| The childhood of Jame Gumb is not described in the same detail that Dolarhyde’s is, however, it is still an extremely important part in the becoming of Jame as the Death’s Head Moth. We do not know anything about the father of Jame; we assume he was never around. His mother participated in beauty pageants and failed to place in the Miss Sacramento Contest a month into her pregnancy with Jame. When Jame was born, his mother named him James. An error by the hospital staff left Gumb’s name on his birth certificate as Jame. No one, not even Jame’s mother, ever bothered to change it. Jame’s mother became an alcoholic after her acting career fell short and at the age of two Jame was placed in a foster home by Los Angeles County. The grandparents of Jame retrieved him from an unsatisfactory foster home at the age of 10. Two years later, Jame killed his grandparents. Jame’s name sums up how he felt. Jame feels he is incomplete and is unsure of his own identity. He obviously does not like the person he was born as. After Agent Starling shoots Jame in his own basement, he manages a few words: “How . . . does . . . it feel . . . to be . . . so beautiful” (The Silence 348)? As with Francis Dolarhyde and his grandmother, Jame feels an attachment and love to his mother even though she did not probably treat him well and did not appear to care much about him. Jame sees his mother as a beautiful person. Jame decides then, that the change he needs to make to make himself beautiful, is to become his mother. As Jame prepares to kill the last of his kidnapees, he dresses himself in womens lingerie and watches tapes of his mother at a beauty pageant and then her sliding down a pool slide naked with a large group of other women. We find out that the woman sliding down into the pool is not even Jame’s mother, proving how little he really knew about her. Jame has an image of her though in his mind, and that is one of the things that drives him. After the scene with the old beauty pageant tapes, Jame speaks to his little poodle: “Oh, Precious. Come here to Mommy. Mommy’s gonna be so beautiful" (The Silence 283). Jame is making the change to a woman to make himself beautiful. Francis Dolarhyde nearly falls in love with a blind woman. The blind woman falls somewhat for him. Dolarhyde is good to her. He sympathizes with her disability and understands her feelings of ridicule and misunderstanding. Like a blind person, Dolarhyde feels society has ignored him and treated him like someone who is inferior to the rest of society. What does the blind woman then see in Francis? She feels his compassion for her and finds comfort in his shyness. But, does she being blind, see not what is on the outside of the Dragon, the unattractive facial features and horrible acts of murder, but the internal goodness that is inside Dolarhyde. The part of him that still wants to be good. Is she able to see that in all evil there is good, or possibly that evil was bred from goodness? Was it the goodness of God that ultimately created the monster Dolarhyde is becoming? In the first two of Harris’s Lecter novels, we know nothing about the past of Dr. Hannibal Lecter. All we see is a man too smart for his own good, for society’s good. A man so intriguingly intelligent, he seems to mock most of humanity, finding humorous annoyances in everything that surrounds him. However, we are missing the past. So far, this has been Harris’s most direct and obvious form in the justification of his criminal’s actions. New York Times Book reviewer Thomas Fleming, in fact, sees the connection between Francis Dolarhyde’s childhood and his transition to the Dragon as “too visible” (Fleming). He goes on, “Real life is more various, less predictable” (Fleming). I do not follow Mr. Fleming myself. Just because Dolarhyde had the childhood he had doesn’t automatically translate to him becoming a mass murderer. His childhood spelled nothing out about the attraction to a dragon, or why the families Dolarhyde killed were set up like an audience to watch Dolarhyde work on the mother. And why would the anger Dolarhyde has need to be expelled upon a family. If we did not know the intimate details about Dolarhyde’s childhood and are not able to follow his thoughts like we can, the reader would not have much of an idea as to the reasons behind the actions of Francis Dolarhyde. In that case, Dolarhyde would sure be pretty unpredictable. Fleming speaks as if there does not need to be reasons behind the actions and directions each of us take in our lives. However, there are things we see, dream up, or are born with that create the responses we have. Something triggers our