5/5/2023 0 Comments The waxworks95), and the following paragraphs will discuss twenty- and twenty-first-century texts encompassing various media-novels, short stories, films and TV series, computer and virtual reality games, and museum exhibitions-which serve as further evidence that figures of Jack not only do not bring us any closer to revealing the identity of the killer or discovering the reality of this figure, but speed it along its path towards the mythical, while at the same time making the very real victims of the notorious murderer less real and less fleshed-out. Accordingly, Dan Laughey states that the Ripper ‘has become a Baudrillardian simulation’ and ‘is hyperreal’ ( Laughey 2013, p. The creation of the image of Jack the Ripper, including his wax likeness, complete with his (stereo)typical signifiers-long knife, top hat, black bag, black overcoat-stems from descriptions by people claiming to have seen him, and its development is parallel to the steps Baudrillard assigned to the creation of a simulacrum: ‘1 It is the reflection of a basic reality’ (the witnesses’ words), ‘2 It masks and perverts a basic reality’ (sensational press reports), ‘3 It masks the absence of a basic reality’ (reproductions of images), ‘4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum’ (production of waxworks) ( Baudrillard 1988, p. What is known about him (or her) stems from sensational press reports which were informed by Gothic imagery and the fear of the other. However, in the case of the Whitechapel killer there is no ‘real’-there is only ‘simulation’: ‘the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal’ ( Baudrillard 1988, p. Jean Baudrillard described hyperrealism as ‘the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another, reproductive medium’ with each transmediality, the real is ‘volatilized’, but, at the same time, ‘reinforced’, eventually becoming ‘ reality for its own sake … the hyperreal’ ( Baudrillard 1988, p. This sense of control is, however, false, since any representation of the Whitechapel killer has no genuine model and can only be described using the Baudrillardian concepts of simulacrum and hyperreality. This is one of numerous attempts to give the anonymous, faceless killer some form and shape: evil that can be named and seen seems less malevolent, more manageable. Together with Vlad the Impaler, Elizabeth Batory, Atilla the Hun, Rasputin, and Billy the Kid, a victimless seven-inch Jack the Ripper figurine represents a historic ‘face of madness’ ( McFarlane’s Monsters series 3: Six Faces of Madness 2004). Since there is no known model to base his wax likeness on, any representation of the infamous Jack poses a number of questions about the status of the Whitechapel killer and his victims. This article examines various wax representations of him and his victims, with the term ‘waxworks’ used to denote not only dummies put on show in the Victorian times but also the ones on display now, as well as their various transmediations, group or individual, on page and screen. It would be equally difficult to argue with a parallel statement that no chamber of horrors is complete without Jack the Ripper. The association of representations of villains with this medium became so close that its dictionary definition includes the following usage as an example: “no waxworks is complete without its chamber of horrors” ( Waxwork n.dat.). In the nineteenth century, visiting exhibitions of wax figures which included infamous criminals was a means of substituting for the ‘lost pleasure’ of public hangings (Pamela Pilbeam qtd. Waxworks was one of the manifestations of the nineteenth-century fascination with the nascent cult and culture of celebrities, a culture that in the twentieth century incorporated serial killers as well ( Schmid 2006).
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