Written in Blood: The Murder Narrative and the Crime of the Papin Sisters Open Access

Abstract

Abstract
Written in Blood: The Murder Narrative and the Crime of the Papin Sisters
By Julia E. House
On February 2, 1933, Christine and Léa Papin, two maids in Le Mans, France, attacked and brutally murdered their employers, Madame and Mademoiselle Lancelin. The victims' faces were beaten and slashed beyond all recognition, their legs striated with a kitchen knife. Taken into custody following their crime, the suspects provided a detailed account of the chronology of the attack, omitting no detail save that of the motive behind the crime. Due to this one missing element, the murders have sparked a number of literary, cinematic and dramatic representations in the years following the crime, each trying to resolve questions around the disturbing murders. Through the lens of each writer, the crime has taken on a different shape, the sisters either psychotics, revolutionaries, lesbians or victims themselves. Yet even with the many treatments of the murders, the story remains obscure nearly a century later.

This thesis analyzes the structures employed in narrating the crime of the Papin sisters. The first chapter examines three traditional detective narratives by Edgar Allan Poe, Gaston Leroux and Guy de Maupassant, mapping out expectations that are set up and resolved in the text. The second chapter analyzes the Papin sisters' crime via their testimony and journalists' accounts of the trial. The third chapter relates specifically to the explanation provided by Jacques Lacan in his Motifs du crime paranoïc and the closely linked play of Jean Genet, Les Bonnes. The final chapter discusses three films based on the crime, Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie, Jean-Pierre Denis' Les Blessures assassines and Nancy Meckler's Sister My Sister.

This murder case challenges the facile solutions to crime provided in fiction, as traditional narrative means prove futile in explaining the story. The gap between the reader's expectations and the availability of satisfactory resolution pushes the event to further analyses, culminating in a discarding of narrative completely as the story is taken up in visual forms of representation. What becomes apparent in this analysis is that the stringent logical form of narrative must be abandoned before the story of this murder can begin to be comprehended.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Introduction: The Murder Narrative: Truth and Fiction ..........................................1

Murder as spectacle......................................................................................7
Murder as popular art form ..........................................................................9
Truth and fiction ........................................................................................12

Chapter One: Reading Murder...............................................................................20

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue": Murderer as animal...........................22
Le Mystère de la chambre jaune: The dreamed crime...............................34
"La Petite Roque": Killer as divided subject .............................................46

Chapter Two: Testimony of the Papin Sisters .......................................................57

Christine and Léa Papin: First version of the crime ..................................59
Second version of the crime.......................................................................63
Christine's revelation .................................................................................68
Journalists' accounts of the crime..............................................................75
"L'anormal, l'inexplicable, l'inexpliqué"..................................................80
Motive, sanity and guilt .............................................................................86

Chapter Three: Representations of the Crime

by Jacques Lacan and Jean Genet...................................................................93
Jacques Lacan's analysis............................................................................95
The Papin sisters' influence on Lacan's later work .................................108
Jean Genet, Les Bonnes............................................................................112
Theater and literature ...............................................................................113
Jean Genet on theater ...............................................................................125

Chapter Four: Visual and Cinematic Representations .........................................127

Cinema and theater ..................................................................................129
The "before and after" photographs.........................................................133
The Surrealists and the Papins .................................................................136
Cinematic representations........................................................................139
Claude Chabrol, La Cérémonie................................................................140
Nancy Meckler, Sister My Sister .............................................................141
Jean-Pierre Denis, Les Blessures assassines............................................143
Language and naming ..............................................................................144
Folie à deux and dualities ........................................................................150
Murder scene............................................................................................154
Why cinema? ...........................................................................................166

Conclusion: Vision and Knowledge ....................................................................169
Works Cited .........................................................................................................174


List of illustrations
Photograph: Fig. 1. Léa and Christine Papin before their crime .........................134
Photograph: Fig. 2. Christine and Léa after committing the murders. ................134

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	French
Degree	PhD
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Language, Modern
Keyword	crime narrative vision and knowledge Jacques Lacan murder narrative Jean Genet Papin sisters
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Lang, Candace, Emory University
Committee Members	Oeler, Karla, Emory University Bennington, Geoffrey, Emory University Bonnefis, Philippe, Emory University

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