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Volume 17, Number 2 (1993) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum The Mystery of Helen Jewett: Romantic Fiction and the Eroticization of Violence PATRICIA CLINE COHEN Univerity of California, Santa Barbara an ax crashed down on her head three times and cracked her skull; her bed was then set on fire by the killer. Seven hours later her half-burned body was subjected to a full autopsy directed by the. city coroner, right in the room where her murder took place. It must have been a fairly gruesome scene. Yet something about this particular murder captured the fancy of New York newsmen, and their insistent coverage of the crime produced a public sensation that quickly spread the length and breadth of the nation. The grisly murder was repackaged and sold as a mystery who-done-it about a beautiful and elegant courtesan. Within days of the crime, fictionalized accounts of Jewett's life and imagined accounts of her moments of death began to appear, and they have continued to appear into the twentieth century. This essay starts with the proposition that it is an altogether curious thing to sensationalize, glorify, romanticize, sanitize, and commodify a horrific and brutal murder. Yet such cultural productions are commonplace today. The media industry of the modern era so easily reconstructs homicides into fascinating amusements, that it takes a stretch of the imagination to recall that this particu- lar form of entertainment has not always been around. In fact, the genre dates precisely from the antebellum years of the Jewett murder, and the sensation and publicity surrounding her death did much to set the stage for the rise and popularity of murder mystery and detective fiction, whose literary conventions were pioneered by Edgar Allan Poe, a resident of New York City in the year 1837. One of Poe's earliest forays into murder was the story of Marie Roget, closely based on the New York murder of Mary Rogers of 1841, a case much compared with the Jewett murder at the time.1 The appeal of fictionalized homicide is actually not hard to fathom. In the world of fiction, homicides are rendered safe. They become the centerpiece of gripping and suspenseful narratives that in cinematic or novel presentations are actually meant to be enjoyed. Murder mysteries allow their readers the opportunity to become detectives, to be ever alert to the non-barking dogs, to gain the satisfaction of having clues fall in place. They are brain teasers, mental puzzles. Fictional murders can have a visceral as well as intellectual appeal. The suspenseful apprehension of a movie murder about to happen produces a prickle of excitement. Such movies are called thrillers; they scare, but the scare is tempered and even made pleasant because viewers can be confident that the story line of the movie will make sense of the violence and resolve it satisfacto- rily. Also, movies usually merely suggest the gore of violent death, shunning the unrelieved, stomach-turning carnage that has to be dealt with in real life crimes. Like fictional crime plots, the stories constructed around true murders are meant to fascinate or to thrill. Daily newspapers, tabloids like True Detec- tive, or TV shows on true crime allow for the contemplation of human evil, from the relative safety of the armchair at home. A murderer, either acting in a fit of anger or passion or through premeditated malice, steps over the line of acceptable behavior, and we look over the abyss at the perpetrator and stretch our minds to try to comprehend this breach of the boundaries of the possible. Currently American culture prefers medical explanations for the most extreme and incomprehensible killings; such killers are labeled psychopaths, and their murderous deeds are taken to be symptoms of profound mental disease. The transgression of murder is often a challenge to explain, and differ- ent cultures resort to quite different explanations, embedding murders in narra- tives that reconfigure the crime to make it comprehensible, safe, satisfying, and even instructive. The refashioning draws on familiar motifs and themes specific to the culture, on particular ways of thinking about human nature and behavior that work to make sense of the otherwise senseless act. An historical study of available narratives employed to account for murder can therefore reveal a great deal about patterned responses in that culture, about its stock assumptions about human beings and their social relations that can be invoked to explain something which is in itself difficult to explain. As Daniel Cohen has so ably shown in his new book on New England murder narratives, the colonial experience of murder was quite different from the narratives or reconfigurations that are common today. The colonists did not delight in turning murders into mystery thrillers, nor did they distance themselves from murderers by postulat- ing some kind of psychopathic personality. A murderer in 1680 was not a psychopath but instead a sinful evil-doer and frail human, like unto everyone else. The lesson to be drawn from murder was that anyone might be capable of it, given the inherent evil of humans, and execution sermons emphasized the necessity and