The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
Auteur
- Hallie Rubenhold (Écrivain)
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Classement en biblio - 4 lecteurs
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We have grown so comfortable with the notion of 'Jack the Ripper', the unfathomable, invincible male killer, that we have failed to recognize that he continues to walk among us. In his top hat and cape, wielding his blood-drenched knife, he can be spotted regularly in London posters, in ads, on the sides of buses. Bartenders have named drinks after him, shops use his moniker on their signs, tourists from around the world make pilgrimages to Whitechapel to walk in his footsteps and to visit a museum dedicated to his violence. The world has learned to dress up in his costume at halloween, to imagine being him, to honour his genius, to laugh at a murderer of women.
By embracing him, we embrace the set of values that surrounded him in 1888 which teaches women that they are a lesser value and can expect to be dishonoured and abused. We enforced the notion that 'bad women' deserve punishment and that 'prostitute' are a sub-species of female.
In order to keep him alive, we have to forget his victims.
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Lecture extrêmement intéressante. On ne se concentre absolument pas sur Jack l’éventreur, mais sur ses 5 victimes – Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine et Mary-Jane. L’autrice a fais un travail de recherche trés détaillé qui nous permet d’avoir des informations d’une grande précision sur leur vie, et par extensions, sur la vie des femmes de la classe ouvrières à l’époque, non seulement la façon dont elles vivaient mais également la façon dont la société les percevait.
Le dernier chapitre du livre, la “conclusion”, offre également un aperçu générale et matière à réfléchir sur la manière dont ces femmes et leur tueur sont perçu encore de nos jours et par conséquent sur le patriarcat qui est vraiment intégré dans notre manière de penser, sans même que l’on s’en rende compte. Je pense que c'est ce qui m’a le plus marqué dans ce livre.
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Date de sortie
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
- USA : 2019-02-19 (English)
Activité récente
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Résumé
Five devastating human stories and a dark and moving portrait of Victorian London—the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper
Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffeehouses, lived on country estates; they breathed ink dust from printing presses and escaped human traffickers.
What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women.
For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that “the Ripper” preyed on prostitutes. Not only is this untrue, as historian Hallie Rubenhold has discovered, but it has prevented the real stories of these fascinating women from being told. Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, revealing a world not just of Dickens and Queen Victoria, but of poverty, homelessness, and rampant misogyny. They died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time—but their greatest misfortune was to be born women.
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