actions. Finally in Hannibal, some details arise pertaining to the past of Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Hannibal lived on a large estate in Lithuania during his childhood with his parents and his sister, Mischa. During World War II, the Germans came upon the Lecter estate as the Eastern Front was collapsing. Hannibal’s parents were killed and his sister chopped up with an axe and eaten. Hannibal was close to his sister, seemed to look up to her or admire something she had. FBI agent Clarice Starling becomes for Hannibal the reincarnation of his sister. The one thing that scares Hannibal, that he seems emotionally attached to, is the memory of his sister being taken from his grasp to be chopped up. Dr. Lecter wants time to reverse--no longer should increasing entropy mark the direction of time. He wants increasing order to point the way. He wants Mischa’s teeth back out of the stool pit. Behind his fevered calculations is the desperate wish to make a place for Mischa in the world, perhaps the place now occupied by Clarice Starling. (Hannibal 436)Dr. Lecter is not someone just above and beyond everyone else in the understanding of the world, but a man frustrated, searching for what has been missing since his childhood in Lithuania. Who else besides God would have such an understanding, such arrogance, to their knowledge of the human? The Devil. Lecter is, but not only, the Devil. Lecter mocks humans, knows them too well, especially those evil urges, the anger all of us have. Lecter gives us the Devil as he speaks with Starling at the beginning of The Silence of the Lambs: “I collect church collapses, recreationally. Did you see the recent one in Sicily? Marvelous! The facade fell on sixty-five grandmothers at a special Mass. Was that evil? If so, who did it? If He’s up there, He just loves it, Officer Starling. Typhoid and swans--it all comes from the same place” (The Silence 22).Also in the first encounter between Lecter and Starling, Starling immediately notices something about Lecter. “Dr. Lecter has six fingers on his left hand” (The Silence 15). That of course, a reverence to the Book of Revelation and the name of the Beast being 666. In a letter to Agent Will Graham of the FBI in Red Dragon, Dr. Lecter brings up God again: When you were so depressed after you shot Mr. Garrett Jacob Hobbs to death, it wasn’t the act that got you down, was it? Really, didn’t you feel so bad because killing him felt so good? Think about it, but don’t worry about it. Why shouldn’t it feel good? It must feel good to God--He does it all the time, and are we not made in His image? (Red Dragon 349)Lecter also has an extensive knowledge of the Bible and we find him with a crucifixion drawing on his own cell wall. “It’s Golgotha after the Deposition. Crayon and Magic Marker on butcher paper. It’s what the thief who had been promised Paradise really got, when they took the paschal lamb away.”Once again Dr. Lecter is pointing out dark side of God, the dark side of human nature. Lecter may very well be the voice of Thomas Harris at times, or at least a questioning voice in the mind of Harris. Is evil inevitable? Are we all just as evil as the next person? Dr. Lecter takes a stab at the latter of the two questions in his visit with Will Graham at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane: “Do you know how you caught me?”Dr. Lecter represents the basic ideas Harris is discussing in all three of these books. Will good always find evil and can evil find its way back to good? Throughout these three novels, over and over again we are given the Devil and the Christ in Lecter. We will continue for now with the evil references of Lecter in the three novels. Dr. Lecter, ignoring the Sabbath, saw his psychiatric patients on Sundays. His eyes reflect red and in them is “endless night” (The Silence 161). Agent Starling tells Behavioral Science Director Jack Crawford: “he enjoys seeing the destruction of faith, it’s his favorite thing” (Hannibal 48). In HannibalHannibal 156). When Lecter is scheduled to give a speech to a group of renowned medieval and Renaissance scholars, he chooses Dante’s Inferno and Judas Iscariot as the subjects. Dr. Lecter in this speech goes into great detail about the death of Judas Iscariot and Pier della Vigna in the seventh level of the Inferno. These are wonderful examples of destruction of faith. Dr. Lecter proceeds to kill Rinaldo Pazzi, of the Florence police, by hanging him in way that had Pazzi’s bowels fall out. In the Acts of the Apostles, St. Luke describes Judas hanging with his bowels out. And we soon find that Lecter proceeds to the village church of Santa