even efficacy of gallows repentance. Writing of a different cultur- al climate, David Papke, in his book Framing the Criminal, shows how some antebellum journalists and fiction writers chose to present murder narratives strictly from the critical perspective of class relations, a perspective that virtual- ly disappeared in popular crime accounts of the later nineteenth century.2 The journalistic and fictionalized versions of the Helen Jewett murder case are part of a set of narratives that fastened on gender and sexuality to explain murder. Of course, there have always been murders of women commit- ted by men, and a much smaller number of murders of men by women. But not until the early nineteenth century did there arise a coherent body of stories that are recognizably stories of sex crimes.3 These narratives tapped into social understandings of sexuality and of power relationships between the sexes in an effort to make sense of murders that in previous periods would have been treated as unique or individual events rooted in the particular personalities or circumstances of the killer and victim. By the 1840s, there had occurred per- haps a half dozen highly publicized cases that packaged illicit sex and violence against women in such a way as to suggest that the crime itself was an expres- sion of erotic struggle between men and women.4 What emerged out of the sensationalized coverage of these cases was murder verging on pornography, murder as an opportunity to contemplate forbidden erotic ideas and to link lust and violence. It is no accident that nearly all of these signal sex crimes of the early nineteenth century were turned into works of fiction, sometimes several times over. The fictional accounts, with their made-up and detailed dialogues, their focus on the sexuality of the victims, their claims to get inside the head of the murderer and his victim, and their closely textured accounts of the lust to kill, fixed in their readers' minds the links between sex and violence that no mere factual reporting of a murder case could do. The sex crime narrative, then, was a result of an interactive collusion between journalists and fiction writers, each drawing on the other's cultural productions to invent and reinforce themes of tic violence and mortal danger to women. In the case of Helen Jewett, the fictional representations were so plenti- ful and contradictory that it takes some patience to establish anything like an authentic account of her life and death. Here, then, is a bare bones version of what happened to her, which will provide the baseline for evaluating the culturally salient reconfigurations of her murder that resonated with 1830s ideas bout sexuality and violence. Jewett was a 22-year-old prostitute who lived with ten other young women in an elegant brothel at 41 Thomas Street in lower Manhattan, not far from City Hall. Jewett had a select clientele drawn from the ranks of clerks and young businessmen, as well as out-of-town merchants and writers from the theater world. Her brothel was at the top of the line in the trade; young women in this house typically received $3 to $5 per client, a rather substantial sum of money in 1836. The four-story brick house had been built in 1825 as a brothel; the owner of record was the very elderly John R. Livingston (brother of Chancellor Robert R. Livingston), who owned about 30 properties in the sex trade in the 1830s - a fact kept concealed in all the publicity after the crime. A madam lived on the premises, controlled access to the house, presided over the downstairs parlor (a gathering room for polite socializing), and sold food and liquor to the guests. The girls each paid her $10 a week for room and board; maid service for laundry, fire lighting, and help dressing also was provid- ed by a set of young black women who lived nearby in the neighborhood.5 Helen Jewett's life was probably fairly comfortable. She had time to read books and periodical literature and to write letters, six or eight per day; she had a rich wardrobe and expensive jewelry; she never had to cook or scrub. She was basically an independent entrepreneur, choosing some clients and rejecting others, and not under the rigorous control of the madam or a pimp. To be sure, there was some degree of danger in her life. Rowdy street gangs of working-class men occasionally descended on the fancy brothels, smashing furniture and mirrors and, less often, pummeling the inhabitants of the houses.6 Jewett was personally attacked three times in incidents that left records in the New York Police Office when she swore out assault and battery charges. But these were relatively minor incidents; in one she charged a man for maliciously tripping her in a theater, and in another the attacker ripped her dress; in the third, her assailant was another prostitute.7 But on the whole, Jewett was generally safe from violence, largely because she was able to control the condi- tions of her employment. Most of her customers were regulars with whom she cultivated personal relationships. She carried on an extensive and flirtatious correspondence with many of them and even exchanged presents, books, and tokens of affection like rings and portrait miniatures with a select few. Her client