Customer Reviews

The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (Studies in the History of Sexuality)

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This book is a rather "dry" exposition. Once some pages into reading it, my original enthusiasm for the story of Mary Rogers was seized by a disappointment. I sense this book was originally an academic paper possibly researched and written as a master or doctoral thesis. This is not necessarily an indictment based on the book's initial origin and intention. It does perhaps account for it's colorless narrative and a redundant construction meant to reinforce in as many ways as possible an artlessly expressed author's hypothesis. The loss to the reader is a story not brought to life. This was a time of tumult in New York City illustrative of significant social transition and the embryonic appearance of the mercenary tabloid press. Back then, just as it would be today, the molested, murdered body of a beautiful young girl dumped near a river could be crafted into sensational news. Now I got the facts surrounding The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers but little more.

A better and more accomplished book on a similar topic centered in New York during the same time period is "The Murder of Helen Jewett" by Patricia Cline Cohen.

Amy Srebnick has written a marvelously entertaining book of early Victorian New York, that along with the Murder of Helen Jewett by Patricia Cohen, takes the reader into a fascinating period of New York history. As an alien in this city, it is wonderful to see how the idea of New York grew out of this period. This short book manages to touch on many, interrelated topics showing how the death of Mary Rogers was used and manipulated by many people for their own political or social purposes, while her life before her death remained a mystery. People interested in the early history of the growth of abortion legislation would also be fascinated in the ways in which this touchs Mary Roger's own death. It is a fascinating book that has already led me to others covering this period.

