sex and scandal in New York 1830s
...rest around Jewett’s murder as he began to report who he believed was guilty. He began to cast his eye for possible guilty parsons other than Robinson, and looked towards jealous female rivals from the more depraved class, This is an important detail in this complicated case as it inspired a “mystery and a juggle about this whole affair”. For Bennett the story provided an arena to declare war on the other daily papers and to show that he alone had the real story. His barrage of details, which the other papers reluctantly repeated, subsequently influenced the reading public. The journal of commerce, noted that “the number of reader is doubled…among those classes who have suffered greatly from their want of intelligence on financial matters”. The Herald kept the case front page news, and city papers in Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., were forced by reader demand into to reprinting Bennett's detailed accounts. People on the streets of New York could talk about nothing else. It seemed that stories such as Bennett’s account of a late-night grave retrieval suggested a particularly misogynistic form of violence, one central to the representational politics of both tabloids and the sensational fiction being produced during the period. The sensational public sphere offered a space in which an anti-Whig, anti-aristocratic masculine class politics was reaching a mass audience for the first time. Tabloids such as the Herald challenged the ideal of the traditional bourgeois public sphere, in which a landed citizenry could supposedly debate political questions in a purely abstract, disembodied fashion. By offering a politics of scandal, such publications provided “a representational opportunity for a number of different voices, many of which were forcing vexed questions of class, gender and self-possession into public discourse in disruptive ways.” Bennett was so successful in creating scandal around this mysterious death of Jewett, as he used her murder to Deal with issues of class and property, and Jewett also represented a site at which the city’s homosocial economies were unstable. To those such as Bennett, Jewett represented the “corrupt classes that had long excluded lower-class artisans such as himself.” Scandal and sensation around the Jewett murder also enhanced due to Bennett’s sensationalist attempts to uses this murder as a representative of a state of “male panic” central to class politics in 1830s New York. Jewett and the publicity surrounding her murder reveal “anxieties over class and masculinity, both of which were being contested in what is referred to as the “sensational public sphere” coming into being in the mid 1830s and 1840s.” The various forms of masculinity available to men in the city were often contingent upon registers of class in which the distinction between bodily integrity and bodily violation played a crucial role. It was a fictionalised account that contrasted masculine nature prone to sexual error against the seductions of feminine nature, which could only be pure or depraved. Bennett viewed the murder as an unfortunate accident, with the theme that a man may sin but does not thereby lose his basic moral nature, while a fallen woman is incapable of either remorse or redemption. As with the trial, the attitude of the day, as Davis writes was that “men could be absolved of their sexual transgressions (including murder) because female sexuality inspired it. Nothing could so clearly reflect an anxiety concerning the changing and ambiguous position of women in the early nineteenth century." We can see here the double standards being played out, and as a result Bennett was able to spark enormous scandal and sensation around the murder and this issue of hypocrisy. Moreover, prostitutes had long been familiar to New Yorkers, but between 1830 and 1860 women on the town became the subject of a sustained social commentary. It was an economic and social option, a means of self-support and as Stansell notes “ a way to bargain with men in a situation where a living wage was hard to come by, and holding one’s own in heterosexual relations was difficult.” Bennett was able to use this in order to create sensation because prostitution seemed only to be have increasing along with the population, at the rate one would expect in a city that multiplied in size more than six times between 1820 and 1860. In a city so concerned with defining both women’s proper place and the place of the working class, the alarm over prostitution stemmed in part from general hostilities to the surroundings of labouring women from which prostitutes came. Sexual territory was also dangerous ground where the same mobility that gave women some degree of freedom. Stansell argues that this “continual movement of people in and around each others’ lives had also rendered them more vulnerable to male entrapment and abandonment.” The interchange between households and the streets allowed women to involve themselves in the lives of passing acquaintances. Women moved easily in and out of different households, and Bennett used Helen Jewett’s story as part of a warning to other young men and women of the consequences of such morally impure lives. Dunlop goes further to suggest that the idea that a girl is on display for assessment and potential annexation was socially valid to some men. This built upon the citizens concerns as Bennett got the readers to think about this murder quite literally in terms of where society was heading. The new murder narratives were so overwhelming that Halttunen explains, “ministers were losing their cultural monopoly over the popular literature of murder at a time when their larger professional authority was in serious decline.” These texts may be read as contributions to a wider debate on the democratisation of access to the formerly exclusive sphere of literary culture, and on the formation of what was subsequently termed mass culture. The phenomenon that Bennett was concerned with was an expansion of commercial production, which assumed the proportions of a literary overflow. Subsequently, we can see how through all the scandal and sensation that Bennett was able to produce, had also lead citizens to a time of commercial culture, something that they were unfamiliar with. Public reaction was swift with regards to the murder mystery of Mary Rogers, which further emphasises the argument that commercial culture was another reason for Bennett’s success in creating scandal around both murders. The New York Herald asserted, "A young and beautiful girl has been seduced and murdered within hail of this populous place. The city is full of rumours that got up for the basest and most mercenary matters." The history of New York, a point of great population growth, economic and cultural transformation, gave birth to an explosion of new forms of print culture: the popular penny newspaper, the cheap commercial novel, and the serialised detective story. All of these developed in the ten years around Mary's death, serving the arrival of a newly expanded reading public and all were specifically urban in their content and sensibility. Mary Rogers's life and death became a text, or many texts really of this new urban print culture. Through her story urban journalists and fiction writer’s invented complex tales of urban life figured around the violent death of a beautiful young woman. Bennett took advantage of this earliest sensational narratives of urban commercial culture as the Rogers’s story invited, just as Rogers herself did, an exploration of city culture, with its romance, its sex, and its violence. Commercial culture fascinated citizens and this was again as a result of Bennett’s writing. Printed coverage did more to sustain the impenetrable mystery than to dispel it. Srebnick’s Mysterious Death offers a multilayered and richly insightful study of the Rogers murder. She argues that three distinctive narratives shaped the literary response to the Rogers case. As a “tragic narrative, her death was sued to sho the triumph of evil over good in the perpetual war between the competing forces of urban life; as a narrative of violent death, her story provided titillation at the same time as it provoked fear, rage and cries for retribution; and, as a source of mystery, her death inspired literary quests for detection and understanding.” The fact that no one was ever brought to trial for the crime proved irresistible opportunity for contemporary writers to offer their own solutions. The newspapers reported on possible leads, the arrests and subsequent releases of suspects, and other aspects of the Mary Rogers case for several weeks. The murder of the "beautiful cigar girl" is undoubtedly one of the pioneer instances of the media celebrating a gruesome crime. While Mary Rogers served as a source of cultural representation, the representations of her served a variety of other purposes. In her name political agendas were fought and social and legislative policy enacted. Unable to solve the crime, the city's police and system of policing came under fire, fuelling an already ongoing crisis about rising crime rates, criminal justice and social order in the growing ci...