Crime and moral punishment

Here the culprit is known from the start, and the question is not who killed but what the fault does to the one who committed it. Dostoevsky follows a student convinced he has the right to kill, Hawthorne places a woman before a community that wants her publicly shamed, Zola shuts two lovers in with the memory of a drowning. Cinema adds the repeated gesture and silence: the hands of a pickpocket in a Paris station, a priest bound by the secret of confession, a village butcher and a schoolmistress.

works 11

• NovelThe Scarlet LetterNathaniel Hawthorne · 1850A Puritan community punishes the offence in public and gives shame a visible form, worn on the body. The novel looks at what it costs the woman who displays it, and the man who hides it.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelCrime and PunishmentПреступление и наказаниеFyodor Dostoevsky · 1866A novel of 1866: a poor student in Saint Petersburg kills a pawnbroker to test a theory, and has to live with his act.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelThérèse RaquinÉmile Zola · 1867Two lovers kill an inconvenient husband, then discover that the crime has not freed them.LiteraturePublic domain
• Short storiesFearAngstStefan Zweig · 1920A woman who has deceived her husband pays to keep it from becoming known, and discovers that fear costs more than the fault.Literature
• NovelAn American TragedyTheodore Dreiser · 1925The country tells itself at this time that any man can rise if he wants to. This novel takes a boy who has been given nothing, puts that promise into his head, and follows what it makes of him.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelThérèse DesqueyrouxFrançois Mauriac · 1927A woman of the landowning bourgeoisie of the Landes, married to unite two pine properties, tries to understand how she could have wanted her husband's death.Literature
• CinemaFuryFritz Lang · 1936America in the 1930s, where a rumour is enough to send a small town storming its jail.Cinema
• CinemaStray Dog野良犬Akira Kurosawa · 1949A crime film of 1949 in which a young detective spends a summer looking for the pistol stolen from him in the crowd of a tram.Cinema
• CinemaI ConfessAlfred Hitchcock · 1953A man confesses a murder to his priest, specifying that he was wearing a cassock.Cinema
• CinemaPickpocketRobert Bresson · 1959A solitary young man turns pickpocketing into a discipline, almost an asceticism.Cinema
• CinemaLe BoucherClaude Chabrol · 1970A school headmistress and a butcher become friends while a killer strikes in the area.Cinema