relationships, to judge from the surviving letters, seemed to mimic hetero- sexual courtship customs of the respectable middle classes, with of course two important exceptions, that there was an acknowledged and expected sexual component to the relationship and that Jewett made no pretense of exclusive love.8 Jewett became a prostitute at the age of 17. Her father was a poor and intemperate shoemaker in central Mainewho put her out to domestic service when she was about ten years old, about the time her mother died. At age 13, Helen secured extended employment with one of the leading families in Augus- ta, Maine; the father was the Chief Justice of the Maine State Supreme Court. The Judge's family indulged her with more than a basic education; she demon- trated a precocious taste for reading and was permitted the run of their book collection. A nearby bookstore and lending library supplied a steady stream of novels, and at least one of the four assumed names this girl adopted in her later career was that of a courageous and noble character from an early Scottish novel of historical romance. In the judge's house, the servant girl learned to play the lady, so successfully that she once confused a guest at the house about whether she was the servant or a daughter of the house. Her earliest romantic attachment occurred during this period, to a man with whom she walked and conversed about books.9 Reading cemented her bond with her first crush, and it filled her head with ideas of a life beyond her lowly station as a servant girl. Many critics of the day condemned novel reading as a particular danger to young women. Novels wasted time, they said, and worse, filled impressionable girls' heads with impossible fantasies of throbbing romance.10 This servant in Augusta, Maine, would appear to be a prime example of their warnings. After five years in the judge's house, Helen moved directly to the prostitute district of Portland. Three years later, in 1833, she had moved to that capital of commercial sex, New York City, where she lived in a succession of fancy brothels in the Fifth Ward. The years of novel reading gave Helen ideas about how to invent her own life history to be most appealing to men. In 1834 when she appeared in the Police Court to lodge the complaint against the man who tripped her, the hard-boiled police court reporter, captivated by her beauty and charm, asked her how she came to be a prostitute. The resulting story she told him was a classic seduced and abandoned fantasy; it was printed in the New York Transcript and was dredged up and printed again, elaborated into a pamphlet, after her death in 1836. It portrayed heroine Helen as an unfortunate orphan whose kindly guardian, a judge, sent her to boarding school near Boston. There a rich merchant's son gained her trust and cruelly seduced her. The judge tries to take her back, but alas, reintegration into respectable society is not ever possible, and the poor child winds up friendless on the streets of New York. The hard-boiled reporter lambasted the wretched villain in his column, but privately he wrote to Helen about his envy of the man: "What a prize the villain had who seduced you at the Boarding School. How I should liked to have been in his place!" By such tangible responses Helen Jewett knew well that her self-presentation as a seduced and therefore ruined maiden augmented her sexual desirability among men.11 After her murder, at least three completely different versions of her background circulated in the penny press newspaper columns and in pamphlets that can with some certainty be attributed to Helen herself, stories she told to various people (clients, girls in her house) that embellished her childhood and variously accounted for her descent into prostitution. Sometimes the villain was a bank cashier, or a lawyer, or a merchant's son, but Helen was always the protected orphan - never a serving girl, just an orphan from a modest family background, so that the class gulf between her and her seducer was not impossibly large. (Perhaps to have owned up to being a servant, Helen would been admitting to membership in a non-respectable class, unworthy of sympathy in seduction.) In addition to the reinventions of herself that Helen manufactured, two other versions appeared in pamphlets, versions that were in fact total fictions that continued her preferred theme of Helen the innocent girl seduced by a conniving rake of an upper class, in one case a South Carolina planter's son attending Yale College. When Helen herself had manufactured the stories, she was of course alive, and the function of the seduction narrative was to represent herself as a sexual innocent awakened by evil masculinity to the status of a corrupted and alluring temptress; in short, Helen used the story to improve her business. But once she was murdered, the now-published seduction stories then functioned as severe cautionary tales with a starkly difference meaning: victims of seduction inevitably wind up dead. The wages of sin are death, the Bible promised, and here was a proof of it.12 Helen Jewett indeed wound up dead, but the precise reason can proba- bly never be known. The young man charged with her murder was an 18-year- old clerk in a Maiden Lane dry