One thing this movie missed

rob2661 on Sun Jul 29 2012 18:05:01

"Gull believed"- is there any evidence Gull(who never actually murdered anybody, but is being made out to be a serial killer without a shred of evidence) believed this stuff, or were these things just being attributed to the "Gull" we have presented in the "From Hell" fiction. It sounds to me like an attempt to caricature something he thinks was a reactionary, rather fascistic aspect of "Victorianism" by a twentieth century writer pushing an agenda ("nutty right wingery killed the Whitechapel 5"-in fact the "right wingers", like say the militaristic Sir Charles Warren, were as desperate to stop and catch the Ripper as anyone else).

How on earth would a Victorian think of the female as representing "creativity/imagination" in opposition to the male, who he must therefore have thought less likely to have these qualities-for this period, the concept would seem risible. He surely would have been hard put to find his evidence... trying to think of the female equivalents to all those myriad creative and imaginative males (Shakespeare, Da Vinci, Newton, Luther, Kant, Beethoven, Mozart, Tolstoy...). I'm not saying the female tends to intrinsically lack these qualities, the reasons for this deficit are probably simply social and political rather than anything else-but a Victorian would have seen precious little evidence of female input into these areas over the centuries compared to an overwhelmingly male one. He probably would have found the idea laughable, not built a theory out of it and then, for goodness sake, murdered a bunch of prostitutes nobody had ever heard of in a wacky plot to stifle some perceived fem threat to male hegemony. The coherence of all this escapes me.

Oh, thank you for taking the time to answer me. Your post makes me want to read the graphic novel, I think I'll go buy it. It seems really much more interesting and deeper than the movie.

Also it's nice to see someone answering a long answer like this and not: "Jeez go read the book you dumb noob!" like you see on the Game Of Thrones boards (for instance) all the time! :-)