Silence Of The Lambs By Thomas Harris Essays - Hannibal Lecter

Silence Of The Lambs By Thomas Harris THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS The novel The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris is said to fall under the genre of psychological horror. The stories that fall under the genre of horror include a few essential elements: a villain or one seen as evil to create an initial story line. The foil is the next element; a foil is a person who tries to stop the villain from going through with the evil plan or plot. These two elements naturally lead to conflict between the two persons or groups and then from this conflict suspense, the last element is added. Suspense is important to keep the reader interested and to keep the story line going. When psychology is added to a story, the definition of horror is changed completely. There are still those few essential elements above but there is also a few more added. The story now has something to do with the mind and how it works, and there is really no definition for that. The mind and its workings are a mystery to us and that mystery of the mind adds to the suspense and therefore the idea of psychology and horror are able to go together and become one. This essay will prove that The Silence of the Lambs is indeed a psychological horror according to the five criteria above along with other sources. The first element to a psychological horror is a villain, and the villain is The Silence of the Lambs is Mr. Jame Gumb. He is a white male in his mid thirties, most serial killers are white male, unemployed, intelligent and experience financial difficulty.(Bonata, 3) Gumb is all of these things, he is unemployed but a very skilled seamstress, and using these skills is making himself a second skin out of women who he is able to take control of and render them powerless. He is also very intelligent but is anable to interact with other people and therefore remains unemployed. He experienced financial difficulties until he was the recipient of a large sum of money from an inheritance. The unconscious fear of women goads some men with a co mpulsive urge to conquer, humiliate, hurt, or render powerless some available sample of womanhood. (Menninger, 183) Gumb was deeply disturbed and unable to overcome the death of his mother and he wanted to be like her and resented any woman because he feels that he should have been born a woman instead of the man that he is. He is sewing a skin of women to try to become more like his mother and less of the man that he is. This is how he received his nickname Buffalo Bill because the way he murders and then skins his victims. Jame Gumb is a very disturbed individual and his violence and crimes are often attempts to escape from insanity. (Menninger, 181) Jame Gumb is in a word where he believes that he can become a woman and live somehow be with his mother again or even attempt to become her. Men who are violently afraid of their repressed but nearly emergent homosexual desired often try to overcome these fears with violent demonstrations. (Menninger, 183) Jame Gumb did not know what he was in terms of sexuality and decided that he would rather be a woman than a man. This desire drove him to commit such horrible crimes and try to become a woman using their skins. The foils to Jame Gumb are a much stronger force that he is or could ever be, they are the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the FBI. They want to stop the murders as soon as possible so that no other lives are lost and the country can get back to normal without living with the fear of a serial killer on the loose. Along with the FBI, an X-psychiatrist named Dr. Hannibal Lecter and, Clarice Starling they try to stop the murders and regain order to society, this is not an easy task and there are many obstacles along the way. The first obstacle is that the whereabouts of Gumb are unknown and his identity has alluded the