There are two notably evil people in The Silence of the Lambs: Jame Gumb and Hannibal Lecter. Gumb (also known as Buffalo Bill) is a serial killer who imprisons women and skins them. The novel presents him as fundamentally unlikeable and irredeemable. For all intents and purposes, he is evil incarnate, and he functions as the novel’s primary villain. Hannibal Lecter, on the other hand, is a different beast. Unlike Gumb, Lecter looks and often acts like a civilized human being. He is incredibly intelligent and verbally proficient. His interests range from human psychology to classical music and literature. Despite herself, Starling cannot help but feel drawn to Lecter, and she even feels a certain bond to him that she cannot explain. However, like Gumb, Lecter is quite evil. He is a cannibal who is responsible for multiple murders, and he delights in the pain and suffering of others. Notably, Lecter is not fascinating because he is highly intelligent and charismatic—he is fascinating because he is all of that and evil.
Through the juxtaposition of Gumb and Lecter, the novel poses an interesting question: are these two people fundamentally the same? If not, what separates them? Throughout his conversations with Starling, Lecter provides his answer to this question. He hates the FBI’s classifications of the psychology of serial killers because they are oversimplified and intellectually lazy. Similarly, he dismisses Starling’s broad theory that the definition of an evil person is someone dedicated to bringing about chaos. After all, although Lecter enjoys chaos, he has others interests as well. Gumb also is not dedicated to chaos. If anything, the murders he commits are attempts to bring order to his life, which has been in disorder for as long as he can remember. Ultimately, then, what Harris shows in this novel is that evil does not have a precise definition or personality type. It can exist among all types of people and in any kind of community.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Nature of Evil ThemeTracker
The Nature of Evil Quotes in The Silence of the Lambs
“Do your job, just don’t ever forget what he is.”
“And what’s that? Do you know?”
“I know he’s a monster. Beyond that, nobody can say for sure.”
Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences. You’ve given up good and evil for behaviorism, Officer Starling. You’ve got everybody in moral dignity pants—nothing is ever anybody’s fault. Look at me, Officer Starling. Can you stand to say I’m evil? Am I evil, Officer Starling?
I collect church collapses, recreationally. Did you see the recent one in Sicily? Marvelous! The facade fell on sixty-five grandmothers at a special Mass. Was that evil? If so, who did it? If He’s up there, He just loves it, Officer Starling. Typhoid and swans—it all comes from the same place.
You’d like to quantify me, Officer Starling. You’re so ambitious, aren’t you? Do you know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube. You’re a well-scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste. Your eyes are like cheap birthstones—all surface shine when you stalk some little answer. And you’re bright behind them, aren’t you? Desperate not to be like your mother. Good nutrition has given you some length of bone, but you’re not more than one generation out of the mines, Officer Starling. Is it the West Virginia Starlings or the Okie Starlings, Officer? It was a toss-up between college and the opportunities in the Women’s Army Corps, wasn’t it? Let me tell you something specific about yourself, Student Starling. Back in your room, you have a string of gold add-a-beads and you feel an ugly little thump when you look at how tacky they are now, isn’t that so? All those tedious thank-yous, permitting all that sincere fumbling, getting all sticky once for every bead. Tedious. Tedious. Bo-o-o-o-r-i-ing. Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn’t it?
Considering the face again, she believed she learned something that would last her. Looking with purpose at this face, with its tongue changing color where it touched the glass, was not as bad as Miggs swallowing his tongue in her dreams. She felt she could look at anything, if she had something positive to do about it. Starling was young.
That’s not a guess. He’s very likely right, and he could have told you why, but he wanted to tease you with it. It’s the only weakness I ever saw in him—he has to look smart, smarter than anybody. He’s been doing it for years.
“There’s a moth, more than one in fact, that lives only on tears,” he offered. “That’s all they eat or drink.”
“What kind of tears? Whose tears?”
“The tears of large land mammals, about our size. The old definition of moth was ‘anything that gradually, silently eats, consumes, or wastes any other thing.’ It was a verb for destruction too... Is this what you do all the time—hunt Buffalo Bill?”
“I do it all I can.”
“What do your two disciplines tell you about Buffalo Bill?”
“By the book, he’s a sadist.”
“Life’s too slippery for books, Clarice; anger appears as lust, lupus presents as hives.”
