Who Is Jack The Ripper?

In Last week’s lecture we looked at a series of film clips taken from Jack the Ripper Films. Although it is a tragedy, for a few murders that happened over 100 years ago; it has had such a lot of media attention. This could be down to the fact that people interpret the murders to represent something much more than death. Although the identity of the murderer has never been discovered a global iconography has been invented; people assume that the murders were committed by a middle-class man and that he wore a cape, top hat and carried a doctor’s bag. The notion of the Ripper being middle-class has come to represent the class-struggle in society; he represents the upper more professional classes and the murders show the influence and power they have over the working-class. All the films viewed in last weeks lecture; whatever decade they were set all contained this iconography of the Ripper.

Last weeks lecture was helpful to help us understand how the Ripper was and still is viewed in society. As we are looking at the phenomenon of ripperology it was good to see the different representations of who the Ripper was. Although we didn’t do much group work, we decided to go off independently and look at what Ripperology is and all come up with some ideas to base our presentation on; what to look specifically at.

I think that whole spectacular surrounding Jack the Ripper is because he is unknown; people want to know more.

http://www.casebook.org/suspects/