Spectatorship and the Consumption of Dying at Public Executions
By Reb Xu
citation: Xu, Reb. “Spectatorship and the Consumption of Dying at Public Executions” The Coalition of Master’s Scholars on Material Culture, September 17, 2021.
For most of the death penalty’s history in the Western world, executions were a public affair that welcomed all to spectate. The optics of public executions retain a strong grasp on our cultural memories of specific events – for example, it is impossible now to separate the guillotine from the French Revolution, due to the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The immortality of these memories suggests that deaths will remain forever public, and we forever spectating. It is worth noting that public executions are one of the few instances where death is curated for spectators; the executed have no control over their deaths anymore, and their process of dying is made a product to be consumed by others. Although the official reasoning for making executions public was that viewing punishment would make for a disincentive towards committing crime, one cannot deny that the crowds’ morbid curiosity and thirst for violence contributed significantly to the attendance of these executions, and the authorities catered sometimes to this desire. In the case of Roman public executions under the Late Republic and Empire, public executions were staged to be unique events so that regular spectators would not be bored.[1] Rowdy crowds were a regular fixture of public executions across any time period. Some have noted that these congregations beneath the scaffold created a space where individuals from all classes and walks of life would participate in a ritualistic event together.[2] Ironically, the disorganised spirit of an execution crowd often led to more crime, rather than prevent it, thanks to the bloodthirstiness of the audience it garnered.[3] The spectacle of the public execution drew people in and agitated complex and strong feelings within them. It is precisely due to the public execution’s gruesome subject matter that these events garnered such attention and entertainment value throughout history – much like the way that slasher and torture porn horror films, violent video games, and true crime generate so much interest in our contemporary times.
Perhaps this fascination with spectating the specific process of a violent or ‘unnatural’ death activates some urge deep within our psyches. In 1912, the Russian physician and psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein introduced the concept of a death drive in her article ‘Destruction as Cause of Becoming’. Spielrein’s death drive theory presents a push-and-pull relationship between the ‘negative instinct’ of destruction (death) and the ‘positive instinct’ of creation/regeneration (life).[4] The juxtaposition of these two instincts could perhaps be applied to the viewers of a public execution – in spectating the violent extinguishing of another’s life, the thrill of one’s own existence is further emphasised. The act of tipping the executed over the threshold between life and death invoked emphasised both the vitality of life and the way that execution wrested control of this life from the executed and handed it to another party, the state or the executioner. By removing autonomy over one’s own life and body from those to be executed, the authorities involved simultaneously communicated their own power and suspended the basic human dignities of the executed. We cannot flawlessly reconstruct the emotions of the execution crowd, but contemporary critics of the practice made explicit connections between the violence of the execution, and the saturnalia of its audience, likening the crowd to ‘wild beasts’.[5] The brutality of public executions was certainly associated with the hungry liveliness of its viewership. However, the gawking of executed bodies does not merely end with the drop of an axe or the snap of a rope. Medicine’s need for human bodies as material further exposed the condemned after death to a visceral degree.
Anatomists and other scholars of the human body sought out the bodies of the executed for the purpose of dissection – baring out all the hidden corners of the corpse in plain sight. In 16th-century Italy, anatomy students would collect the bodies of foreign criminals for dissections and anatomical demonstrations.[6] Although public anatomies were intended for medical professionals and medical students to better familiarise themselves with the inner workings of the human body, towards the end of the 16th century, the general public also attended these events occasionally.[7] By purposefully choosing to use the bodies of foreign executed criminals, anatomists introduced a level of separation between the body and the viewers, making the dissection easier to watch than, say, one that involved the body of someone local. Outlawing the public dissection of locals would also preserve the honour of local families by preventing an undignified display of their deceased relative’s body.[8] Dissection presented the ultimate exposure – the body is usually set in the centre of an amphitheatre, with eyes surrounding it on all sides. Then the parts beneath the skin that even oneself usually never sees in life are assiduously displayed, scrutinised, and taken apart. In anatomies that allowed the attendance of non-academic audiences, these rituals usually took place around the time of Carnival, during winter, so that the bodies would last longer.[9] Carnival’s raucous atmosphere would impart an air of unruliness to these anatomies, packed to the brim with revellers, charlatans, barbers, and academics alike.[10] In a sense, the chaos of these scenes matched the energy of the execution crowd. On the other hand, the spectacle of the public anatomy presented the body of the executed for a more tangible consumption, escalating the exhibition of the body to a degree where the body becomes less representative of the person, and more like an object.
