Daily Express declared that: ‘All the women officials who have been engaged in watching Mrs. Thompson have felt the strain acutely … [m]any … have declared that they would never again carry out the duty imposed on them yesterday.’[68] Shortly after the execution, it was rumoured that ‘her insides fell out’, suggesting that she was pregnant and miscarried on the gallows, and this horror was witnessed by those present.[69] This rumour, although denied by the Home Office, circulated for decades, and Thompson’s biographer, Rene Weis, believes from his research that it was ‘a rumour of almost certain truth’.[70] John Ellis, the hangman, reportedly emerged from the execution shed screaming ‘Oh Christ, Oh Christ’. Two weeks later, he attempted suicide. Such reports confirmed a fear that was expressed in the papers before Thompson’s execution: namely, that executing anyone was barbaric, but that executing a woman had debilitating effects on witnesses, and exposed them to shame, humiliation and helplessness.[71] Why all these rumours? What was their cultural function? On one level, it did not matter if the rumours were true; they functioned culturally to express Thompson’s status as the abject other, associated with fear, horror and disgust. Whereas the body was conspicuously absent in representations of Van Nguyen’s and Bywaters’ executions, in rumours about Edith Thompson’s hanging, the body — a specifically female body — returned to claim its due. These rumours, and Thompson’s status as ‘abject other’, were clearly gendered: the rumour that ‘her insides fell out’ related to her potential to be a mother. This gendered meaning is brought out in Fryn Tennyson Jesse’s excellent 1934 novel on the case, A Pin to See the Peepshow, in which the narrator comments, prior to the character’s execution, that every killing of a woman is ‘the killing of a womb’.[72] Through metaphors, the novel imbues the female body with cultural meanings of maternity, vulnerability, and the sacred, rendering Thompson’s execution a violation of these values.
These rumours circulated not only in the weeks after Thompson’s execution, but for decades afterwards, particularly in the context of the movement to abolish the death penalty, which gained momentum after the Second World War. Along with the rumours, there was increasing suspicion that the Home Office had something to hide, that a cover-up was being perpetrated. In 1926, Major Blake, formerly the Governor of Pentonville, published an extract from his memoir. He stated that Bywaters had told him, on the eve of his execution, that Thompson was innocent. Blake was promptly arrested and tried for breaching the Official Secrets Act, which forbade officials to reveal any details, confessions or conversations to the public.[73] Blake’s case alerted the public to the Home Office’s procedures for suppressing the details of executions, and heightened suspicions about Thompson’s execution. In 1931, Ellis, the hangman, succeeded in killing himself, after attempting to kill his wife and daughter. His son said he never recovered from hanging Thompson.[74] In 1948, Sir Beverley Baxter, a Tory MP and abolitionist, who was editor of the Daily Express at the time of Thompson’s execution, reported that two warders came to him on the night of her execution: ‘They had taken part it the execution. Their faces were not human. They were like something out of another world. For, somehow, they had to get Edith Thompson to the gallows, after she had disintegrated as a human creature.’[75] After Baxter’s story was published, Tom Clarke, news editor of the Daily Mail in 1923, wrote to Baxter with a similar story: he claimed that the Governor of Holloway Prison visited the editor of the Daily Mail on the night of Thompson’s execution to ask him to begin a campaign against the death penalty.[76] The editor told Clarke that the Governor was visibly distressed and extremely upset about the execution. In 1950, Margery Fry, the Principal of Sommerville College, Oxford, gave testimony to the Royal Commission on the Death Penalty on behalf of the Howard League for Penal Reform. She recalled seeing Dr. Morton, the Governor of Holloway; his Deputy, Miss Cronin; and the Chaplain, Reverend Glanville Murray, a few days after Thompson’s hanging. She testified: ‘I was greatly impressed by its effect upon all of them … I have never seen a person look so changed … by mental suffering as the Governor … Miss Cronin was very greatly troubled by the whole affair … I was struck by this as Miss Cronin was not … a sensitive or easily moved person …’[77] She added: ‘I distinctly remember … two things … [the chaplain] said: “[w]hen we were all gathered together there it seemed utterly impossible to believe what we were there to do”; and “[m]y God, the impulse to rush in and save her by force was almost too strong for me”.’[78] The concept of the abject, as elaborated by Kristeva, is useful for interpreting reports of the reactions of those who witnessed, directly or indirectly, Thompson’s execution. As Kristeva proposes: ‘[t]he corpse … upsets even more violently the one who confronts it … refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live … [t]here, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.’[79] Whereas Thompson had been dehumanised in the press prior to her execution, these reports suggested that her execution was traumatising for witnesses because it brought them face to face with the abject, and thereby dehumanised the witnesses.
As Kristeva suggests, the abject is not only that which is despised or excluded from the social group. The structure of the abject also provides the means for challenging the legitimacy of the law underpinning the hegemonic social order. The abject entails a dialectical logic: ‘[The abject] lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the latter’s rules of the game. And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master … it beseeches a discharge, a convulsion, a crying out.’[80]
The ‘return’ of Edith Thompson’s execution, like the return of repressed memory in later decades, can be explained in terms of this demand for a ‘discharge … a crying out’. Accounts of her execution were used to reveal the barbarism of the death penalty, and thereby to challenge the humanity, ethics and legality of a government that supported it. In 1956, rumours about Thompson’s execution were aired once again in a dispute that erupted when Arthur Koestler, a high-profile writer and abolitionist, published horrific details of Edith Thompson’s execution in The Observer.[81] In what became known as the ‘Parliamentary Hanging Controversy’, the Home Office attempted to put an end to what Lord Mancroft called the ‘legend’ that ‘something horrific’ happened during Edith Thompson’s execution.[82] The Home Office was, however, on the back foot — historically, it had shrouded hanging, and the rules given to executioners, in secrecy. Demands were made that the instructions to executioners be published, and Ronald Paget asked, in Parliament, if the Home Office could clarify whether there had been any changes to the instructions as a result of Thompson’s execution. In 1956, these rumours prompted a call for the Home Office files on her execution to be prematurely opened, and for a parliamentary investigation into what happened, and whether her execution resulted in changes to the instructions that the Home Office issued to executioners. Whereas previously these rumours figured Edith Thompson’s status as abject other, at this point, 30 years later, with reasons for the hostility towards her long forgotten, and with the case against her increasingly discredited, her status as abject other reflected badly, not on her, but on the society and, particularly, on the judicial machinery. In this new context, her execution became a symbol of the excesses of the law. Consequently, conditions were ripe for her to be recuperated as a symbol for the abolitionist movement. In using her case as a symbol, Koestler harnessed the power of the abject to turn people against state-sanctioned execution. As a result of Koestler’s articles and book, the Home Office was forced, in 1956, to make a public statement about Edith Thompson’s execution.[83] It denied that anything ‘especially horrid’ or ‘disgusting’ happened at her execution. Nonetheless, the rumour that ‘her insides fell out’ persisted, feeding abolitionist arguments about the barbarity of the death penalty.[84] In her case, the abject prevailed in challenging the legality and inhumanity of the death penalty, until it was finally abolished for murder in Britain in 1969.