By Aria T.
Since the book’s release in 1988, Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs has had a lasting impact on more than one area of media and writing. Its influence is undeniable.
The Silence of the Lambs presents the reader with two sides of the “psychopath coin”: Buffalo Bill and Hannibal Lecter, respectively. Both characters are villains in the story, although the way in which they are perceived is entirely different.
Jame Gumb, otherwise known as Buffalo Bill, is a “traveling man” who has kidnapped, murdered, and skinned five young women before dumping their bodies into different rivers across the country. His goal? To create a “woman suit” for him to wear.
Even a mere description of his actions and the desire behind them is grotesque and can make any sane person uncomfortable—reading about them is an entirely different experience. Gumb is truly a demented character, one that can easily be viewed as pure evil. He doesn’t even consider the women he kills to be people; he refers to them as “it.”
However, when compared to Hannibal Lecter, there are key differences between them, not just in behavior, but also, in the way they are viewed. Lecter is a standout villain in horror history; his character forever impacted the psychological thriller genre. But there’s a reason behind the world’s obsession with him, a treatment that a character like Jame Gumb never received: Hannibal is charming despite all of his evil. He is intelligent and sophisticated. In fact, he’s rather polite. Starling (who has been assigned to interview him) remarks that “it was as though committing murders had purged [Lecter] of lesser rudeness.” Hannibal the Cannibal, killer of at least nine known victims, tells Clarice Starling that, “Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly.”
While Hannibal is, without a doubt, a despicable, terrifying being, his personality and his charm are what draws the audience to him. Even his perception of himself, his perception of evil, stands out amongst characters like Gumb. It’s very apparent that Gumb’s insane behavior stems from childhood trauma, evidenced by his repeated viewing of the same home video of his mother (who abandoned him at the age of two) winning a beauty pageant, specifically before he gets ready to “harvest the hide.” This obsessive behavior shows the audience where this desire for a “woman suit” stems from. It contextualizes the behavior he exhibits.
Although not revealed in this book, Lecter, obviously, also has a past. A childhood event that contributed to his eventual spiral into evil. However, when he asks Starling what her motivation is for interviewing him, she reveals that she believes he will cooperate with her, and help to advance the study of serial killers, because he shares her curiosity into why he is the way that he is— the question of “what happened” to him.
Lecter then tells Starling that nothing happened to him. Instead, “I happened.” He believes that he cannot be reduced down to influences or events. “You’ve given up good and evil for behaviorism,” he tells her. “Nothing is ever anybody’s fault…Can you stand to say I’m evil? Am I evil, Officer Starling?” Starling clarifies: to her, Hannibal is destructive, which, therefore, makes him evil. Here, the audience gets a glimpse into Lecter’s moral compass, the reason he is so different from other villains. Hannibal challenges Starling’s world view. If evil is just destructive, he says, “then storms are evil, if it’s that simple. And we have fire and then there’s hail. Underwriters lump it all under ‘Acts of God.’” Lecter views the reduction of “evil” to mere labels as being lazy. This is part of what makes him so compelling: Hannibal does not deny that he is evil, but rather, challenges the perception that evil has only to do with the consequences of actions.
After all this discussion on evil, Thomas Harris doesn’t let the reader forget who Lecter really is. When he escapes from the mental hospital, he decides to stay in a hotel for some time using another man’s name. Since having been confined for so long, “he enjoyed going to and fro in his suite and walking up and down in it.” Not unlike the way Satan was roaming the earth before presenting his case against Job: “And the LORD said unto Satan, ‘Whence comest thou?’ Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, ‘From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it’” (KJV Job 1:7). However charmed the reader may be by him, there is no denying it: Lecter is evil. Harris’ subtle nod to the most evil character within Christendom here is pure genius.
Aside from all the focus surrounding the villains of The Silence of the Lambs, there is another character that requires just as much attention: Clarice Starling. A student at the FBI Academy, one who is, frankly, a bit naive, but who hungers for “advancement,” as Lecter puts it.
For a novel released in 1988, a time when female leads were few and far between (and, when they were present, severely underdeveloped compared to their male counterparts), Clarice Starling is a standout character. Similar to the likes of Ellen Ripley (Alien) and Sarah Connor (The Terminator), Starling represents a change in the female characters of the 70s, 80s, and 90s—she’s among the few female leads featured in books during that time, hence the other examples being from movies. She’s a first of her kind, and inspires a brand new generation of characters like herself (such as Dana Scully, another red-haired female FBI agent). As such, Clarice is a pioneer amongst female leads; hers is a story of “a woman in a man’s world,” and how she overcomes that.
In one scene, Crawford attempts to get a sheriff to speak to him privately by claiming that there are aspects to the Buffalo Bill case that a woman shouldn’t hear, in reference to Starling. One of the many instances where she is underestimated or disregarded, this comment stings her, especially considering she was the one to get tips for the case from Dr. Lecter himself. Later on, Crawford asks, “When I told that deputy he and I shouldn’t talk in front of a woman, that burned you, didn’t it?…It was just smoke. I wanted to get him by himself.” Starling knew this, and understood why he did it, but she can’t just let it go. “It matters, Mr. Crawford,” she says. “Those cops know who you are. They look at you to see how to act.”
She forces Crawford to consider his actions and their implications. “Duly noted, Starling,” he tells her, and it’s clear that he takes her comment seriously and applies it to future interactions. By pushing for Crawford to recognize the impact of his actions, she demonstrates her capacity to rise above and get the job done.
Other than her place in the story as a woman, Starling as a character is an unforgettable lead that deserves the spotlight. She’s intelligent, determined, and curious, but she also cares for the innocent; she wants to protect them. Her motivations, her past, and the ways in which they affect her are the inspiration for the title of the book.
After her father’s death, Starling went to live with a foster family on a farm, one that raised horses and sheep for slaughter. On one particular day, she decides to run away with a horse she calls Hannah, although she remarks that she didn’t know her actual name because “you don’t find that out when you’re feeding out slaughter horses” (which feels reminiscent of how Gumb never bothers to learn his victims’ names and refers to them as “it”). Hannibal asks why she chose to run away on that day, so early in the morning. Something must have woken her. “What woke you up? Did you dream? What was it?” And she tells him: “I woke up and heard the lambs screaming. I woke up in the dark and the lambs were screaming.”
Her inability to save the innocent lambs, and her desire to save a blind, fat horse that was going to be killed, are exactly why she feels that she must save Jame Gumb’s current victim, Catherine Martin. Lecter tries to confirm this, although he already knows it’s true: “Do you think if you caught Buffalo Bill yourself and if you made Catherine all right, you could make the lambs stop screaming, do you think they’d be all right too and you wouldn’t wake up again in the dark and hear the lambs screaming?”
“Yes. I don’t know. Maybe,” she says.
The Silence of the Lambs is one of the most disturbing, terrifying, and yet, exhilarating psychological crime novels to date. Any reader is desperate to watch these events unfold, no matter how demented and ugly they are. Starling as a female lead in a space where she’s underappreciated and underestimated, the duality of Jame Gumb and Hannibal Lecter as depictions of evil, the question of what evil actually is—maybe the lambs never will be silenced, but that won’t ever stop you from turning the page to find out.