However, the relationship between medicine and executions extends beyond the anatomical theatre. The phenomenon of corpse medicine and the popularity thereof incited a steady demand for human bodies. The theory behind most corpse medicine lies in the consumption of life as spirit.[11] As the spirit dwelled in the body, consuming someone else’s body would logically restore the spirit of the ailing.[12] The business of corpse medicine was closely tied to the public execution, which naturally provided the raw materials for this genre of medical science. Bodies of criminals would often be stolen, much to the chagrin of anatomists who planned to acquire the corpses for themselves.[13] Blood especially was a prized ingredient, and many attended public executions for the express purpose of receiving a dose of liquid life. Numerous accounts across Europe, stretching from the first century to the 19th century, details people collecting the blood of those who had died in combat, or by beheading, with vessels and cloths to sell or take as medicine.[14] By drinking the blood gushing from the veins and arteries of the freshly executed, or using other body parts like human fat in medicine, consumption becomes literal. The death of the condemned has been transmutated into life for the afflicted.
Public executions eventually died out as a practice, in part due to public outcry against the gruesome display, but also due to fears and moral panic surrounding the mixing of classes and the creep of ‘lowbrow’ culture.[15] The use of executed people’s bodies decreased also as physicians and students of medicine received cadavers from other sources, and the practice of corpse medicine died out. The bodies of the condemned were imbued with less meaning, and the obsession with viewing these bodies eventually died out, evolving into the current compulsion of interacting with condemned bodies as little as possible.[16] Yet, when reflecting upon the longevity and universality of public executions and their themes of exposure, voyeurism, and consumption, one is faced with questions regarding the materiality of life and death, the justification of postmortem punishments, and the value of a person versus the value of their body. We should not forget that much of scientific progress is mired in the history of crime and the history of violence as entertainment, along with the biopolitics of the times.[17] Does committing a crime rob us of the immateriality of being a person, and instead make us bodies of material? As historians, I guess we have no choice but to keep watching to find out.
Endnotes
[1] Chris Epplett, ‘Spectacular Executions in the Roman World’, in A Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity, eds. Paul Christesen and Donald G. Kyle (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 522.
[2] Annulla Linders, ‘“What Daughters, what Wives, what Mothers, Think You, They are?” Gender and the Transformation of Executions in the United States’, Journal of Historical Sociology 28, iss. 2 (June 2015): 149.
[3] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 62.
[4] Sabina Spielrein, ‘Destruction as Cause of Becoming’ (English version), Journal of Analytical Psychology 39 (1994): 173.
[5] Gregory Shaya, ‘The Unruly Emotions of the Execution Crowd and its Critics in Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century France’, Cultural History 8, iss. 1 (April 2019), 81.
[6] Cynthia Klestinec, Theaters of Anatomy: Students, Teachers, and Traditions of Dissection in Renaissance Venice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 16.
[7] Klestinec, Theaters of Anatomy, 91-92.
[8] Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2006), 212.
[9] Park, Secrets of Women, 214.
[10] Klestinec, Theaters of Anatomy, 93.
[11] Richard Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians (New York: Routledge, 2016), 20.
[12] Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires, 267.
[13] Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires, 137.
[14] Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires, 14-15, 118-135.
[15] Shaya, ‘The Unruly Emotions’, 89.
[16] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 10.
[17] Sabine Hildebrandt, ‘Capital Punishment and Anatomy: History and Ethics of an Ongoing Association’, Clinical Anatomy 21, iss. 1 (January 2008): 10-11.
Bibliography
Epplett, Chris. ‘Spectacular Executions in the Roman World’. In A Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity, edited by Paul Christesen and Donald G. Kyle, 520-532. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Hildebrandt, Sabine. ‘Capital Punishment and Anatomy: History and Ethics of an Ongoing Association’. Clinical Anatomy 21, issue 1 (January 2008): 5-14.
Klestinec, Cynthia. Theaters of Anatomy: Students, Teachers, and Traditions of Dissection in Renaissance Venice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.
Linders, Annulla. ‘“What Daughters, what Wives, what Mothers, Think You, They are?” Gender and the Transformation of Executions in the United States’. Journal of Historical Sociology 28, issue 2 (June 2015): 135-165.
Park, Katharine. Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection. New York: Zone Books, 2006.
Shaya, Gregory. ‘The Unruly Emotions of the Execution Crowd and its Critics in Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century France’. Cultural History 8, issue 1 (April 2019): 70-93.
Spielrein, Sabina. ‘Destruction as Cause of Becoming’. Journal of Analytical Psychology 39 (1994): 155-186.
Sugg, Richard. Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians. New York: Routledge, 2016.