Reparata, where in the horned helmet of the Devil’s Armor on the church wall, are all the needed materials for the Italian Dr. Fell, Dr. Lecter’s Florence identity, to leave Europe under a new identity. And finally, after Dr. Lecter carries Starling out of the barn full of wild boars, one of the men involved with the scheduled death of Dr. Lecter speaks of the situation: “They (the pigs) kill my brother, kill Carlo, but they stand back from Dr. Lecter. I think they worship him” (Hannibal 427). Hearing all of this should convince you that Lecter is the Devil and we can just leave it at that. However, I have yet to finish my analysis of Dr. Hannibal Lecter. We have already established the unpleasant childhood memories of Lecter, but that is not where the justification behind Lecter’s actions and his possible internal goodness end. Lecter kills the one time lover of Jame Gumb, Benjamin Raspail, at his psychiatric appointment because “I got sick and tired of his whining. Best thing for him really, therapy wasn’t going anywhere” (The Silence 59). Lecter, embarrassed by the language with which nearby prisoner Miggs uses toward Starling at one point, gets Miggs to swallow his tongue. “It has a certain pleasant symmetry to it though, his swallowing that offensive tongue, don’t you agree” (The Silence 60)? Lecter seems to kill most of the time to protect himself, to protect or get revenge for someone else, to relieve the victims own tensions, or to just make the world a better place. Lecter could be seen as ridding the world of the bad. The people who treat Lecter with courtesy, find that Lecter extends the same courtesy to them. Long time nurse of Lecter’s, Barney, recalls: “He told me once that, whenever it was ‘feasible,’ he preferred to eat the rude” (Hannibal 87). In The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter helps save countless women’s lives by aiding in the capture of Jame Gumb. He also helps Starling, at least temporarily, to achieve the silence of the lambs. We discover Starling ran away from her uncle’s ranch after hearing lambs screaming at night; they were being slaughtered. In hunting down Jame Gumb, Starling was able to save lives and stop the torturing, something she did not do back at her uncle’s ranch in Montana. This, in turn, helps Starling have some temporary peace from the nightmares she has of the screaming lambs. In Hannibal, Mason Verger seeks revenge against Lecter. Dr. Lecter left Mason with one eye, hardly a face, and a paralyzed body after Lecter convinced Mason to feed his face to dogs. We learn though, that Mason is a lying, sadistic man who buys his way to get whatever he wants. He enjoys watching the death of people and messing with the minds of little foster kids. Lecter was unsuccessful then, in his first attempt to get rid of the evil Mason Verger. The hunter Lecter kills in the woods in Hannibal was illegally hunting and we will also recall bad memories Lecter has of the Germans killing all the animals at his parents estate. Dr. Lecter kills FBI Director Paul Krendler towards the end of Hannibal. Krendler was secretly working for Mason and trying to end the career of Starling. There seems to be a reason, and a pretty good reason, behind every murder committed by Dr. Lecter. We also seem to agree with the validity of Lecter’s actions because of a respect we have for him and his insight, his own justifications. We find one of the first of Lecter’s attractions to Starling could lie in looking inside his memory palace, a place he can retreat to whenever he wants. In it one of the things you will find is “a painting of St. Francis feeding a moth to a starling” (Hannibal 253). This painting could be Lecter’s symbolic remembrance of Starling’s capture of Jame Gumb, whom you might remember representing the Death’s Head Moth in a way. The painting could also show that Starling is now becoming a savior to Lecter. Here is the description of one of Dr. Lecter’s drawings: “As you can see, here is Christ crucified on a clock face and His arms revolve to tell the time, just like the Mickey Mouse watches. It’s interesting because the face, the head hanging forward, is that of Clarice Starling.” (Hannibal 269)Starling has taken the place of Lecter’s sister now, who once endured torture, like the problems Starling has run into now. Starling has also become what will bring out some of the goodness in Lecter. Starling is going to bring Mischa back. Starling is nearing a transformation. The transformation will complete at the end of Hannibal. Before, Starling was crucified in Lecter’s drawing. Now, as Mason Verger prepares to feed Lecter to the wild pigs Lecter’s “arms are