7
NecroAmerica
In reality, the local sheriff, Arthur Schley, entered a remote farmhouse on November the 17th, of 1957. With no electricity, the generator not working, the house dark and stinking of rotten food and rubbish, Schley made his way with trepidation through the rooms, tripping over discarded junk and garbage left to decompose. This was the house of Ed Gein, a local handyman and suspect in a robbery in the nearby town of Plainfield. Bernice Worden, 50-year-old proprietor of the hardware store was missing, Ed had visited the store the night before asking about the cost of antifreeze. The next day, investigating the disappearance, police found a receipt for a gallon of antifreeze written by Worden for Gein. As Schley played his torch over the farmhouse shed, something rubbed against him.
From the wooden beams above, a corpse—more like the carcass of a deer—swung in the frigid yet fetid air, tied upside down to a crossbar, sliced from the genital area through the abdomen to the neck, headless and gutted—the body of Bernice Worden. When more police arrived to assist the sheriff, they discovered her head made into a strange fetish, her heart in a cooking pan on the stove, and yet more items with a gruesome provenance. Human skull bowls, an armchair with a cover made from stitched together human skin, lampshades and baskets also made from skin, women’s genitalia salted and kept in a box as if they were Christmas decorations, nipples strung together to make a belt. Where most people would keep snowdomes, potpourri, and china pigs, Gein kept human heads, noses, and a heart. Police also found nine death masks and a suit made from the flayed flesh of women. What had happened to Ed Gein to turn him into a ghoul? What placed him on a par with the skinu-facturers of Buchenwald who may have made items from human skin twelve years earlier?
Born on the 27th of August 1906 in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Edward Theodore Gein was the youngest son of parents Augusta and George and brother of Henry. Augusta controlled the family with a strict Lutheran religious moral code, enforced by daily bible studies, visions of hell and severe warnings about the corruptibility of the city, the world, and its women. To Augusta, men were weak, prone to sin and lazy, and she instilled in the boys—particularly Ed—a righteous mistrust of alcohol, sex, and other people. After running a successful grocery store, Augusta moved her family to the country, a rural paradise separate from the flesh of the city and its whirlpool of sin and vice. Gein’s father worked as a tanner and some-time carpenter and was (like Kürten’s father) a violent alcoholic when home.[139]
The director Joseph Losey was born in La Crosse three years after Ed Gein. In 1951, he directed a remake of Fritz Lang’s M, this was six years before Gein’s police discovered Gein’s horror house. Gein probably knew nothing of Kürten and co., but in the year his fellow La Crossean used the basement, staircases, and rooftop of the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles (a precursive psychological architecture to Hitchcock’s Psycho), Gein was dressing as his mother in a suit he had made from body parts.
The village closest to the 160-acre farm was Plainfield, near to the city of Berlin, Wisconsin. From 1914, the boys attended the local schools where fellow students bullied the shy and bookish Ed because of his effeminate manners and mummy’s boy behaviour. His mother would not allow him to make friends, suspicious as she was of anyone outside of the family, and would scold the boys, accusing them of behaving like their no-good, alcoholic father. Ed worshipped his mother and drifted into a lonesome life stirred only by the books he read and the singular company of his older brother.
Their father died of a heart attack in 1940, and the two Gein boys worked as handymen in Plainfield and on the local farms. Although they considered Ed somewhat strange emotionally and socially, the residents trusted him enough to allow him to look after their children. Ed did not mix with others, spending most of his time with his mother; even his brother thought this odd and chastised Ed for his neediness. The area in which they lived was prone to brushfires and on the 16th May 1944, one such fire was burning perilously close to the Gein farm and Ed and Henry went out to battle it. In the smoke, confusion, and encroaching night, Ed could not find Henry. The next day with the fire stifled, Ed reported the disappearance of his brother to the local police. Officers soon found Henry’s body in a location shown to them by Ed. Despite some suspicion—the ground around the body was unaffected by the fire, and there was some cranial bruising—police thought the shy and effeminate Ed incapable of murder and the coroner judged the cause of death to be smoke inhalation. With Henry gone, it was just Ed and his mother. But soon after, his mother suffered a series of paralyzing strokes. Gein nursed her for 19 months until, five weeks after the Nuremberg trials began in Germany, on December 29 1945, Augusta died. Throughout Gein’s care his mother had verbally abused him.
Ed was devastated yet determined to remain on the farm, eking out an existence through the small amounts of cash he could get as a handyman and babysitter. When the government paid him a subsidy for a soil conservation project, he no longer had to find work and only visited Plainfield for supplies. His mother’s rooms on the upper floor—the arena of the superego, Augusta’s world of orders, perpetually bombarding Ed with impossible orders, inapplicable ethics, unrealizable morals—was sealed off, as was the downstairs parlour and living room—the realm of the ego, the reality principle. With his mother gone, he no longer had a conception of self, no ‘ideal ego,’ which is, as Žižek explains it: ‘the idealized self-image of the subject (the way I would like to be, I would like others to see me).’[140] Gein’s mother—‘the Ego-Ideal [is] the agency whose gaze I try to impress with my ego image, the big Other who watches over me and propels me to give my best, the ideal I try to follow and actualize’—was gone, only the id survived free of the superego, the ‘agency in its revengeful, sadistic, punishing, aspect.’ Ed, alone on his farm, amid the memories of his dead mother, the growing squalor, was living in a Lacanian triad of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. ‘His own ideal ego is imaginary,’ he was his own ‘“small other,” the idealized double-image of his ego,’ the retarded handyman, the village idiot, the weirdo in the dark farmhouse out in the woods. Ed’s ‘ego-Ideal is symbolic, the point of [his] symbolic identification, the point in the big Other’ (big mother) from which he observes (and judges) himself; his ‘superego is real, the cruel and insatiable agency which bombards [him] with impossible demands and which mocks [his] failed attempts to meet them, the agency in the eyes of which [he is] all the more guilty, the more [he tries] to suppress [his] “sinful” strivings and meet its demands.’ With his big mOther dead, he attempted to stifle the cravings of the id (he lived in the basement) and the shouts from the cellar by recreating his mother, by dressing in her very skin, and he did this by raiding graveyards and by murder.
Ed enjoyed reading magazines like Adventure, which ran stories such as ‘The End of the World’ by Franklin Gregory, ‘Xipe the Skinless’ by Gordon MacCreagh, ‘Headhunters of Luzon’ by John D. Fawcett, ‘Six Under the Earth’ by Roaldus Richmond, and ‘Human Bloodhounds’ by Robert Monroe. His grip on reality weakened by his mother’s death and heightened by his solitude, he became addicted to this type of magazine and its tales of Nazi experiments, cannibals, and zombies. He may have even read the ghosted ‘The Secret of Elena’s Tomb’ and Robert Bloch’s ‘The Mad Scientist’ in Fantastic Adventures both published in September 1947. He also read books on human anatomy and scoured obituaries in the local newspapers. If the adventure stories and tales of human experiments stimulated his imagination, then the obituaries gave him the time and place to live out his fantasies.
139
For details about the life and crimes of Ed Gein see Howard Schechter,
140
Slavoj Žižek,