On August 2, 1841, the New York Herald told of the badly mutilated corpse of a 3young and beautiful girl2 found floating in the Hudson River. Though the random death of an anonymous individual would obviously command more attention in the press in 1841 than 1995, the death of Mary Rogers, would not, for its relative ordinariness, seem capable of provoking the intense and wide range of reaction that it did. The Mysterous Death of Mary Rogers demonstrates the way average people make history by arguing that the case sparked legislation, introduced newly acceptable subjects into the media, and inspired the birth of the crime novel. Through careful examination of the public records and contemporary fiction and non-fiction, Amy Gilman Srebnick, a professor at Montclair State University, explores the identity of Mary Rogers, the twenty-year-old descendent of prominent New England settlers living in Manhattan without a husband or father, as a panoramic window into the origins of American urban culture. She also scrutinizes the new publicization of sex, the fear of random violence in the city and the increasing economic and sexual independence of women that intersected in Rogers1 murder and subsequent resurrection through the public discourse. Contemporaries speculating at whose hands Rogers died revealed their own particular paranoia through their various theories: if you thought it was an urban gang, you were probably in fear of the city, a new cultural and physical construct at this time. If you thought it was a single individual who killed Mary, specific fear of certain New Yorkers had invaded your psyche. If you thought Rogers1 death was the result of a botched abortion, you were probably more concerned with the newly unrestrained openness surrounding, and commercialization of, sexuality, and its ramifications for the single woman. You would also probably be right. The cause of Rogers1 death remains a mystery, and though Gilman Srebnick sides with the abortion theory, she is wise not to assert with certainty one scenario over another. Though she reiterates every known detail of the murder, she uses the research not to speculate but instead to focus on what the facts tell her about Rogers1 class, habits, consorts, family history and place in New York society. Following her death, 3Mary was constructed in everybody1s image but her own,2 writes Gilman Srebnick. The numerous newspaper accounts of her death told more about their editors1 predilections than Mary1s true persona. As a member of the new female working class untethered by patriarchy or child-rearing, she represented a threat to established social order; as a young, attractive and available female, she was simultaneously alluring and threatening, and in this way 3serv(ed) as an extended metaphor for the city2 she lived in; as a possibly pregnant but unmarried woman, she was linked through residual Victorianism to a lower class standing; as the victim of a murderer or an incompetant abortionist, she served political purposes for those seeking to reform policing methods or outlaw abortion. The death of Mary Rogers presented an opportunity for new experiments in journalism. The newspapers of the dayÐmany were launched around this time to cater to a newly expanding reading publicÐdescribed in horrific detail the violence done to Mary1s body, and though they assumed a position of detatched scientific description, the effects were to eroticize Mary1s corpse by describing the female body in a way that had never seen its way into the newspapers, and to construct a narrative of the circumstances of her death that conveniently corresponded to the political agenda of the paper in question. In these descriptions, writes Gilman Srebnick, 3a new journalistic voice coalesced: the voice of the urban reporter. Tough, angry, voyeuristic and deeply misogynist, the voice used the already familiar form of the (journalistic) crime narrative to focus on the female subject.2 Depending on whether this voice found Mary guilty of sexual misdeedÐlike having someÐor considered her 3the symbol of virginityŠdestroyed byŠthe modern city,2 her murder became a rallying point for those seeking to reform policing or place legal and social restrictions on the burgeoning sex industry and on abortion which, however inaccurately, was linked with it. Publicly funded police patrols were relatively new in 1841, and the Police Reform Act of 1845 passed by the New York State Legislature mandated surveillance in addition to simple response and apprehension. Around the same time, the newly formed American Medical Association1s powerful lobby made abortion a criminal act for both practitioner and patient; very public trials focused public ire on abortionists, in the process revealing much about the era1s sexual prudishness. (Unfortunately, though Gilman Srebnick spends a chapter on the politics of abortion at the time, she never tells of the risks associated with the procedure in the 1840s; if numerous women were dying during abortions, perhaps its restriction was not such a bad idea.) As an attempt at a vigorous book on a faded society, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers sometimes suffers from dry academic writing and excessive repitition, including nauseating overuse of the word 3labyrinthine.2 As an academic reformulating a paper for public consumption, Gilman Srebnick (or her editor) thankfully restrains herself from getting bogged down in and relating the primary materials that are the historian1s pornography. But as a demonstration of fear of the inner city stemming from its multiplicity of inhabitants; of the economic independence of some women leading to their castigation as sexual predators; of the link between open feminine sexuality and economic marginalization; of the influence of journalism on public opinion and political policy; of 3the principle of freedom of information (being) yoked in public discourse to voyeurism and melodrama;2 of 3the popular preoccupation with single women, fractured families existing outside the domestic model, (and) the availability of abortion;2 and, most notably, of the fact that these issues did not begin with gangster hysteria, Anita Hill, the Gary Hart/Donna Rice affair, feminisim, Watergate, or the O.J. Simpson trial, and may be uniquely and essentially American issues with no temporality, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers will rock your world.

I think this is one of those academic, publish-or-perish things which find their way into print every now and again. The writer seems to be trying to win the approval of some feminist womans-studies coterie on campus. Thus, opposition to promiscuity is 'prudish' and 'patriarchal', suggestions by journalists that it is unwise for single females to wander certain areas alone is 'misogynist', and so on. It goes on to say restricting abortion can only be a conspiracy against women, never mind that all the 19th century feminists, without exception, favored it's restriction, most notabaly Susan B. Anthony. And, despite thousands of years of human experience, there can never be any good reason to be against promiscuity, only irrational rants by prudish, patriarchal misogyny. And of course, fear of Women's Sexuality.

Essentialy, anyone at any time who was opposed to anything the modern version of feminism wants, only did so from low or irrational motives. If the author knew what the arguments were (and are) for modesty, chastity, domestic life, stopping abortion and being opposed to prostitution, and then argued against them, this would have been a different and better book, As it is , if she does know them, there is no sign of it here; assertions are made about things, documentation is provided about the things, but no discussion of the assertions is done at all.

Essential reading for your next community-college class on "The Social Erection of Phallocentric Gender Identity". People who want to expand their thinking beyond this particular smelly little orthodoxy, on the other hand, will want to give it a miss.