“Wash yourself.”
It was the same unearthly voice she’d heard talking to the dog.
Another bucket coming down on a thin cord. She smelled hot, soapy water.
“Take it off and wash yourself all over, or you’ll get the hose.” And an aside to the dog as the voice faded, “Yes it will get the hose, won’t it, Darlingheart, yes it will!”
“I hadn’t heard your voice in years—I suppose the last time was when you gave me all the misleading answers in my interviews and then ridiculed me in your Journal articles. It’s hard to believe an inmate’s opinions could count for anything in the professional community, isn’t it?”
To even mention Buffalo Bill in the same breath with the problems we treat here is ignorant and unfair and dangerous, Mr. Crawford. It makes my hair stand on end.
He switches back to the cage just in time. The big insect’s wings are held above her back, hiding and distorting her markings. Now she brings down her wings to cloak her body and the famous design is clear. A human skull, wonderfully executed in the furlike scales, stares from the back of the moth. Under the shaded dome of the skull are the black eye holes and prominent cheekbones. Beneath them darkness lies like a gag across the face above the jaw. The skull rests on a marking flared like the top of a pelvis.
A skull stacked upon a pelvis, all drawn on the back of a moth by an accident of nature.
“He covets. In fact, he covets being the very thing you are. It’s his nature to covet. How do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? Make an effort at an answer.”
“No. We just—”
“No. Precisely so. We begin by coveting what we see every day. Don’t you feel eyes moving over you every day, Clarice, in chance encounters? I hardly see how you could not. And don’t your eyes move over things?”
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?
“Thank you, Clarice.”
“Thank you, Dr. Lecter.”
And that is how he remained in Starling’s mind. Caught in the instant when he did not mock. Standing in his white cell, arched like a dancer, his hands clasped in front of him and his head slightly to the side.
He had in the past hunted young women through the blacked-out basement using his infrared goggles and light, and it was wonderful to do, watching them feel their way around, seeing them try to scrunch into corners. He liked to hunt them with the pistol. He liked to use the pistol. Always they became disoriented, lost their balance, ran into things. He could stand in absolute darkness with his goggles on, wait until they took their hands down from their faces, and shoot them right in the head. Or in the legs first, below the knee so they could still crawl.
Jame Gumb was news for weeks after he was lowered into his final hole.
Reporters pieced together his history, beginning with the records of Sacramento County:
His mother had been carrying him a month when she failed to place in the Miss Sacramento Contest in 1948. The “Jame” on his birth certificate apparently was a clerical error that no one bothered to correct.
When her acting career failed to materialize, his mother went into an alcoholic decline; Gumb was two when Los Angeles County placed him in a foster home.
At least two scholarly journals explained that this unhappy childhood was the reason he killed women in his basement for their skins. The words crazy and evil do not appear in either article.
From Dr. Frederick Chilton, the National Tattler bought the tapes of Starling’s interview with Dr. Hannibal Lecter. The Tattler expanded on their conversations for their “Bride of Dracula” series and implied that Starling had made frank sexual revelations to Lecter in exchange for information, spurring an offer to Starling from Velvet Talks: The Journal of Telephone Sex.
Well, Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming?
You owe me a piece of information, you know, and that’s what I’d like.
An ad in the national edition of the Times and in the International Herald-Tribune on the first of any month will be fine. Better put it in the China Mail as well.
I won’t be surprised if the answer is yes and no. The lambs will stop for now. But, Clarice, you judge yourself with all the mercy of the dungeon scales at Threave; you’ll have to earn it again and again, the blessed silence. Because it’s the plight that drives you, seeing the plight, and the plight will not end, ever.
I have no plans to call on you, Clarice, the world being more interesting with you in it. Be sure you extend me the same courtesy.
Far to the east, on the Chesapeake shore, Orion stood high in the clear night, above a big old house, and a room where a fire is banked for the night, its light pulsing gently with the wind above the chimneys. On a large bed there are many quilts and on the quilts and under them are several large dogs. Additional mounds beneath the covers may or may not be Noble Pilcher, it is impossible to determine in the ambient light. But the face on the pillow, rosy in the firelight, is certainly that of Clarice Starling, and she sleeps deeply, sweetly, in the silence of the lambs.