goods store named Richard P Robinson. Robinson came from a small town in Connecticut; his father was a large land- owner who at the time represented his town in the state legislature. Robinson had lived on his own in New York City since age 14. His employer, Joseph Hoxie, was active in temperance circles and had helped to found a library for clerks and apprentices to keep them off the streets and into moral reading and lectures. But Hoxie did not supervise his own clerks very well; Robinson and the other two youths hung out in oyster bars, theaters, and brothels nearly every night. Hoxie also paid Robinson a mere pittance - $60 a year - and strong suspicions were voiced after the murder that Robinson may have been embezzling money from Hoxie to support his vicious habits. Robinson and Jewett met in June of the 1835 and within a few weeks were deep into an apparently romantic but also tempestuous relationship, judging from the letters that passed between them. The relationship continued, with passionate ups and teasing or even angry downs, into the fall and winter of 1835-36; by late March the strains had overcome the pleasures. In the ten days before the murder Robinson asked for his miniature back and the two agreed to return all letters. Helen told her madam that Robinson intended to break off with her, in order to make a respectable marriage to some waiting fiancee. But no fiancee was ever named, and in any case Robinson at 19 was rather young and hardly in a financial position to be contemplating marriage. Helen's letters to Robinson mentioned vague threats to expose him, which could have been about embezzlement. Helen Jewett was axed to death in her room somewhere between midnight and 3 a.m. on a very cold and dark Sunday morning in early April. Women at the brothel testified that Robinson had come at 9 p.m., but he had a cloak over his face in partial disguise. He went straight up to Helen's room on the second floor, and at eleven the madam was called to deliver a bottle of champagne; she observed Robinson, back to the door, lying on Helen's bed. At 3 a.m. the madam got up to investigate an open back door, and upon checking the second floor rooms found Helen's door unlocked and the room smoking within. Helen's body was in the bed, with three deep ax gashes on her forehead; the bed had been set on fire. At daybreak the ax was found in the backyard, probably dropped by the murderer as he exited over the fence, and a cloak later identified as belonging to Robinson was found in the next yard. Powerful but circumstantial evidence all pointed to Robinson, and he was arrested.13 Immediately the Jewett case created a sensation in New York. Murders in any case were relatively rare, fewer than 10 per year in the 1830s when the population was a quarter of a million. Men and boys lined up to see the body. The editor of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett, created journalism history by touring the murder room and writing a lurid description of the dead body. (Newsmen in those days did not go out in search of news, but waited for it to come to them; Bennett was pioneering the role of investigative report- er.) Slowly I began to discover the lineaments of the corpse, asHere is the first reworking of the wretched horrors of this ghastly murder into something with erotic undertones. Bennett's sexualized and highly appreciative reading of the body clearly conflicted with the fact that the body had been autopsied hours before, the abdominal cavity eviscerated and uterus dissected. It would not have been an easy incision to miss. In a parallel way, an artist also showed up that Sunday afternoon to sketch the murder scene. The engraving he produced, on sale within two weeks, showed the body back in the bed (whereas Bennett had reported it was on the floor, post autopsy), not at all burned or autopsied, with head wounds scarcely creasing the brow of a female figure who appeared to be peacefully sleeping. The dead girl's wholly exposed breasts were roundly depicted, with nipples erect, so lifelike in their fullness that they seemed to defy not only death but gravity. (Six years later the engraver was arrested for selling obscene prints out of the back room of his store on Courtland street. The print of the Jewett corpse was probably not his first attempt to depict naked women.)15 The other newspaper editors of New York spent the day of the crime in more standard pursuits, tracking the action around the arrest of Robinson, and thus they missed their chance to follow James Gordon Bennett's cue by surveying the murder scene. To compete with the Herald's lurid coverage, the Sun and the Transcript rushed to explain the mystery of the dead girl's back- ground. They came up with wildly different stories, largely because Helen made up different stories about herself. The confusion fueled even more intense interest in the case, and helped to pave the way for the first detective fiction stories by preparing a readership attuned to and eager for mysterious accounts in need of reconciliation. The conflicting stories about Helen Jewett varied most crucially along one dimension: how responsible was she for being a sexually adventurous woman? Did she choose this path in life, or was she forced