outstretched straight from his shoulders on either side, well bound with rope to a singletree, a thick oak crosspiece from the pony cart harness” (Hannibal 401). Lecter at this point is now the Christ figure. Lecter is the opposing forces of good and evil, wrapped into one. The ending of Hannibal would be something an entire paper could be based on alone. Good and evil, it seems have now really come together with the development of a physical relationship between Dr. Lecter and Clarice Starling. Before, Lecter’s memory palace was mentioned. We are left to wonder if the scenes following dinner with Paul Krendler are just occurring in the mind of Lecter. Or possibly Starling is now really Mischa, the transformation of Starling was completed and Lecter says in Hannibal “was beyond him” (Hannibal 466). Starling could have even died after being hit with too much tranquilizer trying to save Lecter. However, Harris would not conclude possibly the last novel concerning Hannibal Lecter with something that doesn’t really happen, would he? No, because it is the perfect combination, each has found what they are looking for. Also, on the last page of Hannibal: “Occasionally, on purpose, Dr. Lecter drops a teacup to shatter on the floor. He is satisfied when it does not gather itself together” (Hannibal 484). Dr. Lecter is no longer looking to reverse time and get back Mischa, he has Clarice, for real. Dr. Lecter also does good by helping bring about a memory palace for Clarice, where she can visit her old horse and her father. Thomas Harris could be saying in these novels that evil is inevitable and we must learn to live with it. Or he could just be questioning possibilities, looking at the possible justifications of evil acts and wondering how and why evil continues to be such a large part of our lives. Harris is continuing a never ending discussion as to why God would create such a thing. The blind woman in love with Francis Dolarhyde at one point “wondered if Dolarhyde thought she understood him easily because ‘blind people hear so much better than we do.’ That was a common myth” (Red Dragon 309-310). The blind woman seems to see the good in Dolarhyde, but as Harris points out, the blind are often misunderstood for sensing things better. Meaning, perhaps Harris is saying other people are finding justification in Dolarhyde when there really isn’t much there. At the end of The Silence of the Lambs, Harris may be questioning the justification of Jame Gumb’s actions: “At least two scholarly journals explained that this unhappy childhood was the reason he (Gumb) killed women in his basement for their skins. The words crazy and evil do not appear in either article” (The Silence 357). Here again Harris could be moving away from my thesis by saying society often looks for too much justification, like I may very well be right now. In contrast, in Harris’s Red Dragon foreword, he points out that “when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It’s all there, and you just have to find it” (Red Dragon x). The evil is born in us in this case, ready to come out. Harris talks about good breeding evil and good resulting from evil. Like in his passage from Hannibal: “That didn’t mean he wouldn’t kill me any second if he got the chance--one quality in a person doesn’t rule out any other quality. They can exist side by side, good and terrible” (Hannibal 87). When Will Graham visited the battlefield of Shiloh, he seems to come to the realization that evil will always be around. In the Green Machine there is no mercy; we make mercy, manufacture it in the parts that have overgrown our basic reptile brain. There is no murder. We make murder, and it matters only to us. Graham knew too well that he contained all the elements to make murder; perhaps mercy too....This is added to in The Silence of the Lambs : “--yet it was Mapp who knew that the washing machine’s rhythm was like a great heartbeat and the rush of its waters was what the unborn hear--our last memory of peace” (The Silence 352). Peace before we make murder. Is Harris trying to justify murder and evil, or is he questioning others justifications of evil? Both it seems. These novels portray Harris’s own struggle with answering questions about evil in the world. What he gives us are all of the sides and ways we can look at it. There is always more than one way to see things. We do know that Harris believes we needn’t look far to find evil. Harris in his acknowledgements at the end of Hannibal: “The wickedness herein I took from my own stock” (Hannibal 485). Evil is all around us, just waiting to be found.
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