|
|
Why we want her to be evil
Article printed in Church Times, November 2002.
Myra Hindley is in hell, we are told by those, apparently with inside information, at the Sun.
It is interesting how the figure of Hindley manages to make such outdated and outrageous Christian doctrines as damnation not only palatable but popular. We are used to our more pleasant beliefs lingering on in post-Christian society. According to the BBC's great survey of religious opinion in 2000, 52% of us believe in heaven, but only 28% believe in hell. It is more important to us, as a rule, that our beliefs are positive than that they are consistent.
It seems, however, that when we are faced with such horrifying deeds as Hindley's we need the nastier side of Christianity after all. In fact it is the very 'niceness' of the faith, the mercy and forgiveness, that then becomes unpalatable. 'The vilest offender who truly believes/That moment from Jesus a pardon receives': how much easier to accept this in the abstract than to see the Moors murderer taking last rites and going to her death as just another repentant sinner.
Hindley is an icon of evil for the British second only to Hitler. It is her face rather than Brady's that stares out of the nation's photographic memory, hers that was sensationally displayed in the Royal Academy painted in a child's handprints. This is not because she was the instigator and the more actively involved of the two - she was not - but presumably because she was the woman.
Something similar is true for Rosemary West. And Maxine Carr has evoked more fascination over the Soham murders than Ian Huntley - I had to ask several people before I found someone who remembers his name as well as hers - despite in the end only being charged with conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
Why is this? Why is the horror of murder so much more compelling when it comes from a woman? One reason must be that we still carry around some residual belief in the purity and innocence of woman. The contrast between this image and the brutality and perversion of what Hindley did is what makes it so ghoulish. The thought that Myra and Mary are sisters.
Also there is the idea that sexual predation is a male thing. The crimes of Ian Brady and Fred West were monstrous, but can to some extent, we feel, be explained by the workings of testosterone on a sick mind. Hindley and Rosemary West are without that explanation, and so what they did seems even more unnatural.
And then there is the fact that in all three cases the victims were children. The natural and right feelings of a woman for children are, we feel, maternal, a relationship more tender and intimate than anything we could expect of a man. So again it is the sense of unnaturalness that feeds our shocked fascination.
And it is fascination, I think, not true horror that we feel. Horror is what makes journalists who attended the trial lie awake at night trying to block the sound of that nightmarish recording out of their heads. It is not what makes newspaper readers pour over full-page transcriptions of it.
This image of Hindley, the face of pure evil, has played an important role in the life of the nation. How compelling we find the idea that evil is something that characterises a small group of people utterly unlike the rest of us: Myra and Ian, Fred and Rosemary, Osama and Saddam.
Solzhenitsyn said, 'If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.'
Those like Hindley who embody evil for us allow us to do precisely that, or rather to imagine we can. If we see them as irredeemably and absolutely depraved, then we ourselves look pure in comparison. We are reassured that for all our failings and shortcomings we are not wicked, because they are wicked and we are not like them.
It is ironic that while such appalling events as the Moors murders help us to face the reality of human badness (another unfashionable Christian idea), our demonisation of the culprits prevents us facing up to an equally important reality: that we ourselves are included in that badness.
This is one reason why the media, and the Home Secretaries that they have controlled, could never allow Hindley to leave prison, despite the fact that she fulfilled the sentence originally recommended by the lord chief justice 11 years ago. The incarnation of evil has to be locked away, the cancer cut out, the scapegoat sent into the desert, for the rest of us to be assured that it is something separate from us.
However, Hindley was, whatever else she may represent for us, a human being, and her literal life imprisonment raises some questions about what prison is for. If it is simply to mete out punishment in proportion to the crime, then should she not have been released after 25 years, irrespective of her iconic status? If it is to rehabilitate, then why was its apparent textbook success with Hindley never recognised? And if, in such notorious cases, it is to vent the feelings of the masses without due regard to justice, mercy or the law, then does it not bring yet more wickedness to a case where there is enough already?