into it? In some of her own stories, she was cast as a degraded innocent of such delicate disposi- tion as to refuse rescue, for fear her stain would contaminate others. At the other extreme, a narrative produced by newspapers in Augusta, Maine, and in Boston depicted her as a loose and coarse girl, who chose her path deliberate- ly.16 One middle position, taken by Bennett's newspaper, was that she was seduced and ruined and then swore her revenge on all mankind for the horrible double standard by determining to ruin as many decent young men as possible. Sex was a weapon for this woman who had turned the tables.17 But whatever her initial intentions, in all these early versions of the Jewett story the key outcome is that she was brutally and inevitably murdered. The motives of young Robinson barely came in for any scrutiny at all; it is as if he were merely the instrument to deliver the punishment decreed by fate. Her choice of sinful occupation was the main determinant of her demise, these representa- tions suggested. Robinson was in fact acquitted of the murder, and that may partially account for why the early versions of the murder paid him scant attention. At trial he had a terrific lawyer who pulled out all the stops on the "Innocent Boy" theme, and he had a friendly judge as well who instructed the jury to disregard the testimony given by harlots about Robinson's entry to the brothel that night, since such women could not be trusted to be telling the truth when they put their hand on the Bible to take the oath. A flimsy partial alibi provid- ed by a local grocer was sufficient to cast doubt on the madam's testimony, and the jury came back with the verdict of innocent after less than 15 minutes in seclusion.18 Evidently the wages of sin did not spell inevitable death for young men. In the 1840s, two more fictional versions of the Jewett murder were published, this time extended to short novel length. One appeared in 1843, written by the prolific dime novelist J.H. Ingraham, and the other in 1848, a multi-chapter work initially serialized in the racy National Police Gazette, written by its editor George Wilkes.19 In these accounts, there is a much fuller working out of gender narratives invoked to explain a sexual murder. In both, Jewett was now transformed into an attractive character whose death was in fact not an inevitable punishment for sin. She was certainly a sexual character in both, a woman of passion who felt desire for particular men and set out to ensnare them, but desire itself did not somehow cause her death. In Ingraham's version, Jewett's unguarded passion comes easily to the surface merely because she was a motherless girl, raised by a mean-spirited aunt. Ingraham assumes as a cultural truism that mothers are the sacred protectors who teach their daughters to control their passions, so that without a mother, Helen Jewett was foolishly open to the first young man, a Bowdoin college student, who tried to take advantage of her. Helen's ruin is all too quickly accomplished, and once she finds herself alone in New York, she embarks on a succession of conquests of rich lovers who support her in style, for awhile. However, her real desire is for Frank Rivers (the true-life cognomen adopted by Richard P. Robinson as his brothel identity). Jewett manages to seduce Rivers, and to do it so successfully that she leaves Rivers with the impression that he has seduced her. Ingraham's novel is a virtual manual in how to accom- plish seduction; the two key seduction scenes are played out word by word, gesture by gesture, giving attentive readers a script to follow, should they chose to attempt it themselves. Jewett's murder, in Ingraham's book, is surprisingly not at the hands of Frank Rivers, the Robinson character. Instead, the Bowdoin college rake reappears in her life, on the verge of a marriage to the governor's daughter, and Helen threatens to expose his sordid sexual past with proof provided by an illegitimate child. In an unpremeditated fit of rage and despair, the Bowdoin boy picks up an ax and beats Jewett's head - all to protect his reputation. The plot is ingeniously constructed to frame poor Frank Rivers for the crime, of course. The Bowdoin boy gets away clean and quickly leaves the country. Ingraham, close on the heels of Edgar Allan Poe, was constructing an early mystery thriller that surprised readers by making the Robinson character an innocent; for despite his acquittal, Robinson soon after the trial was widely believed to be guilty. With Ingraham, we have sex murder as entertainment, Provided by steamy seduction scenes, the surprise ending and the close attention to female sexual and vengeful passion, the latter being deeply disturbing to the men in the story.20 The other novelization of the Jewett murder was presented as though it were a factual recounting of the crime, by the editor of the National Police Gazette. George Wilkes did considerable research, but he also took considerable liberties with facts in the service of constructing a lively and readable tale. He indulged in manufactured conversations and extraneous fictional characters, all to the end of showing Jewett to be an admirably passionate young woman yet without adequate reserve and judgment. Again, as in Ingraham's text, the lack of a flesh and blood mother dooms the girl to sexual susceptibility. Step by step she sinks into prostitution and then runs into bad-boy Robinson. She puts her misplaced trust and love into this wooden young man, but then learns of another girl whom he has perhaps murdered. In jealous anger and fear she threatens to expose him, and she then is herself murdered by Robinson to cover up the first crime and protect his reputation. In Wilkes' book the crime is premeditated and ugly; Robinson is definitely some kind of fiend. Both the Ingraham and Wilkes versions, however, share this theme: that men can become murderously enraged at women who exercise some sexual power over them and who threaten to bring them down through blackmail. Jewett's mere sexuality alone is not what causes her death, as in the earlier cautionary tales. It is her assertive threat to expose the man that brings on his rage. Readers of these two novels certainly got a taste of the forbidden erotic world of the brothel. The eroticism in the stories, however, is nearly all generated by the Helen character. Male sexual desire barely merits mention, either because the authors took it for granted and felt it needed no lavish description or because they presumed their readership was largely male and thus preferred to focus on Helen's throbbing body. In both books, the murder itself is quickly accomplished; there is no lingering over violence and gore, no ago- nized scene of guilt or remorse. The linking of sexuality and violence here is thus strikingly different from the late twentieth-century's version of that combi- nation. In Ingraham, Wilkes, and indeed in the penny press and pamphlet ephemera, the prurient interest was in the sexually adventurous woman, and the mystery of unsolved murder added a second but separate component to a highly charged formulation of female sexuality and death. Some of the authors linked the two elements in a theme of death as just retribution for sin, while others (Wilkes and Ingraham) presented more complicated narratives that ex- plored the limits of women's sexual power over men. But what none of these narratives included was an explicit linking of male sexuality with murder. Editor Bennett's visit to the scene came close, with its idealization of the sexualized but very dead body, clearly appraised through the admiring male gaze. Bennett was obviously inviting his readers to experience a dead body as a desirable sexual object. And indeed, the set-up of the crime invites an interpretation directly linking male sexuality with murder, since the murderer shared champagne, shared her bed, and very likely shared sexual intercourse with Jewett shortly before raising the ax to her head. But commentators in the 1830s and 1840s declined to explore this possibility. The autopsy doctors were silent about it. No acts of sexual mutilation were in evidence to provoke questions about the deployment of male sexual energy in murderous rage. The public commentators preferred not to think about male sexual power and eroticized dominance as adding force to the swings of the ax. Some who thought Robinson guilty in 1836 typically turned to speculations about very rational and concrete motives - he had a new girlfriend or fiancee, or Jewett was threatening to expose his embezzlements, as if these were full and reasonable explanations for a murder. Others were disturbed by the lack of fit between Robinson's class and demeanor and the type of monster the murderer had to be. Robinson was young, very slight and rather effeminate of feature, many noted, and his family's respectable Yankee status suggested that privilege, not anger and frustration, should characterize his temperament. A month after the trial, the sudden discovery and publication of some private letters of Robin- son to a male friend bragging of his many unseemly sexual exploits turned the public mood against him, and made it much easier to see him as a monster now, but still, no one explicitly linked his sexual depredations to the act of violent murder.21 What was missing in the 1830s was an analysis of male vio- lence against women that posited sexually aggressive behavior as a part of a continuum of behaviors (reaching up to murder) that expressed male dominance over women. Sexualized murder entered a new era in the late nineteenth century, when Jack the Ripper hunted prostitutes and eviscerated their reproductive organs.22 We have had a century now of serial killers stalking complete strang- ers and committing murderous acts of apparent lust on the bodies of dead or nearly dead women. Dozens of misogynist murderers have had their fifteen minutes of fame to show the rest of the country how male sexuality and uncon- trollable aggression can sometimes run on parallel tracks. And we are entitled to look back and to reinterpret landmark murders of the past, like the Jewett murder, as possible cases of sexual aggression and misogyny. What is most striking about these earlier murders is how male sexual aggression was over- looked and ignored, in favor of interpretations that centered on what was seen as inappropriate female sexuality. Their gender narratives reveal their foremost anxieties, and ours reveal our own. |
